Sex and Spies- The Strange Case of George Orwell | for everyone |
"A clever woman who can use her personal attractions wisely has in her armoury a very formidable weapon." MI5 agent-runner Maxwell Knight (b.1900 -d.1968), the inspiration for James Bond spy chief "M".
Secrets are always a fascinating subject. We all have our secrets, the things we wouldn't want to get out into the public sphere, thoughts and deeds that are not for broadcasting, our private lives beneath the impression management devices that we deploy and that are our public personas.
Those who work in forensic environments, the police, intelligence agencies and psychiatry can, in differing ways, become privy to these secret thoughts, acts and/or intentions.
It is of course well known that the exploitation of sexual peccadillo's have played a central and often decisive role in the world of espionage in both fact and in fiction.
Take for example Margaretha Geertruida Zelle, better known by her stage name Mata Hari... after she became an "exotic dancer" in Paris in 1905.
Mata Hari became an icon of the First World War and its world of espionage, this Dutch national crossed international boundaries and moved in influential circles across a continent in turmoil, she is said to have been a double-agent working for both French and German intelligence.
On one occasion, when interviewed by British intelligence officers, she admitted to working as an agent for French military intelligence, although the latter would not confirm her story.
However she was eventually arrested by the French authorities for spying for Germany and was executed by firing squad on 15 October 1917 aged 41.
As her entry in Wikipedia notes
"The idea of an exotic dancer working as a lethal double agent, using her powers of seduction to extract military secrets from her many lovers fired the popular imagination, set the legend and made Mata Hari an enduring archetype of the femme fatale."
And then of course there is the famous gay component to this secret world of intelligence gathering and skulduggery.
Right from their formation in 1909, Britain's secret services have been heavily populated with homosexual officers, as has the opposition.
At the peak of the Cold War we had been so penetrated by gay agents working for the Soviet Comintern that they privately referred to their spy ring as "the Homintern".
Guy Burgess, of Burgess and Maclean notoriety, was a prominent Homintern member and such a gay asset that even the Soviets, generally prudish about such matters, had to provide him with a gay partner after he defected to Moscow in 1951.
Sir Anthony Blunt, an MI5 officer with a fine war record, Keeper of the Queen's Pictures, a distant relative of hers, and an art historian of international renown, also had a secret gay life. Alex Kellar, director of MI5's F Branch (Communist subversion) in the mid-1960s, was homosexual, and there are doubts about the sexual orientation of Sir Maurice Oldfield, who retired as chief of MI6 in 1978.
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/so-whats-new-about-gay-spies-1253692.html
It is then in this world of boudoir espionage power and violence of the inquisitive and acquisitive state and those whose interests it serves, that we find a figure with another well known nom de plume, Eric Arthur Blair better known as George Orwell, author, journalist and visionary.
Orwell is a hero to many today who see in his dark totalitarian dystopia Nineteen Eighty Four (1949) a blueprint for contemporary Britain, and the surveillance based police state it is often said to have become.
But like Mata Hari, Orwell too became embroiled in the espionage game and had been watched by MI5 for most of his life, from the age of 26 when he was a struggling journalist in Paris, to the day he died a successful writer and broadcaster in England, aged 46.
The secret file that MI5 kept on the author from 1929 until his death in 1950 was declassified on 2007 and is now in the British National Archive.
It was declassified as part of a phased release of MI5 files under the UK Freedom of Information Act, which was passed in 2005. The file demonstrates a peculiar mix of police paranoia about Orwell's political stance on the one hand and the less concerned, but equally uncertain views of Orwell within MI5.
The documents show Orwell also attracted the attention of police in 1936 for alleged "communist activities in Wigan." Then 33, he had gone to the mining town to research a book about working-class life in northern England.
In 1942, Orwell drew police interest again while working for the Indian service of the British Broadcasting Corporation.
A report by a sergeant named Ewing of Special Branch, the British police intelligence wing, said Orwell had "advanced communist views, and several of his Indian friends say they have often seen him at communist meetings."
"He dresses in a bohemian fashion both at his office and in his leisure hours," police noted.
The file shows that MI5 took no action against Orwell over Ewing's report.
In a note, an MI5 officer named W Ogilvie reveals that he phoned Special Branch to ask why Ewing had described Orwell as having "advanced Communist views."
A police inspector replied that the sergeant felt Orwell was an "unorthodox communist."
"I gathered that the good Sergeant was rather at a loss as to how he could describe this rather individual line," Ogilvie wrote.
"It is evident from his recent writings ... that he does not hold with the Communist Party nor they with him," he added.
The Special Branch files on Orwell were released by the archives in 2005. MI5's response had been secret until the 2007 Freedom of Information disclosures.
And yet Orwell was a complex man, in his later years he had an abiding fear of being assassinated by the KGB largely for what his parody of the Russian Revolution in his book Animal Farm (1945) said about the Soviet Union and communism.
It is now known that shortly before his death Orwell supplied Britain’s security services with a list of suspected communist sympathisers, including the Scottish poet Hugh McDiarmid and Labour politician Tom Driberg, because (claims his son Richard Blair) he feared being killed by the KGB.
