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20 Facts About Harvey Matusow

1.

Harvey Job Matusow was an American communist who became an informer for the Federal Bureau of Investigation and subsequently a paid witness for a variety of anti-subversion bodies, including the House Un-American Activities Committee, before eventually recanting the bulk of his testimony.

2.

Harvey Matusow was born on October 3,1926, in the Bronx, the son of Russian immigrants.

3.

Harvey Matusow became a member of the Communist Party USA in 1947.

4.

Harvey Matusow, freed from FBI supervision, went, on his own initiative, to HUAC and offered to testify in upcoming trials and hearings as a paid expert witness by providing information on his former Communist Party comrades and people he claimed to have known or met in party circles.

5.

Harvey Matusow became an editor of the anticommunist bulletin Counterattack and worked as a campaign aide to Joseph McCarthy.

6.

Harvey Matusow met fellow FBI informer, Elizabeth Bentley, on October 3,1952, at the offices of her publisher.

7.

Harvey Matusow claimed that she was upset at her "frivolous treatment" in the press.

8.

Harvey Matusow never got to the point where she could handle it.

9.

Harvey Matusow said she did not have any new information.

10.

Harvey Matusow is a liar, and she admitted so in substance that night.

11.

Harvey Matusow claimed in the book that McCarthy and Roy Cohn had encouraged him to lie.

12.

Harvey Matusow responded by dumping all his research material in the Hudson River.

13.

Harvey Matusow founded the International Society for the Abolition of Data Processing Machines, which claimed 1500 members in 1969.

14.

Harvey Matusow returned to the United States in 1973 and, on the advice of attorney Paul Marshall, attached himself to the large Renaissance Community commune in Turners Falls, Massachusetts, and marrying the ex-wife of the commune's spiritual advisor, the Aquarian Age mystic Elwood Babbitt.

15.

Harvey Matusow eventually settled in Tucson, Arizona, where, working with the Magic Mouse Theatre, he developed a clown persona named Cockyboo for stage and television.

16.

Harvey Matusow began Magic Mouse as a radio show in Tucson, Arizona, and slowly it grew into a traveling theater troupe, and in 1979, became the television program Magic Mouse Magazine.

17.

Later, Harvey Matusow converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and moved to Glenwood, Utah, to start the state's first Public-access television cable television program.

18.

Harvey Matusow made chimes out of melted ammunition and bomb shells during this time and became involved in collecting clothes for the Rosebud Sioux Reservation in South Dakota.

19.

In 2001, Harvey Matusow moved to Claremont, New Hampshire, to run the town's public-access television studio.

20.

Harvey Matusow was married "around a dozen" times, according to his obituary in The New York Times.