Lona Cohen

Lona Cohen (Леонтина Владиславовна Коэн, Leontina Vladislavovna Koen; January 11, 1913 – December 23, 1992), born Leontine Theresa Petka, also known as Helen Kroger, was an American who spied for the Soviet Union.

She is known for her role in smuggling atomic bomb diagrams out of Los Alamos.

She was a communist activist before marrying Morris Cohen.

The couple became spies because of their communist beliefs.

By 1928, she had joined the Socialist Party.

While in Greenwich Village, Lona had left her parents' Catholic faith and had become an atheist.

She also separated from the Socialist Party at this time, becoming a member of the Communist Party.

George Blake, a British mole for the Soviet Union, claimed in an interview that Lona was a "very, very resolute woman, very determined."

At the time of her marriage to Morris Cohen in 1941, she did not know that her husband was a spy for the Soviet Union.

That year he recruited her into Soviet espionage out of the New York rezidentura.

She and Morris first worked for Soviet control officer Semyon Semyonov until Semyonov was identified to the FBI in an anonymous letter, after which he was recalled back to Moscow.

After four months, Lona and Morris were assigned to a new control officer, Anatoli Yatskov.

The Cohens were first tasked with stealing for the Soviet Union details of newly developed American weapons.

Lona met a young man, identified in her report as Allen, working at an aircraft plant in Hartford, Connecticut.

She then asked Allen to smuggle a working model of a new machine gun out of his plant.

He agreed, in exchange for $2,000.

By carrying it on his shoulders beneath his coat, Allen was able to sneak it out of the plant.

Morris then hid the weapon inside a bass fiddle case and transported it into the Soviet consulate while avoiding detection.

After Morris was drafted in 1942, Lona took over the expanding Volunteer Network that Morris had been maintaining and managed seven agents.

Their work was titled Line X.

As part of Line X, Lona conducted "technical, scientific, and industrial espionage", delivering and receiving documents along the East Coast.

She frequently received documents from seamen from South America and Europe, using her charm to persuade dock-workers to permit her access to the ships.

Later, Semyonov wrote an appraisal of Cohen, commending her love of the Soviet Union and her work with agent Link, eventually identified as Bill Weisband.

While conducting her Line X work, she worked at two defense plants.

First, in 1942, at Publix Metals as a machine operator, and then in 1943 at Aircraft Screw Products.

While working at Aircraft Screw Products, Lona was in an accident and had part of her hair ripped from her head.

A supervisor she worked under accused her of preaching Communism.

As word leaked to the Soviets of the developing Manhattan Project, Lona Cohen was chosen by her new control officer, Anatoli Yatskov, to work as a courier.

Lona's job was to transport classified information from Theodore Hall, and a source cover named "FOGEL" and "PERS" from the American secret atomic weapons project at Los Alamos, New Mexico and carry them to the Soviet consulate in New York.

There, a KGB sub-residency under a young engineer, Leonid R. Kvasnikov, coordinated operations and dispatched intelligence to Moscow.

They were both arrested in Britain in 1961, and convicted of espionage for the Soviet Union the following year.

After serving part of a prison sentence, Lona Cohen and her husband were exchanged by the British in 1969.

They lived the remainder of their lives in Moscow, teaching spy skills.

Lona Cohen was born Leontine Theresa Petka in Adams, Massachusetts, the daughter of Polish Catholic immigrants.

At the age of 15, Lona left her parents' home in Taftsville, Connecticut and moved to New York City.

(Intelligence historian Nigel West, who identified Rudolf Peierls as the spy codenamed "Fogel" and later "Pers" in the Venona intercepts, and his wife Genia as the spy codenamed "Tina". However, the association of Tina with Genia did not fit with what was known about Tina, and she was conclusively revealed to be Melita Norwood in 1999. Nor did Peierls fit Pers, as the latter worked at the Clinton Engineer Works, whereas Peierls did not.There were good reasons for the postwar intelligence agencies to suspect Peierls. He not only had recruited Fuchs, and served as his "sponsor" on recruitment and security matters, but had pressed the authorities for Fuchs to be given a full security clearance without which he could not have assisted Peierls in his work. Fuchs lived with the Peierls family for a time. Peierls had a Russian wife, as did his brother, and he maintained close contact with colleagues in the Soviet Union before and after the Second World War.) Lona met with Hall for the first time in late August 1945, outside a church in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

She had been to this church the previous four Sundays, but Hall had been confused about the date of their meet and did not show up until nearly a month after originally scheduled.

Hall gave her the report that she had traveled for, and she was sent back to New York.

To avoid detection she concealed the report inside a Kleenex box, a move which became known within Soviet spy circles for its cleverness.

After returning to New York, it was discovered that the report she had helped deliver contained a complete diagram of the first atomic bomb.