The friendship between Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest—so emblematic in the modern imagination of Paris in the 1920s, was effectively over by 1940. They had been distant for years, and their last exchange, in 1936, in which Ernest used Scott’s name in a cheap shot in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” had been extremely chilly. When Scott died of a heart attack in Hollywood on December 21, 1940, in Sheilah Graham’s apartment, his work was in literary eclipse. Max Perkins thought that was about to change when he saw the manuscript of The Last Tycoon, which Scott had been working on at the time he died. “It is the most tragic thing that it wasn’t finished,” he wrote with excitement to Ernest. “For it broke into wholly new ground and showed Scott as advancing and broadening.” He had a lot of plans for publishing it, with an introduction by Bunny Wilson, in a volume with a reissue of The Great Gatsby and Scott’s best stories. He wanted to leave out material from the “Crack-Up” essays that Wilson might want to include—he hadn’t liked those confessional pieces any more than Ernest had. The Last Tycoon “shows that except for the physical side of it he didn’t crack up. He was just getting into a good state of mind.” Ernest wasn’t having any of this, and told Max he thought it too bad to publish something unfinished, implying Scott wouldn’t like it, but then added, gruffly, “I suppose the worms won’t mind”—worms being all he hoped was left of Scott.
But this was tough even by Ernest’s standards, and he soon made it clear he didn’t want to leave matters there. He gave a lot of thought to Scott’s body of work over the next weeks—and years. He did, however, summarily reject the notion that The Last Tycoon had any worth: “Most of it has a deadness that is unbelievable from Scott”—a remark that could truly be called a backhanded compliment. In the same letter he said he thought Tender Is the Night was Scott’s real masterpiece—a sentiment that would have done his old friend a world of good to hear.
“By the beginning of 1941, the Sino-Japanese war had been going on so long and was so far away that it ranked more as a historic fact than a war.” So begins Martha Gellhorn’s piece about her honeymoon in China in her amusing travel book, Travels with Myself and Another, published long after Hemingway’s death. To most Americans, the brutal war that followed Japan’s 1937 invasion of China south of Manchuria was already an old story; what made it new was the fact that Japan had joined the Axis powers in September 1940, giving the long-running conflict new significance. The U.S. was also very concerned about the ability of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists to win an ongoing civil war with Mao Tse-tung’s Communists, and by 1940 the American establishment was already embarked on an agonizing debate as to whether the U.S. should intervene on behalf of the Nationalists. The same year as the Japanese invasion, Chiang and his photogenic, American-educated wife—a subject of fascination to many Westerners—were featured on Time magazine’s cover as “Man and Wife of the Year.”
In the aftermath of her reporting of the Spanish Civil War, Collier’s assigned Martha a mission to cover the “Chinese army in action”; she also was asked to write about the status of the Burma Road, the trade route opened in 1938 by the British between Lashio in Burma and Kunming in China, now seen as a critical supply route in the event of British entry into the war. Martha was eager to go, her imagination fired since childhood with visions of the “Orient” à la Somerset Maugham, teeming with Fu Manchus and rickshaws. Ernest was another matter, his geopolitical attention firmly oriented toward Fascism in Europe. As Martha later wrote, he “was knowledgeable in exact detail about anything that interested him but China had not been on the list” (TMA, 53). In fact, her nickname for him in her later account of their travels in the East was U.C., for “Unwilling Companion.”
Ernest was not entirely unwilling, however. He and Martha had been good traveling companions in Spain and worked well together as journalists. Though Ernest may have approached the North American Newspaper Alliance about covering the Far East for them, another opportunity arose that appealed to him more. The previous spring he and his brother Leicester had taken Ralph Ingersoll, long a Time editor and a founder of Fortune, out fishing on the Pilar in the waters off Cuba. Ingersoll was talking about starting a newspaper in New York to be called PM, which would be decidedly progressive—the first issue, proclaiming support for U.S. entry into the war, would trumpet, “We are against people that push other people around.” He intended to sign editorials and sometimes run them on the front page, and the newspaper would be one of the first issued in a tabloid format. He was looking, moreover, for reporters with a well-honed sense of the drama of the story they were covering, unafraid to narrate with flair and make clear their point of view. Leicester signed on immediately. Ingersoll was really trying to recruit Ernest, of course, and pursued him to that end in a series of talks in the Barclay Hotel in July, when Ernest was in New York to deliver For Whom the Bell Tolls to Scribner’s. Ernest did not sign on until that December, however, when Ingersoll agreed that he would cover the Chinese situation for the newspaper. Ernest should stay in the East and cover the story if any action broke out, but otherwise take notes and write when he returned, when he had, said Ingersoll, the distance and time to think about what he’d seen and thus to “render a report of more lasting value than day-to-day correspondence.” Ernest’s seven articles, and an interview with Ingersoll, would run the second and third weeks of June, after he was back in the U.S.
