LONDON -- Britain's Secret Services face tough questions and tighter controls after admitting they kept successive governments in the dark about a British woman who began spying for the Soviet Union half a century ago. British media reacted with outrage on Tuesday both to the revelation that intelligence establishment had acted like a shadowy state within a state and to government hints that the spy -- now an 87-year-old great-grandmother -- would not be prosecuted or even interviewed about her treachery.

Home Secretary Jack Straw, angered over the biggest embarrassment to hit the two-year-old Labour government, issued a statement on Monday clarifying that the first he knew about Melissa Norwood, who began passing secrets to the Russians in 1945, was in December 1998. Newspapers have splashed stories for days on what they called Britain's biggest spy fiasco in a generation and have urged Straw to hold British spy chiefs more accountable to politicians.

The Times said there was "cause for alarm" that decades of spying by Norwood and by a handsome former policeman who for years seduced secrets from British embassy staff had been kept under wraps for seven years since details were smuggled out of Russia by KGB defector Vasili Mitrokhin in 1992. Those revelations of spying were "scarcely more shocking than the fact that the prime minister was not aware of this or any other part of the Mitrokhin Trove until a matter of days ago," it said.

Conservative ministers, in government when Security Services got evidence of the treachery seven years ago, have said they were given no details. "(Britain's Secret Services) have made intensely political decisions without informing the politicians," the Guardian's Hugo Young wrote. The chairman of parliament's all-party intelligence and security committee Tom King -- a former defense minister -- has promised to investigate "all aspects of the handling of the (Mitrokhin) archive." King said his committee, set up by the previous Conservative government to bring Security Services under greater scrutiny, would question the intelligence and security agencies involved.

"I am extremely surprised ministers weren't told," King told the BBC. "The agencies are accountable to ministers...which is what I suppose distinguishes them from the KGB and is very important in our democracy." Prime Minister Tony Blair's Labour government has made no secret of its disquiet at being left largely in the dark over the affair. Straw summoned Secret Service chiefs to his office on Monday and said he had agreed with the director of MI5 (the internal Security Service) to "strengthen our existing arrangements for oversight in this area".

He also ordered an investigation into the revelations about Norwood and about the "Romeo" spy, John Symonds, a former officer in the pornography squad at police headquarters in London. Symonds allegedly worked for the KGB for more than 10 years and slept with employees of British embassies to extract secrets. Straw said the Secret Services suspected for half a century that "traitor Granny" Norwood was a Soviet spy but it had never interviewed her in order not to jeopardize other investigations.

Norwood had been given clearance in 1945 to do secret work despite doubts about her communist associations, he said. But four years later there were "new concerns" and she lost her access to secrets about the development of Britain's atomic bomb in 1949. She was vetted in 1951 and again in 1962 but refused clearance. In 1965 an investigation concluded she had been a spy in the 1940s but came up with no usable evidence and the then Labour Home Secretary Frank Soskice was informed.

MI5 decided not to interview her "because that would have revealed the service's knowledge which was relevant to other sensitive investigations then under way". (Reuter)