who had seemed to fit in so easily to suburban living. British people rather expected that of New Zealanders, back
then. New Zeal-anders were provincial in that special Commonwealth way; you trusted them almost more than your own people
because places like New Zealand and Canada were thinly populated and a little behind the times, and kept to the old values
that reminded you how good it was to be British.
It was only when they were gone, when the police had taken them away, the evening of that same Saturday in January when the
other three were arrested at Waterloo, that the things they left behind revealed who they really were.
Their house was a bungalow on a suburban street in Ruislip, a house of such a common design, with its twinned bow windows
and white cement, and brick edging to the porch, that anyone who passed it might think they could reasonably guess at the
life that went on inside. It looked as predictable as a mass-produced doll's house, to which a child might add pieces bought
in little packs, all made to scale, all with the safety in them of standardised design: a sofa for the lounge, a coffee table
with a Ronson lighter on it, a Murphy radiogram, a bookcase, a bathroom suite, a kitchen cabinet with two drawers in the middle.
At six-thirty on a wintry Saturday evening the lights should be on, and figures placed upon the sofa, Dixon of Dock Green on television - a scene to be glimpsed perhaps through the gap in the not-quite-yet-closed curtains.
So it appeared, and yet it was not so.
The Murphy radiogram had headphones fitted and concealed in its back, and was tuned to a high frequency band for the reception
of foreign transmissions.
The Ronson table lighter had a concealed cavity in its base containing negative films with dates and signal plans for wireless
communications with call signs based on the names of Russian towns and rivers.
The Bible in the bookcase contained pieces of light-sensitised cellophane to be used for the making of micro-dots.
The tin of Three Flowers talcum powder in the bath-room sprinkled talc only from a central compartment and concealed a microdot
reader in secret compartments along-side.
Hidden in the bedroom were a box holding a micro-scope and glass slides, a magazine of 35mm film concealed beneath a chest
of drawers, an extraordinary length of electric flex, thousands of US dollars. Elsewhere were cameras, tape recorders, photographic
developing materials, black-out screens for the conversion of bathroom into darkroom.
Beneath a trap door under the kitchen fridge was a makeshift cache containing more dollars, more lenses and cameras, including
reducing lenses for making microdots, and a transmitter with a foreign plug.
And in the attic space among Helen's carefully stored overwintering apples - stored on slats so they could breathe, no one
of them touching another, the smell of them sweet and domestic beneath the roof - was a radio aerial seventy-four foot nine
inches long.
Tools, gadgets, evidence. That is what fascinated people so. There was the ordinariness of the people and then there was the
evidence of the house, like an extraordinary game of Cluedo.
That nice friendly middle-class woman Helen, who always has a smile for her neighbours, a bone for the dog or a present for
the children, who will do errands for you or bring you fresh eggs from the local farm, connects the aerial in the roof to
the transmitter beneath the kitchen floor, using the flex that was found in the bedroom, puts to her head the earphones that
were concealed in the back of the radiogram, tunes in, calls Volga ya Axov, or Lena ya Amur, transmits to Moscow.
Their names are Morris and Lona or Leontina Cohen. They are Americans, not New Zealanders, Communists and associates of the
Rosenbergs. In 1950 when the Rosenbergs were arrested the Cohens had dropped out of sight, and somehow, somewhere, in some
Soviet country, in the time between then and the
then. New Zeal-anders were provincial in that special Commonwealth way; you trusted them almost more than your own people
because places like New Zealand and Canada were thinly populated and a little behind the times, and kept to the old values
that reminded you how good it was to be British.
It was only when they were gone, when the police had taken them away, the evening of that same Saturday in January when the
other three were arrested at Waterloo, that the things they left behind revealed who they really were.
Their house was a bungalow on a suburban street in Ruislip, a house of such a common design, with its twinned bow windows
and white cement, and brick edging to the porch, that anyone who passed it might think they could reasonably guess at the
life that went on inside. It looked as predictable as a mass-produced doll's house, to which a child might add pieces bought
in little packs, all made to scale, all with the safety in them of standardised design: a sofa for the lounge, a coffee table
with a Ronson lighter on it, a Murphy radiogram, a bookcase, a bathroom suite, a kitchen cabinet with two drawers in the middle.
At six-thirty on a wintry Saturday evening the lights should be on, and figures placed upon the sofa, Dixon of Dock Green on television - a scene to be glimpsed perhaps through the gap in the not-quite-yet-closed curtains.
So it appeared, and yet it was not so.
The Murphy radiogram had headphones fitted and concealed in its back, and was tuned to a high frequency band for the reception
of foreign transmissions.
The Ronson table lighter had a concealed cavity in its base containing negative films with dates and signal plans for wireless
communications with call signs based on the names of Russian towns and rivers.
The Bible in the bookcase contained pieces of light-sensitised cellophane to be used for the making of micro-dots.
The tin of Three Flowers talcum powder in the bath-room sprinkled talc only from a central compartment and concealed a microdot
reader in secret compartments along-side.
Hidden in the bedroom were a box holding a micro-scope and glass slides, a magazine of 35mm film concealed beneath a chest
of drawers, an extraordinary length of electric flex, thousands of US dollars. Elsewhere were cameras, tape recorders, photographic
developing materials, black-out screens for the conversion of bathroom into darkroom.
Beneath a trap door under the kitchen fridge was a makeshift cache containing more dollars, more lenses and cameras, including
reducing lenses for making microdots, and a transmitter with a foreign plug.
And in the attic space among Helen's carefully stored overwintering apples - stored on slats so they could breathe, no one
of them touching another, the smell of them sweet and domestic beneath the roof - was a radio aerial seventy-four foot nine
inches long.
Tools, gadgets, evidence. That is what fascinated people so. There was the ordinariness of the people and then there was the
evidence of the house, like an extraordinary game of Cluedo.
That nice friendly middle-class woman Helen, who always has a smile for her neighbours, a bone for the dog or a present for
the children, who will do errands for you or bring you fresh eggs from the local farm, connects the aerial in the roof to
the transmitter beneath the kitchen floor, using the flex that was found in the bedroom, puts to her head the earphones that
were concealed in the back of the radiogram, tunes in, calls Volga ya Axov, or Lena ya Amur, transmits to Moscow.
Their names are Morris and Lona or Leontina Cohen. They are Americans, not New Zealanders, Communists and associates of the
Rosenbergs. In 1950 when the Rosenbergs were arrested the Cohens had dropped out of sight, and somehow, somewhere, in some
Soviet country, in the time between then and the
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