Charles Flato

This article is part of the Venona series.

Secret apparatus

LaFollette Civil Liberties Committee

Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs

Board of Economic Warfare

Foreign Economic Administration

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Charles Flato also Charles Floto (May 27, 1908 - January 1, 1984) was a writer, American Communist Party member and a Soviet agent.

Flato suffered from polio as a child and as a result was deformed and left with a hunchback forcing him to walk with a cane. He had a younger brother who served in the United States Navy during World War II.

Flato was employed by the United States government and spied for Soviet intelligence during World War II. He married Lucy Burman also a Communist Party member.

From 1937 to 1941 Flato worked as an investigator and report writer for the Senate Subcommittee on Civil Liberties of the Labor Committee. He also served under Nelson Rockefeller in the Latin American division of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs during World War II. Flato worked in the Blockade and Supply Branch of the Board of Economic Warfare (BEW), the Senate Committee on Education and Labor chaired by Senator Robert M. La Follette, Jr., and the Foreign Economic Administration.

He resigned from the government and moved to San Fransico about mid July 1945. He is mentioned in Venona transcript #588 of April 29, 1944. Flato's complicity in espionage was corroborated by information exhumed from the NKVD archives in the 1990s. He was also a member of the “Sound” and “Myrna” groups. His codename in the Gorsky memo is "Bob". In another Venona transcript, he is believed to be codename "Char".

Sometime in the 1950's he and his wife divorced. By 1957, Flato lived alone in a cottage near a beach on Cape Cod and worked as a freelance writer throughout the 60's and 70's. In 1957 he was the editor of the Complete Home Improvement Handbook. He is known to have used at least one ghost writer in the form of a friend for an article printed in The Saturday Evening Post in the early 1960's. The Golden Book of the Civil War was a children's book written by Flato and published in 1961.

After Peking resumed diplomatic relations with the United States, Flato wrote a six-part report on health care in China. The Chinese Medical Association invited him to travel through the country as their guest.

Flato was one of the co-founders of the Medical Pharmaceutical Information Bureau, and wrote and edited for the publication Hospital Practice. He was known to have also written scripts for medical documentaries.

Flato died of kidney failure in Hyannis, Massachusetts, on January 1, 1984. Only after the fall of the Soviet Union when the files of the KGB became open to researchers was it discovered that he was spying for the Soviets in the 1940's.

References

• Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Yale University Press (1999)
• Vladimir Pozniakov, NKVD/NKGB Report to Stalin: A Glimpse into Soviet Intelligence in the United States in the 1940's
• The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America - the Stalin Era, Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, Random House, New York, 1999.
• Alexander Vassiliev's original Russian hand-written notes titled "A.Gorsky's Report to S.R. Savchenko, 23 December 1949".
• Washington Post, January 2, 1984.
• Chicago Tribune, January 4, 1984.
• United States Social Security Death Index.
• Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2006. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale. 2006.