Hemingway tried to spy for the Soviets

New evidence examined in Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (co-written by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev) suggests that Nobel Prize winning American author Ernest Hemingway was an unsuccessful spy for the Soviet KGB in the 1940's.

According to The Guardian:

Its section on the author's secret life as a "dilettante spy" draws on his KGB file in saying he was recruited in 1941 before making a trip to China, given the cover name "Argo", and "repeatedly expressed his desire and willingness to help us" when he met Soviet agents in Havana and London in the 40s. However, he failed to "give us any political information" and was never "verified in practical work", so contacts with Argo had ceased by the end of the decade. Was he only ever a pseudo-spook, possibly seeing his clandestine dealings as potential literary material, or a genuine but hopelessly ineffective one?

Vassily Aksyonov dies

The "anti-Soviet Russian" author of 23 novels, who in 1980 was stripped of his Soviet citizenship and spent much of the past three decades in the United States and France, died at 76 on June 6, following a heart attack in Moscow.

Vassily Aksyonov's novels include The Burn and In Search of Melancholy Baby. Publishers Weekly called his wartime saga Generations of Winter "nothing less than a War and Peace for the twentieth century" and compared the novelist to John Dos Passos and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. His Voltairiens and Voltairiennes (Voltairian Men and Women) won the Russian Booker Prize in 2004.

Aksyonov was forced into exile in 1980 when his manuscript for The Burn was discovered by the KGB. He taught Russian literature at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, until the collapse of the Soviet Union, when his citizenship was reinstated. His absence from his country had troubled him, but following the collapse of the USSR his once controversial works received newfound fame. In 2004, Generations of Winter was adapted into a television miniseries.

Aksyonov had been ill for some eighteen months.

On July 6, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said, "His death is an enormous, irreplaceable loss for Russian literature and culture."

His funeral will be held on July 9.