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uarding one of orwell s last secrets until shortly after celia kirwan s death last autumn when her daughter ariane bankes found a copy of the list among her mother s papers and subsequently invited me to write about it after we published the list in the guardian i asked the british foreign secretary jack straw to release the original 1 he agreed since all the information contained in it is now in the public domain and anyone interested can now read it in its proper place file fo 1110 189 at the british national archives 1 so there is the text what is the context in february 1949 george orwell was lying in a sanatorium in the cotswolds very ill with the tb that would kill him within a year that winter he had worn himself out in a last effort to retype the whole manuscript of 1984 his bleak warning of what might happen if britain succumbed to totalitarianism he was lonely despairing of his own wasted health at the age of just forty five and deeply pessimistic about the advance of russian communism whose cruelty and treacherousness he had personally experienced nearly at the cost of his own life in barcelona during the spanish civil war the communists had just taken over czechoslovakia in the prague coup of february 1948 and they were now blockading west berlin trying to strangle the city into submission he thought there was a war on a cold war and he feared that the western nations were losing it one reason we were losing he thought was that public opinion had been blinded to the true nature of soviet communism in part this blinding was the product of understandable gratitude for the soviet union s immense role in defeating nazism however it was also the work of a poisonous array of naive and sentimental admirers of the soviet system declared communist party cp members covert crypto communists and paid soviet spies it was these people he suspected who had made it so difficult for him to get his anti soviet fable animal farm published in the last year of the last war however he also knew this was a time in which genuine idealistic believers in communism were becoming disgusted by what they saw some turned into the most acute critics of the god that failed to quote the title of the famous book about communism co edited by arthur koestler and the labour mp richard crossman which appeared in the month of orwell s death january 1950 with an introduction by crossman and essays by among others koestler stephen spender and ignazio silone these writers were especially important to anticommunist leftists like orwell who were convinced as he himself wrote that the destruction of the soviet myth is essential if we want to revive the socialist movement at some point in the mid to late 1940s he had started keeping a private notebook in which he tried to work out who was what outright member of the cp agent f t sentimental sympathizer the notebook which i have been able to consult without restriction at the orwell archive at university college london shows that he worried away at the list it contains entries in pen and pencil with asterisks in red and blue against some names there are 135 names in all of which ten have been crossed out either because the person had died like fiorello la guardia the former mayor of new york or because orwell had decided they were not crypto communists or fellow travelers thus for example the name of the historian a j p taylor is crossed out with orwell s heavily underlined remark took anti cp line at wroclaw conference as is that of the american novelist upton sinclair on whom rejecting his own earlier assessment orwell comments no denounced czech coup wroclaw conference stephen spender sentimental sympathiser tendency towards homosexuality and richard crossman too dishonest to be outright f t are not yet crossed out but this was before the appearance of the god that failed the way orwell agonized over his individual assessments is shown by the entry on j b priestley this has against it a red asterisk which is crossed out with black cross hatching and then encircled in blue with an added question mark to this depressed and mortally ill political writer of genius there came in february 1949 a delightful piece of personal news celia kirwan née paget had returned to london from paris celia was a strikingly beautiful vivacious and warmhearted young woman who moved in left wing literary circles as did her twin sister mamaine then married to orwell s friend arthur koestler orwell had met celia when they spent christmas together in wales with arthur and mamaine in 1945 he was lonely and in some emotional turmoil after the death of his first wife earlier that year celia and he got on very well and met again several times in london one evening just five weeks after their first meeting he sent her a passionate letter full of tender feeling and rather clumsily proposing either marriage or an affair it ended good night my dearest love george celia gently refused him in what she later described as a rather ambiguous letter but they remained close friends a year later she went to work for an intellectual review in paris dearest celia he now wrote from the cotswold sanatorium on february 13 how delight ful to get your letter and know that you are in england again i will send you a copy of my new book i e 1984 when it comes out about june i think but i don t think you ll like it it s an awful book really saying he hoped to see her some time perhaps in the summer