i have been inspected to tell you to silence your cell phones at this point. thank you to the museum of art for hosting us. we would like to thank public media and the book laws for their continued support. tonight's raffle winner will receive a copy of soldier spy for the evening author event please stay and join us for cookies after the event under it stage and anthony will be signing books after the event. if you have trouble with the stairs, you can enter behind us. his work in the fields of modern military history and intelligence off and on for 40 years. he joined the united states marine core and serving as an infantry officer and historians. most recently he was the historian for the cia museum responsible for developing a strategic plan and helping turn artifacts into compelling stories. secret adventures, 1935-1961. a riveting international ethic ranging from the civil war to the liberation. it is the stunning untold story of a literary icon art. without further ado, please help me welcome nicolas. >> it is a pleasure to be here. i am thrilled to see people who want to hear my story. we had a great dinner with some of the other folks. i am going to tell you the story of the book and then i will go through parts of interests. i will say i did not know we would care about russian espionage at this point in time. yes, i was an intelligence officer but i am not that good. i can talk a little bit about that if you are interested. love have to questions. i find earnest is so many things to so many people. there are many many ways to come out his body of work and i love to talk about that. i will take you back to the beginning to when where was historian working for the beginning of this book. when i was a historian at the cia museum we were selling these shirts in 201. the historian is the guy who writes content. think of the curator and director. the cia museum are more or less the same person. she, a great american, tony hily, is in charge of the overall direction and picking artifacts and stories to tell. so the historian goes and researches particular stories behind an artifact. let's say you come back from afghanistan with an ak-47 that somebody captures and you have to come up with the story behind that and that is what you weave into the exhibit. we were putting up a gallery on the oss. the oss, the office of strategic services, it was america's first central intelligence agency, all lower case at that point, and it was stood up in 1942. america was a late comer to the world of intelligence. the british established their modern intelligence service around 1909. the soviets picked up where the zars had been and continued the tradition of running the secret service and making it better. the continental powers had intelligence in the united states as well. the u.s. was coming late to the game. in world war ii there is urgency to keep it going. my job is to research it and one way i researched it was to look at who was in oss. i remember at this point, reading a great book, called prepared learning. we have a role in this story. so, i started pulling on hemingway threads and i went up to the national archives outside washington d.c. where you can search oss. by the name of the file, i came up with the interesting fact that three hemingways found their way to oss. i found this remarkable that each one found their way. it wasn't like the hemingway's will fit in here. there are creative powerful people. i thought that was interesting data point. thinking in my head, i have a great question. i am thinking am i going to find things to tie this all together and maybe write an article about the hemingway's in world war ii. and so, i get to the point where ernest story is a little more interesting. most people go right here. ernest, writer, novelist, journalist, whatever. and maybe not go the rest of the way. i found between 1940-1945, he almost deserted the writing part and he is spending the time on intrigue and spying and a little bit of ground combat mixed in. i am going this is a different ernest than we are used to. i go i wonder what is is here. i keep pulling. i get to a point where i think i have exhausted most of the sources. and jow get pretty good sources right on target and might find a file or find a principle file with 25-30 pages of documents. and then you are looking in someone's else file who might have dealt with hemingway and so on and so forth as the returns diminish. you are getting close to the end. you are at the left and right limits of your work one of the hard thinks about working at cia is telling people so much of the work is normal, everyday stuff. yeah, there is some secret squirrel stuff and fancy sophisticated intelligence work but there is also a library, a carpenter shop, there is a cafeteria and people staffing all these functions. it is a heavy academic book. it is about soviet espionage in the book from 1935-1940. there is a chapter about ernest in it. the key document in there, and if you all are interested, i can get into more about where the documents come from and they their authentsicity. but the key number is december '40 or january 1941 hemingway agreed to become a spy for the predecessor of the kgb that we know much better in the cold war. since this is a book about