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When Angela Calomiris (1916-95)--"Angie" to her friends--appeared on Eleanor Roosevelt's radio program (12/1/1950), the former First Lady introduced her as "a young lady of great courage," her spy mission defined as "something like being a soldier." And "if you got shot, you got shot." Nobody mentioned that Angie was also a rather "obvious" lesbian, a denizen of that big closet called Greenwich Village, where Mrs. Roosevelt had also maintained a residence for many years. They knew some of the same people.

 

To a nation with vivid memories of a terrible war, Angie's seven years (1942-49) as an undercover Confidential Informant for the FBI sounded heroic. And as "the McCarthy era" picked up speed, spying on the American Communist Party (CPUSA) and testifying against their leaders--on trial for "conspiracy to advocate the overthrow of the US government by force and violence"--won her everyone's approval. 

 

The press loved the mystique of the female spy, and Angie made many powerful friends among New York journalists who gave her (ghostwritten) book Red Masquerade rave reviews. Sales were good. TV and movie contracts seemed within reach. She was waiting for that big boost to her photography career from the FBI, whose agents had loved the photos she brought in of CP rallies and personalities.

 

But fame was fleeting. Her cover blown by testifying at the trial, Angie was useless to the Bureau. And she had incurred Hoover's wrath by lying on the witness stand--saying (in print) that she hadn't been paid for spying--and insisting (in print) that the FBI owed her a job. It was over. 

This is Angie in her best femme attire, passing for straight, right after testifying for the prosecution at the 1949 Smith Act trial off the CPUSA in New York City. The press had problems with Angie's looks, especially her (unfashionable for the 1940s) short hair. Her anti-Communism excused all that--for a while.

 

But in the end, fellow Villagers wanted nothing to do with Angie. They called her rat, fink, stoolpigeon. She retreated to the relative safety of Provincetown, MA, where Angel's Landing on Commercial Street was part of her small real estate empire. She never talked about her spy career, her time on the witness stand, her book, her brush with fame and fortune. She only told friends that she had once been a "gofer" for Eleanor Roosevelt, and there was some truth to that.

 

The defendants, the National Board of the Party, are pictured below.

--Lisa E Davis, PhD, Author of The FBI's Lesbian

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