The Crook Factory

by Dan Simmons

  Nothing on Ernest Hemingway’s early years except the note that he had graduated from Oak Park High School, worked briefly on the Kansas City Star, and had tried to join the army during the Great War. There was a copy of his rejection form—defective eyesight. Handwritten at the bottom of that army rejection form, obviously by someone in the Bureau, was “Joined Red Cross as ambulance driver—Italy—wounded by trench mortar at Fossalta di Piave, July 1918.”

  The bio sheet concluded the personal information with “Married Hadley Richardson 1920, divorced 1927; married Pauline Pfeiffer 1927, divorced 1940; married Martha Gellhorn 1940…”

  Under “Occupation/employment” the form was succinct: “Hemingway claims to make his living as a writer and has published such novels as The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell by Arms, To Have and Have Not, and The Great Gatsby.”

  The writer seemed to have come to the serious attention of the Bureau in 1935, when he had written an article titled “Who Murdered the Vets?” for the leftist journal New Masses. In 2,800 words—torn out and included in his FBI O/C file—Hemingway had described the effects of the hurricane that had raged through the Florida Keys on Labor Day 1935. It had been the biggest storm of the century and had killed many, including nearly a thousand CCC workers—most of them veterans—in camps along the Keys. The writer evidently was on one of the first small boats to reach the devastated area, and he almost seemed to take pleasure in describing two women, “naked, tossed up in the trees by the water, swollen and stinking, their breasts as big as balloons, flies between their legs.” But most of the article was polemic about the politicians and Washington bureaucrats who had sent the workers to such a dangerous place and then failed to rescue them when the storm came.

  “Wealthy people, yachtsmen, fishermen such as President Hoover and President Roosevelt” avoid the Keys during hurricane weather so as not to endanger their yachts and property, Hemingway wrote. “But veterans, especially the bonus-marching variety of veterans, are not property. They are only human beings; unsuccessful human beings, and all they have to lose is their lives.” Hemingway was making a case of manslaughter against the bureaucrats.

  There were field reports, but these were just copies of reports on other people—mostly Americans or Communist agents, or both, involved in the Spanish Civil War—in which Hemingway was mentioned only in passing. Leftish intellectuals had converged on Madrid like flies circling shit in 1937, and making a big deal of Hemingway’s involvement seemed naive to me. Hemingway’s primary source for material and background at Gaylord’s Hotel there had been Mikhail Koltsov, an intellectual, young correspondent for Pravda and Izvestia, and the American writer appeared to have taken everything the Communist had fed him as pure gospel.

  There were more reports pointing with alarm at Hemingway’s involvement with the propaganda film The Spanish Earth—the writer had narrated it and spoken at fund-raising parties involved with the leftist project—but this hardly seemed subversive to me. Two thirds of all the Hollywood stars and ninety percent of the New York intellectual crowd had been fighting for Marxist credentials since the height of the Depression; if anything, Hemingway had been slow to get on the bandwagon.

  The most recent reports documented Hemingway’s contacts with other Communists or leftist-leaning Americans, including an FBI surveillance report from just last month in Mexico City. Hemingway and his wife had been visiting an American millionaire at his vacation home there. The millionaire was described by the Tom Dillon–like special agents as “one of the many rich dupes of the Communist Party.” I knew the millionaire they were talking about, having checked him out myself two years earlier in a totally different context. The man was no one’s dupe, just a sensitive person who had gotten rich during the Depression while millions were suffering and who was still trying to find some easy path to redemption.

  The last item was a memo.

  CONFIDENTIAL MEMO

  FROM FBI AGENT R.G. LEDDY, HAVANA, CUBA

  TO FBI DIRECTOR J. EDGAR HOOVER, JUSTICE DEPT., WASHINGTON, DC.

  APRIL 15, 1942

  It is recalled that when the Bureau was attacked early in 1940 as a result of the arrests in Detroit of certain individuals charged with neutrality violations for fostering enlistments in the Spanish Republican forces, Mr. Hemingway was among the signers of a declaration which severely criticized the Bureau in that case. In attendance at a Jai-Alai match with Hemingway, this writer was introduced by him to a friend as a member of the Gestapo. On that occasion I did not appreciate the introduction, whereupon he promptly corrected himself and said I was one of the United States Consuls….

