Quiet London Suburb Hid Soviets' Nuclear Spy

LONDON -- The 87-year-old suburban London woman who admitted that for decades she had furnished the Soviet Union with research documents from Britain's top-secret nuclear weapons development program is a most improbable spy.


Melita Norwood made her unrepentant confession Saturday in the well-tended garden in front of her two-story stucco home in Bexleyheath, southeast London. She clutched a handwritten piece of paper with slightly trembling fingers.


"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," she read in a firm voice.


Explaining her motive, Norwood said, "I thought perhaps what I had access to might be useful in helping Russia to keep abreast of Britain, America and Germany. In general," she added, "I do not agree with spying against one's country."


There were several cries of "traitor!" from the crowd in her street. As she retreated into her house, she murmured, "No, no, no," to shouted questions asking whether she regretted her actions.


Norwood had been obliged to confront the press gathered at her gate by disclosures of her past in The Times of London. She told the newspaper that "in the same circumstances, I know that I would do the same thing again."


The newspaper this week is serializing a book published in Britain as "The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West," by a Cambridge professor, Christopher Andrew. It is based on the six trunkloads of documents brought to the West by Vasily Mitrokhin, 77, the former chief archivist of the KGB's foreign intelligence section, who defected to Britain in 1992.


It appeared that Britain was headed into another of the spy expos? frenzies that have occurred periodically with the unmasking of men like Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross who followed their communist sympathies into espionage.


Where those men hid their activities behind their upper-class backgrounds, elite educations and urbanity, Norwood disguised hers with her complete suburban unremarkableness.


She worked as a secretary at the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association, the home of the Tube Alloys project. That was the anodyne name given to Britain's nuclear weapons research program that is sometimes compared with the more famous American project conducted in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Norwood regularly removed files from a safe after hours, copied them and turned them over to Soviet agents in meetings in the leafy southeastern suburbs where she has lived for more than 50 years.


In a BBC interview for broadcast next Sunday, Norwood explains that in addition to sympathizing with the social gains that the Soviet experiment promised, she thought that in the postwar era, the Soviet Union represented the only counterbalance to capitalism and that the West should not be allowed an advantage as great as sole possession of nuclear bombs.


"I thought they should somehow be adequately defended because everyone was against them, against this experiment, and they had been through such hardship from the Germans," she told her television interviewer.


She was born Melita Sirnis in 1912 near Southampton, the daughter of an English mother and a Latvian father who was a follower of Leo Tolstoy.


Known as "Letti" to her friends, she was identified in KGB documents by the code name "Hola." Asked if she had ever been frightened of being caught, she said, "I suppose so, but I can't remember pondering it."


On her retirement in 1972, KGB files complimented her as "a committed, reliable and disciplined agent, striving to be of the utmost assistance." When she visited Moscow with her husband in 1979, she was given an honor for her work, the Order of the Red Banner, which she accepted, and offered a financial reward, which she turned down.


The sensational spy scandal mushroomed Monday when the man at the center of the intrigue said his revelations would unmask thousands of Soviet agents worldwide, Reuters reported.


"Absolutely nobody who spied for the Soviet Union in any part of the world between the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and the mid-1980s can be certain that his or her secrets are safe," said Christopher Andrew, co-author of "The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West."


He said the number of spies to be unmasked in Britain was "well into double figures" and counted two former Labour members of parliament, Tom Driberg and Raymond Fletcher, both now dead.


The Labour government has ordered an investigation.


The book also unmasks a former officer in Scotland Yard's porn squad as a KGB "Romeo" spy. John Symonds, now 63, said he had lessons in the art of seduction from two comely Soviet agents ordered by the Kremlin to improve his rusty technique, Reuters reported.


Symonds was trained to prey on lonely and susceptible women working in British embassies.


He was suspended from Scotland Yard for suspected corruption in 1969 and fled to Morocco in 1972 before he was due to be tried on charges of taking bribes from criminals.


He carried out regular undercover operations from 1972 to 1980 under the code name "Scot."


Among his conquests were two British women who worked in the British Embassy in Moscow. He plied his charms on four continents and other conquests were said to have included the wife of a West German official in Bonn.


Homesick, he returned to England where he was sentenced to a two-year jail term for corruption.


He told Britain's secret service he was willing to give full details of his espionage career, but was dismissed as a fantasist. Now Mitrokhin's revelations appear to back up his claim.