Ernest Hemingway: Spy, or Spycatcher?

Was Ernest Hemingway a spy for Russia? That’s the incredible claim of the new book Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America, by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr and Alexander Vassiliev.

As a Guardian report by John Dugdale details, the book says a KGB file backs up the claim that Hemingway “was recruited in 1941 before making a trip to China, given the cover name ‘Argo‘, and ‘repeatedly expressed his desire and willingness to help us’ when he met Soviet agents in Havana and London in the 40s.”

If true, it seems he wasn’t very good at it, however: The KGB report supposedly says Hemingway failed to “give us any political information” and was never “verified in practical work”, and the KGB gave up on him eventually.

Dugdale adds that the picture of Hemingway as a “dilettante spy” “would chime with his attempts to assist the US during the second world war in his fishing boat El Pilar, patrolling waters north of Cuba in search of U-Boats, making coded notes but only one sighting.”

It would only be fair, however, to observe that a man in a fishing boat spotting a submarine — even only one submarine — is something more than a dilettante, no?