There are conflicting theories as to why George Orwell the chronicler of a totalitarian dictatorship of Nineteen Eighty Four and champion of personal liberty would collaborate with the very agencies he had dramatised as the henchmen of Big Brother, the Ministry of Love.
Ministry of Love (Newspeak: Miniluv) The Miniluv identifies, monitors, arrests, and converts, real and imagined dissidents; in Winston's experience, the dissident is beaten and tortured, then sent to Room 101, when he or she is near-broken, to face "the worst thing in the world" — until love for Big Brother and the Party replaces dissension. Some say it was a symptom of the TB that killed him less than a year later that had affected his judgement and possibly fed into his paranoia... and that is the reason they say for Orwell's surprising betrayal of alleged communist sympathisers with whom he had, had contact.
Well perhaps that was true?
According to some recent research I have looked at, comparative analyses have shown that patients with tuberculosis complicated by neurotic anxiety reactions have markedly lower psychic and somatic immunity. So there are some grounds to believe that in the advance stages of TB Orwell's judgement was clouded by confusion and fear.
Orwell gave the list of 38 names of people he suspected to be either active communists or 'fellow travellers' to Celia Kirwan, a friend who worked in the information research department, a secret unit of the Foreign Office.
When Kirwan (now called Celia Goodman) died in the autumn of 2002 her daughter Ariane Bankes found Orwell’s list among her papers.
Another theory has been suggested that Orwell was the victim of a government "honey trap" operation. He is believed to have been in love with Kirwan.
A hypothesis that is not beyond the bounds of possibility, not then and for that matter, not now either
As recently as 6 September 2009 details of a 'honey trap' operation coming out of the just released deposition in the US of former FBI translator-turned-whistleblower, Sibel Edmonds.
According to the released transcripts, Edmonds testified as follows:
"Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky (D-IL).... married with children, grown children, is bisexual. ... So they have sent Turkish female agents, and that Turkish female agents work for Turkish government, and have had sexual relationship with this Congresswoman in her townhouse ... and the entire episodes of their sexual conduct was being filmed because the entire house, this Congressional woman's house was bugged..."
http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2009/09/turkey-sent-female-agents-to-seduce.html
Dirty tricks are after all supposed to be 'dirty' for them to work, so no great surprises there really.
But in March 1949, Celia Kirwan, visited Orwell at a sanatorium in Cranham, Gloucestershire. "I discussed some aspects of our work with him in great confidence", she told her colleagues. "He was delighted to learn of them, and expressed his wholehearted and enthusiastic approval of our aims."
Although too ill to write himself, he gave the names of potential communists.
Early the following month, Orwell wrote to Kirwan offering to give her "a list of journalists and writers who in my opinion are crypto-communists, fellow- travellers or inclined that way and should not be trusted..."
There is some speculation that Orwell was completely infatuated with Celia Kirwan, in a piece in the Guardian published in June 1998, Peter Davison wrote, "I think he would have loved a wife.....one such was Celia Kirwan, now Celia Goodman"
In her obituary by DJ Taylor also in the Guardian (6 November 2002) is states:-
Beyond her immediate family and friends, Celia Goodman, who has died at the age of 86, will be chiefly remembered for the small, but significant, part she played in mid 20th-century English literary life.
The sister-in-law of Arthur Koestler, through her twin Mamaine, she was also one of the young women to whom George Orwell - traumatised by the unexpected death of his first wife, Eileen - proposed marriage in the winter of 1945.
Not wanting a romantic involvement, she declined. But she was impressed by Orwell's personality, and the resulting friendship lasted until the writer's death in 1950.
So if this was indeed a 'honey trap' it was an unrequited one, devoid of the steamy salaciousness of the allegations recently made public about US Congresswoman Schakowsky... and her alleged 'liaisons' with agents of a foreign power.
This is it seems, a latter day Mata Hari type tale with a lesbian twist, but the story also serves to show that the 'honey-trap' device need not necessarily be gender specific in our more liberated age, when bedroom espionage has to be enhanced by something extra in order to capture the popular imagination.
However, the Orwell/Kirwan relationship suggests that they need not even be overtly sexual relationships, in-fact according to former MI5 spy master Maxwell Knight they should never be so, for fear of killing the 'goose that lays the golden egg'.... after the deed is done.
But the Orwell story gets even murkier because of what is alleged to have taken place in Catalonia when Orwell and his wife Eileen were fighting with the International Brigades against Franco's fascist forces during the Spanish Civil War.
George Orwell's commander and close confidant in Spain was Georges Kopp. who was an agent for both MI5 and the Vichy regime that controlled France on behalf of the Nazis, who was believed had an affair with Orwell's wife, Eileen -whilst in Spain as a company commander of the POUM, the Marxist militia that attracted Orwell in 1936.
There are reasons to doubt those speculations, but in her correspondence with friends Eileen had said that Kopp was "a bit gone on me" during that period that Kopp was posing as a leftist militia leader and the Blairs were volunteers in his unit.
