Granny Spy
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Granny Spy
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
British civil servant and Soviet spy
^ Jump up to: a b c d "Grandmother: I was right to spy" . BBC News. 20 September 1999. Archived from the original on 14 February 2009 . Retrieved 27 April 2008 .
^ Jump up to: a b c d e f Meddick, Simon; Payne, Liz; Katz, Phil (2020). Red Lives: Communists and the Struggle for Socialism . UK: Manifesto Press Co-operative Limited. p. 144. ISBN 978-1-907464-45-4 .
^ Jump up to: a b c d e f John Simkin; et al. "Melita Norwood" . Spartacus Educational. Archived from the original on 2 July 2015 . Retrieved 1 June 2015 .
^ Jump up to: a b c d Meddick, Simon; Payne, Liz; Katz, Phil (2020). Red Lives: Communists and the Struggle for Socialism . UK: Manifesto Press Co-operative Limited. p. 145. ISBN 978-1-907464-45-4 .
^ Jump up to: a b c d Hoge, Warren (13 September 1999). "The Great-Grandmother Comes In From the Cold" . The New York Times . Retrieved 15 May 2019 .
^ Andrew, Christopher; Mitrokhin, Vasili (2015) [1999]. The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West . London: Penguin. p. 154. ISBN 9780141966465 . (Originally published by Allen Lane, The Penguin Press)
^ Meddick, Simon; Payne, Liz; Katz, Phil (2020). Red Lives: Communists and the Struggle for Socialism . UK: Manifesto Press Co-operative Limited. pp. 144–145. ISBN 978-1-907464-45-4 .
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^ Jump up to: a b c "AFM: Judi Dench's 'Red Joan' Biopic Sells Internationally (Exclusive)" . hollywoodreporter.com . Retrieved 9 February 2018 .
^ Jump up to: a b c "Judi Dench, Sophie Cookson to star in Trevor Nunn's 'Red Joan' (exclusive)" . screendaily.com . Retrieved 9 February 2018 .
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^ Jump up to: a b c d e f g h i Cunningham, John (28 June 2005). "Melita Norwood" . The Guardian . London . Retrieved 15 May 2019 .
^ "Melita Norwood" . The Daily Telegraph . London. 29 June 2005 . Retrieved 17 May 2019 .
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^ Jump up to: a b "Melita Norwood" . The Times . 28 June 2005 . Retrieved 15 May 2019 . (subscription required)
^ Duff, W. E. (1999). A Time for Spies: Theodore Stephanovich Mally and the Era of the Great Illegals . Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. p. 141 . ISBN 978-0-82651-352-6 .
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^ 10 May 2019 "Incredible Untrue Events" Jeremy Bernstein , London Review of Books
^ Little, Becky. "How a British Secretary Who Spied for the Soviets Evaded Detection for 40 Years" . HISTORY . Retrieved 9 July 2019 .
^ "Melita Norwood Timeline" . BBC News. 20 December 1999. Archived from the original on 27 December 2007 . Retrieved 27 April 2008 .
^ Allan Massie (7 July 2014). "The Cambridge Five were unreliable spies because they lived before the age of the booze-free lunch" . The Daily Telegraph . Archived from the original on 13 July 2014 . Retrieved 8 July 2014 .
Melita Stedman Norwood (née Sirnis ; 25 March 1912 – 2 June 2005) was a British civil servant , Communist Party of Great Britain member and KGB spy.
