>> prize, serving as a spy for the united states during the second world war, coming up next, military and intelligence historian nicholas ren nalds talk about the impact of the espionage and his connection to the soviet union. this is about an hour and 20 minutes. >> well, 2k3w50d morning. i think this has been a great series. and you're a great crowd. you're here and on time.

out of courtesy of our speaker, if you'll be kind to turn off your pdas and cell phones, that will help amplification. by the way, one of the things that did come up today, there were several inquiries about other programs and what we have at the museum. you can certainly put yourself on our e-mail list, get our e-mail blast. we put out a communique on all of the programs coming and that's a good way to get early communication about what you would want to attend. so we have another celebrity spy and celebrity spies are always controversial because the way we've heard the term, here in the museum, is either people who

worked in intelligence and somebody who was a celebrity and used that conduct he is spee john naj henry williams is a different kettle of fish, if i can say that. and i must say and i think our speaker has a surprising insight into some of his earlier activities and i'll leave it to nick to bring that to your attention. dr. nick reynolds is an intelligence on historians and is presently, by the way, the historian for the museum at cia, at the central intelligence agencies, working specifically on oss, which they have done

ampb will will an exhibit on. he's been several books to his credit, a one on marine operations and also he's done a book on resistance in world war ii. it's an interesting spectrum. nick, we're delighted to have you here. we're very interested to have you here. [ applause ] >> thank you, peter. thank you all for coming out to hear my story. what i'm going to talk about, as peter told you, is the hemmingway family and intelligence in world war ii. what my thesis is, involved in

intelligence to a greater extent than has previously been acknowledged. this was something that they like to do and his brother lester and his son john or bombi and they thought they were very good at it. i'm going to tell you that the results are a little bit of a mixed bag and i'm going to tell you there were surprising lay players whose role on the stage has not been previously acknowledged. i would say the dramatic story but not dramatic results. all right. by way of background, that's the oss, american's war time intelligence agency that existed from 1942 to 1945. it was run by a gentleman named

wild bill donovan, a republican, lawyer, and world war i hero from new york. wild bill was not like all of the republican lawyers in new york. he had a pretty big tent and welcomed a lot of people into that tent from various percent situations. he started off with people like himself, a lot of rich and prominent people but then brought in the best and the brightest. he brought in adventurers and artists. so it was quite a crowd at the end of the day and used to be joked that oss could also that the special services office is

known as o so socialists. earnest, by the way, as you'll come to he sue, could have squeaked under oh so socialist. so the first kmark, when i was researching the subject for the museum, i looked at special stories, interesting stories of people associated with oss. hemmingway's son, jack, was a number of oss, a fully paid member of oss. he's not a celebrity spy. not much special treatment. but he put on the uniform and submitted to the discipline jack, as some of you will know, he's in a moveable piece and he is mr. bumby. he is hemmingway's firstborn.

he grows newspaper france and learns french pretty well, learns his way around the french countryside. here you can see him with earnest and his half-brothers and he is draft age. he's in and out of college at the beginning of the war and then eventually joins the army. no special treatment. he becomes an mp officer. he certainly would not have picked the mp ba tal general in which he wound up which was a ba tal general of black mp. he was not particularly racist. this was not a coveted assignment. any way, he made the best of this. he went off to north africa with this group. it was mostly enforcing regulations, handing out speeding particular kits,

arresting people and that sort of thing and bumby gets kind of antsy doing this kind of work. he gets invited to a party, a highly social event in north africa and randolph churchill, winston's son, he was a handful. he fought with him on a lot of occasions and had successfully worked his way into british special opps. he wasn't ordered. he just kind of showed up and said, i'm winston churchill. i want to be part of this. he goes off in a long-range desert group and drops into occupied yug go slauf yeah. so bumby thinks, this is a sure interesting way to spend your time during the war.

i wonder if we have anything like this so if you're an mp second lieutenant and you're looking to join the intelligent situation, nobody is going to help you. one day in algeria, he goes to a camp. he makes his rounds looking to enforce various regulations and at this camp, it's kind of non-descript. the food is head and shoulders above any army food. he said, what's going on here? why is this food so good? they said, they have a french chef. bumby says, how can i join? they said, do you speak french? do you know you're way around the french countryside? he says, yes. they say, okay, you're in. it turns out that he has joined the oss. the -- at this point in the war, so this is the spring, summer of

