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As mentioned above, this essay was requested by someone with a large platform. I hope that you enjoy reading it. If you want me to continue telling the story of the Spanish Civil War in this way, please subscribe to my Substack to support my writing. I hope that you do because I really do want to continue writing this series.
I always view the Spanish Civil War as an excellent history lesson. Sometimes there are no good guys or bad guys to a conflict. Either side would take a center liberal and line them up against a wall. As far as I'm concerned, they didn't kill enough of each other.
Franco was still a complete nutjob. Too bad most of his superiors got themselves killed off in plane crashes (not a conspiracy or anything that happened all the time back then). This series is going to be a wild ride.
I mean he was a massive narcissist who literally thought he was an instrument of divine will and he had almost sociopathic tendencies towards his own troops in Morocco. He was no coward though. Officers signed up to fight in Morocco specifically because of the high attrition rate of senior officers there and the accompanying chance of promotion. Franco himself was almost killed himself with a bullet to the gut.
Perhaps Hemingway fits better in Fiesta. It seems premise is too simple for a complex matter, but also fitting a complex reasoning into a premade anti premise is also too simplistic
Bravo! As good a brief (but still not too brief) summary of these much-referred-to but often misused and abused series of events as any I have come accross.
And I found it valuable to see the Hemingway clip in this context. Why? I grew up stepping over bodies in '44-45, saw MKP (= communist) mobs acting like Chinese Maoists, and I also saw mobs lynching political-police thugs in 1956 Budapest.
"Be modest in nothing as much as in adoring humans gathered." I forgot which poet said it. (Perhaps Robinson Jeffers.)
I was in Budapest last February and visited the museum that commemorates the victims of 1956. I took pictures of all the faces on the outside of the building.
"Not all republics are created equal, nor do they all perform at an equal level." Absolutely true. Unfortunately, your article doesn't explain why these Spanish "republics" failed, nor how they differed from the features that have made the United States so stable (though I could argue that we aren't so stable at the moment, but that's a different discussion.)
As the American founders argued, democracy is not what creates a republic. It's why it's drilled into American schoolchildren's heads that we aren't a democracy, but a republic. Our system is created to allow for democracy at the local and state levels, but the radicalism that goes hand in hand with democracy is supposed to be mitigated by the checks and balances inherent in a truly republican system. At the federal level, at the state level, between the state and federal level, there are processes that slow down and push back against democracy to assure that we don't tear ourselves apart. Alas, as the US has become more "democratic" (doing away with state legislatures selecting Senators and federal regulatory agencies overreach into state governance are two examples, but also with the current ill-considered obsession with doing way with the Electoral College) the government has become increasingly unstable.
While I loved reading about the history of the fall after fall of so-called republics, I would have loved some insight into why they fell. I suspect too much democracy unchecked by republican features like the rule of law, but you didn't deal with it. Thank you for what you did provide, however. I enjoyed it immensely.
I have a stack of Stanley Payne books and have only read 1.5 of them, but man is he good
While the left temporarily lost in Spain, if you zoom out on a global scale, the left won. It's not the Spanish left who wrote the history, it's the international left. What Franco and his men fought to preserve did not survive into the second half of the 20th century. Monarchism and fascism are discredited today (even if Franco's relationship to both was complicated) and Christianity must present itself in as nonthreatening a manner as possible to avoid the left's ire
When I was in Catalonia I was shocked by just how much anarchocommunist propaganda was in the streets. If a combatant time traveled into modern Barcelona, he'd think the left had won outright.
One detail I appreciated in Oppenheimer was the commies still pledging loyalty to the Spanish Republic years after they had lost, they kept doing that up into the 60s (Burnham mentions it in Suicide of the West)
I hope as many people as possible read more about this time period, the parallels to today are far more striking than Weimar, even if it's less meme-worthy
In an American context(and I think its true for the rest of the Western world as well), the Right mostly doesn't care about culture. Its a chicken and egg problem but most conservatives view arts, culture, writing etc. as useless. Better go become a welder than a struggling artist. The welders do make decent money, its true, but the artist types write your society's story of itself.
The American Right is essentially nihilistic. It believes in nothing except the free market and economic enrichment. The conservatives who bleat about defending Western Civ are just grifting. This philistinism goes unnoticed because of the market-driven proletarianisation of our culture. The Left only values culture simply as a means of narrative management/indoctrination.
