From Finchley with love

Melita Norwood did the shopping, made chutney and, like her mother, spied on Britain for the Soviet Union. When she was exposed, Jack Straw and MI5 said she had not been important; the truth may be different

Like many nonagenarians, Melita Norwood did her best to keep her mind active. Until her death, on 2 June at the age of 93, she began her days with the Today programme. A fan of Jeremy Paxman, she ended them with Newsnight and rarely missed his University Challenge. In her latter years, she lived in a nursing home in the Midlands and missed the vegetable garden she used to cultivate at her house in Bexleyheath, Kent. She still went shopping and cooked for herself and in inclement weather stayed fit by climbing the stairs.

Glaucoma meant she could not read small print, but she always scanned the headlines in the Morning Star, which she had delivered each morning. Norwood, who was usually known as Lettie, was a spy for the Soviet Union for 39 years, but looked back without regret. 'It was such a small part of my life,' she told her biographer, David Burke. 'I merely carried out the task of handing over information.'

Some of it gave the Soviets vital clues to building their first atomic weapon, but Norwood was unrepentant. 'I don't think I was unpatriotic, because we weren't at war with the Soviet Union. Was I letting the country down? I certainly don't think of it in that way.' In the mid-1940s, her busiest period as an agent, she was also the working mother of a demanding young child. 'I wasn't really leading a double life,' she said. 'Picking the kid up, getting the home-help and getting the shopping done occupied much more of my time than spying.'

The title of Burke's book, The Spy Who Came in from the Co-Op, reflects this down-to-earth image. But while Norwood was a loving grandmother and an expert maker of chutney for Labour party bazaars, she was also, the book will reveal, a far more important agent than has hitherto been appreciated. Not only was she the source of major secrets, she was also at the heart of a large and previously unreported network of spies, along with her mother, Gertrude Sirnis.

Before I knocked on her door in the summer of 1999, getting confirmation that Lettie Norwood had been a Soviet spy seemed a daunting assignment. I was making a BBC2 series about espionage and had interviewed Vasili Mitrokhin, the former chief archivist of the KGB, who defected to Britain in 1992, bringing with him 60 volumes of files, including Norwood's. He had named her in the book he was about to publish with Cambridge professor Christopher Andrew, but the lawyers rightly insisted that we needed corroboration.

I need not have worried. It took Norwood less than 10 minutes to confess and when the book and the documentary came out, they triggered a media furore. Now 87, she faced the world's cameras on her sunlit lawn, reading a prepared statement. The granny who spied passed into legend.

Norwood had already been talking to Burke, an historian of the British left, about her revolutionary father. When the storm died down, he was delighted to find she was happy to keep talking. The result is his book, due out next year. His research points to one clear conclusion: the claims made by the then Home Secretary Jack Straw and MI5 after Norwood's outing, that she had been of only 'marginal' importance, were, at best, deeply questionable.

Most historians of Soviet spying in Britain have concentrated on the 'gentleman spies,' especially the five recruited at Cambridge in the 1930s - Kim Philby, John Cairncross, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and Anthony Blunt. Norwood came from a very different milieu: a network of Russian and German exiles, with a history of left-wing politics dating back to the end of the 19th century.Melita's father, Alexander Sirnis, had fled Tsarist Russia. After a spell in California, he settled in Hampshire in 1903, joining a radical community established by Leo Tolstoy's literary executor, Count Vladimir Chertkov.

At Tuckton House, a mansion with sumptuous grounds, Chertkov had gathered about 20 socialists, vegetarians and pacifists. They kept the manuscripts of Tolstoy's novels in a guarded room and printed unexpurgated editions of his works, which they smuggled back into Russia. The count set up a soccer team that competed in the local league; appropriately, Sirnis played on the left wing. He also fell in love with Tuckton House's visiting cobbler - Gertrude Stedman. They were married in 1909; Melita was born in March 1912.

Sirnis soon began to move in revolutionary circles. A frequent visitor to Tuckton House was Theodore Rothstein, a close associate of Lenin, and in 1911 Sirnis joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labour party, precursor of the Bolsheviks. With Rothstein, he made regular trips to the Communist Club in Charlotte Street, central London. Another member was an emigre from the Russian part of Poland, Bronislau Nussbaum. Years later, Bronislau's son, Hilary, changed his name to Norwood on the eve of his wedding to Melita Sirnis.

