The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> Fresh claim over the role the FBI played in suicide of Ernest Hemingway

Fresh claim over the role the FBI played in suicide of Ernest Hemingway
Posted by Marcello (Guest) - Tuesday, July 5 2011, 15:43:25 (UTC)
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Last week I posted a piece by renowned filmmaker and activist, Saul Landau, about Cuba. Somewhere toward the end of the article Landau writes about how the State Department began harassing writer Ernest Hemingway for his links to Cuba. I commented that one wonders if Hemingway was driven to suicide because of the spying and the threats from Hoover's agents - afterall, he was in solidarity with the Spanish Anarchists during the Spanish Civil War - as was George Orwell and Picasso - and he welcomed the Cuban Revolution in an evironment of fear and paranoia. Well, finally one of his friends has spoken out...






Fresh claim over role the FBI played in suicide of Ernest Hemingway. Friend reveals regret for dismissing writer's fear that he was being targeted by J Edgar Hoover



Peter Beaumont The Observer, Sunday 3 July 2011 Article history

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jul/03/fbi-and-ernest-hemingway


For five decades, literary journalists, psychologists and biographers have tried to unravel why Ernest Hemingway took his own life, shooting himself at his Idaho home while his wife Mary slept.

Some have blamed growing depression over the realisation that the best days of his writing career had come to an end. Others said he was suffering from a personality disorder.

Now, however, Hemingway's friend and collaborator over the last 13 years of his life has suggested another contributing factor, previously dismissed as a paranoid delusion of the Nobel prize-winning writer. It is that Hemingway was aware of his long surveillance by J Edgar Hoover's FBI, who were suspicious of his links with Cuba, and that this may have helped push him to the brink.

Writing in the New York Times on the 50th anniversary of Hemingway's death, AE Hotchner, author of Papa Hemingway and Hemingway and His World, said he believed that the FBI's surveillance "substantially contributed to his anguish and his suicide", adding that he had "regretfully misjudged" his friend's fear of the organisation.

The reassessment is significant as it was precisely because of Papa Hemingway that the writer's fear of being bugged and followed by the FBI first surfaced. Hotchner's belated change of heart casts a new light on the last few months of Hemingway's life and two incidents in particular.

In November 1960, Hotchner writes, he had gone to visit Hemingway and Mary in Ketchum, Idaho, for an annual pheasant shoot. Hemingway was behaving oddly, Hotchner recalls: "When Ernest and our friend Duke MacMullen met my train at Shoshone, Idaho, for the drive to Ketchum, we did not stop at the bar opposite the station as we usually did because Ernest was anxious to get on the road. I asked why the hurry. 'The Feds.'

"'What?'

"'They tailed us all the way. Ask Duke.'

"'Well... there was a car back of us out of Hailey.'

"'Why are FBI agents pursuing you?' I asked.

"'It's the worst hell. The goddamnedest hell. They've bugged everything. That's why we're using Duke's car. Mine's bugged. Everything's bugged. Can't use the phone. Mail intercepted.'

"We rode for miles in silence. As we turned into Ketchum, Ernest said quietly: 'Duke, pull over. Cut your lights.' He peered across the street at a bank. Two men were working inside. 'What is it?' I asked. 'Auditors. The FBI's got them going over my account.'

"'But how do you know?'

"'Why would two auditors be working in the middle of the night? Of course it's my account'."

It would not be the only time during this visit that Hemingway would complain about being under FBI surveillance. On the last day of Hotchner's visit, at dinner with the writer and his wife, Hemingway pointed out two men at the bar who he identified as "FBI agents".

With the two incidents immediately preceding Hemingway's hospitilisation at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, where he received electric shock therapy, and several unsuccessful suicide attempts that followed his release, most have written off Hemingway's complaints about the FBI as largely delusional.

