Elizabeth Mary Julia Pirie (8 July 1918 – 2 September 2008) is best known as a British spy who worked for MI5 from the 1950s through her retirement in the 1990s.
[2][3] After his death, Elizabeth Marie Pirie returned to her native Calcutta, now Kolkata, with her daughter.
[2][3] Pirie initially joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service, the women's section of the British army.
Pirie was with the first Allied soldiers going into the Nazi's Bergen-Belsen concentration camp,[4][2] which had a profound effect on her.
Chairman of the British League for European Freedom, the duchess was a fierce opponent of Soviet control in Europe.
[3] In Pirie's obituary in The Daily Telegraph, she is described as "a small, dumpy woman with the appearance of a confirmed and rather matronly spinster", whose "unassuming demeanour masked a sharp intellect and the powers of observation essential for the task of a secret agent.
[3] The Telegraph speculates that she may have been the inside agent who provided crucial information for two important MI5 operations described in Peter Wright's book Spycatcher.