COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE INDEPENDENT
“Ernest Hemingway 'was
secret Soviet spy', claims new book
Written by a former
CIA officer it says the famed author was recruited in 1940”
We can have no idea of the truth here.
Spies and former spies, like the author, almost always use
books or memoirs to plant false or confusing information. It is almost standard
practice.
I've seen it done many, many times, going back to Kim
Philby's book written in Moscow or General Sudoplatov's claim in his memoir that
American physicist, Robert Oppenheimer, was a spy for Stalin. There was also
the CIA’s manufactured Penkovsky Papers
which became a best seller in the 1960s.
Given the author's CIA status and given today's crazed
witch-hunt hysteria in Washington, I am inclined to dismiss the claim as a
trick saying, "See, even venerable figures could be connected to the nasty
Russians." That is as likely an interpretation as can be given without
more knowledge, which we will never see.
"A classified KGB file smuggled out of Moscow"
stinks like a rotting fish carcass.
It is a virtual repeat of the now proved-phony dossier on
Trump supposedly from "Russian sources" according to a British spy
(read: close CIA associate) working as a highly-paid private detective for an
unidentified well-off Republican.
I should add that if somehow it were true that Hemingway
ever worked for Stalin's KGB, it is not hard for a well-informed person to
understand.
The United States was a virtual insane asylum on the subject
of the Soviet Union. At various times, it literally planned in detail a
pre-emptive nuclear attack on Russia. The last I know of was in the early 1960s
when John Kennedy left a Pentagon briefing with the comment that he was sick to
his stomach at what he heard.
The Pentagon was packed with crazed figures like General
Curtis Lemay, a certifiable psychopath who had bombed his way through countless
victims.
Many famous figures in the world were repelled by what they
saw and heard in the United States.
Disapproving of the Stalinist state was one thing, but
accepting the intent to incinerate tens of millions of people was something
else entirely.
Such attitudes secretly permeated through much of Britain's
intelligentsia in the 1940-50s when the phenomenon of the Cambridge spy ring
arose. It was not hard to be motivated against madmen in the United States who
clearly were ready to commit mass murders in order to hold on to a monopoly on
nuclear weapons and essentially become the world's great bully-dictator.
Tragically, these latter impulses still motivate large parts
of the American establishment. Listening to high-level clowns who should (and,
in fact, do) know better talk about Russian influence in American politics is
enough to turn one's stomach it is so patently without evidence and intended to
drive the hysteria of witch hunts.
We should all be extremely cautious about the dangerous
nonsense being tossed about in Washington and repeated over and over in the
corporate press, and books like this deserve being treated with the strongest
skepticism.
