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y shared an office with celia kirwan and himself fell madly in love with her and the aptly named john cloake the picture that emerges is of an ill defined outfit with a very diverse group of people fumbling their way from the recently finished war against fascist totalitarianism in which most of them had fought into the new cold war against the communist totalitarianism of britain s recent wartime ally ird was a semisecret department unlike the secret intelligence service popularly known as mi6 whose very existence was denied by the government ird appeared in the lists of foreign office departments but not all its officers were identified there much of its funding came from the secret vote a governmental appropriation used to fund the secret services and not subject to the usual forms of parliamentary scrutiny an internal foreign office description from 1951 says flatly it should be noted that the name of this department is intended as a disguise for the true nature of its work which must remain strictly confidential 3 in the beginning that true nature was mainly to collect and summarize reliable information about soviet and communist misdoings to disseminate it to friendly journalists politicians and trade unionists and to support financially and otherwise anticommunist publications the department was established by the labour foreign secretary ernest bevin and it was particularly interested in authors with good credentials on the left bertrand russell for example wrote three short books whose publication was subsidized by the ird why communism must fail what is freedom and what is democracy according to ird veterans some authors like russell knew perfectly well that the publisher background books who approached them to write a book was backed by this semisecret department of the foreign office others such as the philosopher bryan magee who contributed the democratic revolution were outraged when they subsequently learned the source of the publisher s funds the pattern is familiar from other well known episodes of the cultural cold war such as the cia funding for encounter the better known of these authors would obviously have been published anyway but ird helped to give their work a wider circulation especially in foreign countries that were already under communism or seen as threatened by it in orwell s case it supported burmese chinese and arabic editions of his animal farm commissioned a rather crude strip cartoon version of the same book giving the pig major a lenin beard and the pig napoleon a stalin moustache in case simple minded readers didn t get the point and organized showings in backward areas of the british commonwealth of a cia financed and politically distorted animated film of animal farm the department also established a close working relationship with the overseas services of the bbc in one file that i have read ird officials tried to press sir ian jacob then head of the bbc s european service to adopt its recommendations for the choice of words to describe the soviet state 4 one choice example police state another useful phrase which underlines this sometimes overlooked but essential aspect of the system in this case the bbc resisted the pressure and the foreign office official overseeing ird told his subordinates to back off however it seems that some ird operatives did not stop with these relatively mild means of what ernest bevin called anti communist publicity using methods they had learned in the previous war working for the political warfare executive or for mi6 they apparently tried to combat what they saw as communist infiltration of the trade unions the bbc or organizations like the national council for civil liberties by identifying members who were or were alleged to be communists by spreading dark rumors about their activities and perhaps worse so we must imagine robert conquest sitting in one room at carlton house terrace scrupulously gathering and sifting information about east european politics in another office a former member of the world war ii political warfare executive or of mi6 might be preparing some slightly less scrupulous operation next door you could meet the charming professional diplomat guy burgess who worked in ird for three months and being a soviet agent told his controllers in moscow all about it down the corridor though only beginning in 1952 sat a young woman called fay the novelist fay weldon later recalled that when a visitor came from mi6 she and her colleagues would be told turn your backs so this james bond figure could walk down the corridor unseen watch the wall my darling while the gentlemen go by but they peeked as the cold war intensified the white propaganda of the early years seems to have been increasingly supplemented with gray and black by the late 1950s according to someone who worked for british intelligence agencies at that time ird had a reputation as the dirty tricks department of the foreign office indulging in character assassination false telegrams putting itching powder on lavatory seats and other such cold war pranks little of which will be found in the files even if the intelligence related ones are finally released all the survivors insist that it is most unlikely that any names supplied by orwell in 1949 would have been passed on to anyone else and especially not to mi5 britain s domestic security service or mi6 in charge of foreign intelligence in all honesty adam watson told me i cannot remember any case in which we said to mi5 or mi6 did you realize that x says so and so is a crypto communist however as mr watson himself cautioned me old men forget clearly no one can ever know exactly what say the head of the department ralph murray might have muttered to a friend from mi6 over a brandy at the travellers club just around the corner from carlton house terrace celia kirwan always strongly defended orwell s contribution to the work of ird in the 1990s there was fevered speculation about his list the marxist historian christopher hill said i always knew he was two faced the labour mp gerald kaufman wrote in the evening standard that orwell was a big brother too celia kirwan insisted i think george was quite right to do it and of course everybody thinks that these people were going to be shot at dawn the only thing that was going to happen to them was that they wouldn t be asked to write for the information research department some writers today suggest the ird s anticommunist activities were britain s equivalent of the mccarthyite witch hunt if so then one is struck by how mild it was by comparison with the american mccarthyism which prompted arthur miller to write the crucible and charlie chaplin to flee back to orwell s britain consider who some of the people on the list were and what happened to them peter smollett was singled out by orwell for special mention in his covering letter to celia under remarks on his list orwell noted gives strong impression of being some kind of russian agent very slimy person born in vienna as peter smolka during world war ii smollett was the head of the soviet section in the british ministry of information one of orwell s inspirations for the ministry of truth we now know two more things about him first according to the mitrokhin archive of kgb documents smollett smolka actually was a soviet agent recruited by kim philby with the codename abo second he was almost certainly the official on whose advice the publisher jonathan cape turned