In the 1980s, however, Hemingway's FBI file was released following a Freedom of Information request by Jeffrey Myers, an academic then at the University of Colorado. The file demonstrated a keen interest in Hemingway, including his wartime attempts to set up an anti-fascist spy network called the Crook Factory, and the interest persisted until he entered the Mayo Clinic in 1960.

Indeed, in January 1961, the special agent tasked with following him dutifully reported to Hoover in January of 1961 that Hemingway "was physically and mentally ill".

That file, running to more than 120 pages, 15 of them largely blacked out for national security reasons, also demonstrates quite how close an interest Hoover and his organisation took in Hemingway. It is reassessing the revelations contained in this file that prompted Hotchner to voice his regret that he had not taken Hemingway's complaints more seriously – or considered the potential impact that such surveillance might have had on a man entering a period of mental illness.



FBI · United States
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9 Jun 2011

Isabella's Garden by Glenda Millard and Rebecca Cool - review

26 Jun 2011

Hem and us

31 Jul 2006

Claws out over Hemingway's six-toed cats

7 Jan 2009

From Kansas City to the frontline

28 Sep 2004

A load of old bull? 'New' Hemingway story may stay unpublished
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Latest 1 2 Next All XenAJD
3 July 2011 12:34AM
gg fbi

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| Link VeronikaLarsson
3 July 2011 1:00AM
America is a fascist police state, worse now than it was 50 years ago.

Hemingway is my favourite author of all time.

Seems apropos on the 50th anniversary of his suicide to quote the Great Writer himself:

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.

Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, 1929
US author & journalist (1899 - 1961)

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| Link NasrallahsNightmare
3 July 2011 1:09AM
veronika is very insightful.

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| Link Mackname
3 July 2011 2:13AM
Let us not forget that in those days, people and states were both paranoid.

Moreover, at the same time the treatment of schizophrenic patients were involved heavily based on electroconvulsive therapy and administrating so many hallucinating drugs which would made the patients much more confused and suicidal.

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| Link Bix2bop
3 July 2011 2:46AM
The "beautiful book about Paris" mentioned by A.E. Hotchner in yesterday's NY Times opinion pages is Hemingway's posthumously-published memoir, A Moveable Feast. Two weeks ago, the Guardian reviewed the 2009 "restored edition" of that book without any mention at all of any controversy surrounding its publication, particularly the objections raised by the same A.E. Hotchner in a NY Times opinion piece titled "Don't Touch a Moveable Feast." Now you've hired an award-winning political reporter to regurgitate the latest Hotchner piece and reduce it to politics.

This is just another example of British amusement at American culture, which you don't take seriously. Instead of hiring Clancy Sigal to turn everyone off to Hemy forever, why don't get John Mullan or Robert McCrum to write about him?

It looks Hotchner has written just more books about Hemingway than the two mentioned here. How does "Dear Papa, Dear Hotch" (a.k.a. the "Hemhotch Letters") grab you?

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| Link renataivona
3 July 2011 3:42AM
The FBI probably caused his illness.
You are not paranoid about being followed
if you are actually being followed.

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| Link horacemanoor
3 July 2011 3:49AM
j edgar hoover was a babe in the woods compared to g w bush & to bush lite [aka obama]

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| Link Radioman390
3 July 2011 4:00AM
Hemingway's paranoia was justified, but more significantly, "Criminal Minds" the gory TV series of an FBI Criminal Profiling team is headed by an "Aaron Hotchner" which is eerily similar to Hemingway's biographer's name "A.E. Hotchner". The TV series began in 2005 and is heading into its seventh season in the US.

It's almost as if J. E. Hoover was taunting the Hemingway legacy. And sending a warning to modern-day literary types.

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| Link Oldgitom
3 July 2011 5:04AM
Our very wonderful secret policemen use the same methods as their colleagues in the old communism regimes, albeit less brutal. As Vaclav Havel observed, under communism, citizens could easily identify their spook minders. They were not 'secret'. They could stand for hours outside your apartment, watching. No, the very idea was to induce fear & paranoia, mental attrition. That's what that disgusting old cockroach Hoover was up to.

