Cedric Belfrage

Cedric Henning Belfrage (8 November 1904 – 21 June 1990) was an English film critic, journalist, writer, and political activist. He is best remembered as a co-founder of the radical US-weekly newspaper the National Guardian. Later Belfrage was referenced as a Soviet agent in the US intelligence Venona project, although it appears that he had been working for British Security Co-ordination as a double-agent.

Cedric Henning Belfrage was born in Marylebone, London, on 8 November 1904, the son of a physician. He was educated at Gresham's School, Holt, before entering Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

While still a student at Cambridge, Belfrage began his writing career as a film critic, publishing his first article in Kinematograph Weekly in 1924. In 1927 he went to Hollywood, where he was hired by the New York Sun and Film Weekly as a correspondent. Belfrage returned to London in 1930 as Sam Goldwyn's press agent. Returning to Hollywood, he became politically active, joining the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League and co-editing a left-wing literary magazine called The Clipper. He decided to make the United States his home and took out first papers for citizenship in 1937, although he failed to complete the process within the statutory seven-year time limit.

Belfrage joined the Communist Party USA in 1937, but withdrew his membership a few months later. Thereafter, he maintained a friendly but critical relationship as a so-called "fellow traveler" outside of party membership and discipline, recalling in his 1978 memoir that for "temperamentally argumentative" adherents of socialism such as himself, such status as a "non-Communist, non-anti-Communist...suited us better." Despite his non-membership in the American Communist Party, Belfrage remained a believer that that organisation functioned as "the core of the radical movement."

During the Second World War, Belfrage worked in the British Security Coordination for the Western hemisphere. After the fall of Nazi Germany, he was appointed as a "press control officer" in the Anglo-American Psychological Warfare Division and was dispatched to Germany to help reorganize that nation's newspapers. He and his associates requisitioned buildings, equipment, and supplies for a new "democratic" German press and oversaw a purge of Nazi collaborators from the new German newspaper industry.

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