Nuorteva was born in Astoria, Oregon, United States, where her father had lived since the 1910s, after moving from Tampere, Finland.
During the Second World War, in December 1941, the NKVD suggested that she could join intelligence training and sent her on a mission to Finland.
Her brothers Matti and Pentti had been sent on similar missions, but both were arrested in occupied Petrozavodsk and executed by the Finnish forces.
The wrappers of the chocolate with Russian-language text were later found, as well as a small tube of lipstick, which was used as evidence that a woman had been there.
Her presence had already been noted earlier and she was suspected of being a "desant," as Soviet spies and saboteurs parachuted into Finland were called.
Finnish Security Police Valpo and Military Headquarters arranged her interrogation, but Nuorteva was silent for many months.
She told her story only when the chief of the Turku office of Valpo, Paavo Kastari, brought Arvo "Poika" Tuominen, an old friend of her father and a member of the Communist Party of Finland who had begun to help the Finnish police, to the interrogations to talk with her.
Tuominen succeeded in convincing her that Stalinism had betrayed and destroyed communism and managed to crack her ideology.
Relatives of Nuorteva, including her father's cousin, Professor Paul Nyberg, managed to postpone the execution.
After the talks, Kivimies wrote her memoir under the pen name Irja Niemi, which was in 1944 published by Oy Suomen Kirja.