#194 Ernest Hemingway (Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy)

**David Senra** (0:00)
I want to tell you about a one-time only limited event that I don't think you're going to want to miss. I am doing a live show with Patrick O'Shaughnessy from the Invest Like the Best podcast in New York City on October 19th. Patrick has interviewed over 300 of the world's best investors and founders for his podcast. I've read over 300 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs for my podcast. We'll be talking about what we learned from seven years of podcasting, sharing our favorite ideas and stories and doing a live Q&A. There will also be special event-only swag. If you live in New York City, I think it's a no-brainer, but if not, I think it's a great excuse to fly in. I've already heard from a bunch of people that bought tickets, they're flying in from other cities. Some people are flying in from other countries. That's setting the bar really high, so I will have at least four shots of espresso or four energy drinks before or during the show so we can make it a night that you'll never forget. If you're interested in attending this unique live event, I will leave a link down below. I highly recommend you get your tickets today and I hope I get to see you in New York on October 19th. In 2010, I was a historian for the best museum you've never seen, the CIA Museum.
We were preparing to install a new exhibit on the Office of Strategic Services, OSS, America's first central intelligence agency. I was tasked with finding out everything I could about this experimental organization, which included researching the company roster.
Hastily pulled together to fight the Axis, OSS was an odd creature. At once a collection of men and women from the upper crust of society on America's East Coast and a magnet for astonishingly talented and creative people from all walks of life. From Wall Street lawyers to Hollywood filmmakers, even the future chef Julia Child. In OSS, they could almost literally design their own adventures. My head swimming in research, I made an offhand connection one day that would lead to uncharted waters. I remember reading in the past that Ernest Hemingway and Colonel David Bruce of the OSS had liberated the Bar of the Ritz in Paris from the Germans in August 1944 Now I wondered if there was more to the story. Hemingway would not have been out of place in the OSS. He loved secrets and the edge they gave him. He craved action, but was not cut out for conventional soldiering. He moved easily between social and economic classes and across borders.
I thought to myself that he had a lot in common with many of the other men in the spy business whom I had met or read about. So had he been an OSS spy of some sort? What was the full story about Hemingway and intelligence in World War II?
The writer had tried his hand at various forms of spying and fighting on two continents.
The waystations were varied, often exotic. The battlefields of Spain, the back streets of Havana, a junk on the North River in China. He seemed to gravitate to men and women who operated on their own in the shadows. And then I learned something that surprised me. He had signed on with another intelligence service, one that did not fit the conventional narrative of his life. That service turned out to be the Soviet NKVD, the predecessor of the KGB.
A lifelong Hemingway admirer, I felt I had taken an elbow deep in the gut. How could this be? The characters he created embodied so many American values we still cherish. Truth, bravery, independence, grace under pressure, standing up for the underdog. His voice was uniquely American and revolutionary. He had changed the course of American literature in the 1920s.
Why would he sign on and why would he do it secretly? His greatest work after all came from sharing, not hiding his life experiences.
And so I set on a quest day after quiet day in reading rooms all over the country. I paged through his correspondence. He was almost as great a letter writer as a novel writer.
I wanted to uncover the backstory. Research has always been seductive for me. It felt right for one visit to the archives to lead seamlessly to the next. One more obscure book about the Spanish Civil War or World War II or the Cold War was never enough.
And so over the next three years, I filled in the outlines of the new Hemingway portrait from my unusual sources.
Ultimately, I concluded that Hemingway's dalliance with the NKVD and the political attitudes that explain it made an important difference in his life and art.