Burke throws new light on communist and cold war history, and identifies for the first time a block of flats in Lawn Road, Hampstead, as the centre of much of Moscow's spying activities in London. (2) According to Christopher Andrew she was also a secret member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Melita Norwood: "Thought information might be useful to Russia" An 87-year-old great-grandmother unmasked as the KGB's longest serving spy in Britain has defiantly defended her actions.

In 1979, she and her husband—who knew about her spying and disapproved—visited Moscow so the Soviet Union could award her the Order of the Red Banner (she accepted the honorary award, but turned down the financial reward). From Norwood was coming clean because a Cambridge historian had discovered her espionage while writing a book, but she was unrepentant. In Paris, The source of the storm is Vasili Mitrokhin, 77, who in 1972 was the officer in charge of checking, sealing and moving to a new headquarters 300,000 files kept by the KGB's foreign intelligence service. And Gaster was a close friend of Norwood's husband Hilary Nussbaum (he later changed his name to Norwood) - himself part of that Russian Jewish diaspora that had fled persecution at the start of the 20th century. Melita Stedman Norwood (née Sirnis; 25 March 1912 – 2 June 2005) was a British civil servant and KGB intelligence source who, for a period after her formal recruitment in 1937, supplied the KGB (and its predecessor agencies) with state secrets from her job at the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association.

Norwood turned down lucrative newspaper offers for her story, preferring to tell it for nothing to the academic whom she already knew and trusted. He shows that she was crucially important.This is a splendid book, exhaustively researched and written in a clear, unpretentious style, though not without its faults. Both her parents were active in socialist circles.
In 1992, with a sample of what he had to offer, he walked into the British embassy in one of the Baltic republics (having been turned down by the Americans), and as a result was "exfiltrated" from Moscow to London, together with his wife and their son. The tale of malevolent spymasters, intricate tradecraft and cold-eyed betrayal reads like a John le Carre novel. Without her, the Soviet Union might not have developed an atomic bomb until the mid-50s, instead of joining the nuclear club in 1949.The then home secretary Jack Straw announced that, at her age, there was no point in prosecuting her. He was right, though he refrained from adding that a prosecution might reveal lapses which would embarrass the security services. On September 11 1999 the archive suddenly became front page news when serialisation of On 11 September 1999, Dr David Burke travelled by coach from Leeds to London, to enjoy a frugal Sunday lunch of fish fingers and allotment-grown greens with a lady of 89 called Melita Norwood, and to continue examining the papers of her late father, which are of interest to serious scholars of Tolstoy. The British Secret Service then organised the removal from his Moscow home of six aluminium trunks of notes, the largest and most comprehensive collection of Soviet secret intelligence materials ever seen in the West - as far as the public knows.After seven years of meticulously hard labour, a big book called English readers were surprised to learn that the most spectacular Soviet agent surviving in the UK was now an octogenarian grandmother.

1937 Melita Norwood gets a job as a secretary at the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association. The Government decided, however, that it could not prosecute her so long after the event. Norwood was born to a Latvian father, Alexander Sirnis, and a British mother Gertrude, née Stedman, in Pokesdown, Hampshire (now Dorset). Melita Norwood became friends with … Burke is not just an expert on Tolstoy, he also knows a good deal about Russian émigrés, and about the early days of the British Communist party and its Moscow links.

1937 Melita Norwood gets a job as a secretary at the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association. During this period she married Hilary Nussbaum (he later changed his name to Norwood).

When the coach stopped as usual at Milton Keynes he bought a Sunday newspaper and discovered for the first time that his hostess had been one of the most important Soviet spies of the 20th century, rivalling Kim Philby and Klaus Fuchs. But the ILP was itself terminally divided between those who wanted to go it alone, and those who wanted to throw in their lot with the Communist party.

We meet too many people fleetingly without getting to know them, as when we are told of the Lawn Road flats that "other famous residents included the sculptor Henry Moore, Agatha Christie's second husband, the archaeologist Max Mallowan, and his colleague at the Institute of Archaeology, the communist prehistorian Gordon Vere Childe".
When asked about her motives, she explained: "I did what I did, not to m…


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