Martha and Ernest embarked for China by way of Hollywood, where Ernest talked with Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman about the upcoming film version of his novel, Ernest telling Bergman that she would have to cut her hair short to play Maria; he asked her to show him her ears, and he thought they would do. The next stop was Hawaii, where they were wined and dined not only by local bureaucrats but also by Ernest’s relatives, namely his Aunt Grace (his father’s sister) and her family; Ernest and Martha didn’t know which was worse, the bureaucrats or the family. U.C. liked Hawaii better than she did, Martha wrote her mother, adding, “He was by no means on fire with impatience for the Orient” (TMA, 13).
Upon arrival in the Far East, Ernest and Martha spent a luxurious few weeks in Hong Kong, where they took a stylish suite at the Repulse Bay Hotel. While Martha made the trip to Burma and from there to Kunming (then regularly a target of Japanese shelling) and back to Hong Kong, Ernest, she noted, surrounded himself with a “mixed jovial entourage” made up of police and “crook-type” figures: local Chinese businessmen, unsavory millionaires, and the like. He always seemed to be busy, going to the races and other sporting events, hunting pheasant in the nearby hills, and spending hours drinking rice wine and telling stories; he loved Chinese food and seemed never to tire of setting off the ubiquitous firecrackers, especially in his and Martha’s hotel rooms.
From Hong Kong, Ernest and Martha went together to Namyung and then to Shaokwan, the base of the 7th War Zone, where both of them took notes on the Chinese army. From there they traveled down the muddy North River in a rustbucket Chris-Craft, making numerous stops at which they were received with bewilderment. They wound up in the wartime capital, Chungking, where they had a three-hour meeting with Chiang Kai-shek and his formidable wife, “still a beauty and a famous vamp,” according to Martha (TMA, 50). Shepherded by a tall blond Dutch woman, who approached them at a Chungking market, they went by a mysterious process and circuitous route to meet the Communist leader Chou Enlai.
Ernest would report on both meetings to Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr., who was evaluating U.S. funding of the Chinese Nationalists. As reporters covering countries at war, Martha and Ernest were naturally seeking war intelligence, which did indeed greatly interest some in the Roosevelt administration, whom Martha knew through her friendship with the president and his wife. This hardly qualifies their trip to China as a “spy mission,” as the author of a recent book on their sojourn there claims. On the other hand, Ernest was establishing a pattern in agreeing to report to Morgenthau. During the Spanish Civil War, Claude Bowers, the American ambassador to Spain, had had a meeting with Hemingway on May 16, 1938, at St.-Jean-de-Luz, in which Ernest gave him a detailed analysis of the Republican army, evaluating, for example, their armaments and the strengths and weaknesses of such generals as Durán, Modesto, Pozas, and Miaja. Bowers reported this conversation in a letter to Secretary of State Cordell Hull. As in many such exchanges, it is not clear why (or whether) the secretary wanted such a report, and why or under what circumstances Hemingway provided it. It is probable that he was hoping to encourage American intervention on behalf of the Republican government, as many leading liberal types, such as his friend Archie MacLeish, were doing at the time. This does not make his sojourn in Spain a spy mission, especially because these events in Spain and China took place in the premodern days of foreign affairs, when many visitors to other countries, especially writers, with their superior powers of observation, functioned as “diplomats” or as “spies” in the sense that they came back to the U.S. and told those in power what they had seen.
Hemingway’s reports to PM were competent but nothing special, however crucial a period it was in Far Eastern history. Ernest did seem to grasp what lessons could be learned in China that might help in any upcoming larger conflict. The U.S. must tell Generalissimo Chiang that it would not back a civil war in China. Chiang did want to beat Japan, he assured PM readers. He warned, “The Generalissimo is a military leader who goes through the motion of being a statesman,” in contradistinction to Hitler, who “is a statesman who employs military force.” He concluded the piece, called “U.S. Aid to China,” with a clever if somewhat forced horse racing analogy: “At present Russia figures to win against the Japanese with the Generalissimo. She figures to place with the Chinese Communists.” He concluded, portentously if somewhat lamely, “After this race is run it will be another and very different race.”
Though their journalism in these months was unremarkable, Ernest and Martha’s trip to China was, for all Martha’s descriptions of it as a “super horror journey” (TMA, 10), in many respects a wonderful time for the two of them. They each had an incisive, nonstop sense of humor (though it seldom comes through in their major writings, or even the letters between them). Martha’s description of her journey with the U.C. presents an invaluable portrait of a couple in love meeting great adversity (she doesn’t seem to be exaggerating the appalling living conditions they encountered) and cracking unending jokes about it.
Martha’s essay in Travels with Myself and Another is a fond and positively rollicking portrait of Ernest and their relationship. The running theme is that Martha was the one who started this whole thing, and now she is the one to complain: “Who brought us to China?” or “Who wanted to come to China?” are Ernest’s running responses to Martha’s gripes. Their repartee is witty, so much so that it is unlikely that Martha invented it some thirty years later. Martha: “I’d rather jump off the Empire State building in long underwear than come to China again.” U.C.: “I put nothing past you. Nothing” (TMA, 38). Everything in China was way too dirty for the fastidious Martha: Ernest, her polar opposite in cleanliness, advises her against bathing in the murky and noxious-smelling water, saying that if she brushes her teeth with it, she is a “nutcase” (TMA, 26). When Martha learns, to her horror, that she has acquired a case of “jungle rot,” an athlete’s foot kind of fungus, on her hands, U.C. replies, “Honest to God, Martha. You brought this on yourself. I told you not to wash” (TMA, 54).