  I laughed out loud. The memo went on to describe Hemingway’s most recent proposals to Robert Joyce, first secretary of the embassy, about setting up his counterespionage ring, but Leddy kept circling back to the perceived personal insult at the jai alai match. The FBI was, of course, the American Gestapo, and that introduction was driving Raymond Leddy crazy with rage, all of it hidden behind the clumsy doublespeak of Bureau memoese.

  I shook my head, imagining the introduction amidst the roar of the jai alai game and the shouting of the bettors. Mr. Hoover had been right. If I wasn’t careful, I might learn to like this writer.

  “JOSEPH? JOSEPH, OLD BOY. I thought that I glimpsed the back of that familiar skull. How are you, dear boy?”

  I knew the voice immediately—the clipped yet drawn-out Oxbridge accent and the drone of someone who knew very well how to amuse himself.

  “Hello, Commander Fleming,” I said, looking up at the lanky figure.

  “Ian, Joseph, old boy. We left it at Ian off at camp, remember?”

  “Ian,” I said. He looked the same as when I had last seen him more than a year earlier: tall, thin, curly forelock hanging down over his pale forehead, long nose, and sensuous mouth. Despite the season and the heat, he was wearing a quintessentially British wool tweed suit that looked expensive and well-tailored enough, but as if it had been tailored for someone twenty pounds heavier. He was smoking a cigarette in a cigarette holder, and the way he clenched the thing in his teeth and waved it for emphasis reminded me of someone doing an impression of FDR. My only hope was that he would not sit down in the empty aisle seat next to me.

  “May I join you, Joseph?”

  “By all means.” I turned away from the window, where the green of the coastal shallows was giving way to a deep Gulf blue. I glanced over my shoulder. There was no one sitting within four rows of us; the plane was almost empty. Any conversation we would have would be covered by the drone of the engines and the propellers.

  “Fancy meeting you here, dear boy. Where are you headed?”

  “The plane’s flying to Cuba, Ian. Where are you bound?”

  He tapped ash into the aisle and flicked his wrist. “Oh, just heading home by way of Bermuda. Thought I might do a bit of reading.”

  Cuba was still far out of his way if he was flying back from the BSC headquarters in New York via Bermuda, but I did understand his mention of reading. One of the most successful operations the British Security Coordination had been running the past three years was its huge chamfering center in Bermuda. All mail between South America and Europe, including diplomatic pouches from all of the embassies, was routed through that island. William Stephenson had set up an intercept station in Bermuda where the mail was diverted, copied or photographed, dealt with on the spot by a large team of code breakers, and occasionally altered before being sent on to Berlin or Madrid or Rome or Bucharest.

  But why Fleming was talking out of school like this was another matter.

  “By the way, Joseph,” said the Brit, “I saw William just last week and he said to say hello to you should our paths cross again. I think you were a bit of a favorite of his, old boy. The best and the brightest and all that. Only wish that more of your chaps were so quick on the uptake.”

  I had met Commander Ian Fleming through William Stephenson at the BSC Camp X in Canada. Fleming was another of these gifted amateurs whom the Br
itish—especially Churchill—loved to promote over more plodding professionals. In Fleming’s case, it had not been Churchill who discovered him but Admiral John Godfrey, head of England’s Naval Intelligence Division and a counterpart to the German Abwehr’s Admiral Canaris. As I had heard the story, Fleming had been a thirty-one-year-old London fop marking time in his family’s brokerage business when the war broke out in 1939. Fleming was also one of those perpetual British public school boys, always up to pranks and seeking excitement on ski slopes or in fast cars or in beautiful women’s beds. Admiral Godfrey had seen the creativity in this dandy, for he had given the young stockbroker a commission in the navy and hired him as his own special assistant. Then he turned him loose to come up with ideas.

