She declined it — her spying was, after all, a matter of principle. One was in his office and the other at his London home. In Wombourne, South Staffordshire, 120 miles away, her daughter Anita, a school laboratory technician, was astonished at the revelations about her elderly mother, and described herself as being ‘in a state of disbelief’. Melita Sirnis was born to a Latvian father, Peter Alexander Sirnis (Latvian: Pēteris Aleksandrs Zirnis), and a British mother, Gertrude Stedman Sirnis, in the Bournemouth suburb of Pokesdown. Three years after being exposed, Lette sold the semi in Bexleyheath and moved to be near her daughter, renting a flat in the sheltered housing complex. Secrets of Bletchley Park: How codebreakers paved way for World War 2 victory From World War II through the Cold War, she stole nuclear secrets from the office where she worked as a secretary and passed them to Moscow. Prized: Mrs Norwood, pictured at her home in Bexleyheath, London, in 1999, was a member of the advisory committee on the atom bomb project - a significant help for the Soviet Union. The real Melita Norwood, known as 'Hola' by the Russians was an Englishwoman who worked at the Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association in London. Lette’s work for the Soviets continued right up until her retirement from the company in 1972, when she was 60. The comments below have not been moderated. Her bookbinder father was a Latvian immigrant and Left-wing activist whose slogan was ‘Down with everything that’s up, and up with everything that’s down’. Biography Melita Norwood is best known as a Celebrity. 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). At the height of the war in 1943, she took time off to have a child, Anita. I certainly didn’t.’. Her mother, too, was a suffragette with far-Left sympathies. The Kremlin did not keep its hands clean, however. MI5 was today criticised by the parliamentary committee overseeing the intelligence agencies over its failure to prosecute the KGB spy Melita Norwood. Although her father died when she was six, the family still held Left-wing views which the bright child absorbed from an early age. Russia 'to reopen Cold War Cuban listening post used to spy... GCHQ 'can spy on Facebook and YouTube users and has ability... Drunks who can't keep secrets: What the KGB thought about... 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Datasets available include LCSH, BIBFRAME, LC Name Authorities, LC Classification, MARC codes, PREMIS vocabularies, ISO language codes, and … The next week, the writer David Burke visited her and found her “still in a state of shock,” as he wrote in The London Magazine. On TRENDCELEBNOW.COM, Melita Norwood … Norwood gave a famous press conference in garden of her very conventional London … A great-grandmother described as the most important British female agent recruited by the KGB, has died aged 93. Spy Melita Norwood (far left) pictured with her mother Gertrude, sister Gerty and half-brother Alfred Brandt. I just wanted Russia to be on equal footing with the West,’ she told the media crowding at her front door in 1999 after being publicly exposed, before politely closing it. Well, she was partly aided by the boys’ club atmosphere of MI5, the British Security Service. Her mother … Image of spy Melita Norwood opening Norwood Labs at Greenwich University in 1993. Melita (everyone called her ‘Lette’) had joined the company as a clerk in 1937. This includes data values and the controlled vocabularies that house them. ‘I did not want money. Melita Norwood, on the other hand — codenamed Hola — was a model of reliability. For the KGB, this was an unbelievable piece of good fortune, because Bailey happened to be a member of the advisory committee on the atom bomb project. Norwood was coming clean because a Cambridge historian had discovered her espionage while writing a book, but she was unrepentant. British intelligence only confirmed she was a spy in the 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union, when the former KGB officer Vasili Mitrokhin defected to the United Kingdom and turned over six trunks of archive information about Soviet spying. Indeed, so trusted was Lette that she had access to Bailey’s two safes. Two weeks ago, nine years after her death, Melita’s barely-known name unexpectedly re-emerged when the Mitrokhin Archive, a file of top secret Soviet documents, was made available to the public for the first time. Behind this dull company name was an important firm involved in vital research. No sniff of suspicion: To her neighbours she was a charming old lady who was a little bit eccentric. Melita Norwood did the shopping, made chutney and, like her mother, spied on Britain for the Soviet Union. HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate. © 2021 A&E Television Networks, LLC. “I thought perhaps what I had access to might be useful in helping Russia to keep abreast of Britain, America and Germany.” She added that, “in general, I do not agree with spying against one's country.”