"What Franco and his men fought to preserve did not survive into the second half of the 20th century." It did survive. The Nationalists won.
- Anarchism is completely discredited in Spain. It's not a serious political movement but a fashionable graffiti subject for dumb teenagers, like you yourself observed in Barcelona.
- The endless fixation with "being European" has sunk to manageable and non dangerous levels.
- Private property and private enterprise are secure.
- Economic orthodoxy is rarely questioned (*).
- Catholic education is still widespread and the only threat it seems to face is the lack of priests.
- Even the monarchy was restored.
The only aspect of modern Spain that looks like a defeat of the Nationalist objectives to me is the triumph of regionalisms and the threat of a region (Catalonia most probably) breaking away from Spain.
(*) More of a post-war objective of the Francoist regime, but still.
The anarchist experiment in Barcelona that Orwell raved about early in the book had been eliminated by the communists by the time he returned from the front just a few months later.
Totalitarian Leftists will always defeat the Leftists who want personal liberty and freedom, worldwide.
Did the Left win? Hardly. The Left came into being with the French Revolution and defined itself as a political project for universal emancipation and the empowerment of the people (the working classes). By the 1970s this was all dying: the Left accepted the inevitability of capitalism and has been floundering ever since. The Left experienced a decisive, catastrophic, defeat in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall. This was compounded in 1991 with the Belovezh Accords that dissolved the USSR. Since then the skinsuit of the Left has been used for various purposes but mass mobilisation to alter class relations is no longer on the agenda.
IMO Basques dealt a bad hand. Good God-and-country nationalists but Castilian nationalists couldn't abide by them. My friend's (ex-) wife's Basque dad was once chastised by Spanish soldiers to "speak Christian"
To explain why that side felt and acted the way it did, because the other side's views and actions are already very well represented and understood thanks to them writing the histories of this conflict.
If people want a balanced view, I will write that as well.
To read Orwell's account, the Spanish civil war was a proxy war between fascism and communism. Franco was on Hitler's "side" and the resistance was backed by Stalin. The Spanish people were merely extras in a greater drama.
But Orwell is not a historian, and Franco stayed out of WW2, so the whole affair appears moot from a disinterested western perspective.
To be honest, I don't care how authoritarians feel. When a war or conflict ends, the people should expect their civil liberties to be restored. If they can't be restored because the people behave like cats in a burlap sack, there's no hope for that society.
Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia" is probably my favourite book that I have ever read, but yes, his analysis at the time as to the conflict left a lot out.
I remember the context, particularly the intervention by outside forces.
How can we say what the people of Spain wanted, when the opposing forces were being supplied by the USSR and Germany. Whoever got the edge in weaponry and training, won the war. That was the lesson I took from Homage to Catalonia.
Thanks Niccolo! I would love to see more of this. Spanish history is a favorite subject of mine.
I will add that the results of the election of 1933 - and the next election in 1936 - had a lot to do with the economic situation in Spain. By 1935 Spanish per capita income was still around 10% lower than what is had been in 1929, which partly explains the frustration of large parts of the Spanish population with the political parties of the republic. Especially considering that per capita income grew almost 30% during the 1920's.
Stanley Payne makes note of this, saying that the positive economic situation of the 1920s increased people's appetite for more change, and faster, rather than slowing them down.
Great research. But I couldn't get too far into the article. Kicking off with a quote from Hemingway put me off.
Hemingway in Spain was working for the Comintern. He was a recruited asset of the KGB.
In the USA, Hemingway willingly, and knowingly participated in numerous anti-American front organizations set up by the Comintern’s Willi Muenzenberg, and his operators.
The best example of Hemingway’s deep involvement with the Comintern was his KGB agent friend, Gustavo Duran. Duran, with Hemingway, and other willing accomplices in the US, was able to secure jobs in the US State Department. Hemingway insisted that the US government send Duran down to Cuba where Hemingway played drunken sub patrol games. Hemingway met Duran in the KGB-controlled Spanish Republican Army during the Spanish Civil War.
Duran was the head of the Spanish Comintern-puppet intelligence service in the sector in which Hemingway spent time. Hemingway fell for Duran, and became his life-long advocate. Anyone who was in the Spanish Civil War on the Republican side knew exactly what the Comintern/KGB involvement was. George Orwell lost his appetite for Socialism after his stint with the Comintern side in Spain.
