retire. so they would just learn as they went. >> our lcv cities tour continues the weekend of march 3 1st and april 1st from little rock, arkansas on season 2 and 3. before he won a pulitzer prize for his writing, world war 1 veteran and author ernest hemingway served as a spy for the united states during the second world war. coming up next, military and intelligence historian nicholas reynolds speaks at the international spy museum about the larger than previously acknowledged impact of hemingway's espionage during the war and his connection to the soviet union. this is about an hour and 20 minutes. >> well, good morning, and welcome back on what appears to be a lovely day.

getting warmer. i think it's been a great series, frankly. i have enjoyed every one of them. [ applause ] >> thank you. okay. and you're a great crowd, by the way. you're here, you're on time. we don't always have that. so this morning will be the last of our series out of courtesy to our speaker if you'd be kind enough to turn off your pdas and cell phones, that would be a help. it can interfere with the amplification. by the way, one of the things that did come up today, there were several inquiries at the back about our other programs and what we have at the museum, you can certainly put your yourself on our e-mail list, get our e-mail blast, we put out a communique every three months on all the programs that are coming and that would include things like the smithsonian series, and that's a good way to get early notification of what's upcoming and what you might want to attend.

so we have this morning a subject, another celebrity spy, and celebrity spies are always very controversial because the way we've used the term here in the museum, as you know from the galleries, is either people who were worked in intelligence and later became celebrities like julia child or somebody who was, in fact, a celebrity and used that to conduct espionage like the ballplayer mo burr. hemingway is a different kettle of fish, i think, if i can say that. and i must say at this point i don't have a good handle on hemingway's intelligence activities, and i think our speaker does. and i think he has a surprising insight into hemingway's -- some of his earlier activities, and i will leave it to nick to bring that to your attention. nick, by the way, is presently our speaker, nick reynolds, dr.

nick reynolds, is an intelligence on military historian with a ph.d. from oxfo oxford. he is presently, by the way, the historian for the museum at the cia, at the central intelligence agency, works specifically on the history of oss, which they had done an exhibit on and he is still function there is. he's taught at the naval war college. he's been in charge of history for the marine corps and has several books to his credit. one on marine operations in the second gulf war and also he had done -- he has done a book on german resistance to hitler in world war two which is an interesting spectrum of interest, nick. so we're delighted to have you here. we're very interested to hear about mr. hemingway, so please help we welcome nick reynolds. [ applause ] >> well, thank you, peter, and

thank you all for coming out to hear my story. what i'm going to talk about, as peter told you, is the hemingway family and intelligence in world war ii. my thesis is that the hemingway family was involved in intelligence to a greater extent than has previously been acknowledged. this was something that they liked to do, and they in this case is ernest himself, his brother lester, and his son, john or bumby, 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 also going it tell you there were some surprising players whose role on the stage is not previously been acknowledged. so i say it's a dramatic story, but there are not dramatic results.

all right. by way of background, i think a lot of you probably already know this, but i'd like to cover it very quickly. and that's the oss, america's wartime intelligence agency. it 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 the republican lawyers in new york. he had a pretty big tent and welcomed a lot of people into that tent from various persuasions. he started off with people like himself, a lot of rich and prominent people, but then he brought in the best and the brightest. he brought in academics. he brought in adventurers. he brought in artists. so it was quite a crowd at the end of the day, and it used to

be joked that oss could also -- the official name was -- the special services -- office of strategic services is also known as oh so social or oh so socialist. ernest, by the way, as you will come to see, could have squeaked in under oh so social or oh so socialist. so the first character, when i was researching this subject for the cia museum, i looked at the -- i looked for special stories, interesting stories of people associated with oss, and i came across the fact that hemingway's son, jack, was a member of oss. so he's a fully paid up 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, some of you will know if you're a hemingway aficionado, he's in a moveable feast. he's mr. bumby. he's hemingway's first born and that's what you see here. you see him in paris with hemingway in 1925. grows up in france, learns french pretty well. learns his way around the french countryside. by the time of world war ii, he's taller than his dad. here you see him with ernest and h his half brothers and he's draft age. he's in and out of college at the beginning of the war and eventually joins the army. no special treatment. he becomes an mp officer. it's probably not something that he would have picked, and he certainly would not have picked the mp battalion in which he

wound up which was a battalion of black mps. i don't think he was particularly racist, but this was not a coveted assignment. anyway, he made the best of this. he went off to north africa with this group. it was mostly rear echelon work, so you're enforcing regulations, handing out speeding tickets, arresting people selling black market goods, that sort of thing, and bumby gets kind of antsy doing this kind of work. he figures there's has to be more to war than enforcing these kinds of regulations. so he gets invited to a party, a highly social event, in north africa at the home of a brit named duff cooper and there he meets randolph churchill. that's winston's son. he is a handful. he was a handful for winston, fought dramatically with him on a lot of occasions, and has successfully worked his way into british special ops. he wasn't invited. he didn't get a set of orders. he just kind of showed up and

