Kim Philby was part of the Cambridge Five, who were arguably the most notorious Soviet spies operating in Great Britain from the 1930s through the 1950s. By the mid–1960s, all five had been identified and had either defected to the USSR, been turned, or been neutralized.
Melita Norwood, although less well known, was also a Soviet spy in England for nearly forty years; her role as an atomic spy was especially important during the cold war years. The Hoover Institution Archives recently acquired her papers, which are now open to researchers.
Originally a labor organizer and later secretary to the director of the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association, her assistance is believed to have hastened the Soviet Union’s entry into the nuclear club by at least five years. Although identified as an agent in 1999, Norwood was never prosecuted by the British government. She died in 2005.
Norwood was born and raised among revolutionary émigrés from tsarist Russia, where she acquired the leftist leanings that brought her and her husband, educator Hillary Norwood, into the Independent Labour Party and the British Communist Party in the 1930s. She was recruited as a spy by the NKVD in 1934. For some four decades, Melita Norwood (likely with the knowledge and assistance of her husband) passed secret information on Britain’s atomic project to the Soviets.
The collection contains materials dating back to the early twentieth century, including photographs of Russian political émigrés in England and the Tolstoyan commune (Tuckton House) founded by those émigrés. Also included are family papers, notebooks describing the Norwoods’ travels to the USSR, and correspondence with various scholars, family, and friends.
Although the collection contains no espionage-related documents, many of the papers will cause researchers to ponder whether and how organizations such as the British-Soviet Friendship Society and the British Society of Russian Philately, under the auspices of which Hillary traveled to the USSR, might have been covers or conduits for espionage and to what extent the Labour Party was infiltrated by Soviet operatives. Norwood was the subject of a biography by historian David Burke entitled The Spy Who Came in from the Co-op (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2008).
Other related collections in the Hoover Archives include the Archives of the Soviet Communist Party and Soviet State on microfilm, the papers of David J. Dallin (a specialist on Soviet espionage), interviews with Pavel Sudoplatov (a prominent NKVD agent), and numerous additional collections on international espionage.