Hemingway, on the other hand, imbibed the Comintern line and kept it going for the rest of his life.
Hemingway's status as a recruited agent for Comintern intel is not a secret, but it seems no one wants to deal with the reality of his being a traitor.
Duran's role is much less studied. I've dug up lots on Duran and Hemingway and will get it out some day soon.
Until then, thanks for your work on the Spanish Civil War.
Well yes, that was kind of the point of including Hemingway. I aim to discuss his role (and the roles of other celebrities during the conflict) later on.
We visited Hemingway's home in the Keys last year. I never really liked his writing all that much, and his fascination with communism leaves me flummoxed. Many of his contemporaries were the same; wealthy elites all. I look forward to a deeper explanation and insight. He certainly was a "man's" man.
Thank you for saying this. I actually came into the comments to write this myself. I read Hemingway as a child and loved his writing style but felt betrayed when I discovered he was coopted (if not working directly) for the NVKD. There's a great book called Hotel Florida that describes the hotel in Madrid that was always used by 'war tourists' or leftist journalists. The book describes how Martha Gellhorn, Hemingway, and 2 photographers were used by the NKVD for propaganda purposes to favorably present the socialists to westerners. The bigger takeaway that you leave with is how leftist war correspondents would actually take a tram to the battlefield for a few hours of work before socializing over dinner with extravagant dinners and drinks while cities were bombarded amid food shortages. The main characters are rewarded for their slanted coverage by seeing their careers take off with international fame and it really makes you disgusted with the journalist profession, if it hasn't done so already.
Hemingway was much, much worse than just those snippets, too. He was an arrogant faker (his entire persona was built on his being a "wounded war hero" from WW1--truth was that he was a candy-striper--making coffee and donuts for the soldiers, his mobile coffee truck was hit by some shrapnel from a stray shell and he got some in his leg.), status seeker.
The Spanish reviled him--there's a book that gathers recollections of the twit from Spaniards who knew him during his bull-fighting research and his Civil War days. None had a positive view.
He was recruited to work directly for the KGB--but, in espionage terms, he was a handling problem. They handled him with kid gloves. He was used for covert influence operations. Supporting the Soviet line in the Spanish Civil War was his main operational use.
In Cuba, he supported the Comintern agent, Gustavo Duran, by using his celebrity status to run interference for Duran--and helping Duran get a job in the US State Dept.
The FBI was on to Hemingway, and likely kept an eye on him.
The drunk twit was paranoid about the FBI, because he knew, of course, that he was guilty of espionage. He was put in a mental institution due to his paranoia, and later blew his silly brains all over his foyer, because he feared the consequences of his traitorous actions.
It's hilarious that Hemingway groupies say that he was "harassed" by the USG. He was anything but harassed--he was handled with kid gloves and undeserved reverence.
Lots more details, too.
That's why the opening quote here completely queers anything else that's there.
Sorry, I missed this comment. The best thing to do is to check out my footnotes as I'll be using around 50 sources or so throughout the series.
was going to write that this seems very similar to weimar republic....and there it is.
Hit the like button at the top or bottom of the page to like this essay. Use the share or restack buttons to share this across social media. Leave a comment if the mood strikes you to do so (be nice!).
As mentioned above, this essay was requested by someone with a large platform. I hope that you enjoy reading it. If you want me to continue telling the story of the Spanish Civil War in this way, please subscribe to my Substack to support my writing. I hope that you do because I really do want to continue writing this series.
I always view the Spanish Civil War as an excellent history lesson. Sometimes there are no good guys or bad guys to a conflict. Either side would take a center liberal and line them up against a wall. As far as I'm concerned, they didn't kill enough of each other.
Not for want of trying :)
Franco was still a complete nutjob. Too bad most of his superiors got themselves killed off in plane crashes (not a conspiracy or anything that happened all the time back then). This series is going to be a wild ride.
Strong disagree on Franco's mental state.
I mean he was a massive narcissist who literally thought he was an instrument of divine will and he had almost sociopathic tendencies towards his own troops in Morocco. He was no coward though. Officers signed up to fight in Morocco specifically because of the high attrition rate of senior officers there and the accompanying chance of promotion. Franco himself was almost killed himself with a bullet to the gut.
No he wasn’t
Perhaps Hemingway fits better in Fiesta. It seems premise is too simple for a complex matter, but also fitting a complex reasoning into a premade anti premise is also too simplistic
I loved this and would love to see more on the Spanish Civil War.
