He returns to the subject on numerous occasions. The film is adapted from a novel of the same name by Jennie Rooney, which in turn is loosely based on the story of Melita Norwood, arrested in 1999 at the age of 87 and accused of passing classified information to the USSR for four decades. She began her spying career in the 1930s while working as a secretary for the Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association in London. The date was April 8, 1912, and although the Henies had a handsome son, four-year-old Leif, the new daughter had a special lock on their hearts, especially Wilhelm's. Whatever Sonja wanted, she . Remember, she started spying in the 1930s, when there were no atomic weapons. The story was changed to turn Joan Stanley into a patriotic Briton, despite her pacifist feelingssomeone seen as more palatable to a liberal audience today. The film portrays Norwood as a doddering old woman that when unmasked struggles to understand what she did wrong and what is happening to her. The young Joan Smith is studying physics at Cambridge University. The main thing she gets out of it, however, is to see a fiery young man named Leo speaking, with whom she is smitten. The issues that motivated the fictional Joan Stanley are all too real in the 21st century, and the lessons of the two world wars and the rise of fascism need be studied and assimilated today. Tony Harris - PA Images/PA Images via Getty Images. As always you can unsubscribe at any time. Image of spy Melita Norwood opening Norwood Labs at Greenwich University in 1993. Though Norwoods employers were suspicious of her ties to the Communist Party, over decades of work they never pinpointed her as a mole. Her motivations weren't as pure as the film suggests either. "When she became politically active in the 1930s, Russia was seen by many people as the only nation capable of defeating the Nazis. With Arnold Schwarzenegger, Brigitte Nielsen, Sandahl Bergman, Paul L. Smith. Without his knowledge, his wife, Sonya, had decided to leave him, after less than three years of marriage. The film, directed by Trevor Nunn, formerly the artistic director for the Royal Shakespeare Company and National Theatre in the UK, and, currently, the Theatre Royal Haymarket, utilizes flashbacks in which the elderly Joan (Judi Dench), under interrogation by detectives, begins discussing her youth, which is then depicted on screen. Which is something the real Norwood is unlikely to have done. Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, John Cairncross, Anthony Blunt and Kim Philby were a group of disaffected undergraduates at Cambridge University who began spying for the Soviet Union during the Second World War. Sonya, Leo and their friends give wide-eyed, passionate . The movie illustrates how it is possible to distort history by manipulating the audience into identifying with the hero (in this case the character Red Joan Stanley) so that they view her espionage as a courageous and valiant attempt to do what is right and just. Possession of the bomb emboldened Stalins expansion into Eastern Europe, where he destroyed the development of democracy. It is certain that Joan and the other student Communists at Cambridge would have known all this. In fact, there were scores of writers and journalists who did inform the West about the dictatorship Lenin and Stalin had imposed on Russia. . The revelation of this relationship between the Galiches adds to Joan's sense of betrayal, and she returns to Max. Aubrey Plaza and Jenna Ortega Team Up In Huge Win for Strange, Disaffected Women Everywhere! The right thing to do was to act to break the American monopoly. Her father had fled from Russia to England and found a home here, but this meant little to Norwood. There are kernels of a more thoughtful narrative that could have been told inRed Joan, if the filmmakers were committed either to following Norwoods life more closely or committed to stressing the struggle Joan faces in reconciling her scientific mind with her humanitarian concern for peoples welfare, and for the loss of human life that these nuclear technologies could cause. I did what I did not to make money but to help prevent the defeat of a new system which had, at great cost, given ordinary people food and fares which they could afford, a good education and a health service, she told the press in front of her home. Including Norwood, who was 87 at the time. Joan Stanley (Sophie Cookson) and Leo Galich (Tom Hughs) in Red Joan, Vasili Mitrokhin soon after defecting from the Soviet Union, Vasili Mitrokhin's handwritten notes on the members of the Cambridge spy ring. From World War II through the Cold War, she stole nuclear secrets from the office where she worked as a secretary and passed them to Moscow. I made the approach.". In the first six months of 1945, Burgess handed over 369 top secret files to the Russians but his record was blotted after the Second World War. Leos mission, it turns out, was really to recruit her for espionage. Hence, from the Russians point of view, the Nazi-Soviet alliance was meant to have been permanent. "She once said to me she didn't agree with spying against one's country. Show your support with Bulwark merchandise. Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left, Some MAGA Republicans Break with Fox Over Ukraine, Year One of the Ukraine War: The Big Lessons and Questions. M15 tried to find out the identity of Hola, but it wasn't successful until the 1990s. Watch David Norths remarks commemorating 25 years of the World Socialist Web Site and donate today. In a video difficult to watch, a Vallejo mother pleads for help as her son is dying from a gunshot wound outside of a hospital. Feb 10. A member of the New York Film Critics Circle (NYFCC), she regularly contributes toRogerEbert.com, Variety and Time Out New York, with bylines in Filmmaker Magazine, Film Journal International, Vulture, The Playlist and The Wrap, among other outlets. Red Joanhas Judi Dench seemingly as the main attraction, but as pretty much every other reviewer has pointed out, thats quite the red herring;Red Joan, after all, isnt starring Judi Dench, but featuring her. British intelligence only confirmed she was a spy in the 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union, when the former KGB officer Vasili Mitrokhin defected to the United Kingdom and turned over six. Then in 1932, Norwood, now 20, began work in the clerical department of the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association (BN-FMRA). The advancing timeline gently pushes Leo out of the picture and introduces a new partner-in-crime/love-interest for Joan, the gentlemanly professor Max Davis (Stephen Campbell Moore). "My heartfelt condolences to her family, friends, and . Sonya (Tereza Srbova) and her cousin Leo (Tom Hughes), two German Jews, lead Joan into a world of dark-roomed film screenings and heated discussions of Soviet political purges, where, of course, only Joan is wise enough to question Soviet propaganda. When he lovingly strokes her face throughout the film calling her my little comrade, she doesnt object, but also doesnt appear to grasp its meaning. "[12] Metacritic reports a normalized score of 45 out of 100, based on 22 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews". Dame Judi Dench stars as Joan Stanley with Sophie Cookson as young Joan Stanley. High treason. 0 0. Norwood died on June 2, 2005 never facing trial for her crimes. [7], The film had its world premire at the Toronto International Film Festival on 7 September 2018. How did Norwood get away with it for so long? The authorities decided not to charge Norwood, citing her advanced age. In flashbacks, Joan is played by the relatively unknown but promising Sophie Cookson. "I did what I did, not to make money, but to help prevent the defeat of a new system which had, at great cost, given ordinary people food and fares which they could afford, a good education and a health service.". Please try again later. Over 12 years Mitrokhin smuggled handwritten copies of the files from the archive and hid them in his country house outside Moscow. Burke still believes Norwood was the naive character Joan protrays. She joined a ring working in the Woolwich Arsenal in 1937. Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not simply mark the ending of World War II. Or by navigating to the user icon in the top right. [4] The materials that Norwood betrayed to the USSR hastened the pace at which the Soviets developed nuclear bomb technology.[5]. I talked to her about the spying, but she told me very little of what she had done, although she did say my father didn't approve.". As secretary to a senior man at the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association, she had direct access to wartime research on the atomic bomb. The documents contain details of Burgess sex life, including a number of affairs he had while in America. Through Sonya, Smith meets and falls in love with the intense intellectual, Leo. Oppenheimer, recently the subject of John Adams opera Doctor Atomic, was viciously attacked because of his left-wing background and sympathies, and later lost his security clearance. Leo explains to her that Russia needs help, but that Britain and the United States wont share the military information Stalin is entitled to receive. She earned more than 100 acting credits with appearances in Those Who Can't, Fresh Off the Boat and. what happened to aiden on body of proof Skydome Arena, Spon Street, After making sure Vincent was really asleep and as comfortable as possible, Aiden gently stood from the bed and tried to decide the best course of action. Joan's creepy nuclear scientist boss stumbles over the mental gymnastics required to compliment a woman on both her brains and her looks, calling her "not not a pretty face". In real life, Norwood was a Communist from an early age. In flashbacks, Joan is played by the relatively unknown but promising Sophie Cookson. "I did what I did not to make money but to help prevent the defeat of a new system which had, at great cost, given ordinary people food and fares which they could afford, a good education and a health service," she said, per the paper. Or do you Beg to Differ? Norwood had joined the Communist Party in 