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29 April

Konon Molody

The Portland spy ring was an espionage group active in the United Kingdom between 1953 and 1961. It comprised five people who obtained classified research documents from the Admiralty Underwater Weapons Establishment (AUWE) on the Isle of Portland, Dorset, and passed them to the Soviet Union. Two of the group, Harry Houghton and Ethel Gee worked at the AUWE and had access to classified information. They passed this to their handler, Konon Molody (pictured), a KGB agent acting under a Canadian passport in the name Gordon Lonsdale. Lonsdale would pass the documents to Lona and Morris Cohen, American communists living under the names Helen and Peter Kroger; they passed the information to Moscow. The ring was exposed in 1960 after a tip-off from the Polish spy Michael Goleniewski. The information he supplied was enough to identify Houghton. MI5 surveillance uncovered the rest of the group, who were arrested in January 1961 and tried that March. Sentences for the group ranged from 15 to 25 years. (Full article...)

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On this day...

April 29

HMS Endeavour

1760 – Seven Years' War: France began an unsuccessful attempt to retake Quebec City, which had been captured by Britain.
1770 – On his first voyage, British explorer James Cook and the crew of HMS Endeavour (pictured) landed at Botany Bay, making the first recorded European landfall on the eastern coast of Australia.
1945 – World War II: The U.S. Army liberated Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp, and killed German prisoners of war.
1995 – Before a crowd of about 165,000 at the Rungrado 1st of May Stadium, Ric Flair and Antonio Inoki competed in the main event of Collision in Korea, the highest attended professional wrestling event of all time.
2015 – The ringleaders of the Bali Nine were executed in Indonesia for attempting to smuggle 8.3 kg (18 lb) of heroin to Australia in 2005.

George Farquhar (d. 1707)
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John Compton (b. 1925)
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