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Born Morris Cohen in the Bronx in 1910 of Russian-Jewish parents he married Leona or Lona Petka of Adams, Massachusetts. Both became Communists at that time. Kroger fought for the Communist brigade against Franco in the Spanish Civil War, using the name of Israel Altman. Later he worked for the Russian-sponsored Amtorg Trading Co in New York until 1942, before serving in the US Army in World War II.
The Cohens were part of the NKVD espionage networks in New York City which include those run by the Rosenberg and Colonel Abel. Warned that the Rosenbergs were about to be arrested by the FBI in 1950, the Cohens hurriedly fled to London where they reappeared as the Krogers in 1954. They had taken the name of a couple, Peter & Helen who had died much earlier in New Zealand; a long used identity-change tactic employed by the NKVD. It was not until November 1960 that MI5 picked up the trail of the Krogers in London, identifying them with the Soviet network operated by Gordon Lonsdale. Lonsdale delivered secret information he had obtained from the British traitors Houghton and Gee who worked at the Admiralty UWE in Portland, England.
MI5 agents kept the Krogers under surveillance until the other members of the Portland Spy Ring were arrested in early January 1961. Police Officers then arrested the Kroger's at their West London home. A search yielded a mother-lode of espionage equipment, including cipher pads on quick-burning flash paper, ciphers, code books, sophisticated photo equipment, a device for reading microdots, a specially-built Ronson lighter containing a coded message inside, and numerous other items. After a week the MI5 officers found a powerful transmitter capable of sending in rapid bursts. There could be no doubt that the Kroger's Bungalow was the communications centre for sending information to Moscow and some twenty years later, the new occupants of the Kroger's home dug up a second high-speed Soviet radio transmitter in the back garden. Fingerprints taken from the Krogers were sent to Washington where the FBI identified them as belonging to Cohens who were still wanted in the Rosenberg case. Instead of returning the Krogers to the US the British authorities tried and convicted them of espionage. They were sent to prison for twenty years.
The KGB went out of its way to secure the release of the couple by engineering the arrest of British lecturer Gerald Brooke who was visiting Moscow and who was accused of distributing subversive literature. The KGB offered to exchange the Brooke for the Krogers. The US authorities stepped in, stating that the Krogers were US citizens and could not be bartered for a British subject and that if they were to be released, they had to be extradited to the US for their part in the Rosenberg conspiracy. The Soviet Union claimed that the Krogers were in fact Polish citizens, not Americans, and the British, more eager to regain Brooke than to appease the United States, accepted the claim. The Krogers were exchanged for Brooke in October 1969. They vanished a few years later. Peter Kroger takes to the grave the name of the mole codenamed 'Percy' within the Manhattan Project who helped him pull off the century's espionage coup |
