Flato was employed by the United States government and spied for the Soviet intelligence during World War II.
He also served under Nelson Rockefeller in the Blockade and Supply Branch of the Latin American division of the Board of Economic Warfare during World War II.
He is known to have used at least one ghost writer in the form of a friend for an article printed in The Saturday Evening Post in the early 1960s.
Flato was one of the co-founders of the Medical Pharmaceutical Information Bureau, and wrote and edited for the publication Hospital Practice.
He gave Suze his car before he died of kidney failure in Hyannis, Massachusetts, on January 1, 1984.