More meaningfully, Martha’s essay shows a very unusual, for her, lack of self-consciousness. Or, perhaps, an indication of a sense of humor about herself—not much in evidence elsewhere in her work. Ernest made some dead-on comments about her that she reported almost forty years later. When Martha slipped away from a bull session in which Ernest was participating with an assortment of shady characters, Ernest said, “M. is going out to take the pulse of the nation” (TMA, 15). A random observation, when Martha complained about the diseased, poor, desperate people they were meeting on their travels: “M. loves humanity but can’t stand people” (TMA, 48–49). At another juncture, on the same subject, U.C. says, “The trouble with you, M., is you think everybody is exactly like you. What you can’t stand, they can’t stand. How do you know what they feel about their lives?” If they were as badly off as she thought, he said, they’d commit suicide rather than endlessly produce children or set off firecrackers (TMA, 22–23). There’s an insight in every one of these wisecracks, which Martha seems to have recognized at the time, not just when she recalled them many years later. In China in 1941, Martha and Ernest were having a ball.
They parted in Rangoon, Ernest heading back to Hong Kong while Martha left for the west coast of Burma to see yet more military installations. They met again in New York in late May or early June. Ernest was debriefed in Manila by Army Intelligence, and both he and Martha at the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) in Washington by Colonel John W. Thomason, Jr., before his scheduled meeting with Henry Morgenthau, who had a particular expertise in relations with China.
On their way back to Havana, the couple stopped in Key West to pick up Patrick and Gregory for their summer at the Finca. Later that month Ernest learned that “Mr. Josie,” aka Joe Russell, the proprietor of Sloppy Joe’s, had died of a heart attack. Ernest felt bereft. Josie was only fifty-three.
Ernest seems to have greatly admired John Thomason, who would prove to be a surprisingly important figure in his life for several years to come. Ernest had heard of the colonel long before they met. Thomason was a much decorated Marine veteran of World War I and a longtime successful author of military fiction. Perkins had urged a volume of Thomason’s short stories, Fix Bayonets!, on Ernest back in 1926; Ernest told Max that he was “disappointed” in it—apparently because he did not like the idea of the bayonet, which lent itself too readily to “ornamental killing”—though he found the writing “often splendid.” But Ernest was otherwise predisposed to Thomason, having been introduced to him by a longtime friend whom he greatly admired, Colonel Charles Sweeny, the soldier of fortune and adventurer who would eventually fight under five flags before his death in 1963.
Ernest had first met Sweeny in Istanbul in 1926, where Sweeny joined Atatürk’s revolutionary army; his romantic military history and his sophisticated understanding of warfare quickly made him an object of fascination to Ernest. A ruddy-faced San Francisco native and graduate of West Point, Sweeny had in the First World War organized the Lafayette Escadrille, the celebrated crew of American pilots flying for France; he had transferred to the U.S. Army after American entry into the war. In the aftermath he had fought the Bolsheviks with the Polish Army. Ernest next ran across Sweeny in Spain, where the two men spent a great deal of time together. Ernest told Perkins that Sweeny showed up in Spain as a newspaper correspondent, bearing six bottles of cognac and three of absinthe as gifts for Ernest. Sweeny was really there to aid the Republican army, and participated in the planning for the battle at Teruel—the Republican defeat there was due in part to nobody’s paying attention to Sweeny’s recommendations, Ernest said. Ernest found Sweeny outspoken and arrogant, nearly impossible to work with, and believed he was almost the only one in Spain who could, but, he told Max, “I would rather listen to him on military things than anybody I have ever known.”
Thomason and Sweeny seem to have known each other through a military elite with a common interest in intelligence work. Ernest and Martha’s “debriefing” with Thomason after their China trip was no doubt only pro forma, perhaps even Ernest’s first meeting with the colonel. But his interest in intelligence-related skullduggery was piqued, and Ernest was soon hatching schemes that resulted in one of the murkiest and most feckless projects of his career—a government-sanctioned campaign against Nazis in the Caribbean.
As Americans in Cuba, Ernest and Martha were of course more removed from the war than their compatriots stateside, yet at the same time they felt in some ways more in the thick of it. Havana was very much an international city where unaffiliated individuals of many nationalities were in close contact, providing a fertile ground for espionage. Cuba’s location, at the edge of the Atlantic and as the closest of the Caribbean islands to the U.S., added to the possibilities for wartime intrigue.
