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The original was posted on /r/todayilearned by /u/RollingNightSky on 2024-04-19 03:44:58.

Original Title: TIL that George Orwell was spied on by a Soviet secret agent named Hugh O’Donnell, code-name O’Brien. In a coincidence, (book spoiler) Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four to have a spy named O’Brien betray the main character, without knowing about the Soviet spy codenamed “O’Brien.”

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    12 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    George Orwell, the writer who savagely attacked the Big Brother powers of Russian totalitarianism, was spied on for the Soviet Union by a fellow British volunteer during the Spanish civil war, a new book reveals.

    According to the book, Crook admits that he took his orders from the Soviet espionage agency, then known as the NKVD and later renamed the KGB, and that Orwell and the other ILP members were “of special interest to me”.

    Among his reports was an observation that he was “95% certain” that Eileen Blair, who married Orwell in 1936, was having an affair with George Kopp, another ILP member, whom Bowker describes as “a strange Belgian adventurer”.

    In a reference to the ruling powers in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Bowker writes that Crook, who subsequently helped to kidnap opponents in Spain, was like a character “straight from the Ingsoc world of spying, intrigue, dissemblance and cold elimination”.

    Bowker writes that, although Orwell was oblivious to this, “the fact that the character in Nineteen Eighty-Four who first wins the confidence of Winston Smith and then betrays him is given the name O’Brien must be one of the strangest coincidences in literature”.

    “The most terrible things were happening even when I left, wholesale arrests, wounded men dragged out of hospitals and thrown into jail, people crammed together in filthy dens where they have hardly room to lie down, prisoners beaten and half starved.”


    The original article contains 771 words, the summary contains 234 words. Saved 70%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!