Was Famed Author Peter Matthiessen a Spy or an Informant?

The post below is from guest contributor Ben Ryder Howe, a journalist and frequent contributor to New York Magazine.

This week sees the publication of TRUE NATURE, a biography of the writer, naturalist, Zen monk and political activist Peter Matthiessen. The 716-page book is expected to be one of fall’s major titles. Matthiessen, who died in 2014, was one of the last literary men of action, known for his sprawling New Yorker travelogues on crossing the Amazon and summiting the Himalayas as well as for his National Book Award-winning fiction.

Matthiessen also spied for the CIA, which his son Lucas accidentally disclosed to a New York Times reporter at a Christmas party for The Paris Review in 1977. The Times subsequently revealed Matthiessen’s secret in an article, “Worldwide Propaganda Network Built by CIA,” which came out in the wake of the Church Committee hearings into intelligence abuses. At the time, the press was aggressively investigating the CIA. Matthiessen, one of the decade’s biggest literary names, was a surprise catch. The revelation threatened his career and trailed him to its end. He called working for the agency “the one adventure of my life I regret.”

Nevertheless, despite being questioned about it dozens of times over the years, he succeeded in never revealing what he had actually done. Was he an agent or a case officer? Did he have a security clearance? Did he handle other sources of intelligence, or was he the one being handled? Who or what was he spying on?

Unfortunately, the new biography doesn’t solve the mystery, or even really try. We should want to know what Matthiessen did, because there have long been unsettling indications that he spied on other writers – particularly dissident writers, including Richard Wright, the towering midcentury author of BLACK BOY, who was hounded into exile by J. Edgar Hoover because of his political activism and died an early death likely because of the stress.

We should also want to know because researchers, including TRUE NATURE’s author, Lance Richardson, have spent decades trying to get the CIA to release Matthiessen’s file, as well as the agency’s files on The Paris Review, which Matthiessen used as cover while spying – all without success. Whatever secrets the files contain, they are now almost seventy-five years old, nearly the same age as the CIA itself, raising the question: will the public ever get to know