Louis Budenz
Louis F. Budenz was an American labor activist, journalist, and decade-long communist spy. Budenz obtained a law degree from Indianapolis Law School in 1912. He was the publicity director for the American Civil Liberties Union in 1920, then managing editor of Labor Age into the early 1930s. Budenz joined the Communist Party USA in 1935 as the managing editor of The Daily Worker. In “Red Spy Queen,” Kathryn S. Olmsted writes that a founding member of the party “asked Budenz to spy on his former friends.” This, it turns out, involved “helping the NKGB to find the people who would befriend and then kill Trotsky in Mexico.” He was then “asked to pass along gossip he learned as a journalist.” His handlers did not find his intelligence "particularly significant." In 1945, The New York Times reported that Budenz had renounced communism for the catholic faith, abruptly abandoning the party. He spent hours debriefing the FBI on the party’s inner workings. The agency paid him to testify to different committees. In 1948, Budenz testified that the party “had placed ‘perhaps thousands’ of its members in government jobs.” Documents that I obtained from the CIA last month show that Budenz, in 1951, offered to share information with General Eisenhower as well. Eisenhower had just become the first supreme commander of NATO. "I shall be glad to furnish you with any information in regard to the communist conspiracy here and abroad," he wrote. “It occurred to me that a clear picture of the pattern of Soviet tactics, through infiltration and agitation, might aid you in your great task." An internal memo suggests the agency was “actually not too eager to become involved with this gentleman." It offered a “preliminary sounding out interview” nonetheless. Sadly, the documents do not provide any insight into what – if anything – happened next.