espionage and not hemingway it doesn't talk about what it means in the context of hemingway's life and work. it talks about him in terms of soviet espionage. the amount is stunning between 1933 and 1945 by any standard they basically and they had somebody in the white house and mid level officer at justice. they had a couple congressman. so they called him crook. that was his code name. crook. to get back to this, i read agreed to work with them t time and that was upsetting for me for a couple reasons. one was, i have been and still am a lifelong fan of hemingway's writing. the other is i worked at cia and found what is the worst thing, what is your worst nightmare at cia? anybody? finding your friends a spy. it was written -- they worked with them. they shared cubicles and whatnot. i felt like that. this guy who had been by companion of sorts. then i went looking for well, so now i am kind of starting to leave museums and and work rather than the fumes project. there is a lot of great stars about that and they have written a lot of great books and cold a lot of good stories and could one of these experts please explain to me what this means for how should i look at ernest hemingway now. there was one chapter saying this was an anomaly. i kept looking and didn't find any secondary sources so you go back and start looking for primary sources that would help to tell the story and i eventually got to a point where i could satisfy myself about the story but i didn't know if it was interesting enough to tell you, tell a wider audience. so the story in a nutshell is that hemingway signed up with the soviets and then he didn't really become a great spy for the soviets. he went and did other exciting things during world war ii but it wasn't really for the soviets. a lot of people, like when i was trying to market the book to see about interest in publishing it, i would get push back from agencies saying we want this to be a spy story and want hemingway as james bond. but he is not. he is like somebody who sets out. eventually i get to a series of letters he wrote to his best friend who was an army general. when it was really expensive to make phone calls. he talked his reaction to the public and threw in references to his time with the soviets. when you put these little pieces together you have a story that spans and that is the story that i tell in the book. in the q&a, i can get into a lot more detail on any particular part of the story you might be interested in hearing but for now, i will take you on an exkcursoy -- excuse. he lived to do things that people live to a hundred wouldn't get to. it is a function of his charisma, competitiveness . they said he could suck the air out of the room. he wants to be the authority and to a large extent he does succeed and succeeds supremely and a substantial amount of other things. if he had been like some of the other soviet spies, they put on their work, they write memos and pass them. richard nixon finds out and they go to hearings and to jail. it is an interesting human sophisticated story. unlike alger who went to the state department, meetings, wrote things down and stolled the stories, ernest goes to war. ernest loves going to war. he wants to be the war writer of his generation. the drama in this picture is from the airport. we were not in danger at all. but i am doing my day job now. ernest on his day job gets sprayed by enemy fire and almost gets killed. so, that is not it. he has assigned himself to the left making him thing more like common terms than an american writer. it was pretty apolitical. he is something like a libertarian. he likes to live in the u.s. this is the head of the kgb of spain. he had many names and he is doing stalin's dirty work in spain. he is arranging with hemingway to see secret facilities they don't show to other people. that is one of the drivers for who the bell told. this guy, the head of the russian secrec services of spain is one of the men who facilitates and enables ernest to write, i think one of the greatest political novels of the 21st century for whom the bell tolds. he winds up living in ohio believe it or not. that is a great story i can tell you if i want you to get into it. here is another character that ernest runs across. this is a man named jacob gold. he always work for the nk. he is 5-2, that is red hair, he has startling blue eyes and said to be a lady killer -- not literally but figure. he is the perfect guy for them to use because he is an old ball chic activist who started before the russian revolution, before he is 18 and he has been arrested three times since the death, once, banished to siberia. he escapes from siberia by walking east. think about that. he walks to china and then eventually gets across the ocean and winds up in new york and he continues doing what he has always done. he is a russian revolution. now he is a russian soviet revolutionary and an american passport. he is the perfect guy to have as an nkgb operative. he pitches him and says we need you to work and we don't know exactly what he said with or four this. he would have thought for but ernest reported he would hold it that way. this is a verbatim. i can't go back that far but it is in the files. when it was accessed by the guy who