And in April 2019, a film adaptation premiered in the U.K. and the U.S. starring Judi Dench as Joan Stanley, the fictional counterpart to Melita Norwood, the real-life spy. Britain revealed Monday that it had suspected for half a century that "traitor granny" Melita Norwood was a Soviet spy, but it had never interviewed her because it … 'There could be no worse … Melita is a diversified telecommunications operator in Malta offering internet, television, telephony and mobile services. Norwood died in 2005, but people have remained fascinated with her story. FACT CHECK: We strive for accuracy and fairness. 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’. Discover Melita Norwood Net Worth, Salary, Biography, Height, Dating, Wiki. 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’. ‘I did not want money. ‘It was a complete shock at the time,’ says Anita, now 71. Published: 19:34 EST, 18 July 2014 | Updated: 19:48 EST, 18 July 2014, Melita Norwood, codenamed Hola, was one of the KGB's most prized spies. Her fa­ther, who died when she was six, was a book­binder. La vera protagonista è Melita Norwood, Granny Spy. ‘She thought he was the best. Scroll below to learn details information about Melita Norwood's salary, estimated earning, lifestyle, and Income reports. © 2021 A&E Television Networks, LLC. 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. … She told The Times of London that “in the same circumstances, I know that I would do the same thing again.”. I certainly didn’t.’. Nov 21, 2020 - Melita Norwood was known to her neighbours as a charming old lady - but Soviet documents revealed she passed on Britain's nuclear secrets over a period of 35 years. HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate. On September 11, 1999, Melita Stedman Norwood, 87, gave a statement to the media at her home in Bexleyheath, South-East London after they discovered the shocking facts about her past. Behind this dull company name was an important firm involved in vital research. These documents revealed Norwood’s espionage, but British officials kept it secret because they didn’t think there was enough evidence to prosecute. 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. The activities of 'Granny spy' Melita Norwood were finally exposed in 1992 Spy Melita Norwood (far left) pictured with her mother Ger​trude, sister Gerty and half-b​rother Alfred Brandt. Melita Norwood reads a statement in her garden, which she had lovingly tended (Image: PA) Read More Related Articles. In many other countries, the grey-haired great-grandmother would have ended her days in prison, or even been shot. 'Melita Norwood was a die-hard Communist who proliferated nuclear technology,' ex-MI5 officer Nick Day said. She declined it — her spying was, after all, a matter of principle. 87-year-old Melita Norwood reads a prepared statement outside her home in Bexleyheath after her spy activities were discovered by the British press. Taking tea with the spy who came in from the Co-op . Towards the end of the war, it was carrying out highly classified government research into the properties of uranium, as part of Britain’s atomic bomb project. But to the neighbours in Garden Avenue, Bexleyheath, a pleasant street of semis and discreet net curtains, Lette was viewed as a charming old lady who just happened to be a bit eccentric and very openly Left-wing. Twice a week we compile our most fascinating features and deliver them straight to you. From Anthony Blunt to Melita Norwood, all Soviet spies seem to suffer from selective memory loss, says Andrew Pierce. 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. 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. Joan, loosely based on real life “granny spy” Melita Norwood, is played by both Judi Dench, as the octogenarian facing a possible charge of … only confirmed she was a spy in the 1990s. But she continued to send these secret files until the early 1970s, when she retired as a spy. ‘She was lovely, a pure lady,’ says Sheila Howell, who was a neighbour for more than 20 years. Intriguingly, it included profiles of 200 British KGB collaborators written by their Kremlin handlers. I remember her talking to me once about Karl Marx,’ he says. On TRENDCELEBNOW.COM, Melita Norwood … It was not that side I was interested in. “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.”. This includes data values and the controlled vocabularies that house them. In fact, Melita Norwood was the Soviet Union’s longest-serving British spy. Norwood gave a famous press conference in garden of her very conventional London … Melita Norwood was a great-grandmother when her espionage was finally revealed. She began her spying career in the 1930s while working as a secretary for the Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association in London. 