When Melita Norwood's espionage was exposed after 40 years, the great-grandma revealed she was a legendary KGB spy who leaked US and British nuclear secrets.

Melita Norwood whiled away her golden years making homemade jam in the suburbs, tending to her garden, and waiting for a knock on the door from the British MI5 security team who investigate nuclear spies.

Tired of the subterfuge, Norwood eventually outed herself. Remarkably, Moscow’s ‘Agent Hola’ remained a free woman even after a jaw-dropping press conference in 1999 in which Melita, then an 87-year-old great granny, told journalists she was a nuclear spy. The neighbors were shocked. They’d always considered Melita a bit eccentric - she sipped tea from a Che Guevara mug and delivered copies of the communist Morning Star news, after all - but a spy?

Back in 1932, Norwood was hired as a secretary for London’s British Non‑Ferrous Metals Research Association, a sleep-inducing moniker that hid its vital mission: research into uranium for Britain’s atomic bomb project. She spent the next 40 years stealing documents from the company safe. At one point, Melita was even identified as a security risk, so why wasn’t she interrogated before her retirement?

MI5 said they knew all about Norwood but didn’t want to tip off Moscow. Others suspect MI5 wanted to sidestep questions about why the Soviet sympathizer wasn’t properly vetted and carried on leaking atomic secrets for decades. The real story is much more dramatic.

‍Vasili Mitrokhin & the Grandmother of All Spies‍

With her gray hair tamed by clips and penchant for sensible, buttoned-up blouses, Melita Norwood was an unlikely Cold War warrior yet her father, a revolutionary socialist, fled Tsarist Russia for Britain and brought his politics with him. Norwood, born in England in 1912, became an unapologetic communist. She lived much of her life in the same semi-detached house in southeast London that she’d bought in the 1930s when she was hired as a secretary for the British Non‑Ferrous Metals Research Association. The group worked on the Tube Alloys nuclear weapons research project with its US allies, a top-secret operation that eventually became part of the Manhattan Project. 

Cambridge historian Professor Christopher Andrew stumbled on Norwood’s deception while researching a book in the 1990s. He found Norwood’s name in KGB files given to Britain by former Soviet officer and defector Vasili Mitrokhin.

Norwood’s 1999 press conference, held on a quaint suburban street (Garden Avenue), finally revealed her startling truth - Norwood was Moscow’s longest-serving British operative and still is, quite possibly, the longest-serving undetected female spy in history if her Guinness Record still holds. She was operational from 1932-1972, stealing documents from her boss, photographing them with a KGB camera, and returning the intelligence to his safe unnoticed.

Astonishingly, her male-dominated work environment inadvertently allowed Melita to carry on. Who’d suspect a secretary, after all? Given the same circumstances, Norwood told journalists she’d do it all again. 
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Norwood & the Cambridge Five

Even after Norwood passed away in 2005, her legacy of intrigue carried on, inspiring the novel Red Joan in 2013 and the film adaptation in 2019 starring Sophie Cookson and Judi Dench.

Red Joan is told through an idealistic fictional character, Joan Stanley, but the dangerous real-life KGB spy is often compared to deadly traitors and Cambridge Five spies Kim Philby and Donald Maclean who were recruited as students at Cambridge University. Norwood's covert activities are believed to have accelerated the Soviet nuclear weapons program by two years (some even say five years).

Both Norwood and the Cambridge Five were identified because of the Mitrokhin archive, a collection of 20,000 documents the FBI described as the ‘most complete and extensive intelligence ever achieved from any source’.

The archive criticized Maclean and fellow Cambridge Five spy Guy Burgess - Maclean for his ‘drunk spells’ and Burgess for being ‘constantly under the influence of alcohol’ and being ‘not very good at keeping secrets’. Norwood, in comparison, was a model spy described as a ‘loyal, trustworthy, disciplined' agent who stole a large amount of crucial data for Moscow.

Unlike Philby, Maclean, and Guy Burgess, Norwood did not need to defect to Mother Russia. The wily operative escaped capture several times including a close call in 1937 when Britain uncovered the Soviet spy ring run by Percy Glading - cofounder of the British Communist Party - who counted Norwood among his members. Although three of Glading’s agents were imprisoned, MI5 couldn’t immediately identify the ‘Agent Hola’ mentioned in Glading's notebook.

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Nuclear Spies and Traitors

While Kim Philby may be widely known as Britain’s most notorious double agent, the Mitrokhin archive reveals Russia’s high regard for Norwood, a woman Moscow awarded a lifetime pension in 1962 for her ‘many years of excellent work’.

“It’s interesting that in all that time, there is never a moment when the KGB lose contact with Melita Norwood but they completely drop Kim Philby,” Professor Andrew told the media.

Interestingly, Norwood is also linked to Anglo-German nuclear spy Klaus Fuchs. Both were run by British housewife Ursula Kuczynski, a German expat and colonel in Russia’s Red Army who had spied on the Japanese in Manchuria. In Britain, Ursula also controlled Fuchs and Norwood. Over the decades, it became one of the most accomplished spy rings in history.