said, i'm winston church hill, i want to be part of this. goes off on a long range desert group and then he drops into occupied yugoslavia to work with tito and the partisans. bumby hears this story and thinks this is sure an 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 usual looking to join the intelligence organization, nobody is going to help you. so he's pretty much on his own. there's no signs, no table of organization. and one day in algeria he goes to a camp, he makes his rounds looking to enforce various regulations, and this camp is kind of nondescript but it is a fabulous mess hall. the food is just head and shoulders above any other u.s. army food, and he says what's going on here? why is the food so good. and they said this unit has a french chef. they do not have u.s. army

chefs. bumby says how do i join? he doesn't ask who are you? he says how do i join? they say do you speak french and know your way around? he says yes. they say you're in. it turns out he has joined the oss. 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. you can either go on the next mission, which is a really exciting mission. it was going to drop into the south of france. there's only one problem, we don't have time to train you to send you to jump school to be a parachutist before you go. do you mind going on the first jump of your life into combat? and the other choice is, well, you can wait, take the training, and something will show up later on. he says, no, no, i'll go now.

so he hops into -- he gets on this mission and he has one condition, a very hemingway kind of condition. he won't go without his fly rod, reel, and tackle box. so there he is loaded up to -- loaded up for the war and he's got his fly rod in one hand, there's a british dispatch officer who doesn't want to let him on the airplane with a fly rod, and bumby says, no this is communications equipment, an oss aten na disguised as a fly rod. the brit says very good, off you go. he goes out the bottom of a b-17 opinion they cut a hole in the floor. he drops through, fly rod in one hand, himself in the other. first jump of his life into combat. he lowers -- he's got the fly rod on a string so he lowers it to the ground so 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 -- it's a quintessential oss mission. it's to spy on the germans, to figure out what german units, what german fortifications are in the area, what strength and so forth. and it's also to work with the french underground to get them reading on the same sheet of music as the allied forces, not doing things that the allies -- that the uniformed allies are uncomfortable with. so bumby does a pretty good job at this. he fits in well and makes a contribution. he does take time off every so often to go fly fishing, another very hemingway touch, and on one occasion he's 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 only insignia on it is an american flag on one shoulder.

lucky for him the germans walking by see the other shoulder, they say something in german, probably not really complimentary, laugh, and walk on. bumby's luck does run out in the fall of 1944. he's in a fire fight. he's severely wounded and he's captured. the germans treat him pretty well. they do realize he's a hemingway. in fact, he runs into the boyfriend of his former nanny from the period when he was growing up in europe, and he spends the war -- the rest of the war in a p.o.w. camp liberated in 1945, and then goes back to the states, gets evaluated. oss was very good about evaluating people, at least at the headquarters level. it was a little more sophisticated. so he gets interviewed by an officer who's making decisions

about onward assignments. bumby says i want to go to asia. the war is still going on there. let me have a crack at the jap piece. the oss says we'll get you ready for that. the evaluation officer writes that john hemingway has been through a lot. he's acquitted himself well. he's quite mature for our age. he has good social skills, so he's under 25. you know, he's not that old. he's a good operations officer, and then they add, not very reflective. so this was -- if you think about the elements of this evaluation, it's really kind of -- by hemingway's family values, it's really a pretty good evaluation. ernest himself might have been happy to have it. some of you will remember ernest was wounded in world war i and he was very reflective about it. it bothered him enormously for years. anyway, ernest was very proud of what bumby had done and bragged

enormously about his service in oss. now, to flesh out bumby's record i went to one of my favorite places which is the national archives when i was a graduate student i used to go down here but you you have to go out to college park and there all of 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 just go in and see virtually all the files? anyway, so i'm looking actually for bumby and ernest, but i stumble across lester, and that's ernest's brother. he's about 16 years younger than ernest. he's closer in age to bumby and he's a chip off the old block, so he's a survivalist.

he lives in the woods by himself. he's a hunter a fisherman, he's a boat builder above all. he loves boating. he builds a sailboat and sails the caribbean in this boat with one other guy, a really kind of homemade outward bound trip. and then around 1939 britain is in the war but the u.s. is not yet in the war, and he's down in the hemingway family -- ernest is living in key west with his second wife. there will be a quiz after this on ernest's wives and which one affected u.s. intelligence the most. anyway, so he's living with his second wife pauline in key west. he is a lover of sloppyhe ets a

kinson. jenginson is a fellow writer and fellow boatman. he's looking for someone 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 sloop called "the blue stream," and here we see ernest on "the blue stream." ernest is in the middle. lester is on the right. that's martha gelhorn, to be wife number three. not yet wife number three, to be wife number three with them on the boat. so they go off. the boat is outfitted. here is 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 blowup here you see that ernest and martha most probably also have adult beverages while they're outfitting this boat. so they cruise around the

caribbean. they are looking for places where nazi submarines might refuel and might have come up -- might have enlisted the inhabitants of the area to run these places and stockpile oil, supplies, whatnot. they think they've found a lot, and they write various reports. one of the reports goes to the office of naval intelligence. another one gets disseminated in a highly secret publication known as reader's digest. so "at the end of the day here you have lester thinking that he's had -- 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. he talks about his adventure in the caribbean.

