[quote name=\'Desperado\' date=\'Feb 13 2005, 05:41 AM\']It's a widely documented fact that Goodson and Todman belonged to several anti-American extremist groups. Todman was a Nazi sympathizer and Goodson worked for the KGB in the 70's and early 80's...
[snapback]74946[/snapback]
[/quote]
Well, now that the story is beginning to leak I feel compelled to try and set the record straight.
Goodson's secret double-life as a government agent started with the OSS, the World War II era equivalent of today's CIA. He was positioned on the San Francisco coast to monitor the intelligence chatter for any mention of a possible Japanese attack on the mainland U.S. West coast. It was a noble mission that had him at the waterfront regularly, toiling at many jobs among the riff raff at the docks. This portion of his early life is alluded to in the A&E Biography in the discussion of his compulsive handwashing which developed from trying to remove the fishy smell from his essence.
In that era Goodson's path crossed many times with a local SFPD confidential informant named Merv Griffin. They would exchange information in the soundproof studios of KSFO where the station management cooperated with the OSS by hiring Goodson briefly as a station staff announcer. Unfortunately the Japanese attack that was almost successful occurred several hundred miles South of San Francisco and came without warning from the Bay Area operatives. The embarrassment led to a shake-up that ended Goodson's mission in the city by the bay.
Goodson was subsequently reassigned to the East coast to work on another mission, the details of which remain hazy. The documents available through the Freedom of Information Act concerning this era are still heavily redacted; some pages are almost completely blacked-out. Curiously, Merv Griffin and Goodson cooperated again so many years later in New York during this time. Watch those old tapes of "Play Your Hunch" carefully; even the title of the show alludes to the dual purposes of these two familiar operatives.
We do know that Goodson's teaming with Todman soon after his reassignment to New York was part of a government operation to infiltrate the Madison Avenue advertising community which was suspected of being rife with Communist sympathizers. The power of the advertising industry to subversively broadcast the Commie manifesto was apparent to the goverment. Todman went deep undercover, infiltrating that ad agency / country club crowd that became well known for their 3-martini lunches and their daily commutes to and from the Connecticut suburbs. As such, Todman would spent countless hours at the advertising industry's favorite Manhattan watering holes and in the bar car on the New Haven Railroad line between Grand Central and Greenwich.
A portion of this now stereotyped lifestyle was humorously portrayed in some of the Rock Hudson - Doris Day - Tony Randall movies of the early 1960s. That was one of the earliest pieces of evidence to the workings of what has only recently become known as the entertainment industry's "Gay Mafia". It was retaliation by a group at Universal Studios in Hollywood for the CIA's threatened "outing" of Hudson and others should they fail to cooperate with the government agenda.
Wait, I think I hear someone outside my window! I'd better run. More later!
Randy
tvrandywest.com
