Smith, Michael. "Russians Had Third Major Spy Network in Britain."
Telegraph (London), 14 Jan. 1998. [http://www.telegraph.co.uk]1. "Green Ring"
2. Hugh Hambleton
3. Kitty Harris
4. Jenifer Hart
5. John Herbert King
Smith, Michael. "Russians Had Third Major Spy Network in Britain."
Telegraph (London), 14 Jan. 1998. [http://www.telegraph.co.uk]
KGB files made available to The Telegraph "show that Soviet intelligence had a third major spy network in Britain, separate from the Cambridge and Oxford rings. The so-called Green ring was run by the GRU, Soviet Military Intelligence...
"The Green Ring was built up by Oliver Green, a printer who was recruited by Soviet military intelligence while serving with the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. He began recruiting the network after returning to Britain in 1938....[Although] Green's network never achieved the spectacular success of its KGB rival, it was well-trained and highly professional.... All the agents recruited by Green were British subjects. They included [a] government official, a number of soldiers, a worker at an aviation plant, a merchant seaman and a pilot."
Heaps,
Leo. Thirty Years with the KGB: The Double Life of Hugh Hambleton. London: Methuen, 1984. Hugh Hambleton, Spy: Thirty Years with the KGB. Toronto and London: Methuen, 1985. [pb]
Milivojevic, I&NS 2.2, finds this to be a "convincing account of how Hambleton was recruited and controlled over a long period of time." Hambleton, a Canadian citizen, spent 10 years in a British prison after his trial in 1982 for espionage in NATO in the 1950s.
Elliott,
Geoffrey, and Igor Damaskin. Kitty Harris: The Spy with Seventeen Names.
London: St Ermin's, 2001.
According to Michael Smith, Telegraph (London), 16 Mar. 2001, Harris was a "Soviet spy [codenamed Norma] who slept with Donald Maclean while acting as an intermediary between the British diplomat and his KGB controller."
Hart, Jenifer. Ask
Me No More. London: Peter Halban, 1998.
Clark comment: Hart was identified by Peter Wright, Spycatcher (1987), pp. 264-266, as a member of what he labeled the Oxford Ring of pre-World War II Soviet spies. This book is Hart's response, in spirit at least, if not directly. She essentially denies being a Soviet spy, while admitting her links to the Communist Party and clandestine meetings over a sustained period of time.
West, IJI&C 12.2, points up the dilemma by noting that Hart "has come tantalizingly close to conceding that almost everything Wright said about her is true, but she balked at the last fence, the identification of her English contact." From what we know today, the gaps in Hart's tale are "altogether too big to sustain." See IJI&C 13.3/402-403 for Hart's response to West's review and West's rejoinder.
Thurlow, Richard C. "Soviet Spies and British Counter-Intelligence in the 1930s: Espionage in the Woolwich Arsenal and the Foreign Office Communications Department." Intelligence and National Security 19, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 610-631.
"The management of the spies Percy Glading and John Herbert King, and their discovery by British counter-espionage, were interesting examples of the contest between Soviet intelligence and the British security authorities."
Watt, D. Cameron. "Francis [Thurlow (above) uses John] Herbert King: A Soviet Source in the Foreign Ministry." Intelligence
and National Security 3, no. 4 (Oct. 1988): 62-82.
King was "arrested in 1939, convicted of espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union, and sentenced to ten years' imprisonment." The author identifies "four sets of episodes which probably can be traced to his influence."
Return to UK Spy Cases Table of
Contents