War on terror is the operation to convince us that secret policemen protect democracy.. OGT

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| Link Kitten69
3 July 2011 5:20AM
Looks like our cousins have taken a leaf out of the UK GOVs viral suspicion of "socialists and communists" - or is it the other way round?

The SS, the Stazi and KGB would have thought they were in heaven seeing the current state of state snooping in modern Britain.

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| Link Mackname
3 July 2011 5:21AM
Some information about schizophrenia

‘Paranoid’ delusionsThese are ideas that make you feel persecuted or harassed. They may be:
 unusual – it feels as though MI5 or the government is spying on you. You may think that others are influencing you with special powers or technology.
 everyday - you start to believe your partner is unfaithful. You are convinvinced by odd details that seem to have nothing to do with sex or not being faithful. Other people can't see the connection.
 upsetting – feeling persecuted is obviously upsetting for you. It can also be distressing for the people you see as your persecutors, especially if they are close to you, like your family.


Extract from:

http://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/mentalhealthinfoforall/problems/schizophrenia/schizophrenia.aspx

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| Link asterixorb
3 July 2011 5:23AM
Hemingway sounds a bit like a paranoid schizophrenic to me, regarding his breakdown.
The FBI had surveillance on just about anyone who was, for whatever reason, famous, whether in high or low culture.
It was a very paranoid time all round in America,

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| Link OnlyJustWilliam
3 July 2011 5:58AM
Hands up who remembers what Tricky Dicky said?

"He [J. E. Hoover] had a file on everybody"
from the Nixon tapes in a conversation relating to blackmail

Hoover was blackmailing everything that moved. He got a dose of his own medicine when his transvestism was leaked. There's a lesson in there: those who live in glass houses should get changed into women's clothing in the basement!

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| Link nzgeezer
3 July 2011 6:31AM
"just because you're paranoid, don't mean they're not after you"

Kurt Cobain

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| Link Mockingbird2
3 July 2011 6:50AM
I would say that spying on people is worse in America (and the world) today than it was in Hemingway’s day. In Hemingway's day it was very crude and amateurish, today its a lot more sophisticated. Also, Hemingway was a great soul who believed in freedom, that he was being spied on by his fellow Americans must have come as a great shock. Now that our telephone conversations and internet activity are being monitored on a daily basis this is accepted as the necessary price for the BIG LIE the war on terrorism, in reality, a governments war on its people. With NATO and America now waging constant war on Third World countries who happen to have oil, this control has, and will get more paranoid. You don't challenge the Empire even if you are a Hemingway. By killing himself someone in the FBI probably said: saves us the job.

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| Link KhusroK
3 July 2011 7:33AM
The United States with its mafias, its Columbines and Unabombers, its FBI and CIA, its neocons and ku klux klans, its desire to invade other countries for resources that can be transacted through markets and to kill for these resources, its flag fluttering during daylight from multitude of mid-west homes and its July 4 barbecues, is a society with a deep sickness at its heart. These guys, living in the "home of the brave and the free", as they claim, need professional psychiatric help.

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| Link CanadianWhoGotLost
3 July 2011 7:48AM
All electronic communication is monitored. Or at least filtered for monitoring. The easiest being communication via the Internet. All your google/search engine searches might be archived somewhere. The Internet makes it possible to create a detailed portrait of the inner life and private thoughts of the user. Going on the Internet is almost like going to confession. Using a phone, too. There is a lot to be said for a life "unplugged".

Still, I'm not paranoid. I found the novel 1984 to be very disturbing; so, I don't know how I got so comfortable with the current state of affairs. It certainly foments paranoia.

Sounds like the virtue of "privacy" is losing its meaning for all of us. Time to "revive" it?

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| Link CaptainMidnite
3 July 2011 8:00AM
Veronika said

"America is a fascist police state, worse now than it was 50 years ago."

Bull.
50 years ago North America had a thing called COINTELPRO.
Some of the accusations levelled against the FBI at the time went far beyond people being watched.
-Fred Hampton was shot in bed, in a rain of bullets.
-How many Black Panthers ended up murdered or imprisoned?
-Huey Newton morphed from a revolutionary into a drug addicted paranoid semi-celebrity, and it seems US agents played their part in that.
-The FBI was accused of flooding black inner cities with crack.
-The American Indian Movement had its Wounded Knee massacre, and afterwards individual members were assaulted, assassinated, even had their hand cut off so agents could take fingerprints without having to move the body, according to Mary Crow Dog's autobiography.

Some of these accusations (Wounded Knee) are doubtlessly true, since the FBI's role in it was never in doubt. As for the rest, if only half of these accusations are true, it would seem that modern efforts made by the FBI are rather mild in comparison to what went down in the 60s and 70s.

But the most relevant point is this:

People are knowingly and willingly putting their own photos on-line, posting their videos on Youtube, sharing their thoughts on blogs, on comments sections as I am doing now, shopping on-line, booking their trips on-line, etc.

We are willingly giving up our own private images and thoughts, exposing our purchases, reading interests, travels, etc. And you want to complain about living in a Police State?

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| Link CanadianWhoGotLost
3 July 2011 8:05AM
There's material for a novel in the FBI-spying-on-author situation of the '40s to '60s. I read some of the declassified reports by the unfortunate FBI agent who was ordered to sit through some of the later Ezra Pound poetry readings and lectures. The agent's account of the colourful E.P. speeches and his grasp of the literary content was very very funny. (Yes, I realize not everyone will find that amusing).

Andrei Bitov has a good scene in his novel The Monkey Link where two dissident authors are comparing the sizes of their KGB surveillance teams. "What, just one guy, and not even outside your apt. all night? They must think you're small fry" Or something like that.

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| Link completemonsterbob
3 July 2011 8:14AM
Big up @ VeronikaLarsson

Knowing that I (we/all of us) are being watched, tracked, "followed" a few of us drop the occasional key word of phrase into communications to set the auto-recording in motion. Then go back to complaining about the price of everything. That gives the silly buggers doing the watching/listening more crap to wade through.

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| Link CanadianWhoGotLost
3 July 2011 8:50AM
Since I didn't say it before:
I feel for Hemingway.

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| Link torotorotoro
3 July 2011 9:14AM
he was by all accounts quite depressive from an early age, the fact that he liked a drink, loved guns and couldn't handle his fading strength and talent makes sense to me.

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| Link mackandal
3 July 2011 9:28AM
Surely a shame that EH had to blow his head off, and even more so at the behest of the FBI. But if they'd thought about it--or if they'd read his work--it would have been hard for him to be a real communist, or anti-fascist of any kind. Hemingway's problems with American others--particularly blacks--made him so quintessentially American that it'd be hard to conceive him as anything else. Maybe the spooks thought that ole EH would do their spook-work not only for them, but better.

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| Link baptox
3 July 2011 9:32AM
What I, an American citizen, would like to know is...why are there fifteen pages of blacked-out material in Hemingway's file? After fifty years, what possible threat to national security could this information pose to our government?
Answer: None. What is blacked out is information that our government does not want the public to know about the surveillance and harassment of one of it's most famous and beloved citizens.

I doubt that the FBI's surveillance was the cause of Hemingway's suicidal behavior but they most probably fueled the paranoia he experienced and contributed to his suffering and distress. Most likely Hemingway suffered from post traumatic stress disorder as a consequence of having been exposed to multiple battlefields and having been injured repeatedly.

What should be learned by this? We should all be wary of government and more vigilant in protesting the abuse of power perpetrated by the American government now more than ever. Our American "Justice Department" has just ruled that almost none of those responsible for covert torture carried out in our "War on Terror" campaign will be held responsible for their actions.

