Soviet spy found in Hollywood

Renowned in Hollywood in the thirties, journalist and film critic Cedric Belfrage was born in London in 1904 in the family of a physicist and studied at the University of Cambridge, who left out because of his passion for theater and cinema. After working on critical reviews for the Daily and Sunday Express editions, Belfrage went to the USA. Following his hobbies, he ended up in Hollywood, while continuing to write for newspapers and was close to obtaining American citizenship.

When the Second World War began, British intelligence agencies came to Belfrage and sent him to New York to work for the British Security Coordination Service to exchange intelligence information between the two governments. Neither in London nor in Washington at that time did not know about his left-wing views and secret membership in the US Communist Party.

In New York, Belfrage was recruited by Soviet intelligence and received the call sign "Benjamin". Between the years of 1941 and 1943, he passed to Moscow a lot of secret information about the plans of Great Britain in relation to the Soviet Union, as well as about the situation in France and the countries of the Middle East.

In 1945, the Federal Bureau of Investigation was informed about Cedric Belfrage's contacts with Soviet intelligence agents. In his defense, he stated that he was doing this on the instructions of the British foreign intelligence service MI6, and from London they confirmed his words, so that no charges were brought against him.

In the post-war years, when anti-Soviet sentiments flared up in the United States, and with the filing of Senator McCarthy, the famous “witch hunt” began, Belfrage was reminded of these suspicions and called in for questioning. After he refused to answer the commission’s questions, he was deported to his homeland due to suspicions of sympathy for the Communists. After spending seven years in Britain, Belfrage moved to Latin America, and then went to the US a few more times and died in Mexico on the 1990 year.

Now that the British National Archives have declassified documents on the Belfrage case, Russian and British intelligence experts have realized that it was a very important element of the Soviet intelligence network.

He could have been revealed if the British special services were “digging deeper.” But in London, they were guided by considerations of prestige and feared an international scandal due to the fact that due to an oversight they sent a Soviet agent to work with American secrets.