Hemingway a 'dilettante spy'

John Dugdale reports in The Guardian about "The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (Yale University Press), which reveals the Nobel prize-winning novelist was for a while on the KGB's list of its agents in America." The book, the report says, is based on notes that Vassiliev, a former KGB officer, made when he was given access in the 90s to Stalin-era intelligence archives in Moscow.

The archives, apparently, term Hemmingway as a 'dilettante spy'. According to his KGB file, he was recruited in 1941, given the cover name 'Argo', and "repeatedly expressed his desire and willingness to help us" when he met Soviet agents in Havana and London. However, it also says that he failed to "give us any political information" and was never "verified in practical work", so contacts with Argo ceased by the end of the decade.

There was also a story about another literary figure being involved in international espionage a couple of years ago, the poet WH Auden who repeatedly evaded British intelligence's attempts to find out whether he was involved in the disappearance of the Cambridge spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean in 1951. The suspicion was triggered by reports from a Reuters journalist that Burgess had tried to call his friend Auden the day before he left England.

In Britain MI5's efforts to reconstruct Burgess's social network led to Anthony Blunt, who named the poet Christopher Isherwood and three others.

More dilettante spies?


The Guardian