Toward the end of his life, those around him, watching him drink the massive amounts of alcohol, naturally assumed that Hemingway was loosing his mind, suffering a case of psychosis, or going "increasingly delusional." But he wasn't.

In fact, there were Feds constantly after him, for over a decade, watching his every move. Not only that, but while spying for the FBI in Cuba, he had come very close to uncovering things the US government preferred him not to know.

Documents released under Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests show that Hemingway was semi-hired to spy on "unspecified insurgents" in Havana, and be paid with "special funds" by the US embassy. In 1942, the vigorously anti-Fascist Hemingway organized his own small spy-ring to watch for Nazi-sympathizers in Cuba.

Called the Crook Factory, the group was composed mainly of Hemingway's drinking circle, which was quite pervasive, as well as a few professional operatives. He bought a boat and named it Pilar, stocked it full of machine-guns, and homemade ordinance, then he and others would cruise the Caribbean, on the lookout for Nazi U-boats to hopefully drop a bomb down their hatch.

The Times printed a story that left the reader feeling that Hemingway was an unsuccessful spy, a traitorous, wheedling, backstabber for cash. According to a Hemingway biographer, he was "all too willing to inform on friends who trusted him, and all for $500 a month, from the FBI which he claimed to hate." This seems to be precisely what Robert Leddy, the FBI agent that was assigned to deal with Hemingway would most liked to have accomplished, the continued vilifying of Hemingway's sanity and honor years nearly forty years after his death. Hoover would have been proud.

Buried deep within the story comes this passage: "Leddy also worried that Hemingway might uncover American links to corrupt Cuban officials, such as the head of the secret police." Those signs of official US corruption must have been readily apparent even at that time, as the Mafia-gambling interests in Cuba were multi-million dollar enterprises, as well as the sugar industry. While Batista and his cronies robbed the Cuban people blind, Hemingway's amateurs gathered intelligence places where lips are loosest-in bars, over drinks. Hemingway may very well have uncovered something along the way, although there is no proof of that, because he left Cuba for World War II Europe in 1944, and was never nice about the FBI again.

Hemingway began to refer to the FBI, in 1950, as the American Gestapo. In the 1950s he became a threat, when the FBI discovered Hemingway's plans to write a book about his experiences with them. Hoover ordered constant surveillance. When Hemingway tried to tell his friends and wife, they all assumed he was losing it.

By November 30, 1960, depressed, and paranoid, Hemingway checked into the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, thinking he was being followed constantly. Dr. Rome, a local psychiatrist, contacted the FBI, because "he desired authorization to tell Hemingway that the FBI was not concerned about his having signed in under an assumed name. [redacted] was advised there was no objection," reads an FBI document (January 24, 1961).