A story of wartime intelligence, super-power relations and spies and
their handlers - seen through the experience of Melita Norwood.
On September 11th 1999 The Times newspaper carried the front page
article "Revealed: the quiet woman who betrayed Britain for 40 years.
The spy who came in from the Co-op." Melita Norwood, the last of the
atomic spies, hadfinally been run to ground, but at 87 she was deemed
too old to prosecute. Her crime: the shortening of the Soviet Union's
atomic bomb project by up to 5 years.
At a time when the world faces fresh dilemmas caused by the
proliferation of nuclear weapons, this is the remarkable story of a much
earlier drama. After the atomic bomb strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
in August 1945, British and American intelligence estimated the earliest
date for the production of a Soviet bomb to be 1953. In fact, the Soviet
Union went nuclear in 1948, and tested an atomic bomb in 1949. The
Soviet Union's bomb coincided with the onset of The Cold War, and
threatened humankind with extinction. Melita Norwood was a member of one
of those communist spy networks in America and Britain, who by
guaranteeing those weapons of mass destruction threw down a challenge to
America as sole superpower in the post-Second World War era. This
fascinating book sets her in the context of the times, and uses her as a
prism and focus through which to investigate the whole milieu.
Dr DAVID BURKE is a Supervisor for the Rise of the Secret World:
Governments and Intelligence Communities since 1900 at the University of
Cambridge.
