The death of Melita Norwood "the bexleyheath bolshevik" is

international | worker & community struggles and protests | other press Friday July 01, 2005 15:51 by little old sweetie.

Rest in peace.

Melita Norwood has died at the age of 84 in her bexleyheath home.

Born in 1937 she became an agent for the Soviet Union at the age of 25.

She was exposed cruelly in 1999 and said that "she had only wanted Russia to be on an equal footing" and that as agent "Hola!" had sold secrets on nuclear weapon development to the Soviet Union. In fact she gave them, without personal profit.

Miss Norwood was known to her neighbours for cookies and tea, but not as the "bexleyheath bolshevik"!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

her exposure as a poor great grand-mother-
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/444519.stm

a c&p of her obituary from the telegraph.
the english newspaper whose responsibility it is to yet publicise her "treachery" though like thanks to her and her generation of spookies we never had that war after all, or do some still believe it was reagan's pax americana?


"Melita Norwood, who died on June 2 aged 93, caused a brief flurry of excitement in 1999 when it was revealed that not only had she spied for the Russians for four decades, but that the authorities had known of her treachery but had done nothing about it.

The story of Norwood, a jam-making great-grandmother and self-styled "Bolshevik of Bexleyheath", broke in September 1999 after she admitted being "Hola", a KGB agent exposed in papers produced by Vasili Mitrokhin, the KGB archivist who had defected to the West in 1992.

Norwood's treachery had begun in the 1930s when she was a secretary at the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association and passed on secret documents, including details of Britain's first atomic bomb.

Her security clearance was revoked in 1951 amid suspicions about her Communist sympathies, and suspicions hardened into certainty in 1966, when the "Venona" files of decrypted Soviet communications revealed that she had worked as a spy in the immediate post-war years. Yet MI5 decided not to interview her, and she continued to pass documents to her Soviet handlers until her retirement in 1972.

When further evidence came to light following Mitrokhin's defection, junior MI5 staff decided not to pursue an investigation because it "might have led to criticism for harassing an old lady", and eventually the law officers too decided not to prosecute. The decision led to an investigation by the Commons Intelligence and Security Committee, which concluded that MI5 had made a series of "serious failures".

Far more outrageous, in the view of the press, was the fact that Norwood treated public indignation about her treachery as a huge joke. She steadfastly refused to accept that she had anything to be ashamed of: Soviet Communism was "a good experiment, and I agreed with it… I would do it again," she told reporters.

More interesting was the question of how an apparently intelligent woman could have remained loyal to a system which had caused the deaths of millions and impoverished and oppressed millions more.

She was born Melita Sirnis on March 25 1912 to an English mother and a Latvian father. A bookbinder by trade, Alexander Sirnis translated and printed works by Lenin and Trotsky, and later founded and edited a weekly paper, The Southern Worker and Labour and Socialist Journal. The family house, at Christchurch near Bournemouth, became known locally as "the Russian colony".

Alexander Sirnis died aged 37, when his daughter was six; but her political education was taken up by her mother, Gertrude, a member of the Co-operative Party and active in the Workers' Educational Association. When Melita was 10, the family moved to Thornhill, near Southampton, to live with her maternal aunt, one of the first female trades unionists and an official of the Association of Women Clerks and Secretaries, which Melita was to join when she was 19.

Melita was educated at Itchen Secondary School, then studied Latin and Logic at Southampton University, but only for a year. She and her family moved to London, where she took a job in a Paddington bakers and joined the Independent Labour Party, getting to know such figures as Fenner Brockway, the founder of CND.

In 1936 the ILP split, with some members joining the Labour Party and others (including Melita Sirnis) the Communist Party. This was a time when Stalin was tightening his grip on the Russian people with purges and imprisonments without trial. Such details did not bother Sirnis: "You didn't have to agree with everything that was being done in Russia," she said. "But on the whole, it seemed to be a good idea."