The impetus behind Ernest’s first intelligence effort may have been Martha’s work on an article about possible Nazi spies in Cuba for Collier’s. She had cleared the idea with editor Charles Colebaugh in advance; it was a great story, and one that Martha, with her knowledge of the role fifth columnists had played in Spain, was ideally situated to write. But when she sent it in, in July 1941, the magazine rejected the article. In protest, she reminded Colebaugh that Nazi sympathizers in Cuba had the ability to tip off German U-boats to the location of American ships carrying matériel to the U.K. There were almost eight hundred Germans in Cuba, she told him, and thirty thousand Falangists, or Fascist supporters of Franco (surely a wildly exaggerated figure). Martha thought the editor was foolish; Collier’s was passing up a possible headline reading “Swastikas over Cuba!”
Martha and Ernest grumbled for months about the story, casually continuing to keep track of Cuba residents they believed were Fascist sympathizers. They each badly wanted to do something for the war effort, especially after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Ernest had been following the buildup to war for some time; Pearl Harbor, he thought, only exposed the “laziness, criminal carelessness, and blind arrogance” that had made the devastating attack possible. Too old to enlist, he cast about for ways that he could help the Allied effort. His old friends Evan Shipman and John Herrmann had enlisted, and his son Jack was soon to leave Dartmouth for Officers’ Candidate School.
Even young Leicester Hemingway was doing his part—though he was extremely clumsy at it. Ernest had not seen his little brother for any extended period of time since 1934, when Leicester and a friend had sailed across the Gulf of Mexico in a homemade boat, then made their way to Key West, where they stayed aboard the boat for three months, Leicester joining his big brother for many fishing trips aboard the Pilar.
In 1940 Leicester and a British friend, Tony Jenkinson, had cruised the Caribbean for several months in a schooner called the Blue Stream, on the lookout for any signs of Nazi activity. Once they found a cache of diesel fuel they believed was waiting to be pumped into German U-boats; another time they were approached suspiciously by someone they thought was asking them to run fuel to the Germans. When they docked in Puerto Rico they overzealously reported that they had overheard two men in a post office speaking German and saw them receiving mail with German postmarks. Several articles in the Baltimore Sun detailed Leicester’s cruise on the Blue Stream. Ernest was skeptical. A year later, when John Thomason said he was interested in the possibility of Leicester making further patrols, Ernest lectured his brother on the difference between journalism and espionage—in the latter you reported only what you had seen or not seen, rather than looking for stories—and told Leicester to get a haircut and wash his face “good” before meeting Thomason.
In 1942, however, patrols like Leicester’s had begun to seem like an integral line of defense in the wartime Caribbean. The attention of many Caribbean islanders was riveted to the presence in their waters of German U-boats, which were coming dangerously close to American shores and sinking U.S. ships in alarming numbers. In 1942 the U.S. was losing cargo ships at a horrific rate—251 were sunk in the Caribbean alone. By this time America was in the war and these vessels were carrying vital supplies to the U.K. and, perhaps more importantly, to Russia. A total of 1,508 Allied merchant ships were sunk in that one year. It is not surprising that Americans like Hemingway were eager to do anything they could do to stem these losses. And espionage was, by then, an essential kind of war work.
By early 1942 Ernest was in close touch with American officials in Havana involved in intelligence work. Though the sequence of events is not entirely clear, in the second half of March, Ernest and Martha spent two weeks in Mexico City, ostensibly on vacation. According to recently unclassified OSS documents from 1944, Ernest had been sent to Mexico City to investigate the possibility of raising an army of Republican exiles from Spain who would be shipped to North Africa to join Allied troops there, perhaps the American soldiers who would be landing there in May as part of Operation Torch, the first major counteroffensive against Germany. While in Mexico, Ernest and Martha spent time with Nathan “Bill” Davis and his wife, Emily; Ernest had met Davis in Sun Valley, later reminding Patrick that they had hunted jackrabbits with Davis in the fall of 1941. Davis was in years to come said to be driving a taxi in Mexico City at the time—which does not jibe with his own background as an aristocratic Peabody or his marriage to a wealthy woman, Emily, who, with her husband, would soon become an art collector of note, buying the first of a number of Jackson Pollock paintings the same year. Bill Davis would become an important friend of Ernest’s, and Martha too became a warm friend of both, writing them several long, chatty letters over the next two months. (One, addressed “Dear Guys,” began, “Ernest is asleep and I want to talk.”)
Davis, himself an aficionado whose enthusiasm rivaled Ernest’s, took Martha and Ernest to several bullfights while they were visiting in Mexico City. Though rumors would later surface that he was with the OSS, it is not clear that Ernest was discussing possible espionage with Davis at this time. He and Martha, however, were staying at the Hotel Reforma under assumed names; though Hemingway scholar Daniel Robinson suggests that they were simply avoiding publicity, there is no record that Ernest ever went by a different name for this purpose. Hemingway’s activities in Mexico City at this time remain sketchy; it is known, however, that he met there with Gustav Regler, his friend from the Spanish Civil War. Regler, a Communist, had fled Nazi Germany and then joined the XIth International Brigade in Spain, where he was wounded at Guadalajara. He had recently left Communist ranks. Regler remembered that when he met Ernest and Martha at Tampico Club, a Mexico City restaurant, Ernest, for some reason “in an alarming state of emotional confusion,” harangued him for leaving the party when Soviet Russia was the only hope for beating Germany; he could not understand why Regler had done so, evidently overlooking Stalin’s purges or, for that matter, the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1941.
