Cool 87-Year-Old

Peter Kilander peterk at enteract.com
Mon Sep 13 19:52:33 PDT 1999



>The Great-Grandmother Who Came in From the Cold

Old School Sincerity. (actually, Jedediah Purdy isn't that bad if you don't rely on book reviews and go to the source)

Kurt Anderson - about whom I know little - writes in Slate:

"Speaking of charmingly quaint, and speaking of (literally) Soviet things, how about Melita Norwood, the 87-year-old KGB asset in England? "I would do the same thing again," she said, as people outside her house shouted "Traitor! Traitor!" And triply quaint--unapologetic pro-Soviet communism, little old English lady with a coffee-filter first name photographed smelling her flowers, righteous anti-granny indignation about Cold War politics. And everyone concerned, on both sides, acting more or less honorably ... so unlike, say, the Bill and Monica thing, where everyone concerned, on both sides, acted more or less dishonorably. (The same new book that exposes Melita, The Mitrokhin Archive, says that the KGB manufactured a forged letter from Oswald to Howard Hunt at the CIA before November 22, and leaked it to American conspiracy theorists in the '70s. Although I'm sure the conspiracists would tell me that this new story is just new CIA disinformation.)"



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