brought it to the united states he was allowed to take hand written notes and they were tra transcribed. that is the kind of document that tells about soviet espionage. at a time when the u.s. and friends were around and after the revolution the u.s. and the soviet union had no diplomatic relations. after roosevelt came in 1933, they reestablished the relations and the soviet espionage apparatus saw it as a golden opportunity to come to the united states and start recruiting spies and that is what they did and influencing policy to a certain extent. they are doing this for a couple reasons. one is they just don't know. russia has always been the great unknown. the part of area to the east is what we focus on. they are isolated in countries. we started figuring out the united states is a major player but we don't understand it. that is one reason they are spying on the united states. and they believe they are conspiracy. they believe what you see is almost never what you get. you got to get the back story. you have got to find out the secret behind the published policy. you saw the mention of china in there. so, he is in new york to get recruited. he is living in cuba already. gets recruited in new york and goes to china with this this lady who is martha, his third wife, and he is only about 40. she is going as a reporter and he has a little reporting to do but he is going as a fact finder. he is going to do a little work for the secretary of the treasury. if i went to china, i don't think the president will sit down in the yard and have a cup of tea with me. ernest hemingway -- this is a guy who peeks early. he has three terrific books by the time he is 40. he is well off. people will talk to him. i am ernest hemingway, please come talk to me. he meets her. that is the chinese nationalist and she speaks great english. her husband doesn't speak much english at all. she is representing the nationalists. it is very complicated scenario with the japanese trying to take over china and the chinese side and the communist fighting each other. he wants to go to a meeting with this guy and becomes the premier of china after they take over and stays in that position until he dies in the early '70s. this is an enormously powerful guy and hemingway and his wife love talking to his guy. they think the nationalist chineses are phonies and blow hards. but they think this guy is the real deal. they think i can go to china and be there. this is what we wants to do. this is his boat pea lar. it is an american cabin cruiser. maybe two or three tons. it is made of food. fur and mohogany. he bought her as a fishing boat. but in world war ii, she is a german subhunter. it isn't as crazy as it sounds, but if you look here, there is savannah. he lives in that general region. this is a german mass from world war ii and it shows the shipping lanes. another link to the world of intelligence is here. they give him equipment, a man to run the equipment, radios, codes, tell him how to report, and that is not unlike what the navy was doing up on the eastern seaboard early in the war. ernest says that is not good enough. democracy now! see something you have to tackle it. he never got -- so, your average german submarine weighs hundreds of tons. one of the more advance classes operating in that area was 740 tons. a guy is in search of adventures that probably most of us will never come close to finding in life. the focus of the war shifts decisively to europe and ernest goes as a war correspondent or a nominal one and if we go back to what i said earlier he never just does one thing. he writes a few articles, they get published in the american press, but he can't help himself. he has to get involved more deeply. he does. this is hemingway outside of paris. this is when i started the research, this is the head of oss in europe. there is ernest. he wears a captured belt that says god with us in german. he is reporting on the wall and conducting tactical operations he is cording this lady who is ma ma mary welsh. martha is in the theater reporting on the war and every so often a well meaning commander says let me arrange for the two of them, for martha and ernest, to be together. the result isn't nice because he is spending more time with mary and as i say she eventually becomes his fourth wife. afterwards, not so much. not at all or the opposite. she is talking about all of the spies that she knew in mostly late '30s, early 40s. the reason she knew them was her lover was jacob gull, the guy who recruited hemingway. he sent her -- if he could not make a meeting he would send elizabeth. he kept the files under their bed and what she is doing on the stand is talking about american official after american official or journalists or you know, media figure who was a soviet spy. i cannot prove directly at ernest is reading these every day thinking well is she going to be talking about me? we know she was following the events but i can't say specifically he connects the two. she describes them on the stand. 