  Some of those Fleming-inspired ideas had been discussed openly at Camp X. One of them was Assault Unit Number 30—a group of felons and misfits trained for wildly improbable missions behind German lines. A group of Fleming’s Assault Unit Number 30 characters had been sent into France when the Germans were overrunning that country and had hijacked entire shiploads of advanced military equipment. Rumor had it that Ian Fleming had recruited Swiss astrologers to consult with the wildly superstitious Nazi Rudolf Hess, telling him that his destiny was to please the Führer by arranging a peace between Germany and England. The outcome had been Hess’s insane solo flight from Germany to England; he bailed out over Scotland and had been a prisoner ever since—telling MI5 and MI6 great quantities of detail about the inner workings of the Nazi hierarchy.

  And from my three A.M. black bag jobs at Camp X, I knew that it had been Commander Ian Fleming who had been sent to North America to help Stephenson get the United States into the war.

  “The problem with the chaps Edgar has been sending to camp since you, old boy,” Fleming was droning on, referring to Director Hoover as “Edgar,” “is that the fellows are sent out into the field with no brief other than ‘to go and have a look.’ All of Edgar’s chaps are good at looking, Joseph, but very few have learned to see.”

  I nodded noncommittally. I tended to agree with Fleming’s and Stephenson’s assessments of the FBI’s espionage capabilities. Despite Hoover’s protests about investigation rather than enforcement, the Bureau was essentially a police organization. It arrested spies—Mr. Hoover had even wanted to arrest William Stephenson when it became clear that the BSC leader had ordered a Nazi agent killed in New York. The agent had been in charge of reporting convoy routes to U-boats and sinking thousands of tons of Allied shipping, but Mr. Hoover saw that as no reason to break U.S. laws. But with the exception of a few SIS operatives, no one in the Bureau really thought in terms of espionage—of watching and turning and burning spies rather than just arresting them.

  “Speaking of seeing, old boy,” said Fleming, “I see that an American writer chap down in Havana may be getting into our line of work.”

  I am sure my face was impassive, but in my mind I was blinking in shock. It had been—what?—less than a week since Hemingway had first proposed his idea to the embassy people in Havana. “Oh?” I said.

  Fleming removed his cigarette holder and gave me his lopsided smile. He was a charmer. “Ah, but that’s right, Joseph, dear boy. I forgot. We discussed that in Canada once, did we not? You don’t read fiction, do you, old cock?”

  I shook my head. Why the hell was he contacting me in the open about this? Why would Stephenson and the BSC be interested in this dead-end assignment of mine?

  “Joseph,” said Fleming, his voice softer now, more serious, with less of an insufferable accent, “do you remember the chat we had about the Yellow Admiral’s favorite ploy against business competitors?”

  “Not really,” I said. I remembered the conversation. Fleming had been at the camp when Stephenson and a few others were talking about the German Admiral Canaris’s—Canaris was called the “Yellow Admiral”—uncanny ability to drive a wedge between rival intelligence services that opposed him: in this case, between MI5 and MI6, England’s internal and foreign intelligence services, respectively.

  “No matter,” said Fleming, flicking ashes off his cigarette. “It just came to mind recently. Would you like to hear the story, Joseph?”

  “Sure,” I said. Fleming might have begun the intelligence game as an amateur, but he had never been a fool—at least not in espionage—and after three years of war, he was an expert. This story was the reason he had “accidentally” arranged to fly down to Cuba with me—I was sure of that.

  “Last August,” said Commander Fleming, “I happened to be in Lisbon. Ever been to Portugal, Joseph?”

  I shook my head, confident that he knew I had never been out of this hemisphere.

  “Interesting place. Especially now, during the war, if you take my meaning. At any rate, there was this Yugoslav chap there by the name of Popov. I happened to bump into him several times there. Does the name ring a bell, dear boy? Popov?”

  I pretended to search my memory and again shook my head. This “story” must be of critical importance if Fleming were using someone’s real name in a public place like this. Even with the almost-empty cabin and the loud drone of the propellers, I felt like we were doing something almost indecent.