Nothing came of the Mexico City visit, except perhaps that Ernest was more open to the idea of doing intelligence work in Cuba for the U.S. He and Martha had a number of friends at the American embassy in Havana, notably Bob Joyce, second secretary, and his wife Jane, who in turn introduced them to State Department secretary Ellis O. Briggs, first secretary. Perhaps they were talking over Martha’s rejected Collier’s story about the Nazi presence in Cuba. In any event the possibility of Ernest’s taking on some type of intelligence project and reporting the results to embassy officials was floated, and Briggs and Joyce approached Spruille Braden, the American ambassador to Cuba. (In Braden’s memoir, he claims he approached Ernest himself.) Bob Joyce later told Carlos Baker that Ernest said he had experience running an intelligence operation in Madrid in 1937. This was an invention, or perhaps an exaggeration of his debriefing about the Republican Army with Bowers.
The Montana-born Braden was a Yale graduate (as was Bob Joyce), a Latin American expert who had previously served as ambassador to Colombia. He created a position for Joyce as chief of intelligence, and told Ernest to report to Joyce any suspicious activity; the operation was called the “crime section,” but Ernest quickly dubbed it the Crook Factory. Ernest asked for Gustavo Durán to be made his second in command; Durán was a Barcelona native who had fought in the Republican army before escaping to London and then the U.S., becoming a U.S. citizen and then securing a position with the American embassy in Cuba. Ernest described Durán as “an ideal man to conduct this work.” Ernest then assembled a ragtag circle of operatives, consisting of a bartender at his favorite Havana boîte, the Floridita; Basque friends, many of them former bullfighters or jai-alai players; Spanish priests; rich Americans like Winston Guest and Tommy Shevlin; and what Braden later called “wharf rats.”
The Crook Factory did not escape the notice of the FBI, which had had its eye on Ernest since his rabblerousing speech at the American Writers Congress in 1937. Its first report, an October memo from Raymond Leddy, the bureau’s legal attaché, to J. Edgar Hoover, noted that “conferences” in August had discussed using Hemingway’s “services” in intelligence operations, cautioning, however, that Ernest was no friend of the FBI, having introduced Leddy at a jai alai match as a “member of the Gestapo.” Further memos flew, and that December Hoover himself weighed in, saying that he “of course” disapproved of the connection between Ernest and Braden, calling Hemingway “the last man, in my estimation, to be used in any such capacity.” Hoover added that he believed Hemingway’s “judgment is not of the best,” and cited Ernest’s drinking: “If his sobriety is the same as it was years ago, that is certainly questionable.” The agency also doubted Durán’s loyalties, citing his previous Communist Party affiliation; in fact, in months to come the FBI would obsess about Durán.
Ernest in turn hated the FBI with a passion. He had heard it said that many FBI agents were Catholics and that the bureau was a known friend to the Church, concluding that FBI agents were automatic Franco sympathizers and calling the agency “Franco’s Bastard Irish.” When the local police arrested one of his “operatives” (presumably for an unrelated matter), Ernest exploded, marching off to Bob Joyce’s apartment and insisting that the FBI had ordered the arrest.
The Crook Factory became defunct, in fact, when the confusion among different intelligence-gathering bodies in Cuba and elsewhere in Central America led Roosevelt to order that all such efforts be consolidated and run by the FBI. But the operation had largely been superseded in Ernest’s life by another plan, in which he and his men would patrol the coast of Cuba in the Pilar, looking for U-boats.
The idea was not completely the fantasy of a middle-aged man eager to play at war. The Navy was camouflaging armed vessels as merchant ships; called Q-boats, these ships would lure aggressive U-boats to the surface, open fire with guns, then send down depth charges when the U-boats dove back underwater. Unfortunately, many of the Q-boats that did come across German submarines were inadequately armed. The Pilar was no match for a submarine either, unless the sub was riding on the surface and came within close range. But Ernest devised a modus operandi that would set his operation apart from the other civilian patrols. The Pilar would draw a sub as closely as possible, then open fire, at the same time lobbing grenades into the sub’s conning tower and bombs into the forward hatch. (Ellis Briggs pointed out that the approaching sub could blow the Pilar and her crew out of the water.) It would be a grand adventure—an adventure by sea, involving the big guy vs. the little guy, played for grand stakes, not to mention considerable danger: it was to be a noble enterprise that could possibly encompass fishing as a peripheral activity and would definitely mean that, as Martha would later point out acidly, the Pilar could tap an unlimited supply of hard-to-get, otherwise strictly rationed gasoline.
