Observing Orwell: Big brother was watching.

• Author: Moynihan, Michael C.
• Position: Citings - Writer Eric Blair also known as Mr. George Orewell with a state of paranoid obsession - Brief article

WHILE KIM Philby and the Cambridge Five plundered British secrets for the Soviet Union during the 1930s and '40s, the Special Branch--Britain's version of the U.S. National Security Agency--kept its eyes on a different target: the democratic socialist writer Eric Blair, known to the police by his nom de plume "Mr. George Orewell [sic]."

Three years before the publication of his anti-communist classic Animal Farm, a Special Branch sergeant fingered Orwell for holding "advanced Communist views," noting that the author suspiciously "dresses in a bohemian fashion both at his office and in his leisure hours." Orwell's brand of anti-totalitarianism baffled investigators, with one officer "rather at a loss as to how [one] could describe this rather individual...