. ‘And she had her gardening: flowers at the front, vegetables at the back. Melita Norwood was born on March 25, 1912 in Bournemouth, Dorset, UK. Incredibly, despite doubts about her extreme Left-wing sympathies and links, she was cleared. Play it now. … How fortunate she was. Her consequent contribution of atomic intelligence to the Soviet Union was incalculable, certainly big enough for the Russians to declare that she had made ‘a valuable contribution to the development of work in this field’. In fact, Melita Norwood was the Soviet Union’s longest-serving British spy. He kept sensitive documents in both, sometimes holding evening meetings at home at which Lette was expected to be on hand. Mona Maund, one of the first female MI5 agents, actually identified Norwood as a possible spy back in the 1930s, when Norwood was at the beginning of her espionage career. Melita Norwood reads a statement in her garden, which she had lovingly tended (Image: PA) Read More Related Articles. But she always felt she did the right thing. The revelations came as a total surprise to Norwood's daughter, Anita Ferguson, who didn’t find out her mother was a spy until she read about it in the paper. Melita is a diversified telecommunications operator in Malta offering internet, television, telephony and mobile services. 'There could be no worse … No life could have looked more ordinary. Farm Heroes Saga, the #4 Game on iTunes. Moscow simply preferred to have non-Russians do the killing and destruction. For Mrs Norwood was no ordinary granny. Find professional Melita Norwood videos and stock footage available for license in film, television, advertising and corporate uses. It was not that side I was interested in. The girl who had become bored with university life at Southampton after only a year was soon being promoted from clerk to secretary. These documents revealed Norwood’s espionage, but British officials kept it secret because they didn’t think there was enough evidence to prosecute. ‘She was lovely, a pure lady,’ says Sheila Howell, who was a neighbour for more than 20 years. Working so close to highly classified research, Lette had to go through a security vetting. Intriguingly, it included profiles of 200 British KGB collaborators written by their Kremlin handlers. Norwood died in 2005, but people have remained fascinated with her story. From Anthony Blunt to Melita Norwood, all Soviet spies seem to suffer from selective memory loss, says Andrew Pierce. MI5 worked out who ‘Hola’ was in 1992, soon after Soviet defector Mitrokhin arrived in Britain with his KGB file. How did Norwood get away with it for so long? He founded the Southern Worker And Labour And Socialist Journal in Southampton. For example, she used Che Guevara tea mugs and habitually posted copies of the Communist Morning Star through the letterboxes of 32 of her neighbours. But she continued to send these secret files until the early 1970s, when she retired as a spy. In 2013, author Jennie Rooney published a novel, Red Joan, loosely based on Norwood’s life. Norwood was a long-time member of the Communist Party who supported the Soviet Union’s attempt to bring communism to Eastern Europe and feared a world in which the United States and Western Europe held unchallenged nuclear power. She ended her days in a cosy, third-floor rented flat in a sheltered housing complex. Who would have thought she was a spy? Norwood’s secret finally came out in September 1999, when The Times of London began to publish Andrew’s book serially. When she was unmasked publicly as ‘Hola’ seven years later, no action was taken against her because by then she was 87, and Jack Straw, then Labour Home Secretary, decided that at her age, nothing was to be gained from sending her to prison. I remember her talking to me once about Karl Marx,’ he says. The views expressed in the contents above are those of our users and do not necessarily reflect the views of MailOnline. The file arrived in Britain in 1992 when KGB Major Vasili Mitrokhin defected to Britain, bringing with him, in six trunks, an archive of 30 years of Soviet secrets. ... in latest trailer for YouTube … When she returned to the firm in 1944, she went to work for the director, Dr G. L. Bailey, who wanted Lette because he knew she could cope with the technical jargon.