Elvi Pirk (born Elvi Ormus-Akman) was born on 28 September 1921 in Tallinn. Elvi studied at Nõmme-Hiiu elementary school, and at Tallinn’s Gymnasium no. 1 for Girls in 1934–1939. She was a girl guide starting in 1931, and a girl guide leader starting in 1938. She studied law and economics at the University of Tartu in 1940–1943 and at Humboldt University in Berlin in 1943–1944. The languages that Elvi used were German, Russian, and English. She had also studied French. Elvi worked as a journalist, thereat during the German occupation of Estonia in the editorial office of Tartu’s newspaper Postimees. She was imprisoned in prison camp in 1946–1955. After her release from imprisonment, she worked as a laboratory assistant at the Nõmme Tuberculosis Dispensary and at the Raba Department of the Union Republic Venereology Dispensary. She married the artist Varmo Pirk in those years.

Elvi Pirk participated in the activity of the local history study group of Tallinn’s City Museum, of the Nõmme Common Weal Society, of the Nõmme section of the Society of Former Political Prisoners, and of the Nõmme Society of Houseowners. In 1997, she was decorated with the Order of the Cross of the Eagle 4th Class and the Memorial Cross of the Battles of Keila. Elvi Pirk died in Tallinn on 22 July 2005.

Elvi Pirk fled to Germany in 1944 and from there to Sweden by way of Denmark. There Elvi was recruited into the service of British intelligence. She was sent as an intelligence agent across the Baltic Sea by motorboat on 1 June 1946. Her mission was to deliver radio communication session codes to the Haukka reconnaissance group in Hiiumaa. She was additionally assigned to gather various information on conditions in post-war Estonia. The greater portion of the tasks assigned to Elvi remained unfulfilled because she failed to get any further than Hiiumaa and was unable to pass on to the radio operators the codes and quartzes that she had brought. The radio operators had already been arrested by then. The Soviet state security agencies were obviously aware that this reconnaissance group was being sent to Estonia. Soviet border guards apprehended the boat near Ristna on its way back to Sweden in the early morning of 9 June. Thereafter Elvi was imprisoned in Vorkuta prison camp until 1955.

This article has been written based primarily on Elvi Ormus-Akman’s interrogation transcripts. She spoke in detail in her interrogations about her life and activity in Estonia, Germany, and Sweden, about her recruitment into the service of British intelligence, about the tasks assigned to her, about her covert mission to Estonia, and similarly about her arrest.

The article’s second part was written based on Elvi Pirk’s memoirs of her life in prison camp that were recorded in her home in Nõmme on 28 December 2004. These memoirs include colourful descriptions of conditions in the women’s punishment camp in Vorkuta district.