he says, you know, i'm your guy. i can do this stuff. oss kind of likes him. and they evaluate him more or less independently of his brother and say let's just look at lester on the merits. 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 exam, psychological exam, and so forth. and at the end they're ready to make lester a job offer, and then 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 that 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 says, you know, what you did in the caribbean was good, but

it wasn't that good. your navigation skills were good but you didn't engage the enemy. but you didn't engage the enemy. besides -- and at one point, he also says, it was 98% imagination and kid stuff, what you and tony did. on, by the way, office of naval intelligence, agrees, and there's a scathing letter saying from oni saying we know mr. hemingway, and we are not impressed by his skills. so poor lester is left in washington he's about 25 so only one wife and two kids. and he stays here in washington at least until 1944 working at the fcc. so now we're actually going to get to ernest's story and this

is the story that pretty much takes all the air out of the room. i think the story -- i think bumby's story and lester's stories are great stories and both had a lot of adventure in the 1940s more than many of us will ever experience in a lifetime. but ernest is going to go one better. nobody is going to beat ernest. he's have the most excellent adventure and this is one that to a surprising extent is focused on intelligence operations in one way or another. and this is even though ernest doesn't take his own advice. he's married and has two wives and two kids -- three if you count bumby -- two small kids to worry about. and it's also interesting to note for the hemingway buffs that for about a six-year period, he puts his writing

career on hold, so he's off doing these intel tasks and following the war. rather than sticking to his writing. so when we encounter ernest in the war, he is living in cuba. he kind of goes to a different place every time he switches wives, so pauline is in key west, gorgeous house and then he moves to the -- he takes up with martha and they move to cuba and martha pretty much arranges for him to buy and live in this gorgeous place called finkavia ten or 12 miles outside havana. here's a shot of martha. martha is said to have been a stunningly attractive woman.

i don't think the pictures capture that. i think it was her presence that made people say that. ernest liked her a lot. their relationship goes back to the civil war. what do they do 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 at the finka with one of his books. another hemingway pastime is drinking and here's the -- poor shot of la floridida. the fourth wife at the end next to the bartender. that's mary welch. when you're sober enough you go fishing and ernest is always looking to catch the biggest fish and literally and figuratively make the biggest splash. fishing occurs on this gorgeous

boat called the pilar. the pilar was built in brooklyn, new york, in the 19 30s ernest at this point is already quite well off from his writings and so he has a boat built for himself. and here she is. she's quite something. ernest fancies himself the master mariner, here he is at the wheel. the gentleman on the right was the inspiration for the old man and the sea. ernest loves to go fishing with guns, not just rocks and there's all kind of firearms on the pilar. here he is pretty much in the mid to late 30s and i think that's a top submachine gun many but i can't tell because he's aiming it straight at me.

so he has a remarkable circle of friends. he has bar men and prostitutes. sailors, hunters, writers, artists. jai alai players, liked jai alai players, bull fighters, athletes of various other sorts and then some government officials and senior diplomats. they're actually kind of in -- they're in kind of a contingency category in ernest's life. it's 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 civil, but walk away. he will make exceptions when they prove themself to them. and this happens at the american

embassy in havana in 1942. the ambassador there is a gentleman named sproil braden. yale grad. what 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 he weighs 260 pounds yet he's said to have been very nimble on his feet and a great tango dancer. he's got a young man working for him named robert joyce, another yale graduate, another kind of unconventional guy for the foreign icgetting the mission d doesn't worry that much 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 or 11:00 in the morning and start writing what he learned the night before and before braden comes, he's very unpopular with the ambassador because the ambassador kind of makes desk checks, the previous ambassador made desk checks around 8:30, 9:00 in the morning and that was tough for joyce because he had been thrown out of his previous post for much the same kind of behavior. anyway, 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 sort of its own kind of intelligence operations, and joyce was going to run some of them for him and ernest was going to be his principal agent as we will see. there are two other kinds of people running intelligence operations at the embassy.

the military attaches and then there's the fbi, which at this stage is mostly interested in te ont becomes the american intelligence service for the western 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 would just group the targets together, so a lot of shipping is being sunk and it's being sunk on thete to a certain extent in the caribbean. and if you see -- so havana is

on one of thesene to -- havana, havana is way far down. havana is there on the left-hand side of the -- above the picture. this is a 1942 german map and the title i've chosen for it is actually printed on the map which is not for public consumption and this shows airlines, telephone lines and whatnot in the area. so that the germans might do something -- this is the closest place they can get to the united states where they might have representation. so the idea that ernest and the ambassador and joyce comes up with is to set up kin