1944, the oss is dropping people into europe and bumby is given a pretty stark choice. and you can either go on the next mission, which is a really exciting mission, and it was going to drop into the south of france. there's only onew

there's a british dispatch officer who doesn't want to let him on the plane with a fly rod and he says, no, this is communications commitment. and the brit says, very good, off you go. so they cut a hole in the floor and he drops through a fly rod in one hand, himself in another. first jump of his life in combat. he has the fly rod on a string so he lowers to the ground. it won't hit along with him and possibly break. so jumper and fly rod are unscathed and able to continue the mission. the mission is basically the quintessential oss mission. it's to spy on the germans, to figure out what german units and forth if i indications are in the area, what strengths and so

forth. it's also to work with the french underground to get them reading on the same sheet of music as the ally forces, not doing things that the allies, the uniformed allies are uncomfortable with. bumby does a pretty good job at this. he fits in well and does a contribution. he goes fly fishing, another hemmingway touch, and on one occasion he is fly fishing in a stream by himself and a german patrol comes by. he's wearing sort of a nondescript oss field uniform and really the insignia is an american flag on one shoulder. luckily for him the germans see something on the other shoulder and walk on. his luck runs out in the fall of '44. he's in a fire fight.

he's severely wounded and he's captured. the jemgermans treat him pretty well. they realize he's a hemmingway. he runs into the boyfriend of his former nanny from the period that he was growing up in europe and spent the war in a p.o.w. camp, liberated in 1945, and then goes back to the states and gets evaluated. he gets interviewed by an officer who is making decisions about onward assignments and he says, i want to go to asia. the war is still going on there. let me have a crack at the japanese. and oss says, okay, we'll get you ready for that. the evaluation officer writes that john hemmingway has been

through a lot. he has good social skills. he's under 25. he's not that old. he's a good operation's officer and then they added a, not very reflective. so this was -- if you think about the elements of his evaluation, it's really -- to put it by hemmingway, family values. it's a really pretty good evaluation. earnest himself, as some of you might be able to remember, he was wounded in world war i. it bothered him enormously for years. earnest was very proud of what he had done and bragged enormously about his service in oss. now, to flesh out, when i was a graduate student i went down here and now you have to go to college park.

now the oss records are available for a researcher to look at, which is really a remarkable thing, if you stop and think about it. what other intelligence service in a country that hasn't recently been conquered can you go in and see virtually all of the files? any way, so i'm looking actually for bumby and earnest but i stumble across lester and that's earnest's brother. he's about 16 years younger than ernest. he's a chip off the old block. he's a survival vallist. he goes out and lives in the woods himself. he's a hunter, a fisherman, a boat builder, above all. he builds sailboats and then sails the caribbean in this boat with one other guy, a really kind of homemade outward bound

trip. and then around 1939, the britains end the war but the u.s. is not in the war and he's done -- the hemmingway family, ernest is living in key west with his second wife. so he's living with his second wife pauline in the key west. there he meets a british adventurer named anthony jenkinson. he's a fellow writer and boatsman. he's looking for somebody to go with him to find nazis in the caribbean. so they put together -- ernest thinks this is not a bad idea, by the way, and supports it. they get a fluke called the blue

stream and here we see earnest on the blue stream. earnest is in the middle. lester's on the right. that's martha gelhorn to be wife number three with them on the boat. so they go off, the boat is outfitted. here's another shot of the same. actually, when i first looked at this shot it was much smaller and i thought only lester had an adult beverage but in the blow-up here, you see that ernest and martha also have adult beverages while they are fitting this boat. so they cruise around the caribbean. they are looking for places where nazi submarines might refuel and might have enlisted the inhabitants of the area to run these places and stockpile oil, supplies, what not.

they think they found a lot and they write various reports. one of the reports goes to the office of naval intelligence. another one goes, gets disseminated in a highly secret publication known as reader's digest. and so at the end of the day here you've got lester thinking that he's got a lot to offer in the field of intelligence. he goes, unbeknownst to his brother, he shows up here in washington and he tries to join oss. he walks in the front door, talks about his adventure in the caribbean and he says, i'm your guy. i can do this stuff. and they evaluate him more or less independently of his brother and say, you know, let's just look at lester on the

merits and the processing of the application is surprisingly like processing for the u.s. government now and they fill out some of the same forms, same questions, security background, medical exams, psychological exam and so forth. and at the end they are ready to make lester a job offer and this big hand reaches up from cuba and the job offer goes, poof, and as far as i can reconstruct, what happened was, ernest thought this was not a good idea. ernest made some phone calls and then he wrote a couple of letters to lester and he criticized -- he's really pretty harsh on lester. he said, what you did in the caribbean was good but not that good. your navigation skills were good but you didn't engage with the enemy. and at one point he also says, it was 98% imagination and kid stuff what you and tony did.

