private counterintelligence service. let's go see if we can find out -- suss out who the germans are in town and, you know, are there people with same pro nazi things which could be. i mean, you know, people could have come from the spanish -- from spain which is now run by franco and made their way out to havana and the idea was that ernest, since he knows all these people around town, he's going to use them as his subagents and siphon all this useful information and get it to embassy. he is given an expense account of 500 bucks a month. doesn't sound like much now. but in those days that wasn't bad for a total amateur intel officer. the embassy calls it the crime section. that's its cover name. ernest soon renames it the crook

factory and if you go looking for it in the history books you generally find it as the crook factory. this is kind of -- crook factory is not a really well functioning intelligence organization. as you could imagine, the problem is real, the idea is not terrible, but to use amateurs in this way, you really are opening yourself up for a lot of unusual challenges, and what happens is his sources gather their information, they come out to the finca and they have staff meetings. now since they're not your average government employee, they don't sit quietly around a conference table and wait to be called on. there's drinking, carrying on, and whatnot into the early hours of the morning. ernest pulls himself together, generally types something up, takes it into the embassy, a lot of times himself.

but the quality of this stuff is all over the map. some of it is just laughable. you know, there are a thousand german submarines coming this way. germans didn't have a thousand submarines in 1942. and so it's either laughable or it's just not that important. you know, who had dinner with whom last night and what they said. in the end the crook factory tapers off and is dissolved for a couple of reason, one is that ernest's heart really isn't in it. he liked it at first but once they got into it he wondered if there is something else he could do for the war effort. the other is the embassy got disenchanted with supporting it and thought there was something different. in the long run there was the

fbi. the irony is is that there was one german spy in havana names heintz luning. he was something like a draft dodger. didn't want to get sent to the eastern front in uniform so he thought, well, i'm going to be a spy and join the upfair and they said, well, you speak spanish, you lived in latin america, and we're going to send you to havana and we want you to keep an eye on shipping. he does some of that, but a lot of the time he's drinking and chasing women. so he's just the kind of guy that you would think the crook factory would uncover, but poor luning is not uncovered by them but by alert british sensors in their sensoring mail in bermuda so they've arranged for a lot of the mail crossing the atlantic to funnel through bermuda, they look at it. they see anomalies in luning's letters. he writes cover letters and

there's secret writings in the letters and they go this is crazy. why would they write this? the cover letter doesn't make sense and not much better than how are you, i'm fine and developed secret writing and find lun something a spy and the poor young man is eventually captured and shot. so what is ernest's other idea. he is not through with the war as i said and he's through with the crook factory but wants to continue serving his country and doing something for the war effort. and he goes to the ambassador. kind of a lot of nerve and says, look, i've done all this great stuff for you and set up the crook factory and did all this reporting. now i want you to support me on something else and the ambassador heard him out and said, well, what's that? he said, i want to go looking for german submarines off the

north coast of cuba. have we heard this before? okay? is this part of hemingway family lore? lester, after the war, lester is always the little brother, you know, he's got to keep quiet. but after the war, lester says, you know, ernest got the idea from me. we can't prove that. but there is circumstantial evidence to that effect. so ernest, though, he's going to go one -- he's going to go do his brother one better. he's going to outdo his brother by not only finding the germans, okay, reporting their presence, doing the naval intelligence thing, but he's going to sink submarines, as well, from the pilar and the idea is that the pilar will pretend to fish.

that's going to be its cover. fishing. he had another cover, as well, which was doing oceanographic research for the american museum of natural history in new york. so there were a couple of instances that he was aware of german submarines approaching fishing boats and say, we'll take your catch and your fresh food. so ernest says, i'll wait for them to come alongside and then my jai alai players are going to lob hand grenades down the open hatches and the other members of the crew are going to machine gun the germans on deck. now, say what you want about the office of naval intelligence, but they don't think this is a good idea. they probably put it into the same category, maybe they have a hemingway file, i don't know, here's lester's ideas, we didn't like those. here are ernest's ideas, we don't like them much better. a wonderful guy ernest knows who

is just his kind of man. it's his name is john thomson, a u.s. marine colonel, world war i hero, he's a writer. he's written short stories and cultural memoirs. he is a sketch artist and he's a heavy drinker. and he and ernest have got along very well and they collaborated on an anthology. thomasson says, ernest, this won't work. if you try this, you won't get killed. ernest says, i don't care, i want to do it anyway. he was not a guy you said no to easily and they give in. so the office of naval intelligence, this is all very hush-hush, very secret. ernest loves that, the office of naval intelligence sends him como gear to locate german submarines, they send him some hand grenades to lob down the hatches while the germans, of

