Christopher Andrew: The Sword and the Shield

On Monday, September 13, 1999, only two days after The Times had begun serialization of The Mitrokhin Archive , Jack Straw announced in a statement to the Commons that the ISC had been asked to conduct an inquiry into “the policies and procedures adopted within the Security and Intelligence Agencies for the handling of the information supplied by Mr Mitrokhin.” Over the next nine months the ISC heard evidence from Jack Straw, Robin Cook and four former Conservative ministers, from the heads and other senior officers of MI5 and SIS, from the previous head of MI5, and from the Cabinet Secretary, Permanent Under Secretaries at the Home and Foreign Offices and other officials. Among the final witnesses were Mitrokhin and myself, who gave evidence to the ISC in the Cabinet Office at 70 Whitehall one after the other on the morning of March 8, 2000. While writing The Mitrokhin Archive , I had wrongly assumed that the Committee had been informed about the project. Some of the confusion which followed publication might well have been avoided if the ISC had been properly briefed well beforehand.

The ISC report in June 2000 identified a series of administrative errors which, as usual in Whitehall, had more to do with cock-up than with conspiracy. The first “serious failure” identified by the ISC was the failure of the Security Service to refer the case of Mrs. Norwood to the Law Officers in 1993:

This failure… resulted in the decision whether or not to prosecute Mrs. Norwood effectively being taken by the Security Service. The Committee is concerned that the Service used public interest reasons to justify taking no further action against Mrs. Norwood, when this was for the Law Officers to decide. We also believe that the failure of the Security Service to interview Mrs. Norwood at this time prevented her possible prosecution.

For the next five years, owing to “a further serious failure by the Security Service,” the Norwood case “slipped out of sight.” [16] 16 Intelligence and Security Committee, The Mitrokhin Inquiry Report , p. 12. MI5 may not deserve a great deal of sympathy for its oversight, but it does deserve some. The first priority of any security service are actual, followed by potential, threats. Among the mass of material provided by Mitrokhin in 1992, the case of the eighty-year-old Mrs. Norwood, who had last been in contact with the KGB over a decade earlier and no longer posed any conceivable danger to national security, must have seemed a very low priority — particularly given the strain on MI5’s resources caused by cutbacks at the end of the Cold War and the threat from Irish terrorist groups.

Arguably, however, MI5 underestimated Mrs. Norwood’s past importance. In evidence to the ISC, the Security Service concluded that her “value as an atom spy to the scientists who constructed the Soviet bomb must have been, at most, marginal.” [17] 17 Intelligence and Security Committee, The Mitrokhin Inquiry Report , p. 69. That was not the view of the NKGB (as the KGB was then known) in the final months of the Second World War. In March 1945 it described the atomic intelligence she had provided as “of great interest and a valuable contribution to the development of work in this field.” [18] 18 See below, p. 168. It is difficult to see how Mrs. Norwood could have provided atomic intelligence of such “great value” in March 1945 if, as claimed by Phillip Knightley, she did not return to work in the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association (BN-FMRA) after extended maternity leave until 1946 (Knightley, “Norwood: the spy who never was,” New Statesman , December 13, 1999). MI5 evidence to the ISC confirms that in 1945 Mrs. Norwood was secretary to the Chairman of the BN-FMRA (Intelligence and Security Committee, The Mitrokhin Inquiry Report , p. 67). Though Mrs. Norwood was not, of course, an atom spy in the same class as Ted Hall and Klaus Fuchs, both of whom provided intelligence from inside the main nuclear laboratory at Los Alamos, the NKGB and the Soviet scientists with whom it was in close touch plainly regarded her intelligence as somewhat better than “marginal.” The intelligence she was able to provide on uranium fuel cladding and post-irradiation corrosion resistance was probably applicable to weapons development as well as to the construction of nuclear reactors. [19] 19 This is the view of a government scientist who prefers not to be identified. Precise details of the atomic intelligence provided by Mrs. Norwood are unavailable. Not until they have been carefully analyzed and compared with the other atomic intelligence obtained by Soviet intelligence will it be possible to form a final judgement on the importance of her role as an atom spy. Atomic intelligence provided by Mrs. Norwood after 1945 was irrelevant to the construction of the Soviet bomb which, thanks chiefly to Hall and Fuchs, was an exact replica of the American — not the British — bomb. It remained, however, of some significance. Probably the most important secret in post-war Britain — a secret so sensitive that Prime Minister Clement Attlee withheld it from most of his cabinet — concerned the construction of the British atomic bomb. Mrs. Norwood’s intelligence must have provided some insight into the highly classified progress of British atomic scientists. (See below, pp. 518-19.) Until the final months of the War, the NKGB rated the atomic intelligence obtained in Britain almost as highly as that from the United States. [20] 20 According to a file noted by Mitrokhin (vol. 7, ch. 2, item 19), up to November 1944 the NKGB obtained 1,167 documents on “nuclear secrets” from the USA and UK. Of these 88 from the USA and 79 from the UK were rated as “very valuable.” Mitrokhin’s notes contain no similar statistics for the period after November 1944. Further atomic intelligence was received from the GRU.

As Jack Straw told the Commons when announcing the ISC inquiry, “There is no reason to doubt… that the KGB regarded Mrs. Norwood as an important spy.” Nor is there reason to doubt that she was both the KGB’s longest-serving British agent and its most important female British spy. From early in her career, the KGB had high expectations of her. It maintained contact with her in 1938-39 at a time when the shortage of foreign intelligence officers, many of whom were executed during the Terror, led it to lose touch with many other agents — including some of the Magnificent Five. Since the publication of The Mitrokhin Archive , Viktor Oshchenko, a former senior officer in the KGB scientific and technological intelligence (S) directorate, has kindly given me his recollections of the Norwood case. While stationed at the London residency in 1975, Oshchenko recruited Michael Smith, the KGB’s most important British S agent during the later Cold War. [21] 21 See below, pp. 550-53, 567-8. He remembers Mrs. Norwood’s career as a Soviet agent as “a legendary case in the annals of the KGB — an important, determined and very valuable agent,” and was deeply impressed both by her ideological commitment and by her remarkable access to her boss’s papers. Among the intelligence which Oshchenko believes Mrs. Norwood supplied were “valuable papers relating to the materials involved in missile production.” [22] 22 In 1992, while head of Line X (ST) at the Paris residency, Oshchenko defected to Britain, where he now lives. Details of the use made of Mrs. Norwood’s intelligence within the Soviet Union, however, remain scarce. Mitrokhin’s notes from her file, though giving precise information on Mrs. Norwood’s controllers and other operational matters, give little indication of the doubtless complex intelligence she supplied in the course of her long career as a Soviet agent. It is highly unlikely that the SVR will reveal any details of this intelligence until after Mrs. Norwood’s death.