In 1934, he would recruit Melita as a spy. Rothstein was expelled from Britain in 1920, but his son, Andrew, remained. There, he began to channel Bolshevik funds to England and was instrumental in bringing together several left-wing groups to form the Communist Party of Great Britain. Rothstein had spent the conflict at the War Office, working for British intelligence. Sirnis died on Armistice Day 1918, when Melita was six. Years later, Bronislau's son, Hilary, changed his name to Norwood on the eve of his wedding to Melita Sirnis.īy the time war came in 1914, Melita's father was suffering from tuberculosis, but his fervour remained undimmed and he used the presses at Tuckton House to print the works of Lenin. Another member was an emigre from the Russian part of Poland, Bronislau Nussbaum. With Rothstein, he made regular trips to the Communist Club in Charlotte Street, central London. A frequent visitor to Tuckton House was Theodore Rothstein, a close associate of Lenin, and in 1911 Sirnis joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labour party, precursor of the Bolsheviks. Sirnis soon began to move in revolutionary circles. They were married in 1909 Melita was born in March 1912. He also fell in love with Tuckton House's visiting cobbler - Gertrude Stedman. The count set up a soccer team that competed in the local league appropriately, Sirnis played on the left wing. They kept the manuscripts of Tolstoy's novels in a guarded room and printed unexpurgated editions of his works, which they smuggled back into Russia.
After a spell in California, he settled in Hampshire in 1903, joining a radical community established by Leo Tolstoy's literary executor, Count Vladimir Chertkov.Īt Tuckton House, a mansion with sumptuous grounds, Chertkov had gathered about 20 socialists, vegetarians and pacifists. Norwood came from a very different milieu: a network of Russian and German exiles, with a history of left-wing politics dating back to the end of the 19th century.Melita's father, Alexander Sirnis, had fled Tsarist Russia. Most historians of Soviet spying in Britain have concentrated on the 'gentleman spies,' especially the five recruited at Cambridge in the 1930s - Kim Philby, John Cairncross, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and Anthony Blunt. His research points to one clear conclusion: the claims made by the then Home Secretary Jack Straw and MI5 after Norwood's outing, that she had been of only 'marginal' importance, were, at best, deeply questionable. The result is his book, due out next year. When the storm died down, he was delighted to find she was happy to keep talking. Norwood had already been talking to Burke, an historian of the British left, about her revolutionary father. Now 87, she faced the world's cameras on her sunlit lawn, reading a prepared statement. It took Norwood less than 10 minutes to confess and when the book and the documentary came out, they triggered a media furore. He had named her in the book he was about to publish with Cambridge professor Christopher Andrew, but the lawyers rightly insisted that we needed corroboration.
DAVID ROSE PUZZLE SERIES
I was making a BBC2 series about espionage and had interviewed Vasili Mitrokhin, the former chief archivist of the KGB, who defected to Britain in 1992, bringing with him 60 volumes of files, including Norwood's. Not only was she the source of major secrets, she was also at the heart of a large and previously unreported network of spies, along with her mother, Gertrude Sirnis.īefore I knocked on her door in the summer of 1999, getting confirmation that Lettie Norwood had been a Soviet spy seemed a daunting assignment. But while Norwood was a loving grandmother and an expert maker of chutney for Labour party bazaars, she was also, the book will reveal, a far more important agent than has hitherto been appreciated. The title of Burke's book, The Spy Who Came in from the Co-Op, reflects this down-to-earth image. 'Picking the kid up, getting the home-help and getting the shopping done occupied much more of my time than spying.' 'I wasn't really leading a double life,' she said. Was I letting the country down? I certainly don't think of it in that way.' In the mid-1940s, her busiest period as an agent, she was also the working mother of a demanding young child. 'I don't think I was unpatriotic, because we weren't at war with the Soviet Union.
Some of it gave the Soviets vital clues to building their first atomic weapon, but Norwood was unrepentant.
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