Hollywood film producer, Soviet spy, and FBI double agent Boris Morros is one of the most unlikely figures in espionage history.
Boris was born in Russia to a poor Jewish family and eventually attended a music conservatory in Petrograd as a teenager. There he began performing at the Tsar’s Winter Palace before the 1917 revolution which ushered in the new Soviet state under Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Boris fled Russia and after a harrowing journey settled into a new life in the United States. He was a talented musician and a consummate negotiator and dealmaker, and soon parlayed his musical skills from playing at local synagogues all the way up to work on Broadway musicals.
But Boris found his real calling in the nascent American film industry when he landed a job at Paramount, still headquartered in New York. For decades afterwards, Morros was a film industry fixture, first in New York and later in Hollywood California. He scored dozens of films and hobnobbed with Golden Age stars and starlets.
Then, the Soviet NKVD came calling. Boris’ influence in Hollywood was what they wanted, and they used their control over his remaining family in the Soviet Union as leverage against him. Boris began working with the NKVD, offering jobs with his international production company which served as cover for Soviet agents worldwide. But he also managed to turn the tables on his handlers and used his own leverage, as well as their lack of understanding of business and American culture to gain the upper hand. In this way he survived one of the most dangerous games of all, when nearly everyone he came in contact within the espionage game ended up dead or imprisoned.
For episode 37 of the Spycraft 101 podcast I spoke with Jonathan Gill, author of Hollywood Double Agent: The True Tale of Boris Morros, Film Producer Turned Cold War Spy, a biography of this nearly forgotten but incredibly influential spy. We discussed Boris’ uncanny ability to switch sides at a moment’s notice and survive any situation, which eventually led him straight to the FBI. As a double agent he testified before Congress and dealt a major blow to Soviet espionage in the US in the late 1950s.
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