Glad you enjoyed it. Please do me a favour and share it/shill it with people that you know.
Bravo! As good a brief (but still not too brief) summary of these much-referred-to but often misused and abused series of events as any I have come accross.
And I found it valuable to see the Hemingway clip in this context. Why? I grew up stepping over bodies in '44-45, saw MKP (= communist) mobs acting like Chinese Maoists, and I also saw mobs lynching political-police thugs in 1956 Budapest.
"Be modest in nothing as much as in adoring humans gathered." I forgot which poet said it. (Perhaps Robinson Jeffers.)
I was in Budapest last February and visited the museum that commemorates the victims of 1956. I took pictures of all the faces on the outside of the building.
It is commonly known as Terror House, and it is located on the tree-lned section of Andrassy Boulevard, close to City Park.
Please continue this endeavor. The Spanish civil war is a fascinating subject. I re-read Orwell's Homage to Catalonia every few years.
Thanks!
"Not all republics are created equal, nor do they all perform at an equal level." Absolutely true. Unfortunately, your article doesn't explain why these Spanish "republics" failed, nor how they differed from the features that have made the United States so stable (though I could argue that we aren't so stable at the moment, but that's a different discussion.)
As the American founders argued, democracy is not what creates a republic. It's why it's drilled into American schoolchildren's heads that we aren't a democracy, but a republic. Our system is created to allow for democracy at the local and state levels, but the radicalism that goes hand in hand with democracy is supposed to be mitigated by the checks and balances inherent in a truly republican system. At the federal level, at the state level, between the state and federal level, there are processes that slow down and push back against democracy to assure that we don't tear ourselves apart. Alas, as the US has become more "democratic" (doing away with state legislatures selecting Senators and federal regulatory agencies overreach into state governance are two examples, but also with the current ill-considered obsession with doing way with the Electoral College) the government has become increasingly unstable.
While I loved reading about the history of the fall after fall of so-called republics, I would have loved some insight into why they fell. I suspect too much democracy unchecked by republican features like the rule of law, but you didn't deal with it. Thank you for what you did provide, however. I enjoyed it immensely.
Ed, you seem a bit worked up.
Hi Lela!
"Unfortunately, your article doesn't explain why these Spanish "republics" failed"
This essay isn't the whole story, and I will be getting to why it failed in upcoming entries.
Thanks. I'll look for them.
As John Adams noted; A religious and moral people is required.
This was great. Thank you for writing! Stanley Payne is the best, his bio of Franco is also terrific
If I can get enough interest to continue this series, you'll be seeing a whole lot of other sources.
I really enjoyed your essay and look forward to more on this subject!
Glad you enjoyed it~
I have a stack of Stanley Payne books and have only read 1.5 of them, but man is he good
While the left temporarily lost in Spain, if you zoom out on a global scale, the left won. It's not the Spanish left who wrote the history, it's the international left. What Franco and his men fought to preserve did not survive into the second half of the 20th century. Monarchism and fascism are discredited today (even if Franco's relationship to both was complicated) and Christianity must present itself in as nonthreatening a manner as possible to avoid the left's ire
When I was in Catalonia I was shocked by just how much anarchocommunist propaganda was in the streets. If a combatant time traveled into modern Barcelona, he'd think the left had won outright.
One detail I appreciated in Oppenheimer was the commies still pledging loyalty to the Spanish Republic years after they had lost, they kept doing that up into the 60s (Burnham mentions it in Suicide of the West)
I hope as many people as possible read more about this time period, the parallels to today are far more striking than Weimar, even if it's less meme-worthy
Barcelona is a very, very leftist city, and it proudly flies the flag(s).
No doubt as to why Barcelona is the sexual deviancy capital of Europe.
In an American context(and I think its true for the rest of the Western world as well), the Right mostly doesn't care about culture. Its a chicken and egg problem but most conservatives view arts, culture, writing etc. as useless. Better go become a welder than a struggling artist. The welders do make decent money, its true, but the artist types write your society's story of itself.
The American Right is essentially nihilistic. It believes in nothing except the free market and economic enrichment. The conservatives who bleat about defending Western Civ are just grifting. This philistinism goes unnoticed because of the market-driven proletarianisation of our culture. The Left only values culture simply as a means of narrative management/indoctrination.
