Why did Hall's English spy surrender a nuclear bomb to the USSR?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

She did not receive a dime from the KGB. “I was just in love with Lenin,” she later admitted.

Once upon a time there was a grandmother in southeast London - a dandelion of God named Melita Norwood. In her house, bought on credit back in 1937, she grew flowers and baked pies. The neighbors considered the old woman a lovable creature, albeit with quirks: Granny expressed sympathy for communist ideas and agitated everyone to subscribe to the left-wing Morning Star newspaper. But in 1999, journalists came running to the old woman's house. It turned out that this "cute dandelion" for 40 years spied against his country - Great Britain - in favor of the USSR. This year, the "red grandmother" would have turned 100 years old.

Spy secretary

She was in her early 20s when she got a job as a secretary at the British Association for the Study of Non-Ferrous Metals. There Norwood noticed Andrew Rothstein - one of the founders of the Communist Party of Great Britain. His choice was one hundred percent justified. Melita knew nothing about science and technology, but practically all the documentation of the association passed through her hands. In addition, she, the daughter of a native of the USSR, a Russified Latvian, was an ardent communist. The NKVD officers supplied the girl with a miniature camera. It was with her that she filmed all important documents for intelligence.

But after a year of successful espionage activities, Melita had to be “mothballed”. She worked with agents working at the Woolwich Arsenal military plant. Three of them appeared in 1938, were arrested and accused of betraying the Motherland. Then a very valuable notebook fell into the hands of British counterintelligence, in which the names of Soviet spies, including Norwood, were written in the code language. Melita was in the balance of death. But … British counterintelligence officers were able to decipher only part of the records. Melita's name remained classified.

A few months after the high-profile revelations, Norwood was allowed to continue espionage activities. It was on the eve of World War II and after the Victory that the activities of the secretary - the gray mouse - turned out to be extremely useful for the USSR. The Association for Scientific Research of Non-Ferrous Metals, in which the spy worked, was one of the leading organizations in the "Tunnel Alloys" project - research on nickel and copper, with the help of which scientists tried to obtain isotopes of uranium-235 and create an atomic bomb. Thanks to the ideological Melita, all the achievements of the British were immediately introduced into Soviet developments, and the government of the USSR knew more about the British nuclear bomb than the ministries of the United Kingdom. Prime Minister Clement Attlee also knew about the project. He categorically forbade all scientists to mention "Tunnel rafting" at government meetings, arguing that such secret information cannot be trusted to just anyone. Attlee did not even suspect that "whoever got it", namely Norwood, had already helped the USSR to prepare for the explosion of the atomic bomb in 1949, and the Russians were able to do this 3 years earlier than the British. But this was not the end of Melita's "dirty tricks" for Great Britain. The modest secretary successfully recruited useful officials and researchers into the ranks of the supporters of the Communist Party.

"A disciplined and loyal agent who does everything in her power to help Soviet intelligence," KGB officers wrote in the Norwood file. Melita's contact was Ursula Burton, nicknamed Sonya, one of the main figures in the Soviet spy network in Great Britain. With her, Halla - the party name of Melita - met incognito in the south-east suburbs of London.

Interestingly, already in 1945, British counterintelligence was convinced that Melita Norwood was a Soviet spy. But the secret services could not find a single proof of this. "Providence kept me safe," Norwood sneered.

Even more unusual is the fact that Melita Norwood, who worked tirelessly for the good of the USSR, did not take a penny or a pound for her work with the KGB. “I worked only for the idea, I adored the Russians, but I diligently hid it. I was in love with Lenin,”Melita later admitted. The only thing that the "red grandmother" deigned to accept as gratitude for the betrayal of the Motherland was a life pension of 20 pounds a month and the Order of the Red Banner, which she was awarded, of course, secretly.

Didn't get away with it

The "grandmother of Soviet intelligence" was exposed completely by accident. In 1992, a certain KGB archivist Vladimir Mitrokhin decided to arrange his life well. Back in the 1970s, when the scouts were transported to a new building in the Yasenevo metropolitan area, Mitrokhin was able to copy a lot of classified materials in the general turmoil. The traitor took out secret data, hiding them in boots and socks. He buried the precious treasure in aluminum containers at his dacha and waited in the wings for almost 20 years. In the early 1990s, the enterprising Mitrokhin offered the United States to buy the archive from him. But the Americans did not believe the archivist and refused. But in the UK he was received with open arms. Mitrokhin took out from Russia six suitcases with documents covering the activities of Soviet foreign intelligence from 1930 to 1980. Mitrokhin, in contrast to the "red grandmother", was counting on a reward. The defector received British citizenship, a "country house" and a life pension for his services.

And British counterintelligence learned a lot of interesting things. In the documents taken out by Mitrokhin, among other officials who spied on the USSR, the name of Melita was also listed. A scandal erupted in the British Parliament. Officials demanded that the 87-year-old woman be jailed so that she would pay in full for the 40-year-old betrayal. But the Home Secretary Jack Straw, as a true Englishman, remained unwavering calm, he categorically refused to "torture my grandmother out of respect for her gray hair." Norwood herself was immensely surprised at what was revealed: “I thought I got away with it. If they jail me, I will finally read Marx … "She never repented of what she had done:" I wanted Russia to be able to speak with the West on equal terms. I did all this because I expected the Russians to be attacked as soon as the war with the Germans was over. Back in 1939, Chamberlain wanted the Soviet Union to be attacked, it was he who pushed Hitler to the East … I did what I did, not for the sake of money, but to prevent the defeat of the new system, which paid dearly to provide for ordinary people affordable food and transportation, education and healthcare … Under similar circumstances, I would do the same again."

The neighbors of the sweet grandmother, unlike her 50-year-old daughter, who shouted: “I don’t know my mother at all!”, Melita was not condemned. They still smiled and greeted each other and gladly took Morning Star from her.