5-2 russian with red hair, blue eyes, lives in new york. the post par drama is kind of sort of the morning after. it is like, we had this great adventure of world war ii and now how is it going to fit into the rest of my life. the last part of the drama is this. in the early '50s, so there is a regime which is a right wing regime that -- sorry, am i blocking you guys? early in the '50s, the batista regime is a right wing regime that is opposed by these guys. there is fidel. he is just a kid. fidel is like late 20s early 30s during most of the fighting. this is kind of the last -- whether he is a communist now or became one later i don't know. he denied he was a communist until well after he took power in 1959. is the same calculus that drove him to spain and to seek adventure and drove him in the arms of the soviets. it is anti facist and anti authoritarian attitude. there is a point in the war where it looks like batista, the dictator of cuba, has the upper hand and he reports castro is dead and it is over. this is a friend of hemingway and they worked together in spain covering the spanish civil war and he comes to cuba to see if castro is dead. he finds out he is not dead and he spends two or three days in the mountains with castro. has amazing interviews with castro and writes a series of articles for "the new york times" that appear above the fo fold. now he is the ghost and the guy who supported castro who turns out to be a devil. i went and used his papers which are up at columbia university and you can follow this. all the time he has touched -- everything time he is touching base with ernest he stays with him and they talk about this. he said in his letter. thafr move to the left, moderates desseert him. this is one of the pieces of hate mail he gets. this eventually leads to the bay of pigs. his home is in cuba, castro, liked hemingway just fine, and you live in a gated community through one of us. but hemingway feels that he has got to chose and he winds up leaving cuba and he is ambivalent for a while and thinks maybe i can go back, maybe i can't. after the bay of pigs in april of 1961, cia-led invasion fails and he realizes you cannot have it both ways. you have to be american or not. he would never be comfortable saying i want to be just a cuban. he comes close to that. in his heart of hearts, he says i am always an american. it is a terrible fight and he has to give up all this political involvement that is coming to a head. he has to give up his home in cuba and pay for the moving to the states. it is part of the spriel and cascadeing and they lead to the end of his life. that is pretty much the story i tell. i am happy to take questions. i am happy to talk a little bit about, you know, what i think this means politically. i am happy to take questions. great question. was hemingway's way name emway mccarthy? i have not found it on a -- mccarthy. i have found a hemingway file with a house on american activities committee which is related. .... [inaudible]. how do we really know that woman was planted by did [inaudible]. we'll hear the. >> so the question was, question goes to the authenticity of the files that show that hemingway was recruited by the nkvd. there are a couple ways to look at that. hemingway is only tiny part of a bigger picture and there are guys, historians, who spent their lives on this particular field, soviet espionage in the united states or communism in the united states. soviet espionage in general, and, they have looked at these files every way you can and come to the conclusion they're authentic. why would the soviets, my argument, another way to look at it is, this all fits in the context of his life and when you put it all together there is a progression from a, to b, to c, which bolsters the claim. the third thing is there is a complicated story how the files -- the files have a complicated history and there is basically two releases. the first release was an official release made with the approval of the successor agency of the kgb and they protected hemingway's name in that release. so in the unofficial release what we have here, his name gets exposed. so the fact that, the fact that this is something they were trying to protect, to me says, that it is genuine. yes, ma'am, all the way in the back? >> [inaudible]. >> i, i'm aware of that. i haven't focused a lot on that. my impression of hemiing way's attitudes in the early '30s, he was basically apolitical. yes he would report what is going on but not really taking sides one way or the other. he says numerous times, politics is for other people. only after he gets involved in the spanish civil war that that changes. yes, sir, right there. >> [inaudible] >> i don't see him getting, "the sun also rises" is his testament to the '20s. i don't see a lot of poll ticks in that. yes, sir? >> is there any evidence that hemingway passed -- >> great question. it hemingway passed any significant information to the soviets. the soviets answered that in the files. they said no. they said he was willing to speak to them. he told them he would help them but he never produced the goods. the argument i make is he had buyer's remorse. he signed up, kind of difference between dieting and getting married. when he was in spain, that was like dating, right? you meet these guys. go have a drink with them. they ask you to do something, okay, i'll do that for you. he did little chores for the soviets in spain. and then, dating leads to a formal relationship and, i said during the