Arthur Koestler

Born in Budapest, he joined the Communist party in the early 1930s, and wrote the book Of White Nights and Red Days. He informed on a lover, Nadeshda Smirnova, and went on to work with Willi Munzenberg. Resigned from the party in 1938, and became anti-communist after the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, writing the book Darkness at Noon. He joined the Ministry of Information in the UK as an anti-Nazi propagandist, and then worked as a consultant for IRD''. ''He advocated for progressives in the US to support the government, in line with his friend James Burnham, who introduced him to various US covert and overt government officials. "In February 1948, he had set off on a lecture tour of the united States. In March he met with William “Wild Bill” Donovan in the general’s new York town house on Sutton Place... Koestler [was] formerly one of the brains behind the Munzenberg Trust... Shortly before leaving for the States, Koestler had met André Malraux and Chip Bohlen, the newly appointed ambassador to France, to discuss how best to counter the Cominform’s “peace” offensive. Aboard a ship crossing to America, Koestler had also met, by coincidence, John Foster Dulles, brother of Allen Dulles and future secretary of state, and the two had discussed the same problem. Now, Koestler was sitting down with William Donovan to talk about how to counter Soviet propaganda. “Discussed need for psychological warfare,” Koestler noted in his diary.”

Came up with the idea and became of the contributors to The God That Failed, a collection of six essays from ex-communists. This was edited by UK Labour Party MP and head of the Political Warfare Executive, Richard Crossman.