Did John Steinbeck Spy for the CIA?
thedailybeast.com
thedailybeast.com
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10116113 from 2015 is on this topic, but not that great a thread.
It becomes very difficult to understand what happened during the 50s and 60s, the more you look into it.
Now the only question is the extent to which she did that.
There is good evidence that the magazine was also paid for by the 3 letter agency.
Do you mean New York or Ms.? I'm not familiar with this theory; can you link to more info?
The only question now really is how much they influence the comment section here
Then the Stalinist Russians, with some 5 million people in the gulags, became nuclear in 49. The Rosenbergs were executed in 53. This was some scary, tangible stuff. All that red scare whipped into a frenzy by Hoover and McCarthy built on all that wartime patriotism.
So I don't find it surprising that a few celebrities visiting abroad might write up a few trip reports or befriend diplomats, doing their part to keep the red menace at bay.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pgp53z/how-the-cia-infilt...
But shouldn’t we just change the word to describe Hemingway? Paranoia means unjustified suspicion/distrust and encroaches on mental health issues. It should say people thought he was paranoid about a thing that turned out to be true. So in reality Hemingway was suspicious of shitty spies.
The word for thing that is like paranoia but instead of being irrational and pathological its entirely rational and grounded in fact?
"Justified concern"?
He thought the FBI was following him because he knew they had good reasons to.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/jul/09/hemingway-fail...
Fundamentally, spying is very good for the world. It allows for nation states to understand each other’s thinking and reasoning. The most dangerous situations come from misunderstanding, as we are now experiencing with North Korea.
WW1 is the quintessential example of nation states misunderstanding each other.
Germany's mobilization plans against France actually involving occupying Belgium are a fairly extreme example, but the trend was universal among the major European powers.
It wasn't that they misunderstood each other, it was that they misunderstood the context.
We all spy, it's not some evil to be purged.
I do draw the line at corporate stuff though, if only the world treated industrial espionage as highly as cheating in the Olympics. Sadly we all do that too, with varying degrees of effectiveness, some are brash about it, some will go to great lengths pretending they don't do it. Not sure what's worse.
Saying friends shouldn’t discuss their life’s work is weird, but of course benefits profits and nation state power structures.
'Spying' is not a well-defined term. I think you mean 'information gathering' but also under the rubric of spying fall subversion, sabotage, political interference, propaganda and disinformation, etc.
Even in the realm of information gathering the techniques used are often unacceptable - such as deliberately putting someone in a compromising position and then extorting them to provide access to information they posses.
I don't think the assertion that those things are good for the world would be widely accepted.
From the wiki page:
Snowden described his CIA experience in Geneva as formative, stating that the CIA deliberately got a Swiss banker drunk and encouraged him to drive home. Snowden said that when the latter was arrested, a CIA operative offered to help in exchange for the banker becoming an informant.
Ueli Maurer, President of the Swiss Confederation for the year 2013, in June of that year publicly disputed Snowden's claims. "This would mean that the CIA successfully bribed the Geneva police and judiciary. With all due respect, I just can't imagine it
Everyone should feel free to apply their own judgement about the value of this anecdote.
Edit: I would regard kidnapping, rendition, and waterboarding as a "negative inducement", myself.
(Exception to Betteridges Law of Headlines)
The answer is generally "no".