I Was a Communist for the FBI is the name of a series of stories written by Matt Cvetic that appeared in the Saturday Evening Post. The stories were later turned into a best-selling book, an American espionage thriller radio series and motion picture in the early 1950s.
The story follows Cvetic, who infiltrated a local Communist Party cell for nine years and reported back to the Federal Bureau of Investigation on their activities.
The film and radio show are, in part, artifacts of the McCarthy era, as well as a time capsule of American society during the Second Red Scare. The purpose of both are partly to warn people about the threat of Communist subversion of American society. The tone of the show is ultra-patriotic, with Communists portrayed as racist, vindictive, and tools of a totalitarian foreign power, the Soviet Union.
Famous quotes containing the words communist and/or fbi:
“I have spent all my life under a Communist regime, and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either.”
—Alexander Solzhenitsyn (b. 1918)
“Has anyone ever told you that you overplay your various roles rather severely, Mr. Kaplan? First you’re the outraged Madison Avenue man who claims he’s been mistaken for someone else. Then you play the fugitive from justice, supposedly trying to clear his name of a crime he knows he didn’t commit. And now you play the peevish lover stung by jealously and betrayal. It seems to me you fellows could stand a little less training from the FBI and a little more from the Actors Studio.”
—Ernest Lehman (b.1920)