Though Hemingway’s U-boat hunting operation is often lumped in with the Crook Factory’s activities, it was administered differently and run differently, and it grabbed Ernest’s fancy in a way the Crook Factory never did. It was run under the same auspices as the Crook Factory—the American Embassy, under Braden, Joyce, and Briggs—with John Thomason at the Office of Naval Intelligence overseeing the project. Thomason, however, did not entirely approve the operation, telling Ernest he didn’t think any vessel would get close enough that anyone could “throw beanbags down the hatch”; Ernest in turn called him Doubting Thomason. Ernest told Braden that Durán could take over the Crook Factory; he also airily stated that the Embassy should “pay” him for having started his spy ring by supporting his antisub patrol.
“Friendless”—as Ernest dubbed the U-boat scheme, after one of the Finca cats—would not come cheap: Ernest had a lot of demands. He wanted twin .50-caliber machine guns to be attached to the Pilar’s wales. He requested a number of pistols, including a Smith & Wesson magnum for his own use; bazookas; additional machine guns; magnetic mines and dynamite chargers; and box upon box of grenades. (Ernest’s son Patrick remembered “an unlimited supply” of grenades and machine guns.) The Pilar would tow a collapsible rubber boat (in bright orange, so it could be easily spotted from the air). More important, Ernest wanted radio equipment: a state-of-the-art shipborne HF/DF system (for high-frequency direction finder, called a Huff-Duff) that could detect where radio signals were being sent from, as well as a traditional radio, the bill for communications equipment alone running to $32,000.
Along the way the Pilar’s engines were completely rebuilt. Ernest also had some steel plates that he considered “armor” installed in the hull, in spite of the excess weight they added. The crew was outfitted with olive green U.S. Navy jackets, presumably through Thomason’s office, and, curiously, sombreros, worn against the sun. The embassy and/or the ONI also approved Ernest’s request that his men, if killed, be considered war casualties for reasons of indemnification.
The gasoline supply was of utmost importance. According to the Hemingway servant René Villarreal, gardeners at the Finca had, at Ernest’s instruction, dug a very large hole on the property near the swimming pool. Villarreal, the chauffeur, and two of the jai-alai players, in a comic and drunken misadventure, attempted to lower a large gas tank, the first of three, into the hole; the chain they were using to lower it snapped and the tank hurtled into the hole. Eventually all three tanks were buried, presumably attached to gas hoses for access—though it is not clear how the fuel was to be delivered to the Pilar.
For the Friendless patrols, the Pilar had a crew of anywhere from five to nine, whom Ernest dubbed his Hooligan Navy. The crew almost always consisted of Gregorio Fuentes, the Pilar captain and cook; Winston Guest, nicknamed Wolf, the American millionaire who eventually became the right-hand man in Friendless; Juan Duñabeitia, one of Ernest’s Basque friends, given the nickname of Sinbad the Sailor because of his familiarity with the sea, shortened to Sinsky; Paxtchi Ibarlucia, a jai-alai player, one of several who joined the crew from time to time; Fernando Mesa, an exile from Catalonia who had worked as a waiter in Barcelona; Roberto Herrera, a Spanish Cuban whose brother Luis had been a surgeon attached to the Loyalists in the Civil War; and Don Saxon, a Marine sergeant attached to the embassy, a radio operator and expert in small arms supplied by Thomason at the ONI. In a letter to Martha, Ernest described an evening with his Hooligan Navy: “We were just twenty-one…and twenty-four bottles of wine were drunk….Tommy Shevlin sang some wonderful songs and everybody threw bottles at Fernando as a form of applause. Chairs were thrown to express disapproval….Thorwald [Sánchez, a sugar magnate] had taken the pistol of the soldado, who had fallen asleep, and was firing it….Juan was hit on the ear by a loaf of bread and rendered hors du combat….It was an all time high in Basque celebrations.”
When Patrick and Gregory arrived for their summer visit in July they joined the crew, but Ernest told his brother Leicester that he left his sons at home when they were going to specific places—as opposed to aimless cruising—that suggested impending danger. Ernest also insisted that in those cases Fuentes, who had six children, be left ashore. Ernest described the strategic scenario for Operation Friendless to Leicester:
We had a bomb with a short fuse and handles. We kept it topside, unleashed and ready to fling. The idea was to keep nosing around where we heard them talking [through the Huff-Duff radio system]. Eventually one would surface and order us alongside. Then Patche [Paxtchi] and his pal would arm the bomb, grab the handles, and, as we came abreast of the sub’s conning tower, we figured to clean her decks with our guns while the [jai alai] players flung the bomb over the lip of the conning tower. It would either blast the watertight hatch or go down the hatch and explode in the periscope control area.
It should be noted that if any member of the crew believed this projected scenario, he would need considerable bravery to participate on the Pilar’s patrols. Ernest drilled his shipmates in gun assembly and cleaning and in target practice, throwing everyday objects as they would throw a bomb or grenade. Fuentes remembered shooting at old fuel drums with painted faces, which they called Hitlers. Patrick Hemingway, who remembers the sub-hunting period as “probably the last really great, good time we all had together,” recalls dropping hand grenades on turtles: “this was justified by the need to learn how long it was between when you pulled out the pin and when it went off.”