By the time war came in 1914, Melita's father was suffering from tuberculosis, but his fervour remained undimmed and he used the presses at Tuckton House to print the works of Lenin. Sirnis died on Armistice Day 1918, when Melita was six. Rothstein had spent the conflict at the War Office, working for British intelligence. There, he began to channel Bolshevik funds to England and was instrumental in bringing together several left-wing groups to form the Communist Party of Great Britain.

Rothstein was expelled from Britain in 1920, but his son, Andrew, remained. In 1934, he would recruit Melita as a spy. By then another member of her family was active in Stalin's cause, her mother, Gertrude.

Gertrude, Melita and her sister, Gerty, a member of the Communist Party, were living at 173 Hendon Way in north London. Gerty was studying law at the London School of Economics, where she befriended a lecturer in statistics, René Kuczynski, a German-Jewish Communist who had fled when the Nazis took power in 1933. When he managed to get the rest of his family out of Germany, he asked Gerty and her mother, Gertrude senior, to help them find a place to live.

The place she chose was known as the 'Lawn Road Flats', one of London's most avant-garde buildings, the first 'deck-access' apartments with external walkways in England. For a time, they were fashionable among Hampstead's literary set and also a pivotal point of the Soviet spy network in Britain. One of Kuczynski's neighbours was Agatha Christie; another was Arnold Deutsch, a renowned hero of Soviet intelligence, whose portrait still hangs in the headquarters of the KGB's successor, the SVR. It was Deutsch who recruited the Cambridge five.

Another Soviet agent who lived in the flats was Brian Verschoyle, a courier and go-between. A frequent visitor was Kuczynski's daughter, Ursula, an even more famous spy. A leading member of the 'Red Orchestra', a network in Europe, her codename was 'Sonya'. Later, she handled two British atom-bomb spies at the same time - Klaus Fuchs, from the Harwell research labs in Oxfordshire, and Melita Norwood.

Gertrude Sirnis's value to the Soviets went well beyond a nose for real estate. She was also a 'live letter box' through whom Moscow communicated with the British Communist Party, evading MI5's surveillance. According to documents obtained in Russia, when the Soviets wished to make arrangements for British recruits to train how to use secret transmitters at the 'Wilson school' in Moscow, they did so through the Sirnis family home.

Andrew Rothstein did not find it difficult to recruit Melita. In 1932, she had started work as a secretary at an industrial research group, the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association, and had, she told Burke, begun to think that 'some of the material I saw on industrial matters could prove useful.' One evening, she went to a meeting of the Friends of the Soviet Union, where Rothstein was speaking. Afterwards, she approached him. 'I took the initiative,' she said. 'He sorted me out, found me someone to act as a secret contact.'

As Britain started to re-arm, the Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association began to play an important role in weapons development and worked closely with the government's military designers at the Woolwich Arsenal. Whatever Norwood could copy, she gave to her controllers. She was not the only spy associated with the Woolwich Arsenal. In 1937, MI5 began to investigate Percy Glading, a former Royal Navy gun examiner.

In the following months, MI5 discovered he was the leader of a spy ring and early in 1938 it was ready to pounce. Glading and two accomplices were caught in possession of secret documents, tried and imprisoned.

In the British National Archive lies a file which shows that Norwood was one of Glading's secret contacts, and that MI5 not only knew this, but also opened a file on her and began surveillance at the Finchley home she shared with her husband, Hilary. For reasons that remain unknown, it was dropped.

The claim made by Straw and MI5 after Norwood's outing, that she was only 'marginal', differs very strikingly from the views of her Soviet spymasters. According to the KGB file Mitrokhin smuggled to Britain: 'She was a committed, reliable and disciplined agent, striving to be of the utmost assistance. She handed over a very large number of documents of a scientific and technical nature, and these found practical application... she was awarded in 1958 the Order of the Red Banner of Labour.'

The KGB's former London rezident, Oleg Gordievsky, remembered reading about her in the KGB's official history, issued to members in 1980 to commemorate its 60th anniversary. 'It said that in the nuclear field, British spies were very productive,' he recalled. 'And among them, Hola [the KGB codename for Norwood] was particularly productive.'

Of the many British spies who worked for the Soviets - the Cambridge five; Norwood's fellow atom spy, Fuchs; later agents such as George Blake and codebreaker Geoffrey Prime - only Norwood was awarded the Red Banner. 'This is a very significant decoration,' Gordievsky said. Modest as ever, Norwood told Burke: 'I knew I was given the Order of the Red Banner, but there was no ceremony or anything. They just told me.'

British research on the atom bomb, known as the 'Tube Alloys' project, began in 1941 and the Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association was involved from the outset. At the beginning of 1945, it became central. Faced with problems in designing a reactor to produce plutonium, the artificial element used to build atomic weapons, the government turned to association director GL Bailey.

Norwood was already his personal assistant. 'The investigation is secret and full precautions will be taken to ensure that no unauthorised person obtains information about its nature or results,' said a government memo to Bailey, dated 12 February 1945. 'Anyone with access to the project must be vetted, and their identity approved by the project managers.'

Bailey promised that the association would observe 'strict secrecy' in a letter almost certainly typed by Norwood. Scientists who worked on the project would not be allowed to keep their notes or records, he wrote. 'All members of our scientific staff, together with such clerical staff and others as have access to confidential matter, have been required to sign a statement to the effect that they have read certain extracts from the Official Secrets Acts.'

MI5 interviewed Norwood in Bailey's office. 'Nice chap he was, who did the vetting,' Norwood told Burke. 'Quite a pleasant interview, a friendly interview, but if you want the truth from somebody, it's best to be that way.' The MI5 man went away with anything but the truth. Inexplicably, MI5 never connected Bailey's young PA with the suspected spy who had been put under surveillance in 1938.

By now, she had the tradecraft of a veteran. 'Sometimes, if I was typing something, I typed an extra copy. I typed up the minutes of meetings. I passed on copies by arrangement, left them somewhere pre-arranged or met somebody and handed them over.' Security was minimal and no one stopped her leaving with classified documents. 'There might be spare copies on the shelves. I just helped myself.'

She had many handlers. While some were strangers, she already knew one through her family's links with the Lawn Road flats - 'Sonya', Ursula Kucyznski, who controlled both Norwood and Fuchs from her home near Oxford in the early 1940s.

When Norwood was outed in 1999, Straw and MI5 claimed that the material she supplied about the bomb project was of little significance. It did not directly involve weapons design, but the reactors that made atomic bomb fuel and, by the time Britain built its first reactors, the UK had been denied access to US technology, so had to design its own. According to MI5's assessment: 'The first Soviet reactor was a carbon copy of the American pile rather than the British version.' Norwood's spying was irrelevant.

In fact, the first Soviet reactor at Chelyabinsk was far from being a 'carbon copy' of the American version at Hanford, Washington. Chelyabinsk's designer, Nikolai Dollezhal, did look at stolen plans of the Hanford model before he started building in the Urals in 1946, but far from copying it, he rejected one of its key features, a radioactive core in which the fuel rods were laid horizontally. Instead, he used the technique pioneered by British and Canadian engineers at Chalk River, a plant near Ottawa. Like Chalk River, the fuel rods at Chelyabinsk were suspended vertically. Many documents about Chalk River had crossed Norwood's desk.

Common to all the early reactors was an enormous technical hurdle known as 'creep', a form of distortion in the aluminum alloy 'canning' around the uranium rods. This jeopardised a reactor's ability to function - and the world's leading centre for treating it was the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association. Papers from Norwood on this subject may even have saved the Soviet scientists' lives. By the middle of 1946, Stalin's paranoid intelligence chief, Lavrenti Beria, believed that the reason Chelyabinsk would not work was sabotage. For Dollezhal and his colleagues, Siberia beckoned.

The bonds forged between communists in the era of anti-fascist struggle proved durable. Ursula 'Sonya' Kucynski fled Britain on the eve of the arrest of Fuchs in 1950 and settled in East Germany, where she became a bestselling novelist. She also wrote an autobiography, Sonya's Report. There, she described how, 30 years after her last secret meeting with Fuchs, she met him in Dresden on his release from prison. 'I took a large bunch of dahlias, so it must have been autumn. He and his wife welcomed me. We embraced.'

Sonya never forgot her other atomic spy. In September 1999, a few days after her exposure, Norwood received a parcel in the mail, the English translation of Sonya's Report. With it was a card, bearing Sonya's photograph and a message: 'To Lettie. Sonya salutes you.'

· David Burke's The Spy Who Came in from the Co-Op will be published by Bloomsbury next year

Contributor

David Rose

The GuardianTramp

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