One has to wonder how this perverted decision must look to other fledgling democracies. We are no different than any other horrific thugocracy when we allow the torture of others.

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| Link TerryE
3 July 2011 9:34AM
WHAT WAS -WAS NOT (For Hemingway)
Terry E. Lockett

“Do you suppose you could ask Edgar's boys to stop stepping on my heels? It's getting tiresome." John Steinbeck to Attorney General Francis Biddle

Weak from that last crash
with bloated botas for kidneys, heart on high throttle
ears roaring from the torrent in his veins.
In the end, they circled him
like jackals-
the critics. the FBI, the shrinks.
That sense- that delivered him from
combat, plane wrecks, bush fires
made him certain they were.
But others-
said his mind a traitor;
took him to Mayo
where he was told what was- was not.
They gave him the same RX as a slaughterhouse pig-
Scold's bridle of wires, bed for a rack
36 rounds of high voltage to brain.
His mind capable of recalling
the most minute of details,
the texture of fishing rods,
iridescence of a grasshopper's belly
riddled with holes now
dying.
Pals told him
He could still-fish
still-hunt
but he was done with it,
no point in breathing.
It wasn't the hunt, women,
wars, bulls or streams-
it was the writing of them.
So, on that Sunday Morning,
when all else had failed
it was will- that remained true;
carried his bulk downstairs
unlocked the gun case-raised a 12 gauge to his brow
and squeezed the trigger.
His wife claimed it was an accident. The newspapers
claimed the apple didn't fall far from the tree, and the
Feds had no need to slip the obit. in his file

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| Link RobertB
3 July 2011 9:51AM
Apparently, in the 20's Ernest Hemmingway went off with Legs Diamond's girlfriend. So, Legs took out a contract on Hemmingway. Fortunately, for Ernest Hemmingway, Legs Diamond was gunned down in a cheap motel before the hit could be carried out.

It would be weird if the FBI had saved Hemmingway in the 20's by offing Legs Diamond only to kill him in the 60's.

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| Link ahmetepic
3 July 2011 10:37AM
If Hemingway had been alive today, he probably would have become a TV celebrity or an anchorman, embedded into a giant multinational trust, pretending to be a liberal commentator on world affairs. He would have also chair a TV serial on the side lines, such as "ocean fishing" or "fast track" and turning out books on "How To Become a Hemingway". He would also have a website, a blog and "Hemingway on Facebook and Twitter" accounts... He would have been so busy with himself that, he would have no time becoming a scizoid. Since schizophrenia very much belonged to a time, when the written or the printed word was the most concrete proof of reality. Now that "print" has gone out of the picture, there isn't anybody like Hemingway around, who comprehend life as a written form, much like a novel. There is actually no need for them either. "Reality" now is not something that is written but something electonic, something visual and something fleeting. Todays "writers" can best hope to turn out "film scripts" at best, after having gained insight into writing at "creative writing courses". " For Whom The Bells Toll" in e book format! What a joke!..

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| Link Bestboytoo
3 July 2011 10:53AM
Good call ahmetepic. But I won't start on the 'writers' we must endure now; I'll end up going ballistic.

I endured (not by official attack-dogs) stalking, torment and abuse by four sociopaths in my life (yeah, yeah, I know, I know, I must be a magnet for crazies). I know the feeling of sliding imperceptably towards imbalance, abberance/craziness.

Hoover did it to John Lennon and others so it's not suprizing that his friend should say this.
Tragically, murder is a currency all to cheap and common in our midst.

And I'd like to interview Chapman to find out who it was that was handling him before he killed Lennon.

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| Link TrowbridgeHFord
3 July 2011 10:54AM
Seems to me that this says more about Hotchner than Hemmingway, and it isn't the least bit complimentary - i.e., Hotchner only came to believe the gifted, pursued writer after he had committed suicide. And there is too much stuff about the Bureau not engaging in such witch hunts now.

I say this with a lot of personal experience - the FBI was pursuing me when I left the States permanently in 1989, and it recently resorted to trying to entrap me as Colleen LaRose's aka 'Jihad Jane's Islamic assassin of Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks after Panetta's CIA had been stopped in its illegal effort to hunt me down here in Sweden in Febuary 2009.

In the interim, I had repeatedly complained to those I knew, and in efforts I wrote that I too was the object of a Washington witch hunt, but no private individual, like Hotchner, believed me. It was just all my mental illness and paranoid fears.

Fortunately, the Swedish Security Service aka Säpo was sufficiently suspicious of my efforts that it had me under surveillance, and discovered the two
Rambo operatives hunting me down, forcing them to leave the country. Then its efforts, assisting the Bureau, failed when I declined to join 'Jihad Jane's assassination efforts.

Perhaps, after I am truly gone, John Young of cryptome.org can provide your readers of what I and he thought about the whole process when it was occurring.

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| Link fishandart
3 July 2011 11:26AM
I think the literature taken as a whole suggests that there were a lot of factors that led up to the suicide. In my opinion the most important factor was the pain and discomfort of his worsening health problems and his unhappiness with himself as an individual, particularly his growing sense of guilt about his behaviour within the key relationships of his life. Emotional guilt and physical pain are not easy things to endure. I think the irritation with the FBI would have been trivial by comparison.

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| Link mickstephenson
3 July 2011 12:03PM
@TrowbridgeHFord - Care to elaborate on how you became the target of the FBI's interest in the first place?

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| Link oldworkboots
3 July 2011 12:36PM
America is a fascist police state, worse now than it was 50 years ago.

Hemingway is my favourite author of all time.

This could be two superb opening lines to the worst book ever written.

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| Link TrowbridgeHFord
3 July 2011 1:05PM
Happy to, michstephenson.

When I was an associate professor of politics at Holy Cross College, I got engaged in researching, writing, and talking about the US government, covert conspiracy which assassinated JFK - what not only elicited the interest of Congressman Henry Gonzalez but also the Bureau. While he was helping get support for a new investigation of not only it but also that of MLK, thanks to a four-page, single-spaced outline of the Dallas assassination I provided him upon request, the Bureau started doing an increasingly broad investigation of me.

While the belated House inquiries never really got anywhere because of the opposition to Chief Investigator Richard Sprague wanting the leading suspects to undergo lie detectors tests during its inquiries - what led not only to his forced resignation but that of Gonzalez himself - Jonathan Vankin, co-author of The 60 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time became interested enough in my research that he came up to Ridgefield, CT to interview me about it after I had forced my early retirement from Holy Cross because it was just becoming a recruiter of junior officers for America's warfare state.

During the interview, he was so dubious of my claim that I was under increasing Bureau probing that he asked if I would agree to an FOI request about its alleged dealings with me - what I, of course, agreed to.

Ultimately, the Brueau provided all the agency checks it had made on me, adding that it had a big folder of more secret information pertaining to me which it would only release under a court order which either he or me had to obtain.

I, of course, did not want to pursue the matter further, and don't know what he really he did about it, though I did note my contribution of help in the acknowledgements for the book, and he did write an article which expanded a bit upon my theory about the Dallas conspiracy.

I just decided to leave the Rambo state permanently then in September 1989.

Feel free to pursue the matter more with Vankin if you want.

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| Link QueenVictoriaII
3 July 2011 1:31PM
Still happen in this day and age. And this country...
Just different corrupt institutions (e.g. NewsCorp) and different targets (e.g. Paul Gascoigne).
Link from The Independent.

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| Link nattybumpo
3 July 2011 1:33PM
And of course just commenting on this article will mean that your email address will be flagged by the C.I.A.. Seriously, they're more paranoid about what their friends are up to than their enemies.
They can always defeat an enemy but they never want to lose a best friend!
Who would have thought that George Bush and Tony Blair would become such an item...........