talk, soviet idea we'll tell him what to do now or we'll structure this rip so that we can say, hey, ernest, we need you to two do x or y. talk to so-and-so, find out what he thinks. but once ernest marries the soviets as far as i can tell almost immediately he goes ooh, they were great fun when we were dating but i'm not sure, i'm not sure i like being married to the nkvd. so, he is never like, one of the things that makes this interesting i think is he's not -- so the other soviet spies in washington, they're really conventional spies. they are guys who have access to official secrets they are sworn to protect and they go into the safe. they copy those, and they carry them over to the soviet case officer who sends them to moscow. ernest is not an official. he has no access to official secrets. he is kind of a, he is a spy in a murkier, what the soviets have in mind for him, less clear-cut. it is like, can you go see if so-and-so might ever be willing to support this position? or can you find out if the president is willing to change his policy on spain. ernest has a terrific rolodex as i suggested earlier. people talk to him. so i think that was one of the uses the soviets envisioned for him you about he never really did it. yes, ma'am? >> is there any chance -- [inaudible]. >> okay, well -- >> [inaudible]. >> so, if, if he had, that's a great question. so we have a small oss file that does hemingway as a potential oss operative. and the answer is, no, we don't want him as an official oss operative, and the reason is he would be too hard to control. [laughter] surprise. the relationship with david bruce outside of paris, that is strictly unofficial. they run into each other on the battlefield. they are headed to the same place. they say, hey, let's work together. for like a week, two weeks, it was, they did a fabulous job of running tactical intelligence operations. oh, boy. yes, ma'am, right in the middle. >> that is what i was going to ask about. your initial -- [inaudible] what was that about? [inaudible] >> okay. so what was the oss file that i found about? it's complicated. so his, goes back to his third wife, martha. martha is saying, ernest the war is in europe. it is not in cuba. we're journalists. we cover wars. we're writers. we need to get over there. earnest says no, i'm running anti-submarine operations here. [laughter] and they have these really, i mean, they have, there is a lot of conflict between the two. so she goes over by herself and she runs into an oss guy who had worked in cuba and she says look, can you get ernest on the oss payroll and that will get him out of cuba? so martha generates this traffic that goes to oss headquarters and that they, that they -- so she is trying to save their marriage by signing him up for the oss. i think he never knew. i don't think he ever know what martha had done. yeah, right there. >> [inaudible] >> okay. i'm, i'm a humble historian. -- >> [inaudible] there is a lot of stuff out there by people who are smarter than me on medical issues. there has been article on traumatic brain injury, on depression. there is, parts of release of his files at mayo clinic, at least unofficial release. he had electroshock therapy at mayo. my layman's argument, all of these pressures built up. there is a history of depression in the family. there is a history, then there is the physical, he bangs his head repeatedly in accidents. a lot of this is not his fault. he is just, he's in the wrong place at the wrong time or he is in a car accident or plane wreck. so he has like, one, i, i can think of right off the top of my head, at least four major blows to the head. then he loses his home in cuba. then he is finding it difficult to write as, you know, all the things in his world are, around him are, seem to be collapsing, and, on top of that there's a, there's a strain of paranoid thinking that goes back to his time with the soviets. he didn't spy for the soviets. he didn't do much. he agreed to spy for the soviets but in america, in the '40s and '50s, to a certain extent in the0's, that's enough, that's enough. that's something to worry about. people were being hauled up in front of these committees who had done far less. let's say guys in the state department who were not soviet agents or not communist agents of any kind but they wrote that the cholai and mao tse-tung would win in china. these guys are aggressive and powerful, they were likely to win. for that they were hauled up in front of committees, they lost their jobs. they're not saying communism is great or we support it. they're saying if current trends continued they are going to win and they lost their jobs. so he had something to worry about. yes, the gentleman in the red shirt. >> what about j. edgar hoover from the fbi? >> ah, hover. so my picture of hoover and hemingway is a little different from other people's picture of hoover and hemingway. we have the file. the fbi is great about foia and, actually has a foia reading room on its website. you can see most of hemingway's fbi file on there. so does j. edgar hoover know earnest had the dalliance with the soviets? noep. does hoover know hemingway had friends on the left? yes. does j. edgar hoover think emming way was guilty of anything except for being maybe a