Konon Trofimovich Molody (; 17 January 1922 – 9 September 1970) was a Soviet intelligence officer, known in the West as Gordon Arnold Lonsdale. Posing as a Canadian businessman during the Cold War he was a non-official (illegal) KGB intelligence agent and the mastermind of the Portland Spy Ring, which operated in Britain from the late 1950s until 1961. Gordon Lonsdale identity A person by the name of Gordon Arnold Lonsdale was born on 27 August 1924 in Cobalt, Ontario, Canada. His father Emmanuel Jack Lonsdale was a miner. His mother Olga Elina Bousa had emigrated from Finland. The Lonsdales separated in 1931. A year later, Olga took her 8-year-old son with her back to her native Finland. He is believed to have died c. 1943 and the Soviets obtained his papers for use by their agents. The actual Gordon Lonsdale was recorded as having been circumcised; the impostor was not. Molody's early life Konon Molody was born in Moscow in 1922, the son of a scientist and his wife. His father died when he was a child. According to Konon's son, Trofim Molody, who wrote a book about his father, Soviet intelligence already had their eyes on the young boy. In 1934 the NKVD chief Genrikh Yagoda helped Konon's mother get a foreign passport for him to leave for the US to study in California and live there with his aunt, dance teacher Tatiana Piankova. Between 1936 and 1938 he was enrolled at the A to Z junior high school in Berkeley (According to his official SVR biography, he left the USSR in 1932). Molody returned to the Soviet Union in 1938, having learned English and gained familiarity with American culture. In October 1940, he became a Red Army conscript, serving as a reconnaissance and military intelligence officer during World War II. Demobilised after the end of the war, from 1946 Molody enrolled as a war veteran into the Trade Law Department of the prestigious Institute of Foreign Trade, where he mastered the Chinese language. Spying career In 1951 Molody was recruited by the MGB First Chief Directorate (Political intelligence wing) and trained as a MGB "illegal agent" (NOC) on foreign soil. During his intelligence training he married and had two children. In 1953, Molody travelled to Canada on a Soviet merchant ship, posing as a Canadian national named "Gordon Lonsdale" (the true Lonsdale having died in Finland in