the whole time. the reason i said this is the end of ernest's relationship with american intelligence in world war ii. he had a relationship with another intelligence organization starting in 1941 and that was the kgb. according to transcripts of kgb files that have been published by yale university press in 2009, ernest was pitched in early 1941, probably in new york city, probably in january, by a man named jacob golos, and golso wrote back to moscow that he had recruited ernest hemingway as a soviet spy and that ernest had agreed to cooperate for ideological reasons. he added that ernest had accepted contact instructions for the next clandestine

meeting. as far as i can tell from the traffic, these were material contact instructions, probably something like a jell-o box that had been cut in a certain pattern, the person who you were meeting would have the other half and that's how you know you have the right person. how could this be? i'm a lifelong hemingway fan. and i found this out more or less by accident. what i like to do is when i'm doing research i like to kind of troll in the waters next to the ones that i'm fishing and i thought, what the hell, let's see what kgb was up to in the united states around this time so i went and looked at this book and i went, holy molly, ernest hemingway, it says here, ernest hemingway was a russian spy. and, you know, people who like -- a lot of people who like hemingway like him for good

red-blooded american reasons. you like hemingway in part because he's a man would writes about telling the truth, telling it like it really s that's not what spies do. especially spies who work for another country. so and there's also -- another thing that makes it hard to believe that ernest would have accepted this pitch is that even though he had many friends on the left, he always said he admired them as individuals. he did not necessarily admire their beliefs. he himself throughout most of his life claimed to be apolitical. he said, explicitly that he did not like, quote, the ideology poise. he also said explicitly, i could never be a communist. so i go, what's going on here? how do we break this down? how do we understand it? the first thing i did was look

at how the documents got here. it's kind of an interesting story. it goes back to paris troik characters the end of the cold war, the opening in russia. some people in the kgb go, hey, we need to get on this bandwagon. we need to tell our story to and maybe we can make a few bucks at the same time, contribute it to the retirement fund. so they bring in a retired kgb guy. he's working as a journalist and say, okay, we want you to work on american espionage conducted by the kgb in -- during world war ii and during the cold war and then we'll take a look at it. once you get it written we'll take a look at it and let you know, okay, this part, you can publish, that part, we don't want to you publish. he's the guy who stumbles named ha vasilev. he comes across the file summary and it's really -- you can just imagine the junior officer being

told, okay, we want you to read the whole hemingway file and write this file summary so we the seniors don't have to go through it all. that's one of the things he's copied out verbatim which is a summary of what ernest did for or didn't do for the kgb. so i also checked, you know, the -- you know, who's been working on these collections. this is quite a bit afield from what i normally do and, you know, these are really solid guys. a gentleman over at the library of congress, there's another longtime expert, they're named clair and haines. and it's generally accepted that vasiley did a good job of copying what he saw in the files which he eventually brought out west as the wind -- as the winds change, the political climate changed in russia and some hard-liners came back into kgb

and said what are you doing gentlemen said, i'm doing what you contracted me to do to write this history and they said, no u. you're not. if you try and continue with this, we're going to hurt. so he takes -- he's been a kgb guy for a long time. he takes it seriously and moves out to england and eventually arranges for his files to be smuggled out to him. and, you know, now they're over in the library of congress. his -- the handwritten notes we can all go over there and see them. so the next thing i did, so the, you know, the documentation is probably authentic. it's highly unlikely the kgb would have said let's smear ernest hemingway. maybe they might have smeared some guy, a defector but it's hard to believe anybody in the 1990s was saying, hey, we need to go after ernest hemingway and blacken his name. no, i think this was a

by-product of another kind of operation. any of way, so then i looked at golov. s. did he get it right? he would not be the first intelligence officer who had gone to a meeting. spoken in very general terms somebody he met a few times and then went back to the embassy and said, hey, i just recruited jones, he said he will do anything i ask of him. and then they send the cable off to their head quarters. so i wondered was golos this kind of guy who would have exaggerated his accomplishment and the answer i came up with was probably not. golso was an interesting guy. he was an old bolshevik so in the early 1900ess he was an illegal actor for the bolsheviks in the russia. he gets captured by the czar's police and exile him to siberia. he escapes by going east, okay.

