Did Novelist John Steinbeck Spy for the CIA in Paris?

Steinbeck was in fact quite hostile to Soviet totalitarianism, but the late 1940s and early 1950s were the era of McCarthyism. Anti-communist witch hunts dragged many of Steinbeck’s friends and associates in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee, where they were expected to denounce others, or be doomed to blacklists and perjury trials. Whether a CIA connection helped Steinbeck avoid such an ordeal is not clear, but he was never called.

Thanks to the research of author Brian Kannard, whose Freedom of Information Act requests surfaced the Steinbeck-Smith correspondence half a dozen years ago, we also know that Steinbeck’s older son, Thomas, suspected something strange was going on that summer of ’54 in Paris even though he was only 10 years old at the time.

Thomas “clearly recalls that every few days, someone from the United States Embassy would drop off an attaché case for John,” Kannard wrote in his 2013 book Steinbeck: Citizen Spy. “This case was then picked up a day or so later by a member of the embassy’s staff. This practice was kept up throughout their Parisian adventure of 1954. A young Thomas was not privy to what these communications were, but the transactions are suspicious.”

No kidding. But Thomas, who died in 2016, was remembering all this when he was in his late sixties, often calling Kannard late at night and well into his cups. More intriguing was what Kannard turned up in the FBI files on Steinbeck, which also are available to the general public: