I WAS astonished last week at the reaction of people to the news that an 87-year-old great-grandmother had not been jailed for giving secrets away to the Russians during the Cold War.

Some of the letters to the Daily Telegraph suggested, among other things, that the frail woman's pension be withheld or she should be sent to live in a Moscow high-rise flat on a meagre Russian state pension.

Others obviously came from people having fits of apoplexy about the affair, without regard to either simple Christian charity or plain common sense.

Every few years we have increasingly less startling revelations about this or that spy who has been selling our secrets to the Russians for years without anyone in the obviously incompetent security services having a clue what was going on.

Now that the Communist regime in the Soviet Union has collapsed completely, the archives of the KGB are fair game for anyone with good contacts and a few quid to spare.

What we are learning is that the Russians had for donkeys years possession of all our secrets generously provided by people who believed that the struggle between the capitalist West and the communist East was not equivalent to the Archangel Gabriel struggling with the Devil and his rebellious demons.

When the people calling for an 87-year-old woman to be hung, drawn and quartered have stopped frothing at the mouth, I would like to ask them a question.

Despite scores of spies in the West giving their KGB controllers everything Britain knew about anything, what harm did it do us? Was it the western alliance or the Soviet Union which fell apart at the seams?

The idea that our security services are actually protecting us from anything by creeping around in the dark playing cloak-and-dagger games with their shifty counterparts in other countries is risible.

In wartime, information about the enemy and his plans is vital to avoid wasted lives and to increase the chance of strategic

success.

For instance, if the commanding brains behind Operation Market Garden in the Second World War had been provided with irrefutable intelligence about the strength of German forces in the Arnhem area, a major disaster could have been avoided.

There are countless examples from the Second World War, but the Cold War was a different proposition entirely.

It could be argued that the West should have broadcast its atomic secrets to the East simply to ensure a belief among the Russians that if they attacked us they would surely be destroyed.

Similarly, we should perhaps have shared our atomic secrets with the Russians to keep both sides on a par with each other.

It was a time when the Russians, Western European and American people were told a bunch of lies about the other side by their own self-serving politicians, military leadership and industrialists.

The fear and distrust generated far outweighed the threat we or they actually faced and the duplicity of both sides, killing people in proxy wars all over the globe, was shameful to behold.

Both sets of leaders repeatedly betrayed their own people by distorting the reality of the situation and they have never been brought to book.

If one looks back at the completely barking leadership of the respective protagonists in the Cold War, to take just two for example, Brezhnev and Reagan, neither of whom could have opened a tube of 'Smarties' without the aid of an instruction video, were are lucky to have survived at all.

If one or the other for one minute believed their forces had the upper hand there would have been no preventing them pressing the red buttons on the bedside table - and they weren't the only loonies at the top.

So it could be argued with a logic devoid of rabid patriotism that Melita Norwood did us all a favour as well as demonstrating that the whole spying business in peacetime in more farce than John Le Carre.

But if Jack Straw and his advisors discover through their focus groups and high-tech statistical prediction indicators that there might be a few votes in it at the next

election, the poor woman can expect to be burned at the stake within the next few weeks.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.