Born to a British mother and Latvian father, Norwood is most famous for supplying the Soviet Union with state secrets concerning the development of atomic weapons from her job at the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association , where she worked for 40 years. [1] [2] Despite the high strategic value of the information she passed to the Soviets, she refused to accept any financial rewards for her work. She rejected the Soviets' offer of a pension, [2] [3] and argued that her disclosures of classified work helped to avoid the possibility of a third world war involving the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union. [1] [4] [5]
In The Mitrokhin Archive: The K.G.B. in Europe and the West , co-authored by Christopher Andrew , she is described as "both the most important British female agent in KGB history and the longest serving of all Soviet spies in Britain." [6] She is also described by the Communist Party of Britain (CPB) , as "a real heroine" and "a consistent fighter in defence of peace and socialism." [2] [4] She was also widely known as a life-long supporter of the Morning Star newspaper, and its predecessor the Daily Worker . [7]
In popular culture she is most known for her depiction in the 2018 spy drama Red Joan , whose protagonist was loosely inspired by Norwood's life. [8] [9] [10]
Norwood was born Melita Sirnis at 402 Christchurch Road in Bournemouth [2] [11] on 25 March 1912, [12] the daughter of British mother Gertrude Stedman Sirnis and Latvian father Peter Alexander Sirnis ( Latvian : Pēteris Aleksandrs Zirnis ). Her father was a close associate of both the Bolsheviks and Leo Tolstoy , before he died of tuberculosis when Norwood was six years old. [11] He produced a newspaper entitled The Southern Worker: A Labour and Socialist Journal , which was influenced by the October Russian Revolution , and the paper published his translations of works by Lenin and Trotsky . Her mother joined the Co-operative Party . [13] [12] Norwood won a scholarship in 1923 for an education at Itchen Secondary School , becoming school captain in 1928. [3] She then went on to study Latin and Logic at the University College of Southampton , [12] before dropping out in 1931. [3] After leaving University, Norwood moved to the German city of Heidelberg , where she stayed for a year and became involved in anti-fascist activism. [3]
From 1932, Sirnis worked as a secretary with the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association . [3] Towards the end of 1935, she married Hilary Nussbaum, [14] who was of Russian Jewish descent (he later changed his name to Norwood), a chemistry teacher, teachers' trades union official, and lifelong Communist . [3]
Melita Norwood left the Independent Labour Party (ILP) after the group splintered in 1936, after which she joined the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) , and became an active supporter of the party's newspaper The Daily Worker . [2] The UK authorities were not aware of her party affiliation until very much later. In 1935 she was recommended to the NKVD (forerunner of the KGB ) by Andrew Rothstein , a leading member of the CPGB, and became a full agent in 1937. [15] In the same year, the Norwoods bought their semi-detached house in Bexleyheath , which was at that time a town in Kent ; there they led an apparently unremarkable life together, and Melita Norwood would continue to live there until she was 90. [12]
Norwood’s NKVD espionage career began in the mid-1930s as a member of the Woolwich Spy ring in London. Three of its members were arrested in January 1938 and sentenced to between three and six years in prison, [16] but Melita Norwood was not then detained. Meanwhile, a wave of purges in Moscow led the NKVD to cut back on its overseas espionage activities, and Norwood's new Soviet employers became the GRU , the Military Overseas Intelligence Service of the Soviet Union . Her Soviet handlers gave her a succession of different code names, the last being "Agent Hola". [15] [17]
Her position as secretary to G.L. Bailey, head of a department at the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association , enabled Norwood to pass her Soviet handlers material relating to the British atomic weapons project, known at the time by the innocuous name of Tube Alloys . [2] Bailey was on an advisory committee to Tube Alloys. According to Jeremy Bernstein , Bailey was "warned about Norwood’s political associations and was careful not to reveal anything to her." [18]
The British security services eventually identified Norwood as a security risk in 1965, but refrained from questioning her in order to avoid disclosing their methods. She retired in 1972. [12] Her husband died in 1986, and Norwood said in 1999 that he had disapproved of her activities as an agent. [5] Her neighbours in Bexleyheath, while aware of her left-wing beliefs, reacted with astonishment, as did her daughter, when she was unmasked as a spy in 1999. [12]
Norwood's espionage activities were first publicly revealed by former KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin , in the book The Mitrokhin Archive: The K.G.B. in Europe and the West (1999), co-written by the historian Christopher Andrew . Mitrokhin defected in 1992, giving the British authorities six trunkloads of KGB files. [5] Norwood was well known to be a communist sympathiser [12] but a separate report in 1999 stated that British intelligence became aware of her significance only after Mitrokhin's defection; to protect other investigations it was then decided not to prosecute her. [20] Some have questioned the validity of evidence from the Mitrokhin archive. In any event, Norwood was never charged with an offence. [12]
Norwood said she gained no material benefits from her spying activities. [1] While she said she did not generally "agree with spying against one's country", she had hoped her actions would help "Russia [the Soviet Union ] to keep abreast of Britain, America and Germany". [5] [4] In 2014, newly released files from the Mitrokhin archive suggest she was more highly valued by the KGB than the Cambridge Five . [21]
In a statement at the time of her exposure, she said:
I did what I did, not to make money, but to help prevent the defeat of a new system which had, at great cost, given ordinary people food and fares which they could afford, a good education and a health service. [4]
Red Joan is a 2018 film very loosely inspired by Norwood's life, starring Judi Dench and Sophie Cookson . It was directed by Trevor Nunn , [10] and produced by David Parfitt , with a screenplay by Lindsay Shapero. [9] The film was shot in the UK. [10] [9] It premiered at the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival . [8]
On 2 June 2005, at the age of 93, Norwood died at New Cross Hospital in Wolverhampton . [12]
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Red Granny Spy Case BBC's Jonny Dymond reports on the findings in the "Red Granny" Spy case in Britain. Britain's domestic intelligence agency, MI5 was criticized today by a British parliamentary committee for not prosecuting Melita Norwood the "Red Granny" Spy back in 1992 after receiving a vast archive that was smuggled to the West by Vasily Mitrokhin, a retired KGB officer. Norwood admitted giving away Britain's nuclear secrets to Moscow during the Cold War.
