FBI spied on Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez for 24 years, documents show.
The FBI spied on the late Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez for 24 years, according to recently unclassified documents obtained by the Washington Post.
According to the newspaper, the federal police agency began spying on García Márquez after he arrived in New York for a brief stay in 1961 and didn’t stop spying on him until 1985, well after the Colombian writer had been awarded a Nobel Prize for Literature for his most famous novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude.
According to the Post, the released 137 pages of an at least 270-page file left unclear why the FBI began spying on the author. However, in the year the FBI began its spying practices García Márquez helped found the still active press agency, Prensa Latina for Cuba, which had been overtaken by communist dictator Fidel Castro only two years before. Additionally, the writer had supported a Communist-backed coup attempt in Venezuela in 1958 when working in that country as a journalist.
According to one of the first entries in the García Márquez file, dated February 8, 1961, an order that appears to have come straight from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover directed that “in the event he enters the U.S. for any purpose, the Bureau should be promptly advised.”
The spying went so far that a team of FBI agents contacted at least nine of García Márquez’s friends, one of whom informed the federal police agency of the writer and his family’s departure to Mexico, where he lived for the rest of his life. The FBI reportedly continued spying on García Márquez in Mexico, even until after he had been awarded the Nobel Prize in 1982. Until his death in 2014, García Márquez maintained a close friendship with Castro and was a vociferous critic of US foreign policy in the Americas.
Colombia’s most famous author is not the only artist who has been spied on by the FBI: the agency also spied on authors such as Normal Mailer, Ernest Hemingway, and John Steinbeck.
At: http://colombiareports.com/fbi-spied-on-nobel-laureate-gabriel-garcia-marquez-for-24-years/
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Mary Hoover wasn't as much "anti-communist", as he was anti-talent.
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And just as he himself kept up a certain persona during office hours (the prudish but tireless law-and-order man married to his job) but was someone completely different once he was off the clock ("call me Mary"
, his 48-year tenure at the FBI can likewise be divided into two starkly different periods:
The one before 1945, when he defeated the Colombia-style crime wave that besieged America during the 1920s and early '30s and organized the FBI into the national institution it is today; and the one from 1945 to 1972, when he turned his office into a Gestapo and Murdoch-style eavesdropping and extortion machine, while entertaining his horse gambling addiction and other risky tastes on the public's dime.
The point of inflection? The death of his mother in 1939, and of FDR in 1945 - the only two people Hoover ever truly feared. Which goes to show that the best safeguard of good governance, is oversight.
Sunlight really is the best disinfectant.