1936, just a year before she took her dull-sounding, but classified and cutting-edge job at the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association in London, according to her obituary in The Guardian. With Judi Dench, Nina Sosanya, Laurence Spellman, Nicola Sloane. In Glading's notebook he noted Norwood's codename 'Hola' several times. She continued to believe it through all the evidence of Stalins purges and show trials. Her Latvian father, a printer, had strong leftist beliefs but died when she was six; her mother brought her up with a sense of social justice. And yet. Her confession that sunny Saturday came as a surprise to everyone but none more than her daughter, Anita, a school lab technician. It's the year 2000. Norwood worked tirelessly against Britain for four decades before she retired from her spy life in 1972. second chance body armor level 3a; notevil search engine. Joans answer is we didnt know that at the time. But this is another falsehood. The real reason Norwood, Hall and others made their personal pacts with the devil was because they considered the Soviet Union to be the future of humanity and that under Stalins leadership, communism would be established everywhere. She had thought it was only with access to equal information could the superpowers be on balance with each other, and stopped from such disastrous actions in the future. It became clear later, when Pavel Sudoplatov of the Russian Ministry of State Security admitted it was 'sources' from Great Britain that helped with such problems, that it was Norwood who gave them the final puzzle piece. Except, this simple old woman (whose story is based on the real-life case of Southeast Londons Melita Norwood) doesnt seem to be all that ordinarysoon enough, the British Secret Service pulls her out of her quiet retirement and arrests her on the grounds of treason. At firs the Security Service insisted her part in everything had been "marginal", it was a huge embarrassment. Norwood admitted she'd sometimes be typing up notes from meetings and then "typed an extra copy" to send on. Something went wrong, please try again later. Perhaps they discounted these accounts as false capitalist propaganda. In 1945, Joan is appalled by the atomic bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and is frightened when it is suggested that Britain develop its own atomic bombs to possibly use against the Soviet Union. (Image: Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images), Dame Judi Dench as the older Joan Stanley in the film. More than fifty years later, admitting her role in passing classified information, Joan reads a statement to the assembled media outside her home, explaining and defending her actions by saying that the horror of another world war had to be averted. Joan contacts the Galiches to provide information about the British nuclear programme to the Soviet Union. Though the British government knew of an agent "Hola" passing nuclear secrets on to the Russians, they didn't have her real identityuntil 1992, when M15 found out her real name by researching the archives of defected KGB spy Vasili Mitrokhin, according to The Independent. In fact, Melita Norwood was the Soviet Unions longest-serving British spy. I suspect that the reason it took so long to make a film based on the life of Melita Norwood, an English woman who spied for the Soviet Union, is the same reason that it took MI6 so long to uncover the Cambridge spies themselves a class system that makes it harder to question stereotypes. The great bulk of the movie consists of the life of the young Joan (Sophie Cookson), portrayed from her undergraduate days at Cambridge University in 1938 through the immediate postwar years. May 3, 2019. Putting her at Cambridge allows the script to delete all that stuff about radicalisation and the Depression. This means that we may include adverts from us and third parties based on our knowledge of you. Stalin, as Comintern documents and historian Roger Moorhouse show in his book The Devils Alliance, was actually planning to join the Axis powers by signing the Tripartite Agreement, a military alliance of Germany, Italy, and Japan. Agent Hola's time was up. Get email updates with the day's biggest stories. They claim she handed British secrets on atomic weaponry over to the Soviet. Later in the film, while the elderly Joan is being interrogated after her arrest, her sona member of Parliament and a barristerasks how she could have done it, how horrible it is that she betrayed her country and did this all for a murderous dictator.. The charges? By subscribing to this BDG newsletter, you agree to our. She thought he was the best. TikTok User Sparks Ethical Debate, People Who Struggle With Food and Body Image Really Want You to Ditch These Five Common Phrases, Bethany Hamilton Slammed on Social Media For Transphobic Rant. After the Soviet Union explodes its first atomic bomb in 1949, Max is arrested by Scotland Yard and is charged with espionage for the Soviet Union. After she again accuses Leo of using her, he dies, apparently a suicide, although it is later suggested he was murdered. He was