The Spy Who Came in from the Co-Op

On Sunday morning September 12th 1999 Letty Norwood, a sprightly eighty seven year old, opened her bedroom curtains and looked out upon the representatives of the world's media assembled just beyond her garden gate. The game was up.

According to the headlines in that morning's Times, she was Britain's longest serving female Russian agent and was personally responsible for shortening the Soviet atomic bomb programme by several years. "What a kerfuffle" was all she could be bothered to say, "So what if I did."

This is the remarkable story of Letty Norwood, The spy who came in from the Co-op, the nearest thing to a collective Britain has to offer. At a time when the world faces fresh dilemmas over the proliferation of nuclear weapons, this is the remarkable, singular story of a much earlier drama. In the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and faced with the American monopoly over atomic weapons, the leaders of the Soviet Union believed it was only a matter of time before new and larger "Little Boys" rained down on Moscow. History proved them wrong, but there were a few, integral cogs who helped prevent such an attack and in so doing provoked forty years of Cold War. Letty was one of them, a damned important one.