Ladislas Farago

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Ladislas Farago (1906-1980) was a screenwriter and part-time journalist who published a number of popular books on history and espionage, especially concerning the World War II era.

He was the author of an acclaimed biography of George Patton and received a screen writing credit for the movie Tora! Tora! Tora! together with Gordon W. Prange. Some of his other work (for example, a book in which he claimed to have located Martin Bormann alive in South America in the early 1970s) was perhaps less reliable.

He was born in Hungary in 1906 and came to the United States in 1937. During the 1930s, he was on the payroll of several European intelligence agencies and during World War II, he worked for U.S. Naval Intelligence. There he wrote, among other things, statements that were broadcast to the crews of German U-boats in an attempt to induce them to surrender. These scripts were often aired under the name of Commander Norden. ^[1]

Other aspects of Farago's intelligence activities are more problematic. The British historian Stephen Dorril, in his history of MI6, asserts that Farago was the 'most successful disinformer or dupe' concerning the presence of Nazis in South America.

Farago died in 1980. His son, John M. Farago, is a Professor of Law at the City University of New York.

[edit] Selected bibliography

Abyssinia On the Eve (1935)
Abyssinian Stop Press (ed.)(1936)
Burn After Reading (1961)
Strictly from Hungary (1962/2004)
The Tenth Fleet (1962)
War of Wits (1962)
Patton: Ordeal and Triumph (1963)
The Broken Seal: "Operation Magic" and the secret road to Pearl Harbor (1967)
The Game Of The Foxes (1971)
Spymaster (1972)
Aftermath (1974)
The Last Days Of Patton (1981)

Farago's book AFTERMATH: The Search for Martin Borman, has yet to be disproven. His book "Abyssinia On The Eve" based on his trip to Ethiopia in 1935, is widely used by historians and is one of the most important sources about Ethiopia in this era.