The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB

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: