by Barry Neild

About the author: Barry Neild is a British journalist who covers technology issues for publications such as Computer Weekly.

When suburban granny Melita Norwood ambled down her garden path [in 1999] and proudly admitted to the assembled media that she had spent the best years of her life spying for the Soviet Government, it signalled the unearthing of a chapter of espionage history that had largely been buried under the remains of the Berlin Wall.

Mrs. Norwood’s exposure as one of the spying game’s more unlikely agents harked back to a nostalgia-steeped era of espionage—men in long coats meeting at midnight in rain-soaked railway stations, sotto voice conversations into Bakelite telephones, microfilms, poison-tipped umbrellas and the dusty, filing...