"What Franco and his men fought to preserve did not survive into the second half of the 20th century." It did survive. The Nationalists won.
- Anarchism is completely discredited in Spain. It's not a serious political movement but a fashionable graffiti subject for dumb teenagers, like you yourself observed in Barcelona.
- The endless fixation with "being European" has sunk to manageable and non dangerous levels.
- Private property and private enterprise are secure.
- Economic orthodoxy is rarely questioned (*).
- Catholic education is still widespread and the only threat it seems to face is the lack of priests.
- Even the monarchy was restored.
The only aspect of modern Spain that looks like a defeat of the Nationalist objectives to me is the triumph of regionalisms and the threat of a region (Catalonia most probably) breaking away from Spain.
(*) More of a post-war objective of the Francoist regime, but still.
The Anarchists didn't 'win', the totalitarian communists did.
What makes you say that?
And also, do you mean they won in Spain or they won in the world at large?
The anarchist experiment in Barcelona that Orwell raved about early in the book had been eliminated by the communists by the time he returned from the front just a few months later.
Totalitarian Leftists will always defeat the Leftists who want personal liberty and freedom, worldwide.
Did the Left win? Hardly. The Left came into being with the French Revolution and defined itself as a political project for universal emancipation and the empowerment of the people (the working classes). By the 1970s this was all dying: the Left accepted the inevitability of capitalism and has been floundering ever since. The Left experienced a decisive, catastrophic, defeat in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall. This was compounded in 1991 with the Belovezh Accords that dissolved the USSR. Since then the skinsuit of the Left has been used for various purposes but mass mobilisation to alter class relations is no longer on the agenda.
It sort of amuses me that "Republicans" and "Nationalists" are antonyms in the Spanish Civil War context but synonyms in the Northern Ireland context.
There was actually a short-lived party called the Monarchist-Republican Party in Basque country during the early Second Spanish Republic.
IMO Basques dealt a bad hand. Good God-and-country nationalists but Castilian nationalists couldn't abide by them. My friend's (ex-) wife's Basque dad was once chastised by Spanish soldiers to "speak Christian"
So someone asked you a question and you decided to answer it by presenting only one side of the story. What purpose is served by that?
To explain why that side felt and acted the way it did, because the other side's views and actions are already very well represented and understood thanks to them writing the histories of this conflict.
If people want a balanced view, I will write that as well.
To read Orwell's account, the Spanish civil war was a proxy war between fascism and communism. Franco was on Hitler's "side" and the resistance was backed by Stalin. The Spanish people were merely extras in a greater drama.
But Orwell is not a historian, and Franco stayed out of WW2, so the whole affair appears moot from a disinterested western perspective.
To be honest, I don't care how authoritarians feel. When a war or conflict ends, the people should expect their civil liberties to be restored. If they can't be restored because the people behave like cats in a burlap sack, there's no hope for that society.
Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia" is probably my favourite book that I have ever read, but yes, his analysis at the time as to the conflict left a lot out.
It's important to remember the context of Homage to Catalonia:
It was published in 1938 while the war was ongoing and details his personal experiences, so it can't treated as a historical survey of the war.
Furthermore, Orwell was only in Spain for about six months and saw a limited slice of the conflict.
Read for what it is it's an enlightening personal account with important lessons for us today.
I remember the context, particularly the intervention by outside forces.
How can we say what the people of Spain wanted, when the opposing forces were being supplied by the USSR and Germany. Whoever got the edge in weaponry and training, won the war. That was the lesson I took from Homage to Catalonia.
Unity of command as well. The nationalists had it, the republican side ended up fighting amongst themselves.
That was my takeaway from Ode, a civil war within a civil war.
Thanks Niccolo! I would love to see more of this. Spanish history is a favorite subject of mine.
I will add that the results of the election of 1933 - and the next election in 1936 - had a lot to do with the economic situation in Spain. By 1935 Spanish per capita income was still around 10% lower than what is had been in 1929, which partly explains the frustration of large parts of the Spanish population with the political parties of the republic. Especially considering that per capita income grew almost 30% during the 1920's.
Stanley Payne makes note of this, saying that the positive economic situation of the 1920s increased people's appetite for more change, and faster, rather than slowing them down.
Great research. But I couldn't get too far into the article. Kicking off with a quote from Hemingway put me off.
Hemingway in Spain was working for the Comintern. He was a recruited asset of the KGB.
