The 87-year-old grandmother who was one of the Soviets’ best spies | UK | News

In the autumn of 1992, a man called Vasili Mitrokhin fled Russia with a bag full of secrets. He had worked as a senior archivist for the KGB for much of the Cold War and had spent years meticulously copying down the Russian spy service’s deepest secrets, before finally being exfiltrated by MI6 in a daring operation.

The secrets he brought to the West would unmask hundreds of agents who had spied for the KGB around the world. Yet it was a grandmother in a south-east London suburb who would become the most famous case – and who would also cause a major headache for MI5. It is a story which points to a wider failure to appreciate the threat posed by Russia.

Mitrokhin first approached the British Embassy in Lithuania in March 1992. He turned up, looking a little like a tramp and trailing a grubby bag filled with bread and sausages. But at the bottom were pages and pages of secrets. MI6 started passing leads from these files to K Branch of MI5. Its staff toiled away at the Security Service’s gloomy offices at Gower Street, central London, and their job was to catch spies in Britain. But the Soviet Union had collapsed a few months earlier so many felt the Cold War was over and there was less to worry about from the new Russia.

At one point in the 1990s, MI5 even stopped tapping the phone of the top Russian spy at their embassy in London. And, as ever, the Treasury was demanding budget cuts. But still they began to investigate what Mitrokhin had brought. In June 1992, K Branch looked at one lead about an agent the KGB had run in Britain code named HOLA. That agent, it turned out, had passed important secrets from Britain’s atomic weapons programme early in the Cold War. So important was this intelligence that the conveyor had been awarded the Order of the Red Banner.

Mitrokhin revealed that HOLA was an 80-year-old woman called Melita Norwood living in Bexleyheath, south-east London. She was one of a wider group of atomic spies who had changed the shape of the early Cold War by speeding up Moscow’s ability to obtain the nuclear bomb.

Now a desk officer put her name into the registry – MI5’s sprawling collection of files – and it became clear, rather awkwardly, that she was already known to MI5. She had been vetted before getting her job in the programme and had been cleared, despite leaving a trace as a Communist true believer in the 1930s. She had then been investigated again, a number of times, in the ensuing decades.

By the 1960s, MI5 had decided she was now a “harmless and somewhat uninteresting character”. In fact, Mitrokhin’s notes revealed that, not only had she been a much more important spy than anyone had suspected, but that in 1967, after the last MI5 investigation had concluded, she was still active – and had even recruited a civil servant (code named HUNT) to work for the KGB.

The MI5 officer looking into the Mitrokhin lead then discovered another problem – Norwood was still alive and living in a semi-detached home in London’s suburbs. So what to do? Initially, MI5 had to proceed carefully. Mitrokhin was still in Russia. Approaching Norwood before he was out might raise questions about how they had come onto such a historic case, which would have pointed to the archivist. But even after his dramatic escape, accompanied by his family, in November 1992, MI5 decided not to talk to her. The decision was that it was all a long time ago and a prosecution might be tricky.

The risk, it was thought, was that it might look like MI5 was harassing an old lady for something that took place 50 years earlier. So in 1992, the decision was made to do nothing. A little while down the line, that would come back to bite MI5. Seven years later, in 1999, the secret of Mitrokhin’s escape was going to be revealed with a major book based on his files to be published that September.

And when MI5 saw a draft, they quickly realised they had a problem. BBC journalist David Rose had been working on a documentary about spies and had been given a draft of the book with the idea of broadcasting his programme timed with the publication of the Mitrokhin book.

He had worked out who Agent HOLA was and planned to expose her, and so her name was put into the draft of the book so that it would match up. But the foreign secretary had said the only people who could be named were those who had died, been convicted or agreed to it.

So when Rose turned up at her pebbledash house out of the blue with a hidden camera, a lot was riding on how Norwood – by then 87 – would react, not just for the TV documentary but for those in government. A confession was needed or else they had a big problem. If she denied everything, there was even a chance the not-yet published copies of the book would have to be pulped in case she sued for libel over the claims.

But to the journalist’s enormous relief, she opened the door on her quiet suburban street wearing a crisp white shirt and purple cardigan and invited Rose to sit down at the table. Then she promptly confessed to working for the KGB. “I thought I’d got away with it,” she would say. Did she have any regrets? No, she would go on to say. “I would do everything again.” On Saturday mornings, it emerged, Norwood would walk around her neighbourhood delivering copies of the Communist Party’s newspaper, The Morning Star.

She actually seemed proud of her espionage. When the story finally exploded into public view, she would become known as “The Spy Who Came in from the Co-op” – a reference to where Norwood did her shopping. But amid such lightheartedness, the question suddenly arose: why was she never prosecuted when MI5 had known for years what she had been up to?

She would be described as “the most important British female agent in KGB history and longest-serving of all Soviet spies in Britain” – arguably putting her in the same league as the likes of Cambridge Spies Harold “Kim” Philby, Anthony Blunt, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess. The then home secretary Jack Straw was furious at being taken by surprise by the whole thing and felt misled. The affair turned into a major political row, ushering in inquiries into the handling of the case.

In fact, Norwood was never prosecuted and went to her grave aged 93 in June 2005 utterly unrepentant. The tragedy was that everyone focused on this single spy in a way that overshadowed the story that Mitrokhin had fled to the West to tell. The focus was on the UK’s failure to prosecute spies, like Norwood, rather than the misdeeds of the KGB that Mitrokhin had dedicated himself to cataloguing.

What was more, Mitrokhin could see something that few at that time understood: the KGB was not dead. He would spend his last years before he died in 2004 trying to sound the alarm about what he could see happening in his homeland. The problem was that people had come to think the Cold War was history. Russian spies were no longer a problem, were they? So what if someone spied for them decades earlier? The country had a new leader called Vladimir Putin..

He might be a former KGB man, but many in government – even inside MI6 – thought he might be someone who would bring stability and whom they could do business with. It would take years – and events like the murder of Alexander Litvinenko with radioactive polonium in 2006 and attempted poisoning with nerve agent of Sergei Skripal in Salisbury in 2018, as well as the invasion of Ukraine – before people would understand something that Mitrokhin had always seen clearly: the KGB was not dead.

It had taken on a new name and a new shape but its spies were still busy, burrowing into Western society to steal secrets and cause mayhem through acts of sabotage. The tragedy was that few were willing to listen and now we are living with the consequences of that failure.

It was something Vasili Mitrokhin, who died peacefully in London in January 2004 aged 81 having managed to outwit the KGB and live to tell the tale, would always regret.

• The Spy in the Archive: How One Man Tried to Kill the KGB, by Gordon Corera (William Collins, £25) is out now