The hell-raising writer and war correspondent was recruited by Moscow on “ideological grounds” in 1940, according to a new book by a former intelligence agent.
He was given the codename Argo and his “dalliance” with spying and political intrigue fuelled the paranoia which drove him to suicide 20 years later, says writer Nicholas Reynolds.
In his book Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy the US author claims Hemingway was “turned” by Joseph Golos, an operative with the KGB’s forerunner the NKVD.
It came at the time his most famous novel, For Whom The Bell Tolls, was published. The book is set in the 1930s Spanish Civil War against a background of the rise of fascism and communism.
Reynolds, himself an ex-agent with America’s CIA, claims: “The records of Hemingway’s relationship with the NKVD showed that a Soviet operative had recruited him on ‘ideological grounds’.
“A lifelong Hemingway fan, I felt like I had taken an elbow deep in the gut when I read that he had signed on with the NKVD.
“I concluded his dalliance with the NKVD and the political attitudes that explain it made an important difference in his life, one that has been overlooked.”
Hemingway had reported on the war in Spain, where he met leading figures such as Gustav Regler, a communist-supporting German.
He covered much of the fighting with fellow US writer Martha Gellhorn, who became the third of his four wives.
During the Second World War he reported on Normandy, the liberation of Paris and the Battle of the Bulge. But FBI chief J Edgar Hoover suspected him of communist sympathies, kept a file on him and assigned an agent to follow him when he settled in Cuba.
In the 1950s the hunting and fishing devotee’s life unravelled as he drank and grew more confused and anxious.
He shot himself with a favourite gun in 1961. Reynolds says: “He did not understand politics and intrigue as well as he thought he did and in the end, tragically, he began to understand his limits.”
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