course, are just sunning themselves on deck and paying no attention to what's going on around them. they give them weapons and ammunition and one marine nco to make it all work. so office ernest sails into this part -- i won't point again but take my word for it. where those lines converge on the north coast of cuba, that's where -- that's the general operating area for ernest and over much of the second half of 1942 and much of 1943 that is what ernest is doing. they don't see much. they see probably -- they probably sighted one german submarine and it was going the other way and so at the end of the day, this mission is really

empty-handed. after the war, it's kind of interesting, one of the questions i asked myself, did the germans -- what did the germans do around here and how did they refuel their submarines? did they have or think of having secret supply depots that ernest and lester thought they might have and as far as i can tell the answer is no. the concept the germans came up with was having submarines that were outfitted as supply ships, so what they would do with a forward deployed submarine, one that's operating in this area is to arrange a rendezvous with the milk cow as they called it and they would be resupplied with food and ammunition and they would carry on. but maybe it was worth a try in 1942. this wasn't the most ridiculous thing. ernest wasn't the only guy to try this. there's some literature out there about what's called hooligan's navy and that's about private american sailors who

volunteered and the navy accepted them to take their boats and sort of patrol various parts of the east coast looking for germans. so on this one, the score is, yeah, good try, ernest. you know, too bad, too bad it didn't pan out for you. and he probably would have gotten killed if the germans had actually come alongside for water and fish. so ernest does live to fight another day. now we're in late 1943. so the germans have sunk all the american shipping in the -- especially in the first part of 1942 while we're getting on a war footing. we enter the war in december 1941, you know and we're playing catch-up ball in early 1942. but by late 1943, the focus of the war has shifted back across the atlantic. american troops have invaded

north africa. the brits have pushed the germans east from el al la main and they're talking about invading the continent of europe. so martha, martha is the only woman in ernest's life who really was close to a match for him, you know, her writing at both fiction and nonfiction stands on its own two feet and she's about ten years younger than ernest and she's going, ernest, cuba, cuba is yesterday's story. we need today's story. we need to go to europe. we need to position ourselves for the -- for the invasion for what's going to happen out there. ernest resists. he says, you know, i got an important mission in cuba and she goes off for awhile to europe. he stays home, he writes her, he's an amazing letter writer. one of the interesting things about ernest, he writes five, six, seven letters a day and these letters, you know, they

not like tweets, you know, he's writing two, three, seven, eight, nine ten pages to various correspondents so there's a lot of correspondence between martha and ernest between the period and call them each other names like bug and mookie and whatnot. he stays in cuba and writes these sort of teenage romance letters, drinks, she goes off to europe and she's doing a good job as a correspondent and i'm getting ready for the big show and the pressure is building up on her. you know, how am i going to get ernest over here and save my marriage because she's not stupid. she still wants to save her marriage and who does she turn to to save her marriage? she goes to the oss. on her travels in europe, she goes to -- happens to go to barre, italy and encounters the

oss base chief and it's none other than bob joyce. bob joyce thought the state department was too stuffy, too conventional. no room to breathe. i'm getting out of here. i'm going to find something exciting to do during the war. so he leaves the foreign service and joins the oss and they send him to europe. martha says to him, bob, can you help? ernest wants me to come home at one point she says -- "i am prepared to obey the orders of my master and commander." she usually doesn't talk like that. and -- but, you know, it would really be better if we could figure out a way for oss to get him over here. bob jays says, okay, i'll do what i can and he writes an amazing series of messages across the atlantic to oss headquarters saying, hey, goes to donovan's office, i mean it's not -- you know, this cable,

this is personal cable geese to the two assistant directors of the oss. and joyce is saying, let's get -- let's get ernest in the war -- if you get in touch with him, you arrange a meeting face to face with him. you'll see all the things question bring to the table for oss. he's got foreign language. he's got area knowledge. he knows about special operations after all he wrote "for whom the bell tolls." basically a special operator. and he's run this intelligence service for us in cuba. he can do great things for oss. he senses sought push-back before it occurs and basically adds verbiage to the effect of so what if he's been married three times. so what if he's not dever enshall to people in high place, so what if he was active on the

loyalist, the communist supported side in the spanish civil war. it doesn't work. oss gives -- they listen long enough often are and think about it and circulate the paper and see if they have someone willing to take ernest on. it's too prominent a figure. too much of an individualist. we we can't have him here. they look at special intelligence which is the espionage side of the house running agents. they look at morale operations which is black propaganda. they look at -- nobody thinks they want this 45-year-old out on a battlefield doing tactical intelligence and send a cable back to joyce saying, thanks for the idea but this is a nonstarter. we're not going to sign ernest up for the oss.

