5.5.03
Soviets spied on Orwell in Spain
More on Orwell: the Soviets spied on the writer while he was fighting against the fascists in the Spanish civil war.Odd coincidence: the British handler of the spy assigned to Orwell was codenamed O'Brien in what is apparently an incredible coincidence:
[The spy] passed his reports to Hugh O'Donnell, another communist from London, whose codename was O'Brien. Bowker [author of a new Orwell biography] 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 article also reports that Orwell's wife may have been cheating on him.
