Melita Stedman Norwood (née Sirnis Latvian: [zirnis]; 25 March 1912 – 2 June 2005) was a British civil servant, Communist Party of Great Britain member and KGB spy.

in Europe and the West, co-authored by Christopher Andrew, she is described as "both the most important British female agent in KGB history and the longest serving of all Soviet spies in Britain.

[7] In popular culture she is most known for her depiction in the 2018 spy drama Red Joan, whose protagonist was loosely inspired by Norwood's life.

[11] He produced a newspaper entitled The Southern Worker: A Labour and Socialist Journal, which was influenced by the October Russian Revolution, and the paper published his translations of works by Lenin and Trotsky.

[3] After leaving University, Norwood moved to the German city of Heidelberg, where she stayed for a year and became involved in anti-fascist activism.

In 1935 she was recommended to the NKVD (forerunner of the KGB) by Andrew Rothstein, a leading member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and became a full agent in 1937.

Mitrokhin defected in 1992, giving the British authorities six trunkloads of his handwritten notes which were earlier rejected by the Central Intelligence Agency as possible fakes.

[20][5] Norwood was well known to be a communist sympathiser[12] but a separate report in 1999 stated that British intelligence became aware of her significance only after Mitrokhin's defection; to protect other investigations it was then decided not to prosecute her.

[1] While she said she did not generally "agree with spying against one's country", she had hoped her actions would help "Russia to keep abreast of Britain, America and Germany".

[24] In a statement at the time of her exposure, she said: I did what I did, not to make money, but to help prevent the defeat of a new system which had, at great cost, given ordinary people food and fares which they could afford, a good education and a health service.