Octogenarian Gave to Russia, With Love

Sipping tea out of a Che Guevara mug, tending her suburban garden and admitting to having spied for the Soviet Union for nearly four decades, 87-year-old Melita Norwood has enraged and baffled Britain while calmly waiting to see if she will be prosecuted for treachery.

The great-grandmother, who passed nuclear weapon secrets to Moscow, has been depicted as England’s equivalent of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, the Americans who were convicted of trying to pass U.S. military secrets to the Soviets in the 1940s and were subsequently executed.

She has been called Britain’s most important female spy by hard-boiled reporters who confronted her with her deeds--and then left her house with jars of her homemade chutney pressed into their hands.

Norwood is one of a handful of British agents whose names were revealed in a book published last week, “The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB,” by Cambridge University historian Christopher Andrew. Also exposed were a former Scotland Yard detective and two now-dead Labor Party members of Parliament, including the party’s chairman from 1957 to 1958.

The book is based on six trunkloads of material provided by former KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin, who spent a dozen years copying notes from the KGB’s top-secret foreign intelligence files before retiring in 1985. He defected to Britain with the information in 1992.

Some of the more interesting revelations in the 700-page book are about the KGB’s activities in the United States. Among them are that the KGB:

* Obtained highly classified secrets from major U.S. defense contractors by intercepting faxes from the likes of Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed and half a dozen other companies on the Trident, MX, Pershing-2 and cruise missile systems as well as on fighter jets.

* Disseminated disinformation linking the CIA to the assassination of President Kennedy, including a forged letter from Lee Harvey Oswald to CIA officer E. Howard Hunt, allegedly written two weeks before the shooting in Texas and suggesting that Oswald wanted to meet with Hunt before going ahead with the deed.

* Plotted to maim ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev after he defected to the West.

The files have provided Western intelligence agencies with a broad look at more than 40 years of Soviet espionage operations in the United States, Europe and the Soviet republics. It offers details on U.S. sabotage operations gone awry, the existence of KGB arms caches throughout the West and the Soviet Cold War strategy of using national liberation movements--the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland--to try to destabilize Western governments.

Britons Intrigued by Great-Grandmother

In Britain, however, it is the Norwood case that has intrigued the public and shaken the establishment, although her activities occupy only about three pages and half a dozen mentions in the book.

Today, Norwood hardly looks the part of a spy in her tweed skirt, tufted cardigan and support stockings. She uses a cane and wears her gray hair pinned back from a ruddy face that alternately displays pursed lips and a girlish smile.

But her politics are intact. Norwood is still a believer in the ideals of full employment and an end to the class system--ideals she held when she was recruited to the Soviet cause. She is unrepentant about her past.

“I did what I did not to make money but to help prevent the defeat of a new system which had, at great cost, given ordinary people food and fares which they could afford, a good education and a health service,” Norwood said.

“I thought perhaps what I had access to might be useful in helping Russia to keep abreast of Britain, America and Germany,” she said. “In general, I do not agree with spying against one’s country.”

Britain’s most famous spies--double agent Kim Philby and his cohorts--were Cambridge University-educated members of the elite. Norwood’s background, however, is closer to that of the working classes whose interests the Soviet regime sought to represent.

She was born Melita Sirnis in 1912, the daughter of a British mother and Latvian father who were both committed leftists. Norwood attended a university for a year before taking a secretarial job in 1932 in the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Assn.--the base for Britain’s project to develop an atomic bomb, known as Tube Alloys. She already was a member of the British Communist Party.

Norwood was recruited by the Soviets at the height of both Josef Stalin’s brutal rule and the Spanish Civil War--a period of international struggle between communism and fascism. She became a full agent in 1937; her code name was Hola.

Just what secrets Norwood gave to her KGB handlers and how exactly they were used aren’t specified in the book, which Andrew explains is based on her operational file--who she was, what she did and how well she was graded--and not on her product file.

But clearly she was a valued agent.

“She provided scientific and technological intelligence to the Soviets over 40 years. Very few people did that,” Andrew said in an interview.

Norwood married a mathematician and fellow Communist, who she says disapproved of her spying but didn’t try to stop her. They bought the three-bedroom suburban house where she still lives, and they had a daughter.

From 1945 onward, Norwood supplied what her file described as “many valuable materials” on the Tube Alloys project. According to Andrew, the result of Norwood’s efforts was that Stalin was better briefed on the construction of the British atomic bomb than were many ministers in the British government of Labor Prime Minister Clement Attlee.

She retired from her job and from spying in 1972. Today, Norwood says she doesn’t really think of herself as a spy. But to many Britons, she is a Judas who should be put on trial. To others, however, she was only marginally useful to a Soviet weapon program that was well on its way to making an American-style bomb with the help of spies in the United States; she is irrelevant in the post-Cold War era, these people say.

Relic or relevant, the Norwood case has, nonetheless, embarrassed Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Labor government, which has seemed to be ill-informed and to lack control over the country’s security services.

Debate Rages Over Prosecution Prospects

When Norwood’s existence was first reported by the Times of London on Sept. 11, opposition Tory leaders attacked the government for having failed to tell the public what it knew about the spy and demanded to know why there were no efforts to prosecute her.

Those decisions, Home Secretary Jack Straw was quick to respond, were made during the previous, Tory government.

Still, Straw, who is Britain’s top law enforcement official, admitted that the security services had briefed him on Norwood’s case only in December, as Andrew was putting the finishing touches on his book, and that the prime minister was informed just days before the controversy hit the papers.

Conservatives have called for renewed efforts to prosecute Norwood, while liberals say the important thing is to rein in the security services, which decided independently not to seek prosecution of a woman it had suspected of spying for decades.

Andrew, a historian rather than a legal expert but the one who is most familiar with the Mitrokhin archive, says he doubts Norwood will ever be brought to trial.

“First of all, these documents are notes, and in a British court of law you have to produce original documents,” Andrew said. “Secondly, her confession has been very general. She would have to say in court that she handed over such and such a document on such and such a matter, and she shows no signs of doing that.”

Norwood has displayed what would seem to be a selective memory loss in her otherwise open conversations with the media. She says she can’t recall who recruited her to the KGB or who her handlers were.

Or perhaps it is the habit of keeping secrets. She never told her daughter of her espionage and called her only the night before the news broke to tell her simply to buy the next day’s newspaper.

As to her own fate, Norwood seems resigned, saying, “I will accept the future as it comes.”