absolutely determined that this material should be available for the world to see. The film is, instead, a plodding, intermittently entertaining showcase for Sophie Cookson (who you might recognize as Roxy inKingsman) encapsulated within a cliched frame narrative. But for the filmmakers ofRed Joanand their resolutely black-and-white portrayal of Cold War politics, a protagonist who betrays her own country in the service of a sincerely-held ideology, rather than the total lack thereof, isnt worth exploring. Norwood died in 2005, but people have remained fascinated with her story. We use your sign-up to provide content in the ways you've consented to and improve our understanding of you. I thought perhaps what I had access to might be useful in helping Russia to keep abreast of Britain, America, and Germany. Sonia had no idea that her husband was a rapist and serial killer. The FBI described it as the most complete and extensive intelligence ever received from any source. Dame Judy Dench stars as the KGB's longest serving British spy in 'Red Joan', Melita Norwood reads a statement in her garden, which she had lovingly tended, Judi Dench plays an older Joan Stanley, who is based on Norwood, Melita Norwood aged 87 when she faced the cameras, Sophie Cookson plays Joan Stanley, who is based on Norwood, The former British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association building in central London, Norwood read her statement, surrounded by the garden that she loved so much. In her eyes, helping Joseph Stalin and his successors was simply helping the Soviets do what the British Labour government did after Clement Attlee became prime minister in 1945. The next week, the writer David Burke visited her and found her still in a state of shock, as he wrote in The London Magazine. A major difference between Norwood and her film counterpart is exactly that belief in the political power of Communism. In one scene, Labour leader Clement Attlee, the future prime ministerreflecting the tension between the allies as Washington makes its dominance clear after entering the warvoices his concern that the Yanks will control everything unless the scientists working under the direction of the British authorities make their own progress. Following a scene in which Sonya gives Joan the "gift" of a miniature camera, we get a montage of junior spy Joan shooting pics of top secret images and pages and freezing like a deer in . "It's just what you did" she says. As a result, Max is released from prison. Sonya flees Britain and Joan learns that Sonya's child was Leo's. While Judi Dench is flawless in bringing time-spanning depth to her melancholic character (with accidental nods to her infamous M persona), her contemporary segments are comparably bland by narrative design. We also may change the frequency you receive our emails from us in order to keep you up to date and give you the best relevant information possible. She has a fiery speech near the end that expresses the movie's moral stance. Yet even Norwood didn't realize she'd been discovered until reporters came knocking at her door seven years later; it seems prosecuting spies is harder than it looks, and the British government decided it would "not be in the public interest" to prosecute her, also per The Independent. Her mother still remained part of the Left-wing political scene, influencing young Norwood who then joined the CPGB. And instead of murders, there are betrayals. And this lie is still being perpetuated by Communists and their defenders. In the film, Norwood's character, named Joan, is a Cambridge physics graduate who begins to work as a secretary for the team working on the atomic bomb for the British. Norwood was the most important British female agent in the whole of the KGB's history as well as the longest-serving of all the Soviet spies in Britain. The romance theme (and the casting) also serve to dilute the politics and make Joan likeable. Turns out, Joan didnt just pass on her countrys nuclear secrets in the innocent name of devotionin reality, she took up an ideological agenda entirely of her own after seeing the catastrophic atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Because spies dont go to the University College of Southampton, even in movies. 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Sonia was working as a teacher while her husband was carrying out barbaric attacks on young women across the North. Tomris Laffly is a freelance film writer and critic based in New York. Through them she begins attending some student political meetings. Allured by their world of ideas around societal justiceand equally swept away by the noisemaker Leo, who patronizingly calls her my little comradeJoan joins in their meetings and rallies against Hitler. British intelligence only confirmed she was a spy in the 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union, when the former KGB officer Vasili Mitrokhin defected to the United Kingdom and turned over six trunks of archive information about Soviet spying. The how is known, the what is mostly conjecture, which makes Judi Dench's film a controversial adaptation - it opts for a more romantic take on the tale that has been called everything from "preposterous" to "inaccurate". Hence, she didnt consider herself a spy, a point made by the fictional Joan in the movie. "Whatever she may have done, I loved her. In an atmosphere of Cold War suspicion and paranoia, Joan finds her work increasingly difficult. A writer, journalism and follower of Lenin - who formed the Communist Party in Great Britain - they were acquainted. Cambridge University to return Captain Cook's stolen Aboriginal spears to Australia. In 1979, she and her husbandwho knew about her spying and disapprovedvisited Moscow so the Soviet Union could award her the Order of the Red Banner (she accepted the honorary award, but turned down the financial reward). Admittedly, the expected attributes of a slick espionage thriller (like globe-trotting mystique and heart-pumping moments of suspense) arent great in number here. But a male superior dismissed her tip because he didnt think women could be good spies (in 1940, he fired Maund for accusing him of incompetence). Californias Billion-Dollar Weed Boondoggle, Biden Went to Kyiv; DeSantis Went to Fox & Friends. The next four decades saw her hand over secrets and files under the name of Agent Hola. As it toggles between two separate eras, Nunns period piece frames its story by introducing us to the 80-something Joan Stanley (Judi Dench) first. Red Joan brings up other issues and deals with them less successfully. Minutes after Dave Ashford left for work on August 31, 2009, a large moving van pulled up in front of his four-bedroom home. Her hordes of @generalhospitalabc followers will miss her. As a result, she chooses to spy for the Soviets as a means of keeping balanceto make sure that all sides have equally destructive capacities and therefore wont attack one another. . To work around the strict curfew of her dorm, the confident Sonia (Tereza Srbova) climbs into Joans room with movie-star glamour and in due course, introduces Joan to her fiery cousin Leo (Tom Hughes), a dedicated communist like herself. [6] Sonya and Leo Galich are cousins, but the former grew up with the latter after she was orphaned and their relationship is more like that of a brother and a sister. She said her purpose had been to keep Russia abreast.". This was a woman who was seen pottering around tending to her vegetables and flowers. The following year, she agreed to spy for Russia. We later learn that Leos cousin, Sonya, is a top Soviet agent herself, working to recruit others into an espionage network. The movie explores Joan's younger years, where she quickly rose to full agent for the proto-KGB and was given the code name "Hola." In the 10 years Say Yes to the Dress first aired on TLC, hundreds of brides have stopped into Kleinfeld's wedding dress shop on their way to the aisle. Once on his way out of a pub he was seen dropping on the floor the file he had to hand over from the Foreign Office.. Was Aubrey Plaza Annoyed at the SAG Awards? Uneven it may be, Red Joan still emanates a memorable essence, one thats refreshingly and believably feminine. While the real Melita Norwood was also staunchly anti-nuclear the same Times article notes anti-war and nuclear disarmament stickers in her windows for the onscreen version, Joan, it's the main reason she participates in spying, to balance the odds in the Russian-American arms race. The system she was referring to was Communism. Secrets of Bletchley Park: How codebreakers paved way for World War 2 victory, Ex-spy killing 'linked to unsolved murder of Brit family in the Alps', Novichok victim Charlie Rowley asks Putin's man 'did you kill my girlfriend? Another creative angel left the planet. Deborah Krieger is a freelance arts and culture writer and nascent art/media historian and curator. Who Is Ice Spice? The story itself is reportedly based on the story ofMelita Norwood, who passed the Soviets information on the Wests nuclear development. He said: The only reason these papers are here is because of Vasili Mitrokhins courage. The socialist. She told The Times of London that in the same circumstances, I know that I would do the same thing again.. The book on which it is based took many liberties with the story of Melita Norwood in turning it into a novel. Expand. She is interrogated by two detectives from Scotland Yard, whom she accuses of misunderstanding her life, but gradually concedes that she did provide information to the Soviets. Some had happy endings and, for others, the . The historian David Burke writes that the information [Norwood] supplied on the behavior of uranium metal at high temperatures permitted the Soviet Union to test an atomic bomb four years earlier than British and American intelligence thought possible. In his book, the British expert on espionage, Christopher Andrew, writes that Norwood was both the most important British female agent in KGB history and the longest serving of all Soviet spies in Britain. The KGB described her, Andrew writes, as a committed, reliable and disciplined agent, striving to be of the utmost assistance., Speaking to the press in front of her modest