Ernest got so caught up in the spirit of what he was doing that he proclaimed Operation Friendless a success. The Pilar’s log, camouflaged in a 1941 Warner’s Calendar of Medical History, contains fishing notations, gambling debts, and the like, and also records such activity as inspecting a cave on the Matanzas coastline in search of saboteurs or supply dumps. The FBI, who still had their eye on Ernest, supplied a record of Friendless’s success rate in a memorandum dated June 13, 1943. Some of the reported activities ranged far from sub hunting; in a report to the embassy, Ernest noted that General Manuel Benítez, the chief of the Cuban police, was plotting to seize power when Fulgencio Batista, the dictator, was in Washington. Abundant details were provided, but events proved him wrong; the rifle training he observed with alarm was simply a regular feature of the National Police’s program. FBI agent Leddy pointed out that alienating the Cuban police force was not a good idea.
Leddy recorded other schemes or plots Hemingway brought to the attention of the embassy or the ONI, many of them very confused in the way of much of this kind of intelligence works—one thinks, for example, of the role of the pumpkin patch in the Alger Hiss case. For instance, Hemingway closely followed the visit of the Italian Fascist Prince Camilo Ruspoli; he reported that Ruspoli, who had pleaded illness to delay his internment by the Cuban police, “was not really ill.” Hemingway also reported what he thought was an exchange between a submarine and the Spanish Marqués de Comillas on December 9, 1942, but the legal attaché interviewed almost a hundred witnesses who denied seeing a submarine on the surface. Hemingway submitted another memo protesting that, even so, it would be a “tragedy” if saboteurs from the sub had boarded the ship and might thus land in the U.S. Perhaps the most absurd event was the investigation of a suspicious box found in the Basque Club, a bar frequented by that community, which had been brought to the embassy by one of Hemingway’s friends; the box was found to contain a “cheap edition” of the Life of Saint Teresa. Some of these incidents involved the Crook Factory, not the Friendless operation. But, as Leddy pointed out, all of Hemingway’s activities were of a piece; he noted that Ambassador Braden viewed Ernest as “a pet project of his own” and took “Hemingway’s opinions as gospel.” Leddy, perhaps not the most reliable narrator, also noted that “a clique of celebrity-minded hero worshippers” surrounded Hemingway, citing Guest; Shevlin; Cathleen Vanderbilt Arostegui, the socialite and half sister of Gloria Vanderbilt; and unnamed embassy officials. To them, Leddy cynically added, “Hemingway is a man of genius whose fame will be remembered with Tolstoy.”
The Pilar’s first patrol went out in July 1942, less than two months from the date Ernest proposed the operation. Officially, Ambassador Braden announced that the Friendless operation was over as of April 1, 1943, though Hemingway was out chasing subs that summer and into the fall. In the meantime, Martha had embarked on a cruise around the Caribbean for Collier’s, with the purpose of reporting preparations for war but, like her husband, submarine hunting. She told her editor that she was going to pack a lot of white dresses and Proust, and wrote Mrs. Roosevelt that she was tired of managing the servants and overseeing the housekeeping at the Finca. Martha would later write up her expedition in another winning and humorous piece in Travels with Myself and Another, describing her island-by-island tour as yet another “horror journey,” albeit punctuated with naked swims off deserted white sand beaches. To justify her expense account, she told herself that she might well come across survivors from torpedoed ships—a not uncommon occurrence in the area—or find enemy supply caches or radio transmitters. Her “private dream,” she wrote, was to sight a German submarine—“private” because she “had the sense to keep [it] to [her]self,” as her husband did not (TMA, 61).
Martha later told an interviewer that she found Ernest’s Q-boat operation “rot and rubbish.” She urged him to drop his “shaming and silly” activities at sea and put his mind to how he could really help the war effort. Increasingly, she felt they would have to go to Europe to report from the front, but Ernest dragged his heels.
However bumbling, Ernest’s wartime intelligence activities need to be reconsidered in light of recent discoveries that have shown he was at the same time doing intelligence work for the Soviet Union. The discoveries were reported in a 2009 book whose three authors included a former KGB officer who was given access to KGB records from the 1940s. The story began in early 1941, when Ernest was in New York on his way to China with Martha. He was contacted by Jacob Golos, an operative with the NKVD, the Soviet law enforcement agency whose intelligence unit was the precursor to the KGB. What actually occurred is not clear, but Golos reported that Hemingway was given a password for communications with another operative for future contact; “I am sure,” Golos wrote, “that he will cooperate with us and will do everything he can” to aid the NKVD. Ernest’s code name was Argo.
One historian calls Hemingway’s acceptance of this pitch “stunning”; indeed, it is hard to reconcile with his iconoclastic individualism and, to the extent that he was political at all, his antagonism to totalitarianism whether on the right or the left. When Argo signed on, the Nazi-Soviet Pact was still in effect. For obvious reasons, this had caused a number of left-leaning people to denounce the Soviet Union—especially Jews. To many, the Moscow show trials of 1936–38, meant to root out dissenting Bolsheviks, had already confirmed Stalin’s totalitarianism. But from where Ernest Hemingway sat, the view was slightly different.
