O'Brian and Orwell

A couple of months ago I read that someone had discovered that this
guy who was a pal of Orwell's in the Spanish Civil War was in fact a
Soviet spy. His code name was "O'Brien". The funny thing is that
apparently there is no way in hell Orwell could have known about him
or his code name. Anyone else heard about this?

Marcp

"Marco" <mdi00 RemoveThis @hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:e5f1d809.0308251205.6850f76d@posting.google.com...

 > A couple of months ago I read that someone had discovered that this
 > guy who was a pal of Orwell's in the Spanish Civil War was in fact a
 > Soviet spy. His code name was "O'Brien". The funny thing is that
 > apparently there is no way in hell Orwell could have known about him
 > or his code name. Anyone else heard about this?

It's sort of true. The person who was directly spying on Orwell and his wife
was David Crook, who worked at the ILP office in Barcelona. Crook passed
along his reports to another Communist agent, Hugh O'Donnell, whose codename
was indeed O'Brien. An ironic coincidence.

Alan.<!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->