this is a pretty tough thing to do. and he eventually winds up up in new york as an american citizen so the russians -- world war i happens. bell they -- bolsheviks take over and including the communist party of the united states and golos is one of the founding members of cp usa and probably a support asset for the kgb who says, do you know, they have stations in new york, washington, and san francisco around this time so '30s a and '40s and ask for referrals. do you know anybody that could help us with this information? do you know anybody who could get us real american passports?

s's actually prettythat gettingn passports then even though he's not a trained intelligence officer. he gets better and better at what he's doing and knows the american target better than almost anybody in the kgb and the kgb has real problems around this time because stalin kinds call -- anybody gets to be too good gets called back to russia and gets shot. golos gets called back at one point but he can't go because he's in trouble with the fbi. they have told him he can't travel. so he cables back to moscow, he says, i'm really sorry i can't come because the fbi, i'll be on their -- i'm already on their black list. i will be on a blacker list if i try to leave the country. he is kind of the senior guy on the american scene for periods of time. and he is enormously productive. he is one of the main guys in

project enormous which is stealing american nuclear secrets. so, you know, if you were an intel officer you could imagine this, is his efficiency report bullet. ran source, stole atomic secrets, changed world history. i mean this is a long ball hitter who doesn't need an ernest hemingway to pad out his resume. so i concluded that it was not likely that golos got it wrong. that, you know, he probably did have the meeting with ernest, we don't have ernest's side. let me be clear about that. only have one source but it's not likely they got it wrong or needed to exaggerate it for any reason. so how can you explain this? so why would ernest say, yes, to the kgb especially in january 1941 when the soviet union doesn't look too good to motion people on the left. that's the period at which hitler and stalin are in bed

together. what the explanation i came up with is is pretty much three words and it's the spanish civil war. in the mid '30s, this was a really passionate cause for many people, something like the vietnam war in this country, you were either for it or against it. there wasn't much in between and ernest went to spain three times as a correspondent and he saw this as one of the defining struggles of his time. it was conservatism religious, fascism on the one hand. it was the forces of democracy freedom, progress on the other hand. the way it develops in the spanish civil war, the fashicis

are being supported by the germans and italians, poring in ammunition, a lot of crucial help that enables them to progress. and nobody at first is really willing to help the republic. the democracies are going, i don't know if we want to get involved in this. britain, france, the united states for various reasons are not comfortable with being heavily involved in spain. there is one country that is. th and that is the soviet union and complicated reason why the visits would want to do this. that's a whole other talk but anywhere, they are there, they send troops -- they send advisers, more than troops. they send munitions. and they send an enormous kgb contingent. they help organize and train the

various brigades and this effort really impresses ernest in spain. he decides and says it a few times. you can also find it in "for whom the bell tolls," the only way we'll win this war is by accepting communist or soviet discipline. he doesn't necessarily say he believes in communism or soviet russia but he believes that the discipline that they imposed in spain was the only chance to win that war. now, ernest is wearing blinders when he's saying this because as time goes on in the spanish civil war, the soviets and the kgb are undermining the republic they're there to help and among other things steal all of its gold. give it to us for safe keeping and take the part we need to pay for the arms that we're sending

you but they take it all and stalin has a party when it gets to -- when it gets to russia on ships going through the mediterranean to odessa. he has a wild party and says, hey, if they think they're ever getting this back, they're wrong. anyway, it's probably still there. so ernest doesn't really focus on any of this stuff. he senses some of it. he thinks it's excesses by individuals but he doesn't see any systemic problems and still believes this soviet or communist discipline. so what do they want from him? why would the kgb come to ernest? what do you get by having ernest as your agent? they looked at him as a journalist and for them journalists were useful for a number of things. they could do press placements so journalists could write an article slanted towards your point of view. they could be principal agents so they could run a bunch of