In the USA, Hemingway willingly, and knowingly participated in numerous anti-American front organizations set up by the Comintern’s Willi Muenzenberg, and his operators.
The best example of Hemingway’s deep involvement with the Comintern was his KGB agent friend, Gustavo Duran. Duran, with Hemingway, and other willing accomplices in the US, was able to secure jobs in the US State Department. Hemingway insisted that the US government send Duran down to Cuba where Hemingway played drunken sub patrol games. Hemingway met Duran in the KGB-controlled Spanish Republican Army during the Spanish Civil War.
Duran was the head of the Spanish Comintern-puppet intelligence service in the sector in which Hemingway spent time. Hemingway fell for Duran, and became his life-long advocate. Anyone who was in the Spanish Civil War on the Republican side knew exactly what the Comintern/KGB involvement was. George Orwell lost his appetite for Socialism after his stint with the Comintern side in Spain.
Hemingway, on the other hand, imbibed the Comintern line and kept it going for the rest of his life.
Hemingway's status as a recruited agent for Comintern intel is not a secret, but it seems no one wants to deal with the reality of his being a traitor.
Duran's role is much less studied. I've dug up lots on Duran and Hemingway and will get it out some day soon.
Until then, thanks for your work on the Spanish Civil War.
Well yes, that was kind of the point of including Hemingway. I aim to discuss his role (and the roles of other celebrities during the conflict) later on.
Might make sense, then, to label his quote: "Ernest Hemingway (recruited asset of the Communist intelligence services)"
I dare say that the vast majority of Americans do not know that Hemingway was an agent of communist intelligence.
I will be getting to that in due time. I'd rather not ruin that bit by blurting it out immediately.
Public education is a wonderful thing. One might be forgiven for thinking there was a plan.
We visited Hemingway's home in the Keys last year. I never really liked his writing all that much, and his fascination with communism leaves me flummoxed. Many of his contemporaries were the same; wealthy elites all. I look forward to a deeper explanation and insight. He certainly was a "man's" man.
"He certainly was a "man's" man."
If by "man's man" you mean a nasty, arrogant, traitorous, drunken fraud, then he sure was!
Precisely. That is why the quotes. He cared about three things: drinking, fishing and himslef. Only another man just like him could have liked him.
Thank you for saying this. I actually came into the comments to write this myself. I read Hemingway as a child and loved his writing style but felt betrayed when I discovered he was coopted (if not working directly) for the NVKD. There's a great book called Hotel Florida that describes the hotel in Madrid that was always used by 'war tourists' or leftist journalists. The book describes how Martha Gellhorn, Hemingway, and 2 photographers were used by the NKVD for propaganda purposes to favorably present the socialists to westerners. The bigger takeaway that you leave with is how leftist war correspondents would actually take a tram to the battlefield for a few hours of work before socializing over dinner with extravagant dinners and drinks while cities were bombarded amid food shortages. The main characters are rewarded for their slanted coverage by seeing their careers take off with international fame and it really makes you disgusted with the journalist profession, if it hasn't done so already.
Yep.
Hemingway was much, much worse than just those snippets, too. He was an arrogant faker (his entire persona was built on his being a "wounded war hero" from WW1--truth was that he was a candy-striper--making coffee and donuts for the soldiers, his mobile coffee truck was hit by some shrapnel from a stray shell and he got some in his leg.), status seeker.
The Spanish reviled him--there's a book that gathers recollections of the twit from Spaniards who knew him during his bull-fighting research and his Civil War days. None had a positive view.
He was recruited to work directly for the KGB--but, in espionage terms, he was a handling problem. They handled him with kid gloves. He was used for covert influence operations. Supporting the Soviet line in the Spanish Civil War was his main operational use.
In Cuba, he supported the Comintern agent, Gustavo Duran, by using his celebrity status to run interference for Duran--and helping Duran get a job in the US State Dept.
The FBI was on to Hemingway, and likely kept an eye on him.
The drunk twit was paranoid about the FBI, because he knew, of course, that he was guilty of espionage. He was put in a mental institution due to his paranoia, and later blew his silly brains all over his foyer, because he feared the consequences of his traitorous actions.
It's hilarious that Hemingway groupies say that he was "harassed" by the USG. He was anything but harassed--he was handled with kid gloves and undeserved reverence.
Lots more details, too.
That's why the opening quote here completely queers anything else that's there.