probably a good call. ernest had mixed feelings about the oss. he loved some of the guys. he loved joyce. he loved what bumby did in the oss but he was really critical of anybody even in the oss which is kind of the haven of free thinkers in the american war effort, even in the oss there's still a lot of conventional bureaucracy and government behavior and this just drives ernest crazy and he writes a letter after the war, he says, yeah, there were some great people in oss, but there was also a lot of chicken dot, dot, dot in oss. so ernest does not have an official relationship with oss at this point but he does go to europe. martha finally -- her argument carries the day. off they go to -- they both go off to europe. martha's been a correspondent for "collier's."

ernest arranges for himself to be the correspondent for "colliers" which means a significant demotion for martha. and ernest gets a seat on a plane crossing the atlantic and gets in touch with martha and says, you know, i asked them but they won't take women. i'm sorry. you can't come on the plane. i'll fly over and meet you there. i've arranged passage for you. the passage that martha got was on an ammunition ship crossing the atlantic. anyway, they both make it to london by may 1944. d-day, remember, is coming up in june 1944. there ernest hangs out with a lot of journalists, soldiers, writers, socialites, meets pamela churchill who is -- who's randolph's wife and who eventually runs off with officer rill harriman and becomes the

american ambassador in paris at the end of her life so he meets -- in this kind of -- he meets david k.e. bruce, head of oss for europe. bruce is kind of an interesting guy. virginia aristocrat. married the second or third richest woman in the united states. he is the son of an ambassador. and he's, you know, general bon vivant loves the finer things in life and one of the things he really comes to love is ernest. they run into each other in london and after they ran into each other, talk about fan mail, bruce goes back and writes in his diary, that he had just met hemingway and remembers him as, quote, patriarchal with his gray beard, imposing if i teak, much like god as painted by

michelangelo." so talk about fan mail. anyway here's ernest as he's getting ready to go to europe. grown the beard, by the way because of irritation from the son during the war patrols on pilar. so ernest eventually shaves his beard and goes to europe. he is there as a war correspondent. he's driving around the battlefield looking for excitement. there's -- his -- ernest gets a jeep from the army and he gets a private. and that's the -- that sort of task force hemingway and he's going around looking for good stories. the big story in august of 1944 will be the liberation of paris. everybody can feel it building. nobody knows exactly how it's going to unfold or where the stepping off point is going to be for paris.

ernest is -- he's doing a pretty good job as sort of a journalist tactical recon guy figuring this stuff out and he sort of geuesss it's going to be over here shot around bouilet, west of paris, that's the region he targets as he's driving around. here he is reading the map with the private, private red pelke lucky to survive the war because ernest got him into a lot of tight corners. ernest while driving with red bumps into a group of french resistors who he later describes as, you know, naked to the waist armed with -- summer in france, not totally unreasonable armed with all kinds of unconventional weapons of various sorts but really enthusiastic. they happen to be communists and

as many of you may know the french resistance kind of two major flavors sort of the ga gaulleist right and the other flavor. they kind of elect him unofficial leader. they have a leader of their own but they say that, you know, whatever ernest does, that's going to be okay with us. and so now task force hemingway is red pelke, ernest and these 12 guys from the french resistance. ernest more officially, unofficially take your pick, he comes up with u.s. uniforms, weapons and ammunition for these guys. and then he -- while he's doing this, while he's doing these ear's he runs into david k.e. bruce and bruce is kind of doing the same thing, getting ready for paris and ernest says, hey, david, i've got it all figured out.