First, the circumstances of the Spanish Civil War left Ernest inclined to give the Soviet Union the benefit of the doubt. After all, as Ernest himself pointed out in a preface to a Gustav Regler novel, “The Soviet Union was not bound by any pact with Hitler when the International Brigades fought in Spain.” The alliance came into effect, he asserted, only after the Russians “lost any faith in the democracies.” In such a view, the Soviet Union was in a terrible position; its leaders, unsure whether they could beat Germany in any war, for years had sought an entente with France and the U.K. According to this argument, Stalin had only decided to form an alliance with Germany—an alliance principally to delay the inevitable conflict between the two powers—when the democracies’ refusal to come to the aid of Republican Spain against Fascism made clear that they were either blind or complicit when it came to Hitler and his allies.
Ernest was not an ideological person; the only ideology that ever sat well with him was anti-Fascism. He would not have seen any conflict in agreeing to help both the NKVD and the U.S. embassy in Cuba, so long as the purpose was to defeat the Axis. In both cases his personal contacts were key; if he trusted his interlocutor he would do whatever he was asked. In Madrid, Ernest had become good friends with Alexander Orlov, the NKVD station chief; Orlov enabled him to get to the front and made sure he had all the caviar and vodka he wanted. The developments in Ernest’s friendship with John Dos Passos and the Robles affair suggest how blinkered his relationship with the Soviets could be, yet in For Whom the Bell Tolls Hemingway showed himself to have some awareness of the range of ideological positions available in the Spanish Civil War. And, as noted, in 1938 he gave information to Claude Bowers, the U.S. ambassador to Spain, providing details about the Republicans’ military capacities—simply because he liked and trusted Bowers.
The NKVD connection never really bore fruit, however. An operative would be in touch with Ernest twice in the next few years, once in London in June 1944, and once in Havana in April 1945. But Ernest never made use of the password he was given for future meetings with an NKVD agent. The NKVD files carried the following assessment:
Our meetings with “Argo” in London and Havana were conducted with the aim of studying him and determining his potential for our work. Throughout the period of his connection with us, “Argo” did not give us any polit. information, though he repeatedly expressed his desire and willingness to help us. “Argo” has not been studied thoroughly and is unverified.
It is important to note again that writers were important cultural figures then, and it was not uncommon for government figures to approach them for reports of what they saw when they returned from other countries.
What are we to make, however, of the totality of Ernest’s political activity in these years—his embrace of the Loyalist cause and its most ruthless exponents in Spain; his dalliances with both American and Soviet intelligence; his sometimes comic misadventures attempting to run a quasi-independent anti-Nazi operation of his own in the early years of World War II? Ernest, with his international celebrity, his years living as a minor potentate, first in the quirkily independent “Conch Republic” of Key West and then as the leader of a ragtag entourage of hero worshippers in Cuba, had come to see himself as a political power unto himself, an existential actor who set his own political boundaries and agendas outside conventional ideological definitions. In this, he was part of a cultural tradition that was still very familiar in the 1930s and 1940s.
Many of the most celebrated writers of the literary period that nurtured Hemingway, such as Victor Hugo, Tolstoy, and Gabriele D’Annunzio, had operated in similar ways. Ernest’s close attention to Italian politics during and after World War I would indicate he was aware of D’Annunzio’s renunciation of the Paris Peace Conference and his filibustering expedition to seize the Adriatic island of Fiume; D’Annunzio was a befuddled idealist, at times a quasi-Fascist, who made his own rules, and that was increasingly how Hemingway saw himself—minus the Fascism. These writers could participate in politics when they were inclined to do so, but also, when it suited them, hold themselves aloof. Hemingway, having settled in Cuba while remaining a U.S. citizen, in fact would become enraged when asked, over the years, how he could live there without speaking out against the oppressive Batista regime. He could also protest his own naïveté when he felt it would keep him out of trouble, once writing to a Soviet poet, for instance, “Excuse me if I talk politics. I know that I am always supposed to be a fool when I do.”
During the Spanish Civil War, Ernest was able to find political clarity at two different junctures—first, when he defended the Soviets to Dos Passos; anyone who could beat the Fascists had his support, and the Soviets ran a tight operation that had the best chance of doing so. The second time was when he created the character of Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls, who supported the struggle of the band of guerrillas he found in the mountains, primarily because he liked, trusted, and admired them. Ernest had taken an ideological stand each time, and he felt that he had fought the good fight and had written a successful book, which is what a writer was expected to do for the cause. But the Spanish Civil War was the last time such clarity was attainable for him. Perhaps he disappointed the Soviets as Argo, and the Americans as a spymaster and U-boat hunter, in part because he no longer felt such clarity, and in part because global politics increasingly had no place for his kind of renegade activism.