If you're bugging my phone chaps I'm just about to call my sister and as for my movements, a little light shopping and then the tennis.......

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| Link nattybumpo
3 July 2011 1:35PM
...and what about Jean Seburg...
She killed herself when the CIA wouldn't leaver her alone!

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| Link Jantar
3 July 2011 1:48PM
I'm surprised no-one's mentioned 'The Crook Factory', Dan Simmons's excellent historical novel about Hemingway's war time adventures on Cuba. The book also deals with the FBI story.

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| Link iona1933
3 July 2011 1:54PM
There is no doubt that J. Edgar Hoover was a despicable bastard.

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| Link TrowbridgeHFord
3 July 2011 2:24PM
Still think that the best point of the story is: how can a person be driven to suicide by the process?

It just wares you down - makes one wonder why continue living if it just deprives you of reputation, opportunities, and associates while you attempt to do what you want, or see as necessary. And it just becomes more dangerous if you continue to act as the authorities will just take more lethal means to silence you.

I certainly experienced this, especially after I left the States for Portugal. While I thought I had simply disappeared from their radar screen, I had become a bigger target - one where they acted upon the lie that I had been behind the destruction of President Nixon, planted stories in the States and in Portugal that I was either to be killed by his supporters or by myself because of my loss of credibility and reputation for having continued my efforts, and then resorted to killing me by minute ingestions of some kind of poison when I had dinner periodically in a restaurant in Caldas da Rainha.

Fortunately, I had a good enough cardio-vascular system to survive the attacks, and was never tempted to finish the job while I was experiencing them or recovering from them. Think it was most helpful that I never had weapons around to do it for them when I was most likely to pull the plug. And I really had no idea of what was being attempted when it was most likely to have succeeded,

To survive the growing threats, in sum, one needs a good mind, body, and a lot of luck.

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| Link nattybumpo
3 July 2011 2:39PM
Sorry. It was the F.B.I. that made up a false story about Jean Seberg's personal life and had it published in Newsweek magazine; not the C.I.A..
They also had her blacklisted in Hollywood and she went on to kill herself in Paris!
Her crime? She supported the civil rights movement!
You can find all the facts online............
Please do?

" The Land Of The Free"... ???

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| Link VeronikaLarsson
3 July 2011 3:47PM
I rather suspect the redacted ("blacked out") 15 pages in Hemingway's files have to do with his wartime counterespionage activities.

Hemingway comes from a family with a history of suicide and depression. His alcoholism, treatment for depression via electroshock therapy, poor health from years of alcohol abuse and two near-fatal plane crashes in Africa, plus being hounded by the FBI, all must have preyed upon his mind.

According to my friend Carl Eby, who is one of the world's foremost Hemingway scholars, the primary factor in Hemingway's suicide was the ECT (electroconvulsive therapy) treatment he received at Menninger Clinic for his depression. The ECT caused memory loss and made Hemingway unable to write: "They took away my tools" was his final lament.

It's not a wonder Hemingway committed self-destruction. It's a wonder Hemingway lived as long as he did.

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| Link mickstephenson
3 July 2011 4:04PM
@TrowbridgeHFord, Surely merely espousing conspiracy theory's about JFK assassination alone would not be enough to create that level of FBI attention, there were no doubt thousands more voices out there speaking of a conspiracy surrounding JFK's assassination. Did you have any specific information that others weren't privy to, to warrant such extreme attanetion from the FBI?

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| Link fatalist
3 July 2011 4:24PM
Hemingway comes from a family with a history of suicide and depression.

The real point. Good VL.

Didn't his dad commit suicide? One of his granddaughter's too?

It's been a long long time since I read the Nick Adams stories, but isn't there one or two where he talks about Dr. Adams killing himself? And an uncle or great uncle (?) using a Civil War pistol?

I got the impression this was a thing hanging over his entire life, rather than something he was pushed to.

I'm not a Hemingway fan exactly, but still I'd like to think this was a guy no one could push.

