Cast of Characters

• Raymond O. Barton—U.S. Army general who commanded the 4th Infantry Division and facilitated Hemingway’s work as a war correspondent in France in 1944.
• Fulgencio Batista—right-wing dictator of Cuba overthrown by Fidel Castro on January 1, 1959.
• Elizabeth Bentley—Vassar College graduate who joined the Communist Party in New York in 1935 and then became a Soviet spy. She was also the lover of Jacob Golos, who recruited Hemingway for the NKVD. After Golos died, she turned herself in to the FBI and testified against her former masters.
• Alvah Bessie—American communist who fought for the Republic in Spain and wrote the well-received memoir Men in Battle. He became one of the “Hollywood Ten,” a group of communist writers who went to jail for contempt of Congress in 1947.
• Philip W. Bonsal—U.S. ambassador to Cuba in 1959 and 1960 who befriended Hemingway and tried to find middle ground between Castro’s Cuba and Eisenhower’s America.
• Hayne D. Boyden—U.S. Marine Corps aviator who served as naval attaché at the American Embassy in Havana and supported Hemingway’s antisubmarine war patrols in 1942 and 1943.
• Spruille Braden—U.S. ambassador to Cuba from 1942 to 1945 who oversaw Hemingway’s work with his subordinates Boyden and Joyce.
• David K. E. Bruce—senior OSS officer who met Hemingway in 1944 in France. Together they played a role in the liberation of Paris. Bruce became a senior U.S. diplomat after the war.
• Fidel Castro—Cuban revolutionary who overthrew Fulgencio Batista in 1959, establishing a left-wing dictatorship.
• Roald Dahl—Royal Air Force officer (and future bestselling author) who befriended Martha Gellhorn and helped get Hemingway to Europe in 1944.
• John Dos Passos—fellow novelist and Hemingway friend until their falling-out in Spain in 1937 over the murder of his friend José Robles by Republican or Soviet security organs.
• Gustavo Durán—multitalented Spanish composer and soldier who rose to command a division in the army of the Spanish Republic; good friend of Hemingway until their falling-out in 1943; accused of being a communist spy by Senator Joseph R. McCarthy in the 1950s.
• Chou En-lai—the charismatic longtime Chinese communist leader who met with Hemingway and Gellhorn in 1941.
• Hanns Eisler—former German communist composer investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947.
• F. Scott Fitzgerald—fellow novelist and close Hemingway friend in the 1920s.
• Francisco Franco—Spanish general and Nationalist leader who led the rebels against the Spanish Republic. When the rebels triumphed, he became the country’s dictator, staying in power until his death in 1975.
• Joseph Freeman—American communist writer, New Masses editor, and Hemingway acquaintance.
• Martha Gellhorn—the writer’s third wife, who accompanied him to Spain and China, lived with him in Cuba, and urged him to cover World War II in Europe.
• Jacob Golos—ardent Bolshevik revolutionary who emigrated to the United States, eventually becoming an NKVD operative in New York; recruited Hemingway for “our work” in late 1940 or early 1941. He died on Thanksgiving Day in 1943.
• Igor Gouzenko—Soviet code clerk who defected in Ottawa in 1945 and took with him a stack of secret documents about Soviet espionage in Canada and the United States.
• Winston Guest—American socialite and sportsman who served under Hemingway in both the Crook Factory and on Pilar’s war cruise.
• Gregory Hemingway—Hemingway’s third, and youngest, son.
• Hadley Richardson Hemingway—the writer’s first wife, mother of John Hemingway.
• John “Bumby” Hemingway—the writer’s eldest son.
• Leicester Hemingway—Ernest’s younger brother, who sailed the Caribbean in 1940 looking for supply depots for German submarines.
• Mary Welsh Hemingway—the writer’s fourth, and last, wife, whom he met in London in 1944 and married in Cuba in 1946.
• Patrick Hemingway—the writer’s second son.
• Pauline Pfeiffer Hemingway—the writer’s second wife, a devout Roman Catholic and the mother of Gregory and Patrick Hemingway.
• Valerie Danby-Smith Hemingway—the writer’s last secretary, who, after his death, became the wife of Hemingway’s third son, Gregory.
• Josephine (Josie) Herbst—left-wing American novelist and Hemingway friend in Paris, Key West, and Spain.
• José Luis Herrera (also known as Herrera Sotolongo)—Cuban communist and Spanish Civil War veteran who was Hemingway’s personal physician and friend.
• John Herrmann—Josie Herbst’s husband, a novelist and undercover communist agent.
• J. Edgar Hoover—longtime director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
• Harry Hopkins—aide to President Franklin Roosevelt, director of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), the New Deal agency that operated from 1933 to 1935.
• A. E. Hotchner—American journalist and writer born in 1920 who went to Havana in 1948 to interview Hemingway, became his close companion, and, after the writer’s suicide, authored five books and many articles about him.
