KGB granny Dies

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Suburban superspy dies at 93
By Sean O'Neill and Michael Evans
Secretary who gave nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union never regretted betrayal

THE Soviet Union�s leading female British spy has died and her funeral has taken place amid the kind of secrecy that surrounded her career. 

Melita Norwood passed away peacefully at a nursing home in the West Midlands almost four weeks ago. She was 93. Her family organised a private funeral service after which there was a cremation. 

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Over 40 years, Mrs Norwood systematically passed detailed information about Britain�s nuclear weapons programme to the KGB spymasters who gave her the codename Hola. 
She remained committed to the Soviet cause and to �peace and socialism�. She shopped at the Co-op, drank her tea from a Che Guevara mug, and took the Morning Star every morning until her death on June 2. 
Mrs Norwood�s secret life was revealed by The Times in 1999 after resarch by Christopher Andrew, the Cambridge historian, into the files of Vasili Mitrokhin, a former KGB archivist. Professor Andrew said yesterday that Mrs Norwood had been an �extraordinarily motivated Soviet agent right to the end of her life�. His research revealed that Mrs Norwood had been recruited as an agent in the NKVD, the forerunner of the KGB, in 1937. 
Five years earlier she had taken a job as a secretary in the British Non-Ferrous Metals Association which came to be involved in the research underpinning the UK�s nuclear programme. She would remove files on the top-secret Tube Alloys programme from her bosses� desks, photograph the papers inside and pass the photographs to her Soviet handlers at drops in the suburbs of southeast London. 
Hola recruited at least one other senior agent and the Soviet regime came to view her as more significant than the Cambridge spy ring. 
The Soviet Union granted her the Order of the Red Banner and a �20 per month pension payment. 
After her double life was exposed, when she was 87, there were calls for her prosecution as a traitor. The Government resisted and allowed her to live out her life peacefully. 
David Burke, whose biography of Mrs Norwood is due out next year, said: �As a woman she was everybody�s favourite granny. She was very kindhearted. Until she was in her late 80s she kept an allotment. She was in good health and the end came quite suddenly.� 
Dr Burke visited Mrs Norwood regularly to talk about her life, history and politics. He said: �She was a lifelong member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which some might think ironic, given her history of giving away secrets about the atomic bomb. 
�But she thought that there should be some balance in the world. One power was holding complete control over the bomb which was, to her, a dangerous imbalance. She feared a pre-emptive strike on the Soviet Union. Melita didn�t feel that she was doing anything treacherous. Indeed, although she was a member of the Communist Party she would always vote Labour.� 
Professor Andrew said: �What struck me at the time (of her exposure as a spy) was how extraordinarily resilient she was. For the majority of 87-year-olds, waking up to find the British press outside their door would have been somewhat intimidating. But she just calmly asked them to wait while she went to get her notes and then spoke to them in her rose garden. 
As far as is known, he said, she was �the longest-serving Soviet agent in British history�. 
Mrs Norwood was born Melita Sirnis in Bournemouth in March the daughter of a Latvian father, at whose knee she learned revolutionary politics, and an English mother. 
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1671929,00.html