it's going to happen at this place called rambouillet 23 miles west, looks at the map. everybody has to come through here. why don't we go there? and bruce says, oh, okay. you know, so at this point ernest is kind of leading american intelligence operations in for a day or two in that theater. and so here they are in rambouillet, that's bruce on the left. that's the french resistance guy in the middle and there's ernest on the right. ernest, by the way is kind of overweight at this point. he's six feet. he's 220 or so during the war. kind of a little extra to love for a bit. when bruce gets to rambouillet, he gets there independently. ernest has set him upself in a hotel. pretty good kitchen and a good cellar. has to have a good wine cellar

and finds ernest's bedroom. this is how he describes it. ernest's bedroom was the nerve center of these operations. boys and girls reporting from as far away as versailles. he gave intelligence to refugees from paris and deserters from the german army. army gear littered the floor. revolvers were heaped carelessly on the bed. the bathtub was filled with hand grenades and basin with brandy bottles while under the bed was a cache of u.s. army whiskey. i've never seen it but i'll bet it did exist, v whiskey, maybe. bob kappa, the famous photographer encountered the same scene and wrote in his autobiography, 15 enthusiastic men from the french resistance were taking after the large

charismatic american would spoke hair language copying his sailor bear walk and spitting short sentences. he was always famous for them from the corner of their mouths in different languages. so this is kind of the -- this is the manning table here. and this group establishes an intelligence ops center in rambouillet and the three in the picture, they run tactical intelligence ops for four or five days before paris is liberated. what do they do? ernest goes on a few recon, where are the germans? it's kind of recon by fire but recon by german fire. ernest goes until the germans shoot at him then pulls his head down and says, they must be over there. slightly for sophisticated ops are conventional patrolling, capturing and interrogating

german prisoner, capture more german prisoners than they can handle and don't have people to guard them so ernest says, well, just have them take off their pants. they won't run away and put them to work in the kitchen. if you went down to the kitchen there's a bunch of german prisoners who don't have anything on below the waist and ernest has them peeling potatoes. [ laughter ] so they use local knowledge and people who live in the area that the troops are going to pass through on the way to paris and get information about the germans and passability of roads and this sort of thing. it's good intel and bruce makes sure it works its way up the chain, gets to the operators who are going to need it. it's not spectacular. it's not war winning intel. it's good solid tactical intelligence. so, you know, ernest gets at least a "b," "b" plus for this. then the push to paris happens.

rambouillet fills up with everybody, french armor division, charles de gaulle, a large group of famous and not so famous journalists who ernest pushes around. he kind of appoints himself head pressman there and actually slaps some of them around when they complain about how -- why does he get the good rooms and the best food and wine and he kind of pushes them around and gives them -- one is andy rooney, by the way. [ laughter ] >> bunch of senior intelligence officers show up and then it's off to paris. ernest is in the van with bruce of this french armored division. of course, they've got to stop for a couple of firefights. ernest never drove through a firetight they didn't like. then get into paris and it's pandemonium. ernest's wish has sort of come true.

this picture doesn't capture the cha chaos. bruce a diary captures a little. as they're driving through paris bruce later said it was impossible to refuse the gifts thrust upon us. in the course of the afternoon we had beer, cider, white and red bordeaux, white and red burgundy, champagne from whiskey cognac, armangay, each calvedos. i hope they were still mission capable after doing all this. after the next day bruce and hemingway liberate the hotel. they go into the bar and by this time the entourage is quite large. and bruce orders 50 martinis which gets served up to everything in his group and bruce writes in his diary, he says, you know, they weren't really very good. talk about that kind of, you

know, the virginia aristocrat, only the best for him. but he's fair and he says, you know, we stayed for dinner, and dinner was really, really good. there were about 12 people who strayed f stayed for dinner including ernest, somebody wrote on the menu, we think we took paris and then the 12 people at the table sign up. so this is pretty much the end of the story of ernest and american intelligence in world war ii. he spends the rest of the war, he spends a lot of time in the ritz. he goes over to the hotel skreeb nearby and this is a fanciful portrayal. that's ernest sitting at the table in the foreground. the guy with the patch is william l. shy rer and than net

pl flanner who wrote for paris for "the new yorker." besides from being in paris he dis get out to the front and spends -- he exposes himself to a considerable amount of danger as a war correspondent as the american troops are going towards and entering germany. around this time, bumby, you may remember, his luck ran out in the fall of 1944. he was captured. he talks with oss about a possible mission to liberate bumby, wiser heads prevail. it's not attempted. it probably would have been disastrous. after the battle of the bulge, ernest goes home and resumes his life now without martha. in cuba and here he is arriving home on a pan am airplane. so that's not the end of the