Judi steps into storm as the spy who came in from the Co-op
Red Joan, the tale of an English grandmother who spied for the Russians, is yet to hit cinemas but it has already spawned a bitter row between the academic who gained her trust and the novelist who ‘sexed up’ her story
ON a sunny September morning in 1999, the suburban peace of Bexleyheath was broken by the jostling of the British media on the doorstep of grey-haired granny Melita Norwood. Her neighbours in this unassuming area of south-east London were stunned to learn that the demure pensioner had been unmasked as one of the most important Soviet spies of the 20th century, rivalling the master traitor Kim Philby when it came to length of service to the Kremlin.
The British metallurgy research leaked by the 87-year-old widow during the Cold War provided Russian scientists with a crucial breakthrough in their bid to accelerate Stalin’s atomic bomb programme.
Meanwhile, an academic called Dr David Burke, who had made regular visits to Norwood’s home to examine the papers of her late father, a Bolshevik who translated Lenin and Tolstoy into English, was heading for London on a coach from his home in Leeds to join her for one of their customary Sunday lunches of fish fingers and allotment-grown greens.
It was only when the coach stopped as usual at Milton Keynes that he bought a Sunday newspaper and discovered for the first time that his hostess had lived a very intriguing double life.
Up to then, Norwood’s only overt sign of any political affiliation had been her habit of buying 32 copies of the Communist Party’s paper, the Morning Star, to push through the letterboxes of local socialist supporters.
Other clues to her support of Leftwing causes were a CND sticker in the window of her neat, pebbledash semi and her habit of drinking Co-op tea from a Che Guevara mug. As a result she was promptly dubbed The Bexleyheath Bolshevik and The Spy Who Came in From the Co-Op.
Thanks to the mutual trust Burke and Norwood had built up over the preceding months, when the clamour for her to tell her story became irresistible it was to him that she turned.
The result was a scholarly work that outlined how Norwood’s contribution allowed the Soviet Union to overcome problems that had delayed the development of their nuclear reactors and led directly to Russia exploding its bomb in 1949, years earlier than would otherwise have been the case.
Norwood was never put on trial because of her great age and died six years after being exposed.
NOW, 14 years after her death, her life of espionage will once again be in the spotlight, having inspired a forthcoming film, Red Joan, directed by Sir Trevor Nunn and starring Dame Judi Dench as Joan Stanley, the character obviously based on Norwood, in later life, with Sophie Cookson playing her as a young woman.
The film, due in cinemas in April, is based on a book of the same title by novelist Jennie Rooney, 39, who says she was motivated to write it after learning about Norwood’s exposure while she was reading history at Cambridge.
“New evidence to identify Norwood had become available when Vasili Mitrokhin defected to Britain from the KGB in 1992, bringing with him a huge number of painstakingly copied files previously unseen by the British intelligence services,” she says.
But Rooney’s novel, and the film, has sparked a bitter row with Dr Burke, whose biography adopted her nickname of The Spy Who Came In From The Co-Op as its title. It was published in 2008 – five years
before Rooney’s novel – and was based on the many hours of conversation he had with Norwood, who he had first met – as we have seen – when he was researching the work of her late father Alexander Sirnis, a distinguished translator of important Russian works.
Aggrieved to find a “sexed-up” version of Norwood’s life in Rooney’s novel, Dr Burke accuses her of using his academic work as a basis for her own plot.
”Melita would have been appalled by Rooney’s book, which is just an attempt to make money out of her life,” he says. “There are terrible errors in her book. Melita never had an affair with her boss, she was devoted to her husband. She was a demure secretary which is one of the reasons she got away with it for so long. Is it really fair to portray her as promiscuous? Attaching a sexual element to the story is simply a way to ensure it was made into a lucrative film. This book should never have purported as having anything to do with Melita’s life.”
FOR her part, Rooney dismisses Dr Burke’s accusations, saying: “Red Joan is a novel which has never been marketed as the story of Melita Norwood’s life – far from it. My novel was not based on his book, or on Melita herself. She was the inspiration, but not the subject matter.” Regardless of the quibbles between authors, nothing can detract from Melita’s place in Cold War history and the fascination over her life as the granny spy who was the KGB’s longest-serving agent in Britain.
