Melita Norwood

Melita Norwood , née Sirnis (born March 25, 1912 in Pokesdown , Dorset , † June 2, 2005 in London ) was a British secretary who worked for the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association . She has spied for the NKVD , the GPU , the MGB (Soviet Ministry of State Security) and the KGB for more than 40 years .

Life

Norwood was born to a Latvian father and a British mother. The father reprinted articles by Lenin and Trotsky in the newspaper he edited, The Southern Worker and Labor and Socialist Journal, and distributed them to local Communist Party members, so that his house was soon known as a Russian colony . After graduating from Itchen Secondary School , she studied Latin and logic in Southampton for a year before moving to London to take a job.

In the 1930s she joined the Independent Labor Party . When it split in 1936, she joined the British Communist Party without ever being known. In 1935 she was recommended by Andrew Rothstein (1898-1994), one of the founders of the Communist Party, the NKVD, the forerunner to the KGB. At this point she had already been working as a secretary for the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association for 5 years. In the same year, 1935, she married her husband Hilary, a math teacher and official of the teachers' union. In 1937 she bought the simple semi-detached house with him in Bexleyheath , a southern suburb of London, where she led a completely unspectacular life.

Initially, she was a member of a spy ring at the Woolwich Arsenal , but three members were arrested in January 1938 and sentenced to three months in prison. MI5 , however, had failed to evaluate a ring binder from Percy Glading, head of the spy ring . When the NKVD was temporarily unable to manage it due to the waves of purges in Moscow , it was taken over by the GRU , the Soviet Union's military secret service . She used many secret channels to transmit files of the highest level of secrecy on British atomic bomb research , then known as Tube Alloys , which passed over her desk as the director's secretary. The documents enabled the Soviet Union to recreate a copy of the British bomb within a year and to catch up with its technological deficit within two years. In the course of her long service as an agent she was led under various aliases, most recently "Hola". She was identified by the British Security Service in 1965 but refrained from interrogating her in order not to expose its investigative methods. In 1972 she retired. In 1979 she was in the Soviet Union for the last time. In 1986 her husband died, who disapproved of her betrayal but kept silent about it all his life. Nobody else had ever heard of it, not even her daughter.

In 1992, the former chief archivist of the KGB, Vasily Mitrochin, changed sides and brought a long list of Soviet agents with him to the West. Melita Norwood was on her too, but she was never prosecuted by MI5 or a prosecutor because after a lengthy discussion it was decided not to stir the case again. Norwood did not consider herself a spy, had no sense of guilt, as she took the position that the Soviet Union was a young experiment providing nutrition, education and health care for its citizens and was threatened by the atomic and hydrogen bombs from the USA and Great Britain. They just wanted to help establish their equality. Their motives, political beliefs, and lifestyle were very different from the Cambridge Five . To the last she refused to accept agent wages. Awarded the Order of the Red Banner , the highest military order in the Soviet Union, she was one of the KGB's most valuable agents during the Cold War.

Her case provided the inspiration for the fictional novel "Red Joan", on which the film " Secret of a Life ", released in 2018, was based.

literature

• David Burke: The spy who came in from the Co-op: Melita Norwood and the ending of Cold War espionage . Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2008 ISBN 978-1-8438-3422-9

Web links

• Melita Norwood: A secret life - BBC News 1999 (in English)
• A portrait of the "Times" by Melita Norwood (in English)
• Frontpage magazine report (in English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Katrin Nussmayr: This spy only wanted peace . In: The press . June 6, 2019, p. 26 ( online [accessed July 7, 2019]).