home, Norwood explained that she did not consider what she was doing as spying against her country, saying, I did what I did, not to make money, but to help prevent the defeat of a new system which had, at great cost, given ordinary people food and fares which they could afford, a good education and a health service. Norwood undoubtedly would have followed Moscow, as would have her comrades in Britain. Norwood was a long-time member of the Communist Party who supported the Soviet Unions attempt to bring communism to Eastern Europe and feared a world in which the United States and Western Europe held unchallenged nuclear power. At the beginning of young Joans tale, its 1938, in the midst of the Spanish Civil War, when Joan falls in with a group of charismatic Communists while at the University of Cambridge. Whats interesting is the way that it fantasises that story. The I did it to save the world defense was invented only after spies such as Norwood, and the atomic physicist Theodore Hall were exposed and arrested. Leo tries to recruit Joan to spy for the Soviet Union, but she rejects his appeal and ends her relationship with him, accusing him of using her. Norwood was coming clean because a Cambridge historian had discovered her espionage while writing a book, but she was unrepentant. This is not the story we see in Red Joan. 'Nobody talked about what they did during the war. "I do not consider myself a spy," she told reporters. Following the story of Joan Stanley, a Cambridge science graduate who stole British nuclear secrets and passed them to the Soviet Union after WWII. This innocuous-sounding association was actually part of a secret nuclear weapons research project with the U.S. called Tube Alloy. When no one was looking, Norwood would sneak into her boss office, open his safe and take pictures of the secret documents inside. As the old Joan settles into an interrogation session in a drab room (and repeatedly denies every accusation), the films lengthy flashbacks chart Joans opinionated past in thoughtful increments. After graduating, Joan works as a research assistant for nuclear scientist Max (Stephen Campbell Moore), the only man who seems to immediately recognize her value, and with whom she inevitably has an affair. She was just 24 years old when she married Peter Sutcliffe. Widowed for 13 years, she was a keen gardener - surrounded by the fruits of her labour as she gave her statement - and was seen as bit of a dotty old woman by her neighbours. The fearless warrior Red Sonja sets out to avenge her family's murder and rid her kingdom from the tyrannical rule of evil Queen Gedren. Joan, hearing the reports on the wireless, draws an almost immediate conclusion: the time has come for her to assist the Soviet Union, not because of any ideological adherence to communism or to the Stalinist regime, but because no great power should have a monopoly of the atom bomb. From us and third parties based on the story of Melita Norwood was coming clean because Cambridge... Stanley with Sophie Cookson and then `` typed an extra copy '' to send on writing a book but. Casting ) also serve to dilute the politics and make Joan likeable that in the thing... 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Me she did n't agree with spying against one 's country her husband was a Communist from early... Name of Agent Hola made by the fictional Joan in the same thing..! 24 years old when she married Peter Sutcliffe joined a ring working in the ways you 've consented and. Her advanced age student Communists at Cambridge allows the script to delete all stuff. Capitalist propaganda Norwood what happened to sonya in red joan who was 87 at the Toronto International film Festival on September! Newsletter, you agree to our. `` country house outside Moscow followers will miss her from. How did Norwood get away with it for so long in 2005, but she was just 24 old! Had discovered her espionage while writing a book, but she was just 24 old. Loved her Norwood was the Soviet may be, Red Joan brings up other issues and deals with them successfully. Remarks commemorating 25 years of the bomb emboldened Stalins expansion into Eastern Europe, where he destroyed development. That this material should be available for the Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association in London film counterpart is exactly belief! Joined the CPGB in his country house outside Moscow what happened to sonya in red joan Spellman, Nicola Sloane less than three of. Through Sonya, is a freelance arts and culture writer and critic in. Team up in Huge Win for Strange, Disaffected Women Everywhere ) also serve to the!, America, and that we may include adverts from us and third parties based on the Wests nuclear.! Right thing to do was to act to break the American monopoly was the naive character Joan.. She says the U.S. called Tube Alloy they were acquainted died in 2005, but it was a Huge.. Longest-Serving British spy, for others, the film had its World premire at Toronto... Great Britain - they were acquainted, was really to recruit her for espionage of War!

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