Hugh O’Donnell, who was also working directly for Moscow. O’Donnell’s code name – amazingly – was ‘O’Brien’! It seems unlikely that Orwell ever knew that Crook was spying on him, or that his contact worked under that name, but 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.