oni, office of naval intelligence, agree and there's a saying we know mr. hemingway and we are not impressed by his skills. so poor lester is left in washington. ernest wanted him to stay and take care of his wife and kids. he's about 25. so only one wife and two kids. and he stays here in washington. at least until 1944 working at the scc. so now we're actually going to get to ernest's story. this is the story that takes all the air out of the room. i think the stories -- i think lester's story is a great story. and they both had a lot of adventure in the 1940s, more

than any of us will ever experience in a lifetime. but ernest is going to go one better. nobody is going to be ernest. he's going to have the most excellent. and this is one to a surprising extent his focus on intelligence operations in one way or another. and this is even though take hi he's married and has one wife and two kids. two small kids to worry about. and it's also interesting to know for the hemingway buffs that about for a six year period, he puts his writing career on hold. he's doing these intel tasks and following the writing.sohen we encounter erne the war, he is living in cuba.

he kind of goes to a different . poor pa west, gorgeous house. then he takes up with martha and they move to cuba. and martha arranges for him to buy and live in this gorgeous place which is 10 or 15 miles outside way,here's a shot of martha. martha is said to be a stunningly attractive woman. i don't think the pictures capture that. i think it was her people think. ernest liked her a lot. so what are they doing in cuba? ernest even though he didn't do a lot of writing in cuba, he still did a lot of reading.

and you see him here with one of his books. another major hemingway pastime is drinking. here's this is a shot showing them entertaining, visiting big wigs. th way, at the end next to the b bartend y're sober enough, you o fishing. and earnest is always looking to catch the best fish and make the biggest splash. the pilar was built in the 1930s. ernest at this point is quite well off from his writing. he has a boat built for himself.

here she subpoeis. she's quite something. here he is at the wheel. e the inspiration for the old man and the sea. ernest loves fishing with guns, not just rods. and there's all kinds of firearms. this is before the war, alls on. here he is in the mid to late 30s. and i think that's the top of a machine becse he's aiming it straight at me. so ernest had a remarkable circle of friends and acquaintances in havana. has ba sailors, hunters, writers, artists, high life players. he particularly liked high life

various other sorts, and then some government officials and senior diplomats. they're actually kin in a contingency in life. ernest's default setting is not to like government officials of any kind whether they're american government officials or foreign government officials. so when he first meets somebody and they say hi i'm from the american embassy, ernest's attitude is to shake hands and be sifrl but walk away. he will make exceptions when they prove themselves to him. and this happens in 1942. the ambassador there is a guy named braden. yale graduate. he's a boxer. ernest keeps wanting to go boxing with him and the ambassador is smart enough not to agree to go boxing with

ernest. braden is my frame roughly, 5'10" and weighs 260 pounds. yet he's said to be nimble on his feet and a great tango dancer. he's got a male named robert joyce working with him. another unconventional guy for the foreign service. he believes in getting the mission done and doesn't worry about the form of the mission. so he goes around havana. he makes friends, he stays out late nights. he gets the kind of scoop that a good political officer needs to come up with. but he doesn't always show up at work on time. so he might stroll into work at 10:00 in the morning and write what he learned the night before.

that was tough for joyce because he'd been thrown out of his previous post. in 1942, joyce becomes the coordinator of intelligence at the embassy in havana. and this is -- you know, these days most embassies don't have a foreign service officer doing this. the embassy was running its own television operations. joyce was going to run some of them and ernest was going to be his principle agent as we'll see. there are two other kinds running intelligence operations at the embassy. and then there's the fbi which at this stage is mostly interested in counter intelligence and espionage. and later it becomes the intelligence service in the hemisphere. they're all interested in the

same thing. what are the germans up to around here? and that's a pretty good question to ask. at this time the germans are sinking a great deal of american shipping along the east coast. in u-boat history, it was called the happy time. there were virtually no american defenses, admiral king refused to adopt a convoy system. said it would group targets together. a lot of shipping is being sunk on the eastern seaboard and to an extent in the caribbean. havana was on one of these lines here -- havana is way for down. [ laughter ]

havana is on the left-hand side of the picture. this is a 1942 german map. and the title i've chosen for it is printed on the map which is not for public consumption. this shows airlines, telephone lines and whatnot in the area. this is closest to the united states where they might have representation. so to sit up a private counterintelligence service. let's go see if we can find out who the germans are in town. and are there people with the-n? which could be. people could have