The little old lady from the KGB

Over 40 years, Melita Norwood systematically passed detailed information about Britain’s nuclear weapons programme to the KGB spymasters who gave her the codename Hola.

What seemed interesting to me here, is that this spy lady was of latvian parentage. Mrs Norwood was born Melita Sirnis in Bournemouth in March the daughter of a Latvian father, at whose knee she learned revolutionary politics - he had founded the Southern Worker And Labour And Socialist Journal, a weekly paper inspired by the Russian revolution; her mother, who was English joined the Co-operative party.

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. She was “extraordinarily motivated Soviet agent right to the end of her life”. The research revealed that Mrs Norwood had been recruited as an agent in the NKVD, the forerunner of the KGB, in 1937.

As far as is known, she was “the longest-serving Soviet agent in British history”.