In defense of spying

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The second-oldest profession still surprises some people. So it was this week when Britain's National Archives released decades-old security-service files on George Orwell, greeted in some circles as high irony, that Big Brother would be found spying on the author of "1984." It would have been more surprising if British intelligence were to have failed to watch a prolific socialist who, in the course of travels in international leftism, counted a resignation in protest from the Indian Police Service and a joining-up with the Worker's Party of Marxist Unification to fight the Spanish Civil War among his life moments. Such is spying. It is meant to head off graver acts of state than the keeping of files.

Granted, reading these documents is to imbibe half a dose of Inspector Closeau and the other half routine due diligence. References to Orwell's supposedly "advanced Communist views" — a penciled question mark adorns this one — and dark suggestions of his "bohemian fashion" are met by cooler observations that Orwell would be "an unorthodox Communist," or probably, judging by his writings, no malefactor at all. "The Betrayal of the Left," writes one file-keeper, demonstrates that Orwell "does not hold with the Communist Party nor they with him." The spies could read.

In these documents one sees the clumsy but deliberate bureaucracy which makes a state intelligence entity a state intelligence entity. Rumors and hearsay abound: "[H]is Indian friends say that they have often seen him at communist meetings." So do matters barely relevant: He "reviewed a book written by Richard TERRELL, a well-known communist." Then there are the great, telling items, such as a wartime questionnaire, dated November 1941: "Is there any important difference, from the worker's standpoint, between British imperialism and German Nazism?" "Yes," Orwell replied. "Should Socialists support the present British war effort?" Answer: "Yes." "Should Socialists support the present British Government?" Answer: "Not unreservedly."

Stranger things there have been than the intellectual who writes one thing for public consumption while practicing something else in private. Orwell was no such man. It is more a comfort than a shock that British security services asked the question, kept some answers and stepped out of the way of a great writer and scourge of Communism. They were just checking.