The Spy who came in from the Co-op
David Burke
Woodbridge: the Boydell Press, 2008, h/b, £18.99
The author was conducting a series of interviews with 87-year old Melita Norwood about her childhood among a group of pro-Soviet radical exiles in England in the 1920s and 30s, when it was revealed in the press, via the KGB defector Metrokhin, that she had been a Soviet spy during and after WW2, leaking nuclear secrets. So Burke’s research shifted its focus and this book is the result: partly the original study of the pro-Soviet exile left in Britain and the formation of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and partly another go round the story of Soviet espionage in Britain, in which story Norwood is a minor element.
Depending on what you have read, CPGB member Norwood was a delightful old lefty, or a mysteriously unprosecuted major Soviet spy. (Burke shows that she was both.) Anybody who has been round the British Left in the past 50 years has met people like Norwood, innocents who never took on board the reality of the Soviet regime. This was quite interesting to me. I grew up among such people and thus acquired some of their instinctive pro-Soviet bias, which took a long time to shed.
There is also an interesting account of the political manoeuvrings around Metrokhin and Norwood as MI5 and SIS tried to establish their respective spin on the story. SIS, who wanted a prosecution of Norwood (to show MI5 incompetence, I presume), gave the Norwood material to David Rose, the recently self-outed SIS media asset, for a TV programme. MI5, who didn’t want to prosecute her, got their version to Philip Knightley.(1)
In his final paragraph the author writes:
‘By helping to create an armed stand-off between two nuclear superpowers Melita Norwood had played a significant part in ushering in the era of détente and its counterpart, Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). For that millions of Russian people probably owe her their lives.’
Which raises that most interesting ‘What if?’ question: what if the Soviets had been nukeless in the early 1950s? Would the Americans have nuked them, as Burke implies? There certainly were some among the U.S. Air Force, notably Curtis LeMay, who wanted to obliterate the Soviet Union in the early 1950s.(2)
Notes
- No, I am not suggesting that Knightley is an MI5 asset. Knightley has been a pain in the spooks’ posterior for 40 years.
- In Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr Strangelove, LeMay was parodied in the character played by George C. Scott.