  “Not even a little bell, Joseph?”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  Dusan “Dusko” Popov had been born in Yugoslavia but had been recruited by the Abwehr as a deep-cover agent in England. Almost immediately upon being inserted into the country, Popov had begun working for the British as a double agent. By the time Fleming was talking about—August of the previous summer, 1941, Popov had been passing along real and false information to the Germans for three years.

  “Well, again it doesn’t matter,” said Fleming. “No reason for you to have heard of the chap. Anyway, to get back to my story—I was never good at telling a story, dear heart, so bear with me, please—this fellow Popov, whom some called by the nickname ‘Tricycle,’ had been given sixty thousand dollar in Lisbon by his continental employers to pay his own employees. In a burst of benevolence, this Tricycle chap decided to turn the money over to our company.”

  I was translating as Fleming droned on. Word had it that the British had given Popov the code name “Tricycle” because the double agent was quite the woman’s man, rarely went to bed alone, and preferred a woman on either side of him. The “continental employer” was the Abwehr, who still thought that Popov was running a network in England. The $60,000 the Abwehr had given him in Lisbon was to pay Popov’s mythical sources in England. “Turning the money over to our company” meant that Popov was going to turn the cash over to MI6.

  “Yeah?” I said in a bored tone, popping a stick of gum into my mouth. The cabin was supposedly pressurized, but changes in altitude were playing havoc with my ears.

  “Precisely, yeah,” said Fleming. “The problem was, our Tricycle friend had time to kill in Portugal before he could deliver the money. Our fellows in Five and Six were at sixes and sevens as to who would have the pleasure of entertaining the poor man there, so it fell to me to spend time with him until he could come home.”

  Translation: MI5 and MI6 had become embroiled in a jurisdictional battle over who should tail Popov and ensure that the money was delivered. Fleming, who worked for the more-or-less jurisdictionally neutral Naval Intelligence Division, had been ordered to follow Popov for the few days last August until the double agent could return to England to hand over the money.

  “All right,” I said. “Some guy came into some loot in Portugal and is going to give it to charity in England. Did you have fun showing him around Portugal?”

  “He showed me around, dear boy. I had the opportunity to follow him to Estoril. Ever heard of it?”

  “No,” I said truthfully.

  “A lovely little Portuguese resort town along the coast, dear boy,” said Fleming. “The beaches are adequate, but the casinos are more than adequate. Our Tricycle knew the casinos quite well.”

  I resisted the impulse to smile. Popov was famous for having b
alls. In this case, he had taken Abwehr money promised to his controllers at MI6 and gambled it.

  “Did he win?” I said, interested in the story despite my caution.

  “Yes, rather,” said Fleming, fussing with inserting a fresh cigarette in his long, black holder. “I sat there all night and watched him quite clean out a poor Lithuanian count whom our Tricycle friend had taken a dislike to. At one point, our three-wheeled chap counted fifty thousand dollars in cash onto the table… our poor Lithuanian could not match that. Had to leave in humiliation, actually. I found it all quite edifying.”

  I was sure he had. Fleming had always admired daring above most other virtues.

  “And the moral of this tale?” I said. The engines were changing pitch. We were beginning to descend toward Cuba.

  Commander Fleming shrugged with his cigarette holder. “Not sure there is a moral, dear boy. In this case, our agencies’ quarrel provided me with a wonderful night out in Estoril. But sometimes the results are not so benign.”

  “Oh?”

  “Do you know that other interesting William?” said Fleming. “Donovan?”

  “No,” I said. “We’ve never met.” William “Wild Bill” Donovan was, of course, the head of America’s other espionage/counterespionage outfit, the COI, Coordinator of Intelligence, and Hoover’s greatest rival. Donovan was a favorite of FDR’s—had consulted with him the night of Pearl Harbor—and tended to do things more in the vein of William Stephenson and Ian Fleming; that is, extravagantly, daring, slightly crazily, rather than in the plodding, bureaucratic method approved by Mr. Hoover and his Bureau. I knew that Stephenson and the BSC had been making more and more overtures to Donovan at the COI as Hoover’s interest in cooperating with the British continued to cool.

  “You should meet him, Joseph,” said Fleming, looking me straight in the eye. “I know that you liked William S. You would like William D. for the same reasons.”