Spy story

Operation Whitewash: Judi Dench’s latest role sees her play a suburban widow who ‘nobly’ leaked secrets to Soviets to ‘ensure world peace’…but who in reality gave Russia the keys to the atom bomb

In 1932, Norwood, aged 20, began working in the clerical department of a metallurgy research group — the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association (BN-FMRA) — where she remained until her retirement in 1972.

Her appointment had fateful consequences during the forthcoming nuclear age, as BN-FMRA soon developed close links with the British top-secret project to develop a nuclear weapon codenamed ‘Tube Alloys’. Two years later, Norwood started to spy for the Soviet NKVD — the forerunner of the KGB.

The man who recruited her? None other than Andrew Rothstein, the son of Theodore — the founder of the CPGB. 

Tellingly, as Norwood would later admit to her biographer, David Burke, in 2000, it was she who approached the Russians, and not the other way round.

‘I must have thought if any of the work the BN-FMRA was doing, not secret stuff, might be useful,’ she said. ‘But I didn’t immediately think of pinching it. I made the approach.’

So began almost four decades of treachery, motivated by what Professor Christopher Andrew accurately describes as a ‘myth-image of the Soviet Union which bore little relationship to the brutal reality of Stalinist rule’.