Whether he was really 'gone on' Eileen, or whether he was simply trying to infiltrate her private life to obtain a deeper understanding of her and Orwell's true motivations for being there, is anyone's guess?
Blackmail is of course often the ultimate aim of the honey pot ploy and sex is the master key to gaining control over a person now threatened with public exposure, naming and shaming by the secrets that might be revealed.
Kopp was a British/French/German triple agent fighting for socialism in Spain as part of his elaborate cover, but to the Blair's he was a comrade and in Eileen's case at least, a potential lover.
Concluding Remarks What can we believe, who can we trust?
These are clearly complex questions since nothing is actually what it first appears to be, in the secret world of espionage.
Mata Hari was arrested after French intelligence allegedly intercepted a German signal, that identified what was claimed to be Mata Hari's code name, apparently confirming her as a double agent.
There are suggestions that the French government were now embarrassed by her notoriety and either concocted the signal story, or possibly German intelligence officers equally distrusting of Mata Hari deliberately exposed her, we will probably never know the true answer of which powerful 'friends' most wanted her dead, maybe all of them?
The episode in the life of Eric Blair, George Orwell reported here is yet another mystery and we cannot completely dismiss the possibility that it is also planted 'disinformation' to discredit Orwell in the eyes of his many admirers, but the evidence appears to be that George Orwell was both a target of and later an asset for MI5
Ultimately I think this story is a warning about hero worship and seeing certain individuals as all knowing gurus, or political role models for a new and better future.
But such revelations also show the efforts made to infiltrate the worlds of people like Orwell, people who were actually harmless to the interests that the British secret services represented and who posed no direct threat to the state, nor its ever vigilant watchdogs.
British intelligence wanted to pigeonhole Orwell, to label him and allocate him in his rightful place in the grand scheme of things as they saw them. They never succeeded in doing that and it was never resolved whether Orwell was a friend or foe of the British Empire.
This whole episode has I think an almost slapstick comic element to it, as does Britain's current surveillance state, where the paranoid guardians of the staus quo that are said to monitor our every move, are still obsessed by their own fantasies and suspicions of impending treason.
Paranoia is of course highly contagious, in the above account we see that Special Branch were seriously afflicted by it, Orwell was also afflicted by it, his "friends" gathered intelligence on him and he gathered intelligence on them.
The man who wrote one of the most acclaimed allegories of authoritarianism and warned the world of the dangers inherent in our loss of the personal freedom he set against the oppressive personality cult of Big Brother, was himself immersed in a world of double agents,duplicity, whispered allegations and emotional manipulation.
His life sadly ended prematurely whilst symbolically tied to a chair in Room 101 where, by all accounts, he had been 'singing like a canary', but as rumour has it ,it was a love song that George Orwell sang, perhaps his 'swan song' to Celia Kirwan, his friend, comforter and government agent......
Further reading
http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/orwells-secret-dossier/2007/09/04/1188783207651.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/scotland/article1144512.ece
I'm glad you choose to reprint this post, AA. Orwell I think had good reason to be afraid of a Stalinist agent trying to knock him off while he was in Spain, for reasons of the Spanish government being so dependent on Soviet aid in the last two years of the Civil War. His own published work, "Homage to Catalonia" makes a case for the loss of a real revolutionary movement in Barcelona, thanks to an alliance in Madrid with the moderate Loyalists and the Soviet agents.
ReplyDeleteThe current political tensions in Spain would interest Orwell no end I'm sure.
One thing I have learned is that "heroes" are often if not always flawed, and then after they die, are shaped and distorted by the intelligence trail of facts and speculations left behind in the spy achieves. What more natural for MI5 to do than to try and take advantage of a sick and lonely man with a pretty face? Or any agency in the spy game for that matter?
I wish Orwell had recovered and lived long enough to see the bipolar postwar world and what he would have made of it.
Doug says "I wish Orwell had recovered and lived long enough to see the bipolar postwar world and what he would have made of it."
ReplyDeleteWhat an interesting idea that is Doug, what would Orwell's next book during Suez and later in the Cuba Crisis, the assassination of JFK be like? ...what new stories would he have written I wonder?....who would have been the animals in a let's say a 1968 rewrite of Animal Farm?
All fascinating stuff....I think that Orwell was duped in Spain where he utterly lost his way in a myriad of real and false political operations going on.
Orwell never understood the working class that always interested him so much, but neither did he really understand the upper middle class, from whose ranks he sprang and whose colonial statelessness (the administrative Raj at the end of empire) made them a class of perpetual misfits, always out of step with events back home right here in Blighty, always during his lifetime they were yesterday's people so to speak.
Orwell imagined a Britain that was his own mental construct for want of any tangible experiential benchmarks derived from actually living here .... he was himself ironically, a 'wild colonial boy'...How to be that patriot of good faith was I think his never resolved question and Eric Blair's never achieved liberation from the guilt of colonialism experienced by a sensitive individual like him.
He tried so hard to find a way to be English but he really struggled with what that means, a stateless man, an outsider who died afraid of everything about every empire, and well he might but that is alas the sad fate of the imperial classes, instant karma as the Raj might understand it.
Thanks for leaving your comments Doug.