1940: Ernest Hemingway published For Whom the Bell Tolls, his novel about the Spanish Civil War. He also married his third wife, the journalist Martha Gellhorn.
Hemingway had two houses in the Caribbean: one in Key West, Florida and one in Cuba.
December 1941: With the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the United States entered World War II.
August 1942: Hemingway wanted to participate in the cause. So he met with the US Ambassador to Cuba to create his own organization of spies.
He called them the Crook Factory.
As a journalist who covered the Civil War in Spain, Hemingway met numerous citizens who fled Francisco Franco’s regime for Cuba. He recruited those Spanish ex-pats to spy on Cubans whose politics favored the Axis powers.
He hired six men as full-time spies, while another 20 were part-time informants.
They were a motley group of longshoremen, bartenders, priests, and former Spanish royalty in exile.
The US Ambassador to Cuba, Spruille Braden, provided Hemingway with the funding: $1,000 per month. The spies also received higher gasoline rations.
Hemingway received stories from his network of spies and wrote intelligence reports that he surreptitiously turned over to US embassy personnel.
Very little of the information was useful.
Hemingway owned a fishing vessel, The Pilar. Setting sail out of Key West with grenades and machine guns supplied by the US Navy, he patrolled the Caribbean in search of enemy U-boats. He and his crew followed a submarine on only one occasion, to no avail.
The FBI learned about the Crook Factory, and they were doubtful about the spy network. Hemingway had never liked the Bureau.
They had information on Hemingway’s previous involvement with the Soviets, and they suspected the author was a Communist.
J. Edgar Hoover wrote: ''Hemingway's judgment is not of the best, and if his sobriety is the same as it was some years ago, that is certainly questionable.''
But Hoover warned his staff to be wary of the famous author because President Roosevelt was a fan.
By April 1943, the FBI took over all espionage networks in Cuba.
Hemingway stopped trolling the Caribbean with guns and grenades.
He also temporarily stopped writing. He didn’t resume until he reported for Collier’s Magazine during the Normandy invasion in 1944.
The Crook Factory lasted just eight months and had little to no impact, except perhaps to make Hemingway feel as though he was doing important work.
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