“I thought I’d got away with it; what a kerfuffle,” she was heard muttering shortly before delivering a statement to the reporters who had gathered in her front garden that fateful day in 1999. In her address, Miss Norwood – or Agent Hola as she was known to her KGB handlers – admitted passing on innumerable scientific secrets.
“I did not want money. It was not that side I was interested in,” she declared. “In general I do not agree with spying against one’s country, but I wanted Russia to be on equal footing with the West.” After all her years of subterfuge, Melita actually seemed to relish her day in the limelight. It was her “fox” moment – another Soviet spy, Alexander Foote, once concluded that “the only excitement a spy is likely to have is his last, when he is finally run to earth – a similar emotion to that experienced by the fox.”
As an afterthought Norwood added that her late husband Hilary, a maths teacher who she had nursed at home until his death from liver cancer, had disapproved of her spying activities, but had always respected her commitment to communism.
Those friends in Bexleyheath with whom she had enjoyed swapping jam-making recipes, were shocked by her unmasking, of course, and even her own daughter expressed amazement.
But Norwood, with typical British phlegm, said: “I never considered myself a spy, but it’s for others to judge.” Then she politely closed her front door.
The home secretary Jack Straw announced that at her age there was no point in pressing charges. Not least because a prosecution would lead to embarrassing questions about why she had never been caught by British intelligence. MI5 had in fact investigated her six times, but had let her slip through the net on each occasion.
Straw’s position was, perhaps, typical of the ambivalent attitude held by the British towards their spies, oscillating between fascination and approval to downright revulsion.
Norwood was simultaneously dubbed a “great” spy to rank with the “Magnificent Five” of Burgess, Maclean, Philby, Blunt and Cairncross, and yet there were equally vocal calls for her to be jailed indefinitely for her treachery.
Dr Burke argues that her contribution to Russia’s nuclear bomb programme was at least as great as that of Klaus Fuchs, a member of the Anglo-American nuclear research team who handed over plans to the Russians in the mid-1940s.
Educated at Itchen Grammar School and Southampton University, Norwood was groomed for a life in espionage by her mother Gertrude, who also spied for Moscow, and had helped in the training of Soviet agents as wireless operators. Norwood had begun copying research documents as early as 1934 when, at the age of 22, she went to work for British Non-Ferrous Metals which played a key role in atomic research.
The breakthrough for the Russians came when she was given access to research work relating to a theory about the corrosive nature of uranium at high temperatures.
Says Dr Burke: “The information provided by Melita speeded up the Russians’ nuclear bomb programme by five years. They had Fuchs’ designs but they didn’t have the uranium because they couldn’t control the uranium inside the reactor.
“The British team had been working successfully on the same issue and this was part of the crucial material Melita handed to the Russians.”
OF Melita’s motivation to spy, he says: “She was not a hardline Stalinist. She was an emotional communist and quite naive. She thought what she was doing was for the benefit of the entire world.
“She saw Stalin in those early days as a sort of Clement Attlee figure. When she became active in the 1930s, Russia was viewed by many people as the only nation capable of defeating the Nazis.
“She remained a committed communist and visited Russia several times after her retirement, being awarded the Order of the Red Banner and she was granted a small pension by the KGB.”
Adds Prof Christopher Andrew, MI5’s official historian: “Melita was the longest-lasting Soviet spy in British history and on her unmasking she was inundated with lucrative offers for her life story. She turned them all down, instead telling much of her story to Dr Burke, impressed by his research on revolutionary emigres from the Tsarist Empire, of whom her father had been one.”
For her part, right up to her death in 2005 aged 93, Norwood steadfastly refused to accept that she had done anything to be ashamed of. If anyone questioned the morality of her life of betrayal, she would argue that Soviet communism was “a good experiment, and I agreed with it… I would do it all again.”
● Red Joan is on release in British cinemas from April 12