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. Although her father died when she was six, the family still held Left-wing views which the bright child absorbed from an early age. The girl who had become bored with university life at Southampton after only a year was soon being promoted from clerk to secretary. Datasets available include LCSH, BIBFRAME, LC Name Authorities, LC Classification, MARC codes, PREMIS vocabularies, ISO language codes, and … Well, she was partly aided by the boys’ club atmosphere of MI5, the British Security Service. Indeed, so trusted was Lette that she had access to Bailey’s two safes. Secrets of Bletchley Park: How codebreakers paved way for World War 2 victory 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’. Incredibly, despite doubts about her extreme Left-wing sympathies and links, she was cleared. No sniff of suspicion: To her neighbours she was a charming old lady who was a little bit eccentric. Some believe, however, the real reason she was not put on trial was to avoid embarrassing details emerging about MI5’s mistake in allowing her to work as a personal secretary at the very heart of Britain’s secret atomic research, even though she was known to have Communist sympathies. 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. 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. As the news of Norwood’s espionage broke in The Times, Norwood held a press conference to confirm that she was a spy and explain why she’d done it. 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. Who would have thought she was a spy? We are no longer accepting comments on this article. Over a period of 35 years, she had been a spy for the KGB, passing on Britain’s nuclear secrets that enabled the Soviet Union to catch up in building the atomic bomb. In 2013, author Jennie Rooney published a novel, Red Joan, loosely based on Norwood’s life. Photographer: Michael Stephens/PA via AP Photos MI5 worked out who ‘Hola’ was in 1992, soon after Soviet defector Mitrokhin arrived in Britain with his KGB file. Red Joan Starring Judi Dench, Sophie Cookson, Tom Hughes & Tereza Srbova Directed by Trevor Nunn In cinemas Red Joan is loosely based on the spying activities of British civil servant Melita Norwood, who was nearly 90 years old when she was exposed as a Soviet agent. For her part, Lette Norwood didn’t allow exposure of her treachery to ruin her Morning Star delivery routine, which continued uninterrupted. ‘We all knew where her politics lay. Unlike those Mata Hari-style seductresses whose treachery is based in the boudoir, Mrs Norwood was a very different kind of agent. Norwood was coming clean because a Cambridge historian had discovered her espionage while writing a book, but she was unrepentant. Lette’s work for the Soviets continued right up until her retirement from the company in 1972, when she was 60. MI5 was today criticised by the parliamentary committee overseeing the intelligence agencies over its failure to prosecute the KGB spy Melita Norwood. In 1999, an 87-year-old British woman held a press conference in front of her home to announce that for nearly four decades, she’d worked as a spy for the Soviet Union. One resident, Robert Leck, 78, a former bomb disposal unit RAF corporal, recalls Lette doing the shopping at the Co-op for other elderly neighbours, visiting anyone she thought might be lonely or unwell. Melita Norwood, pictured here at age 87 in 1999, standing outside her home in Bexleyheath, where she reads a statement to the press concerning her involvement in passing over atomic secrets to the KGB. But a male superior dismissed her tip because he didn’t think women could be good spies (in 1940, he fired Maund for accusing him of incompetence). She told me she would have been prepared to be tried as a war criminal and would have accepted a prison sentence.’. These usually ended so late that she stayed overnight. Though Norwood’s employers were suspicious of her ties to the Communist Party, over decades of work they never pinpointed her as a mole. Melita Norwood, once described as "the most important British female agent ever recruited by the KGB", has died at the age of 93, it was announced yesterday. 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. When her identity was revealed, the then Home Secretary, ‘Whatever she may have done, I love her,’ said the mother of two. Melita Norwood, who died in 2005, ‘passed on a lot of valuable nuclear material’ to the Soviets, according to Vasili Mitrokhin, below. She ended her days in a cosy, third-floor rented flat in a sheltered housing complex. 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. At the height of the war in 1943, she took time off to have a child, Anita. No life could have looked more ordinary. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Getty Images offers exclusive rights-ready and premium royalty-free analog, HD, and 4K video of the highest quality. He pro­duced a news­pa­per en­ti­tled The South­ern Worker and Labour and So­cial­ist Journal, which was in­flu­enced by the Oc­to­ber Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion, and the paper pub­lished his trans­la­tions of works by Lenin and Trot­sky. Melita Norwood was one of the KGB’s most prized spies and stole secrets for decades before she was unmasked at the age of 87. In fact, Melita Norwood was the Soviet Union’s longest-serving British spy. This innocuous-sounding association was actually part of a secret nuclear weapons research project with the U.S. called “Tube Alloy.” When no one was looking, Norwood would sneak into her boss’ office, open his safe and take pictures of the secret documents inside.