FBI Spied on Author Garcia Marquez for 24 Years, Washington Post Reports

The paper reported that at its request the federal agency declassified 137 pages of documents from an investigation carried out over more than two decades which reveal that the prizewinning author was monitored starting in 1961, when he lived for a month at the Hotel Webster in Manhattan along with his wife and their oldest son Rodrigo Garcia.

At that time, Garcia Marquez was a journalist who had come to New York to work for the Cuban news agency Prensa Latina, and over time he became a close friend of Cuban leader Fidel Castro, but the agency’s “motivation in monitoring him is unclear,” the Post reported.

The declassified documents provide no clues as to why an FBI dossier was quietly opened on Garcia Marquez, who later won the Nobel Prize in literature, but the agency is still keeping 133 pages of documents in his file secret and is not intending to make them public.

According to the documents, the order to open a file on the 33-year-old Colombian, who at the time was trying to make it as an author, came from FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who instructed U.S. officials to inform the agency immediately if the writer “enters the U.S. for any purpose.”

According to the documents, the FBI initially confused the writer’s name, calling him “Jose Garcia Marquez,” although Jose was his middle name, and over the years it accumulated written profiles on him by The Times, The New York Times and publications in Spanish.

The author’s son, Rodrigo, now a moviemaker living in Los Angeles, told The Post that the family has no clue as to why his father became the target of the FBI’s interest, although he said the news of the file’s existence did not surprise him.

Garcia Marquez died on April 17, 2014, at his home in Mexico City at age 87.