The railroad was not finished, however, and was finally abandoned
after Stalin’s death. Following Stalin’s death in March 1953, the pris-
oners in Norilsk rioted, as did the prisoners in Vorkutaand Kengir.
The riots were put down by the regime.
By 1955 Moscow began to replace prison laborers with volunteer
workers, who were attracted to the Arctic by high salaries and
bonuses. Norilsk today has a population of more than 200,000 and is
the most polluted city in the world.NORWOOD, MELIA STEDMAN (1912–2005). Probably the
KGB’s most productive female agent, Norwood was run within the
British scientific establishment for several decades. Norwood, who
joined the British communist party in the 1930s, became a Soviet
agent in 1937. For 45 years she provided scientific and technical in-
telligence to Moscow. Her code name was “Hola.” During World
War II, she provided information on the Anglo-American nuclear
weapons program, referred to as Enormozby Soviet intelligence. In
a wartime report to Moscow, Norwood was described by her case
officer as a “committed, reliable, and disciplined agent.” Nor-
wood’s five decades as a spy were revealed in 1999 in Vasili
Mitrokhin’s The Sword and the Shield, an account of the Soviet in-
telligence service coauthored by a British academic. Confronted
with the charge of espionage by the British press, Norwood cheer-
fully and proudly admitted her treachery.NOSENKO, YURI IVANOVICH (1927–).One of the most difficult
counterintelligencecases for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
was Yuri Nosenko. Nosenko, whose father was a member of the
Communist PartyCentral Committee, worked in the KGB’s Second
(Counterintelligence) Chief Directorate in Moscow. On temporary
duty in Switzerland in June 1962, he volunteered to work for the
CIA. In January 1964 he returned to Switzerland with two surprises
for his CIA case officer: he had information about President John F.
Kennedy’s assassination, and he wanted to defect.
Nosenko’s bona fides almost immediately came under question.
CIA officers caught him in a number of minor lies. More importantly,
another defector, Anatoli Golitsyn, accused Nosenko of being a
mole dispatched by the KGB to destroy the CIA’s operations against176 •NORWOOD, MELIA STEDMAN (1912–2005)06-313 G-P.qxd 7/27/06 7:56 AM Page 176