down animal farm as an unhealthily anti soviet text how then did the british state prosecute or persecute this soviet agent by making him an officer of the british empire obe subsequently he was the london times correspondent in central europe the worst thing that seems to have happened to him is that some of his short stories about postwar vienna were heavily drawn upon by graham greene for the third man in the film he makes an insider joke phantom appearance as what the viewer must assume is the name of a bar or nightclub called smolka the labour mp tom driberg usually named as crypto but in my opinion not reliably pro cp was according to the mitrokhin kgb papers recruited in 1956 as a doubtless deeply unreliable soviet agent codename lepage after a compromising homosexual encounter with an agent of the kgb s second chief directorate in a lavatory under the metropole hotel in moscow nonetheless he ended his life as a celebrated writer and lord bradwell of bradwell juxta mare e h carr isaac deutscher the novelist naomi mitchison a silly sympathiser and j b priestley all pursued very successful careers without so far as we know any hindrance from the british government michael redgrave went on ironically enough to play a leading role in the 1956 film of orwell s 1984 in other words nothing bad happened to them even when as in the case of smollett it arguably should have to be sure we cannot conclusively say that this was true of all the lesser known writers and journalists on the list of thirty eight that requires further investigation the only case of anything like a possible blacklisting that i have found so far is that of alaric jacob a minor writer who had attended the same private school as orwell and followed his subsequent progress with resentment according to one study of british political vetting alaric jacob joined the bbc monitoring service at caversham in august 1948 but in february 1951 was suddenly refused establishment rights which meant he would receive no pension 5 he complained to his cousin the same sir ian jacob who had dealings with ird and later became director general of the bbc alaric jacob s establishment and pension rights were restored shortly after his wife iris morley who also appears on orwell s list died in 1953 the way in which the bbc collaborated with semisecret departments like the ird and with the intelligence services for secret vetting of its employees is one of the murkier passages of britain s cold war but a two year loss of bbc establishment rights is hardly darkness at noon or a session in room 101 anyway there is no evidence that orwell s list had anything to do with the temporary blacklisting of alaric jacob nearly two years later 3 saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent orwell wrote of gandhi just a few months before he sent celia the list orwell s rule must now apply to orwell himself the saint george of english political writing yet even when all possible files are released and a scrupulous historian has weighed all the available evidence on ird the bbc and the rest his innocence can never finally be proven perhaps orwell would anyway not want to plead innocent but rather growl guilty as charged it all depends on the charge if the charge is that orwell was a cold warrior the answer is plainly yes orwell was a cold warrior even before the cold war began warning against the danger of soviet totalitarianism in animal farm when most people were still celebrating our heroic soviet ally he appears in the oxford english dictionary as the first writer ever to use the term cold war in english he had fought with a gun in his hand against fascism in spain and was wounded by a bullet through his throat he fought communism with his typewriter and hastened his death by the exertion if the charge is that he was a secret police informer the answer is plainly no ird was an odd cold war outfit but it was nothing like a thought police unlike that dreadful genius bertolt brecht orwell never believed that the end justified the means again and again we find him insisting to richard rees that you have to treat each case individually he opposed the banning of the communist party in britain the freedom defence committee of which he was vice chairman thought political vetting of civil servants a necessary evil but insisted that the person concerned should be represented by a trade union that corroborative evidence must be produced and that the accused should be allowed to cross examine those giving evidence against him hardly the methods of the kgb or indeed of mi5 or the fbi during the cold war he told celia that he approved of the aims of ird this does not mean that he would have approved of their subsequent methods the list invites us to reflect again on the asymmetry of our attitudes toward nazism and communism orwell liked making lists in a london letter to partisan review in 1942 he wrote i think i could make out at least a preliminary list of the people who would go over to the nazi side if the germans occupied england suppose he had suppose his list of crypto nazis had gone to the political warfare executive would anyone be objecting the long overdue publication of the ird list also highlights the vital distinction so often blurred between orwell s private notebook and the list he sent to celia at the foreign office readers may according to taste be more shocked or amused by the entries in his notebook there is about them a touch of the old imperial policeman a hint of the spy as well as a generous dose of his characteristic gruff black humor he includes someone from the income tax dep t in his notebook list bloody communists those tax inspectors but all writers are spies they peek like fay weldon in carlton house terrace they secretly write things down in notebooks one aspect of the notebook that shocks our contemporary sensibility is his ethnic labeling of people especially the eight variations of jewish charlie chaplin polish jew english jew or jewess orwell s entire life was a struggle to overcome the prejudices of his class and generation here was one he never fully overcame what remains most unsettling about the list he actually sent is the way in which a writer whose name is now a synonym for political independence and journalistic honesty is drawn into collaboration with a bureaucratic department of propaganda however marginal the collaboration white the propaganda and good the cause in the files of the ird you find the kind of bureaucratic language that we now habitually describe as orwellian or kafkaesque next to the very personal handwritten letter from orwell dear celia with love george in fo 1110 189 is a typewritten communication from the british embassy in moscow dear department it begins and is signed surreally yours ever chancery yet perhaps we should not be surprised for orwell knew this kind of world from inside and drew on it for his awful book while 1984 was a warning against totalitarianism of both the nazi that is national socialist and communist that is soviet socialist kind hence ingsoc much of the physical detail was derived from his experience of wartime london working in the bbc itself a considerable british bureaucracy in close touch with the ministry of information and home to the original room 101 the most delicate and speculative part of any interpretation concerns orwell s relationship with celia kirwan there is in his letters to celia an almost painful eagerness you sense...
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