In 1932 Sirnis had become a secretary with the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association at Euston, where she kept quiet about her Communism and was considered an industrious worker. The Russians were aware that the Association was involved in nuclear research, and in 1935 she was recommended to the NKVD, the precursor of the KGB, by Andrew Rothstein, one of the founders of the British Communist Party. She was recruited, and by 1937 was a full agent. In the early years of the war, a secret project known as "Tube Alloys" was launched, to build an atomic bomb. Understanding metals such as uranium was a key requirement, and much of the work passed over the desk of Sirnis's boss. Quietly and efficiently she removed Tube Alloys files from her boss's safe, photographed them and passed them on to her Soviet handlers.

After the Second World War, Anglo-American atomic co-operation broke down, and Britain decided to pursue Tube Alloys alone. It entailed massive investment in nuclear reactors and isotope separation plants. Every detail was passed on by Sirnis to the KGB.

She seemed to live a charmed life. In 1937 British agents rounded up a ring of Communist agents working at Woolwich Arsenal. Their ringleader, Percy Glading, had mentioned agent "Hola" in his notebook, but the authorities failed to identify her. After a few months on ice she was reactivated in 1938. In 1945 she was cleared for secret documents, despite concerns over her Communism.

In 1949 she married Hilary Norwood, a fellow-Communist and mathematics teacher. Her Soviet controller warned her not to tell her husband about her involvement in espionage, though he soon found out. Yet although he was said not to approve of her activities, he did not report her to the authorities nor, it seems, make any effort to dissuade her.

Most historians of the period argue that the nuclear spy Klaus Fuchs was more significant in enabling the Russians to build their nuclear capability, and that the worst that could be said of Norwood's treachery was that it enabled them to develop their atomic weapon a little earlier than they would have. This was a view expressed by MI5 in its written evidence to the 1999 parliamentary investigation.

Yet this was not quite the picture given in her file in the Mitrokhin archive, where she was described as "a committed, reliable and disciplined agent, striving to be of the utmost assistance". Indeed, so highly was she regarded by the KGB that in the 1930s, when, as a consequence of the purges, there were not enough Soviet officers to keep in contact with all their spies in the West, the KGB chose to keep in contact with her rather than with Kim Philby.

After the end of the Second World War, the KGB and Soviet military intelligence fought for control over her. She was secretly given a Soviet award, the Order of the Red Banner, in 1958, and was granted a small pension by the KGB a few years later.

In retirement, Norwood settled into suburban obscurity and would probably never have been unmasked had it not been for Mitrokhin's defection with six trunk-loads of files from the KGB archive, and for the work of the historian Christopher Andrew, who recognised the importance of the British spy codenamed Hola. The evidence provided by Mitrokhin added little to what MI5 already knew, but as interviewing Norwood might have led to the archive being compromised, the decision was taken to do nothing. When, in 1993, it was felt to be safe to interview her, MI5 again decided not to go ahead, reasoning that as a committed Communist she would be unlikely to incriminate herself, and that the service might be open to criticism for harassing an old lady.

The case slipped out of sight until 1998, when it was decided to allow the publication of Christopher Andrew's book on the Mitrokhin archive. The realisation that publicity surrounding the book might lead to the identification of agent Hola persuaded MI5 to consult the law officers, who recommended, yet again, that nothing be done.

Thus it was that when, in September 1999, journalists tracked Norwood down to her 1930s pebble-dash semi in Bexleyheath, their visit marked the first time that she knew she had been unmasked. For years she had carried on living with her secret, unaware that anyone, apart from her Russian handlers, knew about her past, her husband Hilary having died in 1986.

Much of the shock surrounding Norwood's exposure was due to the fact that she seemed so ordinary. Her neighbours in Bexleyheath knew she was a life-long Communist who still took the Morning Star - she would buy 32 copies of each issue and hand them out to friends - but she never appeared other than a mildly harmless eccentric, the only evidence of radicalism being the CND posters in her window. She was "The spy who came in from the Co-op".

She remained until the end a true believer in the myth of the Soviet peasant worker state that had first inspired her treachery.

She hated all reforms of the Soviet Union's genocidal dictatorship. Norwood remained convinced that Communism could work and that capitalism was ultimately doomed to collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.

Melita Norwood is survived by a daughter."

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(((she is also survived by grand children and one great grandchild. The spy who came in from the co-op is yet another recent death that so mark the end of an era. Russia will lead the g8 summit next year.)))