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right about CIA Paris
Review Connection!
As reported in the 1/13/07 New York Times, Peter
Matthiessen "admits publicly for the first time that he
was a young C.I.A. recruit at the time he helped start the
magazine, and used it as his cover." This testimony will
be shown in an upcoming PBS documentary about the
life of Harold Humes.
In May 2005, the ULA published a Monday Report by
Richard Cummings that broke this story wide open---
nearly TWO YEARS AGO!
By CELIA McGEE
Published: January 13, 2007
New York Times
(Relevant excerpts from the article....)
But also intriguing to many is the documentary’s revelation of a C.I.A. connection to the
history of The Paris Review. In the film, Mr. Matthiessen, best known as a novelist,
environmental activist and advocate of American Indian rights, admits publicly for the
first time that he was a young C.I.A. recruit at the time he helped start the magazine, and
used it as his cover.
“Immy cajoled me into talking about it,” Mr. Matthiessen said.
Mr. Humes, who tussled with Mr. Matthiessen and Mr. Plimpton about this secret after
Mr. Matthiessen confided in him in the mid-’60s, died in 1992 in St. Rose’s Home, the
New York City cancer hospice founded by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s daughter. Ms. Humes
found correspondence between the three co-founders about Mr. Matthiessen’s clandestine
affiliation in a suitcase of papers sent to Mr. Humes’s wife and four daughters in New
York after he had to be institutionalized in Britain for several months after a psychotic
break.
.........
Mr. Auster said Mr. Matthiessen’s statements in the film about the C.I.A. “blew me right
out of my chair.”
“I had no idea,” he said. “I found it, well, startling.”
On the other hand, Philip Gourevitch, who came to The Paris Review as editor in 2005,
said Mr. Matthiessen’s past “was certainly not treated as a secret around the magazine.”
But the writer Gail Lumet Buckley, who worked for the review in Paris in the ’50s and
was close to Mr. Humes and Anna Lou, then his wife, back in New York, said: “I never
knew that. Wow. And I knew him for a million years. He was a hero to me, an antihero
hero.”
.....
Click here to access the entire article on the NYT site.