The Spy Who Came in from the Co-op: Melita Norwood and the Ending of Cold War Espionage by David Burke (review)

Melita Norwood (née Sirnis), born in 1912 in Dorset, England, was the daughter of a Latvian father and English mother. In 1932 she became a secretary at the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association (BN-FMRA). She joined the Communist Party of Great Britain and was recruited to be a spy for the Soviet military intelligence agency (GRU) and later for the Soviet state security organs (NKGB, a forerunner of the KGB). Her job as secretary to G. I. Bailey, the assistant director (from 1944, director) of BN-FMRA gave her access to its files. According to David Burke, her access to the classified information made her a “major spy.” The value of the book depends on how well Burke is able to substantiate this claim, and unfortunately he falls far short. In an effort to enhance the importance of his subject, he repeatedly inflates her contribution, even going so far as to claim that her espionage “would advance the Soviet atomic bomb programme by several years.” Going even further out on a limb, Burke told The Sunday Telegraph of London, “The information provided by Melita was invaluable to the Russians and speeded up their nuclear bomb programme by five years.” Such claims are fanciful, indeed delusional, when the facts are examined.

Editors have advised me that in writing a biography you should try to mention your subject on almost every page. This keeps the author and reader focused on what is important. Burke had no such editor and has not followed this advice. Page after page, even chapters, go by with no mention of Norwood as Burke wanders through detailed descriptions of people and places that have little or no relevance to the topic at hand. Burke’s specialty (and Ph.D. dissertation topic) is Tsarist Russian émigrés, and he devotes many pages of extraneous detail to them. The poor reader holds on, hoping to be led back to the Norwood story only to veer off down another trail.

Obviously Burke had a problem. He did not have enough interesting material for a biography of Norwood, so he threw in everything else he could find about espionage during the period. We learn very little about Norwood’s life and personality and what she did at her job. She all but disappears in what was supposed to be a biography about her. The book is short to begin with, and if the padding and logorrhea had been excised, as a responsible editor should have demanded, it would have ended up at the length of only an article, at most.

We keep waiting and waiting to learn what exactly Norwood passed to the Soviet Union that was so important. Finally after 128 pages we get an answer of sorts, an anticlimax if there ever was one. We are told that her contribution is significant on two counts: that she had access to BN-FMRA documents and to the documents of other industrial bodies, including Metro-Vickers and ICI. What were those documents? Was the information in them of any value? Which documents were passed to the Soviet Union? Most important of all, in what ways did they help the Soviet program? Burke never asks these crucial questions. Nor does he have any answers, and the reason is clear: he has no idea what information Norwood passed or whether it was worth anything in advancing the Soviet bomb program. Throughout he assumes what he should be proving and uses faulty logic to arrive at his unsubstantiated conclusions. The only detail Burke offers is a claim that some of the information had to do with “the corrosive nature of the fluoride gas on uranium metal,” hardly earthshaking and left unexplained by Burke.

At a more fundamental level Burke might have asked more basic questions to try to make his case. For...