What I learned from reading Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy: Ernest Hemingway's Secret Adventures, 1935-1961 by Nicholas Reynolds.
In 2010, I was a historian for the best museum you've never seen, the CIA museum.
We were preparing to install a new exhibit on the Office of Strategic Services, OSS, America's first central intelligence agency.
I was tasked with finding out everything I could about this experimental organization, which included researching the company roster hastily pulled together to fight the axis.
OSS was an odd creature at once, a collection of men and women from the upper crust of society on America's east coast, and a magnet for astonishingly talented and creative people from all walks of life, from Wall street lawyers to Hollywood filmmakers, even the future chef Julia Child.
In OSS, they could almost literally design their own adventures.
My head swimming in research, I made an offhand connection one day that would lead to unchartered waters.
I remember reading in the past that Ernest Hemingway and Colonel David Bruce of the OSS had liberated the bar of the Ritz in Paris from the Germans in August 1944.
Now I wondered if there was more to the story.
Hemingway would not have been out of place in the OSS.
He loved secrets and the edge they gave him.
He craved action, but was not cut out for conventional soldiering.
He moved easily between social and economic classes and across borders.
I thought to myself that he had a lot in common with many of the other men in the spy business whom I had met or read about.
So had he been an oss spy of some sort?
What was the full story about Hemingway and intelligence in World War two?
The writer had tried his hand at various forms of spying and fighting on two continents.
The way stations were varied, often exotic.
The battlefields of Spain, the backstreets of Havana, a junk on the north river in China.
He seemed to gravitate to men and women who operated on their own in the shadows.
And then I learned something that surprised me.