Melita Norwood

Melita Stedman Norwood (née Sirnis) (25 March 1912 – 2 June 2005) was a British civil servant and KGB intelligence source who, for a period of about 40 years following her recruitment in 1937, supplied the KGB (and its predecessor agencies) with state secrets from her job at the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association.

One very widely quoted (but resolutely unattributed) source described her as "the most important female agent ever recruited by the USSR."

Early life

Melita Sirnis was born to a Latvian father, Alexander Sirnis, and a British mother Gertrude, née Stedman, in the Bournemouth suburb of Pokesdown, Hampshire (now in Dorset). Both her parents were active in socialist circles. Her father produced a newspaper entitled "The Southern Worker and Labour and Socialist Journal" in which he printed articles by Lenin and Trotsky and which he distributed to local Communist Party of Great Britain members who tended to gravitate towards the family home. Melita Norwood (as she later became) was educated at Itchen Secondary School (as it was then known), becoming "School Captain" in 1928. She then went on to study Latin and Logic at the University of Southampton, before dropping out after a year and moving to London to get a job.

KGB

The KGB, an initialism for Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti (Russian: Комите́т госуда́рственной безопа́сности (КГБ); IPA: [kəmʲɪˈtʲɛt ɡəsʊˈdarstʲvʲɪnnəj bʲɪzɐˈpasnəsʲtʲɪ], translated in English as Committee for State Security), was the main security agency for the Soviet Union from 1954 until its break-up in 1991. Formed in 1954, as a direct successor of such preceding agencies as the Cheka, NKGB, and MGB, the committee was attached to the Council of Ministers. It was the chief government agency of "union-republican jurisdiction", acting as internal security, intelligence, and secret police. Similar agencies were instated in each of the republics of the Soviet Union aside from Russia and consisted of many ministries, state committees, and state commissions.

The KGB was a military service and was governed by army laws and regulations, similar to the Soviet Army or MVD Internal Troops. While most of the KGB archives remain classified, two online documentary sources are available. Its main functions were foreign intelligence, counterintelligence, operative-investigatory activities, guarding the State Border of the USSR, guarding the leadership of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the Soviet Government, organization and ensuring of government communications as well as combating nationalism, dissent, and anti-Soviet activities.

Mitrokhin Archive

The Mitrokhin Archive, according to British intelligence historian Christopher Andrew, is a collection of handwritten notes made secretly by KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin during his thirty years as a KGB archivist in the foreign intelligence service and the First Chief Directorate. When he defected to the United Kingdom in 1992 he brought the archive with him.

The official historian of the MI5 Christopher Andrew wrote two books, Sword and the Shield (1999) and The KGB and the Battle for the Third World (2005), based on material in the archives. The books give alleged details about much of the Soviet Union's clandestine intelligence operations around the world.

In July 2014, the Churchill Archives Centre at Churchill College released Mitrokhin's edited Russian-language notes for public research; the archives are the largest openly available KGB data trove. The original handwritten notes by Vasili Mitrokhin are still classified.

British and international investigations after publication of the books

Third World

The term Third World arose during the Cold War to define countries that remained non-aligned with either NATO, or the Communist Bloc. The United States, Western European nations and their allies represented the First World, while the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and their allies represented the Second World. This terminology provided a way of broadly categorizing the nations of the Earth into three groups based on social, political, cultural and economic divisions. The Third World was normally seen to include many countries with colonial pasts in Africa, Latin America, Oceania and Asia. It was also sometimes taken as synonymous with countries in the Non-Aligned Movement. In the dependency theory of thinkers like Raul Prebisch, Walter Rodney, Theotonio dos Santos, and Andre Gunder Frank, the Third World has also been connected to the world economic division as "periphery" countries in the world system that is dominated by the "core" countries.

Due to the complex history of evolving meanings and contexts, there is no clear or agreed-upon definition of the Third World. Some countries in the Communist Bloc, such as Cuba, were often regarded as "Third World". Because many Third World countries were extremely poor, and non-industrialized, it became a stereotype to refer to poor countries as "third world countries", yet the "Third World" term is also often taken to include newly industrialized countries like Brazil, Russia, India and China (see also: BRIC). Historically, some European countries were part of the non-aligned movement and a few were and are very prosperous, including Austria, Ireland, Sweden, Finland, and Switzerland.

Deaths in June 2005

The following is a list of notable people who died in June 2005.

June 2005

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