Gellhorn was a family friend of the Roosevelts, and Morgenthau must have heard that the famous writers would be travelling to China. So he had White call Hemingway and ask for information.

In his July 30 letter, Hemingway told Morgenthau and White it was impossible to overstate the animosity between the Chinese Nationalists and Communists, and that Chiang Kai-shek considered the Communists a greater enemy to China than the Japanese occupiers.

He added that civil war was all but inevitable in China unless the Chinese Communists were given their own turf with an identifiable, defensible border, and that the U.S. should ensure that none of the aid or ordnance it gave to the Nationalists was used to fight the Communists.

"I believe we can delay indefinitely any all-out civil war between the Chungking government and the Communists if our representatives make it perfectly clear at all times that we will not finance civil war in any way," he said.

In an oral presentation to White, Hemingway also suggested that if war did break out with the Japanese, the allies should consider launching an offensive from Hong Kong that would drive north to liberate Canton and eventually open up a communication route to Chungking.

As it turned out, the intelligence work proved to be the only success that came out of the trip. The publisher at PM, a former Time magazine executive named Ralph Ingersoll, found Hemingway's articles too dry and analytical.

Hemingway, however, caught the espionage bug in Asia and didn't shake it until World War II ended. When he returned to Cuba, he headed an FBI-funded spy ring to monitor Spanish fifth columnists in Havana. Gellhorn nicknamed the operation "The Crook Factory." After that, he loaded drinking buddies on to his fishing boat with guns and a bomb and plied the Caribbean looking for U-boats.

Later, in France, Hemingway headed a small band of irregulars that moved in tandem with other allied troops heading westward to Berlin.

And Gellhorn? She began the Asia trip with gusto, sending Collier's wonderful dispatches on Hong Kong and the buccaneer pilots of China National Aviation Corp., who braved bad weather and Japanese fighter planes to maintain air links with Chungking.

But Gellhorn endured hell on the South China front. She and Hemingway had to trudge through the rain for five days, and their interpreters spoke almost no English. The writers were bored, confused and despondent, and when they reached the front they found no fighting. They had come to a dormant front. Gellhorn would not be able to cover the story she had crossed the ocean for.

If that wasn't bad enough, Gellhorn then contracted dysentery, an inflammation of the large intestines that causes severe stomach pains and diarrhea. By the time she reached Chungking, she was a physical and mental wreck.

In Travels With Myself and Another, Gellhorn never mentioned how sick she really was. It wasn't in her nature to complain. But the illness may have been one reason her article on her time in Chungking was possibly the worst she would ever write. In Travels, she relishes the story of arguing with the imperious Madame Chiang, and that spat may well have happened. But what she neglected to mention in 1978 was that she actually wrote a profile of Madame Chiang for Collier's that was nauseatingly syrupy. This puff piece gushed about Madame's beauty, her devotion to her husband and her work ethic.

What's sad is not just that Gellhorn could write such pap but that she tried to cover it up years later. She even went out of her way to say in Travels that one Nationalist official let her and Hemingway stay in his house in Chungking, and she accepted his hospitality "knowing" that she would be of no use to the Chiangs and that he had made a "miscalculation" in lending her the house. She added she couldn't quite remember his name.

Press reports at the time in China and Burma show that this unnamed potentate was T.V. Soong, Madame Chiang's brother and one of the richest men in the world. If not a household name, he was certainly known to the chattering classes, and Gellhorn's claim to have forgotten his name is certainly pure balderdash. Although it was a very funny story, the chapter in Travels on China tries to cover up the worst of her reporting during the trip.

Gellhorn also mentions repeatedly in Travels that neither she nor Hemingway really understood what was going on in China, but she was being unfair to her ex-husband. (Given the way he behaved during their divorce, who could blame her.)

Hemingway's articles were indeed heavy on analysis and light on colour, but taken together with his six-page letter to Morgenthau they reveal an incredibly quick read of the Asian situation before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Hemingway only spent 11 weeks in Hong Kong, China and Burma, and he was drunk much of the time, yet he was able to piece together a compelling analysis of the political, economic and military forces at play in the Asian theatre.

His friend, diplomat Addison Southard, said Hemingway's public and private reports from Asia no doubt helped the U.S. government greatly, but they may have helped another government as well.

That's because Hemingway, in collaborating with Harry Dexter White, passed all his confidential intelligence to a Russian spy. In 1948, two former Communists testified that White had given them government documents to pass on to Soviet agents in New York. White immediately made a robust defence of his name before the House Un-American Activities Committee, then died three days later of a heart attack. Though Democrats and Republicans for years debated whether White was guilty, government intercepts released after the Cold War ended verify that White was part of a pro-Soviet intelligence network in Washington during World War II.

Unknown to Ernest Hemingway, the intelligence he worked so diligently to gather in Asia may have ended up in the Kremlin.


Who initiated the House Un-American Activities Committee?

Were the released govt. intercepts called the Venona Project KGB documents?

Were other US govt officials discovered to have been communist spies as a result of the HUAAC?

Which political party despises McCarthy so much that they deny the success of his efforts?

Which political party not only leans left but has embraced leftist/communists?