Christopher Andrew: The Sword and the Shield

The secret of the Mitrokhin archive was less rigorously preserved by some of Britain’s allies. But though there were a few partial leaks by foreign governments and intelligence agencies which had been given access to parts of the archive, none had much resonance in Britain. In December 1998, I received out of the blue a phone call from a German journalist who had discovered both the codename by which Mitrokhin was known in Germany and the contents of some fragments of Mitrokhin’s German material. He told me he knew I was completing a first volume based on the Mitrokhin archive and had already planned a second. For the next few months I expected the story to break in the British press. Somewhat to my surprise, it did not do so.

On Saturday, September 11, 1999, after three and a half years of secrecy and silence, The Mitrokhin Archive suddenly became front-page news when serialization began in The Times . Between Friday night and Saturday morning I moved from a long period in which I had not talked at all about The Mitrokhin Archive in public to a month in which I seemed to talk about little else. Unsurprisingly, the revelations which captured media attention were human-interest stories about Soviet spies in Britain rather than the more important but less parochial disclosures about KGB operations against NATO as a whole and against democratic dissent within the Soviet Bloc. Hitherto the media stereotype of a major Soviet spy in Britain, modeled on Kim Philby and his friends, had been of a bright but subversive Cambridge graduate, preferably from a good public school and with an exotic sex life. In September 1999 the stereotype changed almost overnight with Mitrokhin’s unmasking of Melita Norwood, an 87-year-old great-grandmother from Bexleyheath memorably described by The Times as “The Spy Who Came In from the Co-op” (where, for ideological reasons, she does most of her shopping), as the longest-serving of all Soviet spies in Britain.

A Times reporter was with Mrs. Norwood early on the morning of September 11 as she listened to John Humphrys on the Today program first recount some of the contents of her KGB file noted by Mitrokhin, then interview myself and Ann Widdecombe. “Oh dear!” she told the Times reporter. “This is all so different from my quiet little life. I thought I’d got away with it. But I’m not that surprised it’s finally come out.” Within a few hours, a media scrum had gathered expectantly outside Mrs. Norwood’s end-of-terrace house, interviewing friends and neighbours about how she drank tea from a Che Guevara mug, put “Stop Trident” posters in her window, sold home-made chutney in aid of Cuban support groups, and delivered more than thirty copies of the Morning Star every Saturday morning to veterans of the Bexleyheath Old Left. Mrs. Norwood behaved with extraordinary composure when she emerged later in the day to face the media for the first time in her life. The image of the greatgranny spy walking down her garden path between well-tended rose bushes to make a confession of sorts to a large crowd of reporters caught the imagination of millions of television viewers and newspaper-readers. “I’m 87 and unfortunately my memory is not what it was,” Mrs. Norwood began. “I did what I did not to make money but to help prevent the defeat of a new system which had, at great cost, given ordinary people food and fares which they could afford, given them education and a health service.”

As well as being a media sensation, Mrs. Norwood’s guarded public confession was a remarkable historical document. What had captured her imagination before the Second World War, like that of most other Soviet agents of the time, was not the brutal reality of Stalin’s Russia but the idealistic myth-image of the world’s first worker-peasant state which had abolished unemployment and for the first time enabled working people to realize their full potential — the “new system” nostalgically recalled by Mrs. Norwood when she spoke to reporters. In the mid 1930s that myth-image was so powerful that, for true believers who, unlike Melita Sirnis (as she then was), were able to go on pilgrimage to the Soviet Union, it survived even the contrary evidence of their own eyes. Malcolm Muggeridge, probably the best of the British journalists then in Moscow, later wrote of the British pilgrims he encountered:

Their delight in all they saw and were told, and the expression they gave to that delight, constitute unquestionably one of the wonders of our age. There were earnest advocates of the humane killing of cattle who looked up at the massive headquarters of the OGPU [later the KGB] with tears of gratitude in their eyes, earnest advocates of proportional representation who eagerly assented when the necessity for a Dictatorship of the Proletariat was explained to them, earnest clergymen who reverently turned the pages of atheistic literature, earnest pacifists who watched delightedly tanks rattle across Red Square and bombing planes darken the sky, earnest town-planning specialists who stood outside overcrowded ramshackle tenements and muttered: “If only we had something like this in England!” The almost unbelievable credulity of these mostly university educated tourists astounded even Soviet officials used to handling foreign visitors… [5] 5 Hollander, Political Pilgrims , p. 102.

When Melita Sirnis became a Soviet agent in 1937, the Soviet Union was in the midst of the Great Terror — the greatest peacetime persecution in modern European history. [6] 6 See below, Chapter 5. Mrs. Norwood, however, still does not seem to grasp the depravity of the Stalinist regime into whose service she entered. “Old Joe [Stalin],” she acknowledges, “wasn’t a hundred percent, but then the people around him might have been making things awkward, as folks do.” At the end of her press statement, she was asked if she had any regrets about her career as a Soviet agent. “No,” she replied, then went back inside her house. In another interview she declared, “I would do everything again.” [7] 7 David Rose, “‘I would do everything again,’ says the agent from suburbia,” Sunday Telegraph , September 12, 1999. While interviewing Mrs. Norwood on August 10 for a BBC2 documentary based on The Mitrokhin Archive , Rose had obtained the first confession that she had been a Soviet spy.

Another former Soviet spy identified in The Mitrokhin Archive who made front-page news in Britain was ex-Detective Sergeant John Symonds. Like Norwood, Symonds gave a number of interviews. Symonds confessed to being, as Mitrokhin’s notes reveal, probably the first British “Romeo spy” recruited by the KGB. He said that he had admitted as much almost twenty years earlier to MI5 and Scotland Yard but had been disbelieved. Though Mitrokhin’s notes give no statistics of the number of women seduced by Symonds during his career as a KGB illegal, Symonds claims that there were “hundreds” of them. Initially the KGB decided that his sexual technique was deficient and, to his delight, sent “two extremely beautiful girls” to act as his instructors. Symonds’s recollection of his subsequent career as a Romeo spy is rather rosier than suggested by his KGB file:

I just had a nice life. I’d say join the KGB, see the world — first class. I went all over the world on these jobs and I had a marvellous time. I stayed in the best hotels, I visited all the best beaches. I’ve had access to beautiful women, unlimited food, champagne, caviar, whatever you like, and I had a wonderful time. That was my KGB experience.

“The only people I hurt,” Symonds now claims, “was the Metropolitan Police.” [8] 8 John Symonds (interviewed by David Rose), “I told you I was a spy,” Guardian (G2) , September 14, 1999. Cf. below, pp. 559-63. Many of the women he seduced on KGB instructions would doubtless disagree.