little bit after fellow traveler? absolutely not. we have hoover's own handwriting on the file, kind of a summary near the end of the file, he says i know he was not a communist. he was just a rough, tough, guy, who stood up for the little guy. hoover, i mean think what you want about hoover and other cases, but in this particular case that's kind of the gentler, kindler hoover we don't get to see much about. >> tell us about orlov? >> okay. i think he lives in dayton or cleveland, i have to check. any way, orlov, one of his jobs is to kill people for stalin. they have, basically roving teams of assassins who go and kill political opponents. and what stalin does in his totally paranoid world view, he kills his own people after he decides that they have become a threat. if you do, if you don't do a good job you're in trouble. if you do too good of a job you're in trouble because you're a threat. orlov is a master at his trade and in 1938 he gets a cable from moscow saying you got to come home. and he knows, he knows that this means you come home, you will be tried as a traitor and executed. he says, nope, not doing it. he takes his, takes money out of his cash box, right? he has operational moneys in the station in, in spain. he takes his wife and his daughter. he is lucky. he has his wife and daughter with him at this post. and he goes to canada. he has that passport, which is in the national archives down in washington. he has got that passport. it is still valid, right? and he goes to the american station in ottawa, he wants to be transferred in the states, would they give him a visa to be in the states. so he goes to, this is 1938. he goes to america. winds up spending some time in new york. sometime here in ohio. and he, he winds up, basically eating corn flakes -- he wants to outlive stalin. he knows if he raises his head, stalin will find him. stalin had a record of finding opponents overseas and having them killed. he has, there is a guy who committed see sued, defector who committed suicide in quotation marks in washington. the fame must case is trotsky in mexico in 1940. as long as stalin is alive, stalin will find him. he keeps his head down until writing 1953. writes articles for "life" magazine what a bad guy is for "life" magazine. j edgar hoover reads this spread in "life" magazine, says who the blank is this guy. an he then the fbi descends on him. that is an amazing story. so the, his problem, orlov's problem is, not with communism or killing people. it's with stalin and stalin deciding to kill him. so he stays a true believer and loyal. he could have told, he could have, he could have gone to the fbi or the cia and he could have told, you know, told them about maybe, well if not hundreds, at least tens of really important operations that were still going on! that were still going on. but he didn't. he company his mouth shut and just kind of lived quietly in the united states and loyal to his own organization and towards the end of his life, they came calling. they sent a guy from the station, the resident tour in new york to say, hey, we did analysis. we realize that you knew about these 50 cases and we're still running them. so you didn't tell the americans. it is okay, you can come home if you want. and he says no, i'm too old. he is in his 70s. he said i will stay here, but thanks for dropping by. [laughter] okay. ma'am? last question, sorry. >> [inaudible] >> okay, one of, one of them was name dixie. i can't remember who the other one was. it is in the book, spies. he was congressman from one of the districts in new york city. [applause] >> on sunday, june 4th, author and journal it matt taibbi is guest on "in depth." >> look at thousands of thousands of faces until you see the one face put on earth just for you, that is instantly, that you fall in love in that moment, you know, for me, trump was like that except it was the opposite. when i first saw him on the campaign trail, i thought, this is a person who is unique, horrible and amazing, terrible characteristics put on earth, spill for me to appreciate or unappreciate or whatever the verb is. because i had really been spending a lot of the last then to 12 years, without knowing it, preparing for donald trump to happen. >> mr. taibbi, is contributor to "rolling stone" magazine and author of several books, smelling like dead elephants, dispatches from a rotting empire, the great derangement, terrifying true story of are war and politics. a story of bankers, politicians and the mouse audacious power grab in american history. the most recent book, insane clown president, dispatches from the 2016 circus. during our live, three hour conversation we'll take your calls, tweets and facebook questions on mr. taibbi's literary career. watch "in depth" with author and journalist matt taibbi, noon to 3:00 p.m. eastern, sunday, june 4th. >> folks, wait one second. folks, before we begin i ask you to take time now to please turn off your cell phones. keep in mind that c-span is videotaping this evening. so the at end when we do our q&a, there is a microphone up in front. we ask that you please come and stand at the microphone to ask your question so that we can hear you. otherwise we will not be able to hear or see you if you're sitting down. thanks.