Charles Flato

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

Flato was employed by the United States government and spied for the Soviet intelligence during World War II. Flato suffered from polio as a child which left him with a hunchback and caused him to walk with a cane. He married Lucy Burman, also a Communist Party member.

From 1937 to 1941, Flato worked as an investigator and report writer for the civil liberties subcommittee of the Senate Labor Committee. He also served under Nelson Rockefeller in the Latin American division of the Board of Economic Warfare during World War II.

Flato worked in the Blockade and Supply Branch of the Board of Economic Warfare, the Civil Liberties Subcommittee, 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 Francisco about mid-July 1945. He is mentioned in Venona project 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 1950s, he and his wife divorced. By 1957, Flato had a cottage designed and built by the architect Serge Chermayeff. He lived alone in this cottage near a beach on Cape Cod and worked as a freelance writer throughout the 1960s and 1970s. 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 1960s. The Golden Book of the Civil War was a children's book written by Flato and published in 1961.

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