1 Mar 1941, Chronology of Events Related to Stanley Civilian Internment Camp

American Consul-General Addison Southard hosts a dinner party for Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn. It's a  black tie event, and Southard finds it hard to locate a dinner jacket that will fit Hemingway's huge frame - 'Every jacket he tried on had sleeves that barely reached the elbows'.

Guest of honour is Lauchlin Currie, a member of President Roosevelt's inner circle. Currie tells Hemingway that the US Government want to read nothing in his and his wife's articles that would inflame tensions between the Communists and the Kuomintang. Certainly unknown to Southard and perhaps to each other, both Hemingway and Currie are possibly KGB agents: Hemingway is agent 'Argo' and Currie has been suspected of being an agent codenamed 'Vim'. There is some doubt though as to how much, if anything Currie, who will later help convince Roosevelt to include China in the Lend-Lease Program and head the Chinese branch of its administration, actually told the Russians.

One of the men who set up Hemingway's mission to China and who received his reports was Harry Dexter White, who is also believed by some to have been a Soviet agent ('Jurist'). However, at this time, when America was still not in the war, White and his effective boss US Secretary to the Treasury Henry Morgenthau (definitely not a Russian agent!) were organising international opposition to the Axis, including getting help to the Chinese war effort. Hemingway was judged a useless 'asset' by the KGB but his reports might have been helpful to the Chinese and eventually the Americans.

In spite of all the uncertainties that inevitably accompany claims that a particular person was or was not a Soviet agent before the war, this meeting at a Hong Kong dinner party provides yet more evidence of the falsity of the claim that the Colony at this time was a sleepy place that the great events of the world were passing by!

Sources:

Peter Moreira, Hemingway on the China Front, 2007, 39, 15; http://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/jul/09/hemingway-failed-kgb-spy; ...