• Joris Ivens—Dutch communist filmmaker and Comintern operative who worked with Hemingway on a film about the Spanish Civil War.
• Sir Anthony Jenkinson—a young British aristocrat who joined forces with Leicester Hemingway to explore the Caribbean early in World War II.
• Robert P. Joyce—American diplomat stationed in Havana who befriended Hemingway and facilitated his intelligence work on land and at sea during 1942 and 1943.
• Chiang Kai-shek—Nationalist leader of China during World War II who fought both the Japanese and the communists. He met with Hemingway and Gellhorn in 1941.
• Ivan Kashkin—Soviet literary figure who played an important role in translating Hemingway’s works into Russian and introducing them to Soviet readers.
• Arthur Koestler—Hungarian-born journalist and writer who collaborated with Willi Münzenberg in Spain, then turned against communism and wrote the anti-Stalinist classic Darkness at Noon.
• Charles T. “Buck” Lanham—U.S. Army officer who forged a bond with Hemingway on the battlefield in 1944 and became one of his closest friends. They corresponded regularly after the war.
• Mary “Pete” Lanham—the wife of Charles T. Lanham.
• John Howard Lawson—Hollywood screenwriter and dogmatic communist who refused to answer questions about party affiliation for the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947.
• R. G. Leddy—FBI special agent stationed at the American Embassy in Havana during World War II.
• Archibald MacLeish—prominent American poet and writer who worked with Hemingway and Ivens on their film about the Spanish Civil War; appointed librarian of Congress by FDR.
• S. L. A. Marshall—American military historian who was with Hemingway during the liberation of Paris in 1944.
• André Marty—French communist who became a senior commissar in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War and achieved notoriety for ordering the arrest and execution of many soldiers suspected of disloyalty.
• Herbert L. Matthews—New York Times journalist who befriended Hemingway in Spain and went on to cover Fidel Castro’s rise to power in Cuba, writing a groundbreaking series of articles about Castro and his movement.
• Joseph R. McCarthy—Republican senator from Wisconsin who conducted witch hunts for communists in Washington in the early 1950s.
• Henry Morgenthau, Jr.—U.S. secretary of the Treasury, in touch with Hemingway around the time of his trip to China in 1941, interested in hearing his views on the situation in Asia.
• Willi Münzenberg—German communist who brilliantly coordinated Comintern propaganda operations in Western Europe during the 1930s.
• Joe North—American communist writer and editor who arranged for Hemingway articles to be published in Marxist journals. He may have introduced Hemingway to the NKVD recruiter Golos.
• Alexander Orlov—NKVD rezident, or spy chief, in Spain from 1936 to 1938 who befriended Hemingway and enabled him to visit a guerrilla training camp before he himself fled to the United States to escape from other Stalinist henchmen.
• Maxwell Perkins—Hemingway’s longtime (and sometimes long-suffering) editor at Scribner’s, Hemingway’s publisher.
• Gustav Regler—German communist who served as a commissar with the International Brigades in Spain, where he and Hemingway became friends. He subsequently turned against communism and Stalin, and went into exile in Mexico.
• Alfred Rice—Hemingway lawyer and de facto literary agent from 1948 on.
• José Robles—a Spanish academic who emigrated to the United States, became a professor at Johns Hopkins University, and then returned to Spain, where he served the Republic during the civil war. He was murdered under suspicious circumstances by Republican or Soviet security organs.
• Andy Rooney—reporter for Stars and Stripes who encountered Hemingway on a battlefield in France in 1944.
• John W. Thomason, Jr.—U.S. Marine Corps officer detailed to the Office of Naval Intelligence in Washington, DC, who supported and enabled Hemingway during his antisubmarine war patrols in Cuban waters in 1942 and 1943 and collaborated with him on an anthology about war.
• Leon Trotsky—Bolshevik commander and Soviet leader who was Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s main rival for power in the 1920s. Forced into exile in Mexico, Trotsky died at the hands of an NKVD assassin there in 1940.
• Alexander Vassiliev—KGB officer turned journalist, researcher, and exile. In the early 1990s he signed a contract with the SVR (the post–Cold War Russian intelligence service) to read NKVD/KGB files and prepare summaries to share with Western historians, a project aimed at raising money for the KGB/SVR pension fund. One of the files that he read was that of Hemingway.
• René Villarreal—Hemingway’s housekeeper in Cuba who was known as the writer’s “Cuban son.”
• Emmett Watson—Seattle-based journalist who interviewed Hemingway in 1960 and discovered the truth about his suicide in 1961.
• Harry Dexter White—senior U.S. Treasury official who tasked Hemingway with collecting information about conditions in China in 1941. After the war, White was exposed as a Soviet spy.
• Edmund Wilson—left-leaning American literary critic and writer.
• Milton Wolff—American leftist who fought in the Spanish Civil War and continued to campaign for progressive causes throughout the 1940s and 1950s.