- Title: BRITAIN-MI5/LESSING British spies reveal file on Nobel winner Doris Lessing
- Date: 21st August 2015
- Summary: LONDON, ENGLAND, UK (AUGUST 20, 2015) (REUTERS) VARIOUS OF THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES BUILDING VARIOUS OF DORIS LESSING'S FILES ON TABLES INSIDE THE NATIONAL ARCHIVE VARIOUS OF DR. RICHARD DUNLEY FROM THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES, OPENING FILE (SOUNDBITE) (English) DR. RICHARD DUNLEY, THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES, SAYING: "Doris Lessing clearly was a high profile individual and somebody who had strong left-wing views and people perhaps would have expected that she might have come to the attention of the security services, but until the files are actually released, there is no way of knowing."
- Embargoed: 5th September 2015 13:00
- Keywords:
- Location: United Kingdom
- Country: United Kingdom
- Topics: General
- Reuters ID: LVAC3G413ZCQAH5XPR5WH0JR4R0E
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- Story Text: Nobel Prize-winning writer Doris Lessing was under surveillance for more than 20 years during her youth by British spies who took a dim view of her Communist ideology and anti-racist activism, declassified intelligence files have revealed.
Lessing first came to the attention of colonial-era intelligence agents in 1943 in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, where she grew up, and from then on spies kept tabs on her in Southern Africa and Britain until 1964.
The author of "The Golden Notebook", one of the most influential novels of the 1960s, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007. She died in 2013 aged 94.
MI5, Britain's internal intelligence service, had built up a five-volume secret file on Lessing that has now been placed in the National Archives and was made public on Friday (August 21).
One of the earliest documents is an extract copied from a letter from an Air Ministry official, dated 1944, about the Left Book Club that Lessing ran in Salisbury, now Harare, with her second husband Gottfried Lessing, a German Communist.
"Most topics of discussion there usually end up in anti-British, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist vapourings," the official wrote, noting with concern that "persons with foreign accents" mingled at the club with Royal Air Force personnel.
After her divorce from Gottfried, Lessing moved in 1949 from Rhodesia to London, where security agents picked up her trail.
In 1952, the external spy agency, MI6, took an interest in a visit she made to the Soviet Union with a delegation of left-wing British writers, providing a note kept in the MI5 file.
"Her communist sympathies have been fanned almost to the point of fanaticism owing to her upbringing in Rhodesia, which has brought out in her a deep hatred of the colour bar," the note says, referring to the restricted rights of black Africans.
"Colonial exploitation is her pet theme and she has now nearly become... irresponsible in her statements... saying that everything black is wonderful and that all men and all things white are vicious."
Several of Lessing's 1950s annual membership cards of the Communist Party of Great Britain feature in the file.
"Doris Lessing clearly was a high profile individual and somebody who had strong left-wing views and people perhaps would have expected that she might have come to the attention of the security services, but until the files are actually released, there is no way of knowing," said Dr. Richard Dunley from the national archives at Kew in West London.
"She was quite an influential figure. She was writing certainly by the early 1950s, she was a popular author and there would have been some concern for her support of the Soviet Union and Soviet and communist type organisations, cultural organisations, but MI5 are not going to be actively getting involved in this, it's more of a case them monitoring what she was getting up to," he added.
Such was the interest in her that agents carefully cut out a tiny ad placed by Lessing in 1955 in the Communist newspaper the Daily Worker, advertising cheap accommodation for a woman with a child who could provide company for her youngest son, Peter.
One report dated January 1956, provided to MI5 by the Special Branch of London's Metropolitan Police, described her activist's lifestyle and contacts in suspicious terms.
"Her flat is frequently visited by persons of various nationality, including Americans, Indians, Chinese and Negroes," the report said.
"Some of the visitors seem to stay at the flat for days at a time and some of the visits are made by apparently unmarried couples," Special Branch noted, concluding gravely: "It is possible that the flat is being used for immoral practices."
Later that year, the file documents how Lessing left the Communist Party in protest over its support for the crushing of the Hungarian uprising by Soviet forces. After that, MI5's interest in her activities appeared to wane, although new documents were added to the file until 1964.
Looking back years later on her years as a Communist Party member, Lessing said: "I can't understand why I was so gullible." - Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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