A true story behind Red Joan – the KGB spy who has revealed British secrets for 40 years

In her suburban garden, Melita Norwood, an 87-year-old retiree, read on a sheet of raw paper, intently looking at the lens of a camera while she confessed to being a very spying spy. secret and betray his country.

"I do not consider myself a spy," she told reporters. "In general, I do not agree with espionage against his country.

"I did what I did, not to make money, but to help prevent the defeat of a new system that had, at great expense, given the ordinary people with affordable food and prices, good education and health services. "

Widowed for 13 years, she was a pbadionate gardener – surrounded by the fruits of her work at the time of her statement – and was considered by her neighbors as a little old lady.

After her cup of tea in the morning, she would come out of her Che Guevera cup and distribute copies of the Communist Party newspaper, The Morning Star.

Despite his strange hobby, no one really thought about it. However, if she had had her past, she might not have been so shocked that the journalists rushed to try her luck.

The media were all gathered to hear what she had to say after revelations in the newspaper that day: Norwood had been a Soviet spy for nearly 40 years.

During this period, she had voluntarily transmitted the secrets of the country to Russia, including crucial information on the atomic bomb and its development.

She was a traitor to her country and had been fired for decades.

His confessions, this sunny Saturday, surprised everyone, but nothing more than his daughter, Anita, school laboratory technician.

"Whatever she was able to do, I loved her, she's a very good person, very strong and totally immaterial," she told the Daily Mail at the time. .

"It was a total shock at the time." I told her about spying, but she told me very little about what she had done, although she was not sure what to do. she said my father did not approve of it. "

Norwood was the most important British female agent in the history of the KGB, as well as the oldest Soviet spy in Britain.

His record at the KGB gave him a laudatory criticism, calling him "a committed, reliable and disciplined agent, striving to provide maximum badistance.

"She handed over a very large number of documents of a scientific and technical nature, which found a practical application."

But what a Melita exactly was the subject of a debate.

The how is known, the what is mainly a conjecture, which makes Judi Dench's film a controversial adaptation – he opts for a more romantic interpretation of the story that has been described as "absurd" to "inaccurate".

The film portrays Norwood as an old doddonnante who, poor, has trouble understanding what she did wrong and what happens to her.

His noble motives are far from Norwood's deliberate choices.

The character of Norwood, named Joan, is a Cambridge physics graduate who begins working as a secretary for the team working on the atomic bomb for the British.

She communicates with her former communist lover, Leo, who encourages her to tell the Russians her secrets.

At first she is not sure, but we see her giving in because she wants a level playing field between Russia and the United States.

The film portrays her as a woman who, although she is profoundly overwhelmed, is in fact the person responsible for seeing nuclear bombs as a deterrent rather than a weapon.

Joan also had the idea of ​​enriching uranium in the film, which is part of the process of making atomic energy.

Sitting in front of Max, her boss, she suggests simply using a juicer as simply as suggesting a cup of tea before going back to her notes.

The true story is very different.

Norwood was not a physicist, she had dropped out of college at Southampton University, where she had studied Latin and logic only for a year.

His motives were not as pure as the film suggests.

We see Joan fighting against the Communist Party in which she is abandoned thanks to the company she maintains.

Judi Dench later recounted that she was just a young woman. "It's just what you did," she says.

In real life, Norwood was a communist from an early age. Her father had fled Russia to England and found a home here, but Norwood was not interested.

Born in 1912, she was raised with communists, socialists and Leninists. Theodore Rothstein was one of the members of their group.

A writer, journalist and disciple of Lenin – who formed the Communist Party in Great Britain – they knew each other.

Norwood's father died of tuberculosis at the age of six and the family moved to Southampton.

His mother was still part of the leftist political scene, influencing the young Norwood who later joined the CPGB.

Norwood joined the University of Southampton, but gave up and moved to Germany at the time of the rise of the Nazis.

Then, in 1932, Norwood, now 20, started working in the office of the British Nonferrous Metals Research Association (BN-FMRA).

It's her appointment at the research center that gave her the access she needed.

The BN-FRMA is badociated with a secret project to develop a nuclear weapon called Tube Alloys.

Only two years later, Norwood was spying for the Soviet NKVD – she had been recruited by Rothstein himself.

Author David Burke, who wrote a book about Melita's extraordinary life, was informed by Norwood herself that she was the one who approached them and not the other way around.

"I had to think that the work of BN-FMRA, and not secret things, could be helpful," she explained.

"But I did not immediately think of pinching it, I approached it."

Over the next four decades, she discovered secrets and records under the name Agent Hola.

Burke still believes that Norwood was the naive character that Joan protrays.

He said: "Melita was not an uncompromising Stalinist, she was an outspoken and naive communist, she thought that what she was doing was in the interest of the whole world.

"She thought of Stalin in her early days as a kind of Clement Attlee figurine.

"When it became politically active in the 1930s, many people saw Russia as the only nation capable of defeating the Nazis.

"She once told me that she did not agree with espionage against her country." She said her goal was to keep Russia informed. "

But even if Norwood's intentions are still debated, what she did is not the case.

She removed objects from her patron's safe, photographing details and sending them to the Soviets, as seen in the film.

Norwood admitted that she sometimes typed meeting notes and then "typed an extra copy" to send.

She left them somewhere to pick them up or put them back in a meeting.

Her work continued after the war and there is no doubt that what she delivered was useful to the Soviets.

The Russians were struggling to find a solution to a problem of creating the atomic bomb when Norwood had found the solution.

It became obvious later, when Pavel Sudoplatov, from the Russian Ministry of State Security, admitted that these are British "sources" that have helped to solve such problems, that it is Norwood who entrusted them with the final puzzle.

In 1949, they blew up their first atomic bomb four years earlier than planned.

All this is shown in Red Joan, but what's missing is the other job Norwood did – she was also a recruiter.

In 1967, she recruited a British official, Hunt, who revealed secrets on the sale of arms for nearly 15 years.

While his identity is still unknown to the public, Norwood later confessed, "I will not deny it … I take full responsibility and blame."

Norwood worked tirelessly against Britain for four decades before retiring from his life as a spy in 1972.

It was as if she had managed with all that – and there was a lot to do.

Then, in 1999, a defector uncovered a large archive of KGB documents. The time of the agent Hola was up.

At the fir trees, the security services insisted that his share in everything was "marginal", it was a huge embarrbadment.

After all, Norwood had actually been investigated at least seven times. It had even been identified as a security risk in 1965.

When all she had done was published in the newspapers, her neighbors were stunned.

It was a woman who was seen tinkering and taking care of her vegetables and her flowers.

One of them told the Sunday Mercury: "We all knew where his policy was, I remember that she once spoke to me about Karl Marx. he was the best.

"And she had her gardening: flowers at the front, vegetables at the back, who would have thought that she was a spy? I certainly did not do it."

When she was finally unmasked, confessing in her garden, the public claimed that she was being sued, but Interior Minister Jack Straw ruled that it was not it would be best not to drag such an old woman to court.

It was a show of compbadion that the Russians would not have shown if the roles had been reversed.

Norwood pbaded away on June 2, 2005, without ever having to go to trial for her crimes.

Red Joan was released in the theater on April 19, 2019.