"There's no such thing as retirement, really," John le Carre's secret pilgrim muses in the 1991 spy novel of that name. A few old spies in Britain and the United States have been sharply reminded of the truth of that aphorism this month following sensational revelations that the Cold War espionage web was much bigger than previously thought.
According to the headlines, both countries -- indeed, the entire postwar Anglo-U.S. alliance -- were as riddled with communist agents as a Swiss cheese is with holes. That is hardly news to aficionados of the stories of the Five Men, the two Rosenbergs, et al. But now there are more names, a lot more. "The Mitrokhin Archive," a new book based on six trunk loads of documents smuggled out of Russia by a former KGB archivist in 1992, reveals hundreds of them. That's news.
Although the KGB's main target was always the U.S., Mr. Mitrokhin's revelations have made an especially big splash in Britain. Perhaps this is because the old spies "outed" there include some whom even Mr. le Carre might have had trouble dreaming up. The Sixth Man, for example, turns out to be a woman, 87-year-old Mrs. Melita Norwood a.k.a. "Agent Hola" or, to quote the newspapers, "The Bolshevik from Bexleyheath," a former secretary who passed scientific secrets to the Soviet Union for 40 years. Several other doddery retirees from the cloak-and-dagger game, the brilliantly named Agents "Dan," "Scot," "Ace" and "Armin," have also shot to fame. Scot, a former Scotland Yard detective, has won particular notoriety since being, er, exposed as the KGB's first British "Romeo" spy (assignment: seduction duties). No wonder Conservative Shadow Home Secretary Ann Widdecombe condemned the whole affair this week as a farce.