SYDNEY -- The curtains closed on Australia's famous "Petrov Affair" spy incident, sparked when a Soviet diplomat defected at the height of the cold war, with the death of Evdokia Petrov, 86, at her home in suburban Melbourne.

Petrov, a Russian code clerk given the name Maria Anna Allyson after her 1954 defection to Australia from the Soviet Union, died last week of complications from back surgery.

"I can confirm that she was cremated here on July 22," Jan Cogger of Necropolis Springvale crematorium in Melbourne said by telephone on Friday, Reuters reported. "We have her date of death as July 19 and her age was 86."

Petrov defected on April 20, 1954, some two weeks after her KGB-trained diplomat husband, Vladimir, who did the same when he was the Soviet Embassy's third secretary in the Australian capital Canberra.

She was seized by Soviet agents and images of a distraught, but attractive Petrov being spirited through Sydney Airport by Russian spies were flashed around the world.

They forced Petrov on to a plane bound for Moscow, but police in the remote northern territory capital of Darwin whisked her back when the aircraft stopped there for refuelling.

The Petrovs were granted asylum and new lives.

Media organizations agreed to a "d-notice", a voluntary undertaking not to reveal the couple's new identities or whereabouts.

Vladimir, who took the name Sven Allyson, died in 1991 at the age of 84.

The Petrov affair triggered a royal inquiry into communist infiltration -- Australia's version of similar U.S. witch hunts in the 1950s -- and decades of espionage claims and counter-claims, and the closure of embassies on both sides.

The Petrovs spent their lives in relative obscurity in the tranquil Melbourne suburb of Bentleigh.

Known to neighbors as Maria or Anna, Petrov was said to be friendly, but private.

Averse to publicity, she repeatedly refused to sell her story.

True to the last, the local press learned of her passing a week after her death.