MI5 spied on Nobel victor Doris Lessing for 20 years

Lessing’s movements were documented during her younger years by MI5 both in her homeland in Africa and in England.

Lessing, who was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 2007, was labelled by MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service, as having communist sympathies that bordered on the “point of fanaticism”, and that her opposition of racial discrimination had led to her becoming “irresponsible in her statements”.

After her divorce from Gottfried, Lessing moved in 1949 from Rhodesia to London, where security agents picked up her trail.

Lessing, whose books include “The Golden Notebook” and “The Sweetest Dream”, died in 2013 aged 94. It was this marriage that first brought the author to MI5’s attention, according to the BBC.

Information gathered by colonial intelligence services said she spoke of the “superiority of living conditions and educational development in the Soviet Union compared with other European countries and Africa”.

A letter from the Air Ministry in September 1944 revealed concerns among security organisations about those with left-leaning sympathies, noting that the Lessings ran the Salisbury Left Club in Southern Rhodesia, a club “patronised by persons with foreign accents” and RAF personnel.

In addition, she was a member of the British Communist party and was found inviting unmarried couples and single mothers into her home.

Scotland Yard’s Special Branch also compiled a file on her in 1950, and authorisation was given to intercept post sent to an address where she was staying in Berlin.

“The general tone of this club is reported to be very left, and it is stated that most topics of discussion there usually end up in anti-British, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist vapourings”, according to a note in her MI5 files.

Several of Lessing’s 1950s annual membership cards of the Communist Party of Great Britain feature in the file.

A Metropolitan Police memo revealed that Lessing’s neighbours in Earls Court, west London, had been informing on her. The memo described how Lessing was visited by “Americans, Indians, Chinese and Negroes”, and “it is possible that the flat is being used for immoral purposes”, although a later memo added: “A suggestion that immoral practices were the reason for the numerous visitors has not been substantiated and it can be safely assumed that the meetings were for the furtherance of the communist cause”.

She joined the Communist Party during World War II and went on to marry German exiled communist Gottfried Lessing.

In 1956, Lessing left the Communist Party in disgust after the Soviet Union crushed the Hungarian uprising, yet MI5’s survellance continued until at least 1962, the date of the last non-redacted record in Lessing’s file.