he signed off with much love george sooner than expected on march 29 celia came to visit him in glouces tershire but she also came with a mission she was working for this new department of the foreign office trying to counter the assault waves of communist propaganda emanating from stalin s recently founded comin form could he help as she recorded in her official memorandum of their meeting orwell expressed his whole hearted and enthusiastic approval of our aims he couldn t write anything for ird himself he said because he was too ill and didn t like to write on commission but he suggested several people who might on april 6 he followed up with a letter in his neat rather delicate handwriting suggesting a few more names and offering his list of those who should not be trusted as propagandists but for that i shall have to send for a notebook which i have at home and if i do give you such a list it is strictly confidential as i imagine it is libellous to describe somebody as a fellow traveller celia circulated the letter to her superior adam watson who made some comments then added p s mrs kirwan should certainly ask mr orwell for the list of crypto communists she would treat it with every confidence and send it back after a day or two i hope the list gives reasons in each case mrs kirwan did as she was asked writing from foreign office 17 carlton house terrace on april 30 dear george thank you so much for your helpful suggestions my department were very interested to see them they have asked me to say that they would be very grateful if you could let us look at your list of fellow travelling and crypto journalists we would treat it with the utmost discretion her letter at least in the typewritten version contained in file fo 1110 189 has a cooler ending than his yours ever celia meanwhile orwell asked his old friend richard rees to send him the notebook from the remote house on the scottish island of jura where he had written 1984 thanking him for it on april 17 he writes cole i e the historian g d h cole i think should probably not be on the list but i would be less certain of him than of laski in case of a war the whole business is very tricky and one can never do more than use one s judgement and treat each case individually so we must imagine orwell lying in his sanatorium bed gaunt and wretched going through the notebook perhaps adding a blue question mark to the red asterisk and black cross hatching on priestley wondering how cole or laski crossman or spender would behave in the event of a real shooting war with the soviet union and which of the 135 names to pass on to celia on receiving her note he wrote back at once enclosing his list of thirty eight it isn t very sensational and i don t suppose it will tell your friends anything they don t know note the reference to your friends orwell had no illusion that this was just going to her at the same time it isn t a bad idea to have the people who are probably unreliable listed if it had been done earlier it would have stopped people like peter smollett worming their way into important propaganda jobs where they were probably able to do us a lot of harm even as it stands i imagine that this list is very libellous or slanderous or whatever the term is so will you please see that it is returned to me without fail the letter was signed with love george on the same day he wrote again to richard rees suppose for example that laski had possession of an important military secret would he betray it to the russian military intelligence i don t imagine so because he has not actually made up his mind to be a traitor the nature of what he was doing would in that case be quite clear but a real communist would of course hand the secret over without any sense of guilt so would a real crypto such as pritt the mp d n pritt the whole difficulty is to decide where each person stands one has to treat each case individually 2 at this point maddeningly the paper trail goes cold we know that celia kirwan was supposed to come to see orwell on the next sunday and that he thanked her on may 13 for sending a bottle of brandy did she return the list if she went to visit him again having had the copy now in file fo 1110 189 typed up in the department what did they say at that meeting if it took place what happened next were these names handed on to any other department the file itself shows no further action taken with respect to the names listed in his letter to me announcing the release of the original the foreign secretary writes a check of our records confirms that the list is the only document about orwell s contacts with ird that has been withheld but a good many other ird files have been withheld and parts of released documents blanked out on the grounds that they contain intelligence related matter and are therefore covered by what foreign office archivists call the blanket anyway only part of the truth is ever contained in files a serious answer to these questions requires a judgment on the nature of this mysterious department the ird i have therefore immersed myself in the published literature about it and read some of the files that have been released to the public record office 2 i have also talked to several former members of the department at that time they include adam watson the official who instructed celia kirwan to ask orwell for his list robert conquest the veteran chronicler of soviet terror who subsequently 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 execut...