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BBC's Jonny Dymond reports on the findings in the "Red Granny" Spy case in Britain. Britain's domestic intelligence agency, MI5 was criticized today by a British parliamentary committee for not prosecuting Melita Norwood the "Red Granny" Spy back in 1992 after receiving a vast archive that was smuggled to the West by Vasily Mitrokhin, a retired KGB officer. Norwood admitted giving away Britain's nuclear secrets to Moscow during the Cold War.
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Judi Dench turns 'granny spy' for 'Red Joan,' which sounds fun. It's not.
Judi Dench turns 'granny spy' for 'Red Joan,' which sounds fun. It's not.
Samantha Incorvaia
| The Republic | azcentral.com
Judi Dench stars in spy drama "Red Joan"
Judi Dench plays Joan Stanley, an English civil servant turned valuable KGB spy in "Red Joan."
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"Red Joan" is inspired by the true story of Melita Norwood, a British civilian turned KGB "granny spy" who gave classified information from her scientific research job. According to the movie, she went undiscovered until she reached her 80s.
For a movie about an intelligent female Cambridge science student and communist sympathizer, this movie sounds interesting. Too bad it is awfully dull.
Director Trevor Nunn exudes "The Imitation Game" aesthetics with spies, British historical war drama and espionage. But where "Imitation" is successful in thoroughly showcasing mathematics, it feels like "Red Joan" fails to delve into meaty science and dedicates more time to her romantic relationships.
The movie starts with special services law enforcement disrupting an elderly Joan Stanley (Judi Dench) in her quiet English countryside home. They charge her for breaching secretive policies and bring her in for questioning, which is how the movie flashes back to where it all began with a young Joan (Sophie Cookson) in college during the late 1930s.
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She's a shy student, but that doesn't last. One fateful night she meets fellow freshman Sonya (Tereza Srbova) who couldn't be more opposite of Joan. Sonya introduces her to communism through a propaganda movie night, where she meets Sonya's captivating cousin Leo (Tom Hughes). If the audience thought Sonya would shake things up, it's only the beginning as Joan falls for Leo's mysterious charms and political views.
It's truly a wonder how Dench signed up for this project. Most of her acting consists of heavy sighs of nostalgia and remorse as the focus primarily rests on her younger counterpart. Cookson shines as she has more room to bring dimensions to her character where Dench merely delivers empty statements like "you had no idea what it was like." And it doesn't help that the script, written by Lindsay Shapero, is awkward. Every time Leo calls Joan "my little comrade" it's almost worth retching over.
Fans of historical drama pieces might find something to love here, especially because Cookson does a great job of working with the material she's given. But strong emphasis on "might."
Cast: Judi Dench, Sophie Cookson, Stephen Campbell Moore.
Rating: R for brief sexuality, nudity.
Want to pitch a story idea? Reach reporter Samantha Incorvaia at sincorvaia@gannett.com or 602-444-4968. Follow her on Twitter at @_SamI520 .
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