sunday age-- subagents and get information from lower-level sources funnel through the journalists and turned over to the kgb case officer. they could spot new contacts. they could also do reporting on their own. ernest knew people from president roosevelt down to the barmen and the maids and the prostitutes in havana, so he had a lot of people who would come to his house, have a few drinks and say interesting things. those are the reasons why we can speculate. not entirely clear from the file summary what they wanted from him but before they could get anything from ernest they had to get to the next meeting. remember, he got the material recognition signal. the problem was, he didn't use it. and the case file that we have shows an enormous amount of frustration on the part of the kgb. ernest is not a reliable agent. what do you want from a secret agent? you want him to she up on time

to that meeting and give you the information. well, ernest -- they can't get ernest to meetings. in the course of their relationship, they have looks like fewer than ten meetings. they have it two in 1943 in cuba. they have one in london 1944. good autumn i say because he was a hard guy to hook up with this london. he wasn't there very long. you know, how did they find him and get somebody in to him and sit down and have a meeting? some kgb guy did his homework and really should have gotten a promotion. they have another meeting or two with him in havana in 1945. every time they meet, ernest says, yeah, sure, i'll do what you want and then nothing happens. the file shows no concrete results. ernest doesn't produce for them. why? again, the subject really of a whole other talk, contact is ultimately dropped on both sides.

what do we have at the end of the day. j. edgar hoover was aware of a lot of this. the fbi and hoover as you might have gathered by now were not natural friends. and hoover says, you know, ernest, is just the wrong guy. heard about what was going on in cuba and said i cannot think of anybody who is more ill-suited toward this kind of work than ernest hemingway. you know, then he wrote down a couple of reasons, drinking, judgment, politics and whatnot and by the way the fbi kept an eye on him for his whole life even when he was in mayo clinic just before he died. but anyway, this is one thing that the fbi and the oss could have agreed on because they both looked at hemingway and came to the conclusion that this is somebody who we really shouldn't have as a formal part of our organization.

kgb, one member know in washington and kgb did not get. got a lot of oss memos but didn't get this one so they tried their hand at it. nobody really got a whole lot out of ernest in the intel business in world war ii. ernest as i say, something he wanted to do. it's something he devoted a lot of energy to. but it may have been a dramatic story but it didn't have dramatic results. there just wasn't a lot of product at the end of the day, only a story that i really like to tell. so that's about it. thank you very much. >> if anyone has questions. >> one right over here.

>> i would like to know what -- not the part of spain. why did hemingway kill himself? >> whew! >> that's long and complicated. i think it's the long-term effects of drinking. he's probably -- he was probably an alcoholic physiologically. probably by even by this time, hemingway's productivity as a great author falls off dramatically. you know, the last great book he writes is "for whom the bell tolls" then he writes "old man and the sea." that's really the last home run he writes. everything else is falling off. he's deteriorating physically. i think it's a cascading effect from the alcohol.

he's suspicious. he's irascible. maybe he has some other conditions. i think he was -- what's -- i hesitate to advance a diagnosis, but, you know, mentally unstable and that's -- that played a big role in shooting himself. also his father shot himself and he had -- ernest had a lot of trouble with his mom. he never really liked his mom. and after dad shot himself so ernest kind of upset about dad shooting himself. mom for christmas one year sends him the pistol that dad shot himself with. so, you know, it's a sad story. it's one of those family lore things that works out that ends badly for ernest.

>> i know that the picture in the brochure was hemingway that it is general lamb. i know that in late july of '44. he was -- as they push to paris involved in cover work? >> not that i know of. so what -- the way i reconstruct it is at the -- in the first part of july, 19 -- july/august, first part of august 1944, ernest is with lan. tam and his troops and so ernest says, we'll -- you know, i got to go looking for the main story. i'll come back later and he does come back later. those are the groups, what was it the 22nd ram tur division. 2nd infantry regimen.

