The Cold War and the Golden Age of Hollywood meet in this story of the remarkable career of Boris Morros, film producer and Russian double agent Boris Morros was a major figure in the 1930s and ’40s. The head of music at Paramount Pictures, nominated for Academy Awards, he then went on to produce his own films with Laurel and Hardy, Fred Astaire, Henry Fonda, and others. But as J. Edgar Hoover would discover, these successes provided a cover for one of the most incredible espionage tales in the history of the Cold War—Boris Morros worked for Russian intelligence. Boris’s assignments took him to the White House, the Vatican, and deep behind the Iron Curtain. The high-level intel he provided the KGB included military secrets and compromising information on prominent Americans. His Russian handlers pushed Boris to interfere in American politics, attempting to swing a presidential election to their preferred candidate. But in 1947, Boris flipped, and at the height of the McCarthy era, he played a leading role in a deadly serious tale. Jonathan Gill’s Hollywood Double Agent is an extraordinary story about Russian spies at the heart of American culture and politics, and one man caught in the middle of the Cold War.
