Letter: All in all, a nicer kind of spy

I AM disappointed that all newspapers have persisted in equating the unfortunate Melita Norwood with either the Burgess, Maclean, Philby group or "war criminals" such as Pinochet ("Norwood joins the hall of infamy", 12 September).

She is said to have passed information to the KGB for 40 years but the first 10 of these included the period when the Soviet Union was our ally against the Germans. However misguided her activities, she was not passing information to an enemy, and can hardly, on this ground, be considered a traitor. After the war, any information to which she had access can't have been of much significance, considering that the main information had already been transmitted by others. None of her activity is likely to have caused injury or death to any other persons, either here or in the Soviet Union.

PAULINE ROBINSON

Tollesbury, Essex