Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [105]
Reagan had been getting similar warnings from his brother for months.
HICCASP “was as bad as you could get,” Neil Reagan recalled in a 1981 interview. “I used to beat him over the head, ‘Get out of that thing. There are people in there who can cause you real trouble.’” Neil also boasted that he had been spying on HICCASP for the FBI: “I was doing little things. . . .
You know, ‘Neil, we’d like to have you go out and lay in the bushes and take down the [license plate] numbers off of the cars that are going to be at this little meeting in Bel Air. Put it in a brown envelope, no return address. And always remember, if you get caught in the bushes, you can just forget about saying, well, you’re doing this for the FBI, because we’ll just . . . say, We never saw this guy in our lives.’”103
According to Neil, late one night his brother had an epiphany of sorts and summoned him to “a Nutburger stand at the corner of Sunset and Doheny.” Reagan shared his suspicions that the HICCASP board was being packed with Communists and their allies and showed him minutes he had “filched” to prove his case. “I just looked at him,” Neil recalled, “and said, ‘Junior, what do you suppose I’ve been talking about all these weeks and weeks and weeks?’ ”104
Neil doesn’t date this incident. Nor is it clear when Reagan severed ties with HICCASP. He would later say that he had resigned via telegram in July, a claim contradicted by HICCASP records (which show him being appointed to its labor committee in late August) and by de Havilland’s recollection that he remained involved for three months after she quit.
“He always seemed to be observing,” she told an interviewer in 1989.
“And then I learned much later he was with the F.B.I.” (Some people said she was, too.)105
Reagan’s FBI file was made public in 1985, after the San Jose Mercury News had obtained it under the Freedom of Information Act. The FBI first Ronnie and Jane: 1941–1946
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contacted Reagan in September 1941, at Warner Bros. In November 1943
he was interviewed by an agent at Fort Roach and reported that he had almost come to blows at a party with a fellow actor who had made pro-German and anti-Semitic remarks.106 By March 1946, Reagan himself was being watched by the bureau’s Los Angeles office as a suspected Communist sympathizer because of his involvement with HICCASP, the AVC, and other left-leaning groups.107 In June an agent reported that Reagan had introduced a pro-Communist speaker at an AVC luncheon.108 But sometime later that year—most likely between mid-July and late September—he agreed to help the bureau monitor Communist activity in Hollywood.
According to his 1965 memoir, Reagan was visited at home by “three men from a well-known government agency” several months after he quit HICCASP. “Now look, I don’t go in for Red-baiting,” Reagan told them, but after being convinced that national security was at stake, “we exchanged information for a few hours.”109 At a 1955 trial involving the Screen Extras Guild, however, he had testified under oath that he received confidential information from government agents while still in HICCASP,110 and in his 1990 presidential memoir he would confuse matters further by saying that two FBI men had knocked on his door shortly before he went on HICCASP’s executive council.111 His FBI file doesn’t resolve this contradiction, but it does show that by 1947 he was one of at least eighteen informers for the bureau within the motion picture industry. Reagan’s code name was T-10, and his fellow moles most likely included Walt Disney and Billy Wilkerson, the publisher of the Hollywood Reporter and owner of the Sunset Strip hotspots Ciro’s, La Rue, and Trocadero.112