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| Link DickSocrates
3 July 2011 4:49PM
America is a fascist police state, worse now than it was 50 years ago. Hemingway is my favourite author of all time. This could be two superb opening lines to the worst book ever written.

And your quip could be the opening line to the most self-satisfied book ever written.

And my quip could be the opening line to the 3rd best text-adventure never written.

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| Link Linus9
3 July 2011 5:28PM
After reading that widely circulated story in recent years about Hemingway's possible role as a KGB spy in the 1940s I've wondered if he didn't later fear himself to be under surveillance and if that fear as well as the fear of possible prosecution didn't contribute to his depression and suicide.

To the extent that Hemingway offered his "services" to the KGB you guess it was mostly an act of adolescent-ish (probably drunken) self-aggrandizement at a time when relations between the US and the Soviet Union and the situation of the left in America were very different than what they would become. You doubt Hemingway had access to anything of much value to Stalin.

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| Link FrankLittle
3 July 2011 5:31PM
CaptainMidnite

But the most relevant point is this:

People are knowingly and willingly putting their own photos on-line, posting their videos on Youtube, sharing their thoughts on blogs, on comments sections as I am doing now, shopping on-line, booking their trips on-line, etc.

We are willingly giving up our own private images and thoughts, exposing our purchases, reading interests, travels, etc. And you want to complain about living in a Police State?


Is your name really CaptainMidnite?

OK I accept that Google and other internet companies will gladly give up your real identity and information when asked by the relevant authorities, but you seem to be saying if you do not want to be noticed, do not participate in any on line communities especially if you are critical of government, surely the point of a 'police state' is to intimidate you into silence.

I

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| Link TrowbridgeHFord
3 July 2011 5:44PM
Of course, I didn't have information that other people weren't privy to. The assassination was not done by Martians, operating out of UFOs. It was done by real people whose activities I discovered through reading vast amounts of evidence in official publications, the mass media, various accounts, interviews, etc.

I would say that I learned about the revamping of the Cuban Missile Crisis through accounts in The Dallas Morning News, especially Robert Baskin's articles on October 20, 1963 about is resuming exactly after it started 13 months before, and that someone in Dallas, Fort Worth, and Irving, Texas, was sending threating postcards to Richard Nixon and Representative for Dallas Bruce Alger; Nixon still going there on November 20th, and advertising so much about his lack of any need of security that the DMN highlighed it on the front page on the fatal day, "Guard Not For Nixon"; the SS relaxing that night in Fort Worth after nothing happened to Tricky Dick; a U-2, piloted by Captain Joe Glenn Hyde, Jr. being apparently shot down then over Cuba - what had triggered the showdown with Cuba 13 months before when Captain Anderson's one was shot down then; Bill Harvey's independent campaign against the Kennedy from the CIA's station in Miami, Porter Goss reporting on the apparently shooting down of Hyde's U-2 from the Florida Staits, etc., ad nauseam.

For the more, read my three-part series in Tom Valentine's The National Exchange during the spring of 1977.

For my basic explanation of the Dallas conspiracy, see my "JFK Assassination: The Quintessential 'False Flag' Operation."

I just love it when critics question my evidence and explanations of my being hunted down by America's secret government over the last generation, only claiming that I still cannot have any basis for any of my claims!

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| Link squawk7500
3 July 2011 6:39PM
he went nuts

happens to th best of and th worst of us

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| Link harrisonic
3 July 2011 6:49PM
Hoover was a paranoid fool.

Even when British double agent Tricycle visited him in August 1941 with evidence that plans were afoot for an attack on Pearl Harbour, his hyper-vigilance and mistrust led him to do nothing, and keep the information to himself.

However, without the Japanese attack, our lily-livered cousins would have stayed out of the war, and Wall St would have continued doing business with the Nazis, so I suppose he was actually on our side after all. Well done, J Edgar.

Pity about Papa H, though.



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