Newly publicized top secret files reveal that Nobel Prize-winning author, Doris Lessing, was trailed by the MI5. Assisted by the Met police special branch, the group kept an eye on her, watched her every move as well as that of her friends and colleagues.

The spying started from the suspicion that she was conspiring against colonialism. The accusation was mounted by the writer being a "known communist." According to The Guardian, it all started when the author married communist activist Gottfried Lessing, and it went on for 20 grueling years.

When their marriage, which she described as a "revolutionary duty," ended, she moved from her hometown in South Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) to Britain. There, she became a much bigger target.

MI5 took their spying up a notch after her name, which was misheard as "Lacey," was mentioned in the British Communist Party's headquarters in King Street, Covent Garden, one of the many locations the group kept under surveillance.

By 1952, she was formally dismissed as a "pro-communist," with the report saying that "Her communist sympathies have been fanned almost to the point of fanaticism." 

In the same report, MI5 concluded that "Colonial exploitation is her pet theme," saying irresponsible statements like, "Everything black is wonderful and that all men and all things white are vicious."

By 1956, she moved into a flat in Warwick Road in Kensington. MI5 shadowed her there and found out that the place had "persons of various nationality," noting that the author had "Americans, Chinese, Indians and negroes" as visitors. MI5 believed that her home was "being used for immoral practices."

That same year, Lessing was deported as she tried to fly to South Africa and was marked as a "prohibited immigrant." MI5 alerted the security officials about her arrival, although they were wary of raising suspicion after checking her luggage.

As per Daily Mail, the officials had to practice a "great deal of evasive action and abnormal security precautions to shake off surveillance." Also, around this time, Moscow's suppression of the Hungarian uprising was at the extreme and things were about to take a wild turn.

MI5's files concluded that Lessing's communist tendencies were vacillating by 1957 in light of the suppression. A report stated that she left the Communist Party, calling the group's attitude "hopeless and gutless.

She was also deemed "disgusted" with Soviet suppression of the Hungarian revolution. Dubbed by MI5 as "an attractive, forceful, dangerous, woman, ruthless if need be," Lessing, however, kept her "extreme leftwing views" and "takes an interest in African affairs as an avowed opponent of racial discrimination."

MI5 refused to believe that she has entirely severed her ties with the Communist Party. The last entries in the declassified files, dated around 1962, stated that "In more recent years, she has associated herself with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament."