Codenamed "Argo," Ernest Hemingway is one of the most influential writers in American literature in the 20th century. He was also a spy that worked for both the Soviet & American sides before, during, and after WWII up to and including the Cuban Revolution.
Ernest Hemingway, born 21 July, 1899, was a famed writer and storyteller, and is considered one of the best writers in American history. Born and raised in a Chicago, Illinois suburb, Hemingway attended public schools and began to develop a great love for writing. At the age of 18, with the waning of The Great War and after being rejected for military service due to bum eye, Hemingway volunteered as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross on the frontlines of Austria. There he was injured by a mortar shell, describing later in a letter home:
"Then there was a flash, as when a blast-furnace door is swung open, and a roar that started white and went red.”
Despite his injuries, Hemingway carried a wounded Italian soldier to safety and was injured again by machine-gun fire. For his bravery, he received the Silver Medal of Valor from the Italian government—one of the first Americans so honored.
Commenting on this experience years later in his book, Men at War, Hemingway wrote:
"When you go to war as a boy you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed; not you. . . . Then when you are badly wounded the first time you lose that illusion and you know it can happen to you. After being severely wounded two weeks before my nineteenth birthday I had a bad time until I figured out that nothing could happen to me that had not happened to all men before me. Whatever I had to do men had always done. If they had done it then I could do it too and the best thing was not to worry about it."
Hemingway, it can be seen, is a man who deeply loved his country and wanted the best for it, even when doing so was very divisive. His pull towards leftist causes, however, and his anti-war work led to a recruitment effort from the NKVD . In fact, Hemingway was first approached by the NKVD (the KGB's predecessor) after bringing to light the governments treatment of veterans in an article written in a leftist magazine.
He then served as a war correspondent in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. It was there where he was radicalized and joined the leftist republican guerillas that were facing down the fascist dictator Francisco Franco. Franco, supported by Germany and Italy, was fighting against republican forces supported by the Soviet Union. The United States, at this time practicing a foreign & military policy of ‘nationalist neutrality,’ while also still recovering from the Great Depression, was uninvolved in this conflict.
According to smuggled NKVD files, and written out by Alexander Vassiliev, he was officially recruited in 1940as a Soviet agent, given the code name "ARGO" in New York City. However, it seems, that shortly after his recruitment, Hemingway was deemed unreliable and seemed to provide far too little information to his Soviet handlers. While he still met with them throughout the 1940s, there seems little evidence that anything of substance was reported to the USSR.
After his brief stint with the NKVD, historian Nicholas Reynolds in his book Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy: Ernest Hemingway's Secret Adventures, 1935-1961, stated that Hemingway ,shortly after the devastating Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor, began to work for US Intelligence in what was then it’s less organized form. He first worked with in counterintelligence helping to run the Havana office in Cuba. At some point in the war, the Office of Naval Intelligence also transformed Hemingway’s own cabin cruiser Pilar into sub hunter in the Caribbean, including Anti-Submarine warfare equipment.
Hemingway also worked closely and sometimes directly with the OSS in Europe. He met with famed OSS Colonel, David F.E. Bruce, and directly participated in irregular warfare activities with the French Resistance in order to disrupt the German force & Hitler-installed government of France. As part of this effort, Hemingway led a controversial effort to gather military intelligence in the village of Rambouillet and, with military authorization, took up arms himself with his small band of irregulars. According to World War II historian Paul Fussell:
"Hemingway got into considerable trouble playing infantry captain to a group of Resistance people that he gathered because a correspondent is not supposed to lead troops, even if he does it well."
On an interesting note, Ernest Hemingway had a deeper connection to the OSS also— as his eldest son, Jack, served with OSS Jedburgh’s in Europe. Jack, like his father, lived a fascinating life punctuated by writing, war, & fishing. Jack’s story is an interesting and one to be explored more fully.
Postwar, Hemingway retired back to Cuba, where in 1952, he supported the revolution which he saw as a “historical necessity” but did not fully support Castro’s Soviet-backed Communism. Like the ‘Yankee Comandante,’ William Morgan, Hemingway believed the revolution was for fighting for what he believed were American principles: liberty & justice. Also like Morgan, Hemingway was anti-fascist and fairly unimpressed by Communism, even though Morgan served directly under Castro & along with Che Guevara was one of the only foreign men given the rank of Comandante in the Cuban revolutionary military. However, unlike the Comandante, Hemingway was able to escape the island with his life in the midst of the rise of vapid anti-Americanism by Castro & his embrace of Soviet-style Communism.
In 1958, Hemingway and his wife Mary, setup residence in Ketchum, Idaho after leaving Cuba, as it slipped under the control of the Castro’s. Under the guise of working as usual and seeking medical treatment, but part of his move to such a rural area was, as Reynolds believes, influenced by his paranoia over his time as a Soviet spy with the NKVD. Made worse by his alcoholism, Hemingway’s paranoia & depression increased dramatically during this time, and though he sought treatment, and along with other health problems and alcoholism, led to his suicide in July 1961.
Hemingway’s legacy as a writer can barely be touched as he is considered, along with Mark Twain, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, to be one of America’s greatest writers. His legacy, as an intelligence agent, however, is interesting and a mixed bag of failure and success, and was punctuated with unique adventures abroad. Unlike other experiences he wrote about in his anthology of stories, Hemingway practiced what a I good spy knows on his intelligence work: silence.