that's the group he goes back to after the fall of paris off and on until he goes back to cuba. sure. what else? anybody got any -- yes, sir. >> what happened -- please wait for the mike. sorry. >> you say the son has to go to asia. did his son actually go to asia? >> no, the war didn't last long enough. fascinating family history. bumby also -- bumby was a guy -- everyone that lives in ernest's shadow and especially his sons and little brother, bumby has trouble finding himself in life. he's in and out of the army. he serves in uniform for a number of years and tries various career, stockbroker, professional fishermen, whatnot. what he does do, marries a

wonderful woman and they have two daughters, margo and mariette hemingway. one of them sadly commits suicide. ernest's brother lester also commits suicide. so it's, you know, it's again a sad family history that comes out. any -- can i ask you a question. anybody else have ideas why ernest would sign up with the kgb? is that stunning to you? is that -- you know, what would you do? how wow break it down. >> yes, sir. >> he said he was imagining things, an adventure -- the question was did he imagine he could be a double or triple agent? that would be a great adventure. i have thought of that and it's possible. you know, it's an intriguing -- it's an intriguing theory.

if i could find that ernest had tried to work his way into placing where he would get better access, you know, it's something worth pursuing. there's still a lot out there and there's a lot of playerses i want to go and look for stuff and that's something i'm going to consider. >> how complete are the oss files? are there anythings still secret? >> to my knowledge there are few -- there's a handful of things that are still secret. i've encountered one or two things that says file has been pulled. they're probably in the personnel files so it would have -- it would be something to do with somebody who may be still alive. still at least a handful of oss vet ranges still with us. but by and large, you know, there's this whole treasure trove of documents out there, and what makes it interesting is

the finding aides are incomplete and so you know, you go out there looking for hemingway and only find him in two or three and you have to search -- you wind up searching in things that might have hemingway in them and on a really great day you find a nugget that you bring home and brag about at dinner. [ laughter ] thank you very much. [ applause ] >> thank you all for coming. have a great day.

>> you're watching american history tv. follow us on twitter at c-span history. c-span's 2012 local content vehicle cities tour takes our book tv and american history tv programming on the road the first weekend of each month. shreveport, louisiana with book tv's noll memorial library. >> he was born here for most of his life and started accumulating books when he was a teenager. and continued until he was in his 80s. over his lifetime, he accumulated over 200,000 volumes. if we have a gem in the collection it is probably going to be this one. it's one of the books we're most proud of. it's in the original binding from 1699, and it was once owned by a very famous scientist. you can see he's written his

name, i. newton, and we're not pulling it out so much anymore because it is starting to flake away on the title page. >> and american history tv looked at civil war era medical practices at the pioneer heritage museum. >> pioneer medicine is a long stretch from what it is today. you consider that the things that we take for granted today when we go to the doctor, things like the instruments being as germ-free as possible or the doctor has washed his hands before he decides to work on us. and we use the term loosely for doctors when we're talking early medicine. a lot of these doctors in our region were self-taught or they had worked under somebody else who had been self-taught and they were getting ready to retire. so they would just learn as they went. >> our lcv cities tour continues the weekend of march 31st and april 1st from little rock, arkansas, on season 2 and csea .

history bookshelf at noon eastern. this weekend on history bookshelf, the tangled lives and loyalties of robert oppenheimer, ernest lawrence and edward teller the making of the atomic bombs dropped on japan at the end of world war ii. it's about an hour. >> lawrence is the man of buoyancy and bounce as david lillian that you will once said, the consummate organizer, the man who actually deserves more credit than he has received for organizing the atomic bomb project. that would have been nothing had it not been lawrence to get things rolling. hirst operation at oak ridge was the operation that separated the u 235 to u 238 with the

so-called calutrons named after the university of california. if there had not been a lawrence there would have been no atomic bomb at least not on the schedule it was completed. lawrence was in many ways the sourcer's apprentice. built the great psych la tron. wanted to push forward the frontiers of knowledge but instead it will be modified to separate the uranium for the bomb that's dropped on hiroshima. hence the unintended consequences of scientific intervention and next line, i found lawrence is only interesting if you put him in the context of oppenheimer and temmer, the man in the middle of that famous feud and once you start looking at oppenheimer, he steals the show. he is the theorist as opposed to the experimentalist of lawrence.

the man at berkeley when he was teaching him took sandscript so he could read the hindu classics in the original. a man very much other worldly. almost exactly the opposite, in fact, of lawrence who was the meat and potatoes man the experimentalist, the man most at ease with a solder gun in his hand as opposed to oppen imhere.