Carl Aldo Marzani (4 March 1912 – 11 December 1994) was an Italian-born American political activist with a series of careers as a volunteer soldier in the Spanish Civil War, organizer for the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), United States intelligence official, documentary filmmaker with an Academy Award nomination, author, and publisher.

During World War II he served in the federal intelligence agency, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and later the U.S. Department of State.

Returning to university studies, he received a BA in Modern Greats, (Philosophy, Politics, Economics) from Oxford in June 1938.

[1] Marzani later wrote that the immediate effect of his conversation with Nehru "was to broaden my horizons, show me the relationship between the industrial revolution and colonialism, revise my understanding of both, and give me a solid grounding in the economics of imperialism.

After the German invasion of the Soviet Union in mid 1941, Marzani became director of a popular front anti-fascist organization, and resigned from the Communist Party in August 1941.

A 1943 Venona Project decryption of Soviet espionage cable traffic reported on an American code-named Kollega ("Colleague"), recruited by Eugene Dennis, who later became CPUSA General Secretary.

[8] In 1945 Marzani transferred to the Department of State, where he worked as the deputy chief of the Presentation Division of the Office of Intelligence.

Marzani's branch was moved to the State Department, where he was the deputy chief of the Presentation Division of the Office of Intelligence.

[14] An unsympathetic account of his case, written by one of the participants in both the events and his trial, appeared in the anticommunist magazine Plain Talk.

[16] Arthur Garfield Hays represented Marzani pro hac vice with Allan R. Rosenberg with Charles E. Ford and Warren L. Sharfman.

[18] In December 1947, Time magazine reported Marzani among other "unwelcome guests" to speak at six US colleges, whether "Republicans, Democrats, Communists, Buchmanites, Zoroastrians, or ecdysiasts".

The article mentioned Gerhart Eisler and Marzani ("dismissed by the State Department for concealing his Communist card") together and that it was the University of Wisconsin which had barred him.

In prison, Marzani began work on a book blaming President Harry S. Truman for starting the Cold War.

This book brings the reader undisputed proof of Truman's apostacy to the New Deal; of Churchill's machiavellian plans against the Soviet Union and of the sinister roles of Forrestal, Harriman, Dulles, Byrnes and Vandenberg, and of the murderous conspiracy which started the Korean War.

While he was there, Cedric Belfrage, a British friend from Marzani's OSS days, introduced him to Jacobo Árbenz, the former President of Guatemala overthrown by the CIA in 1954.

These experiences provided background for Cuba Versus CIA, cowritten with Robert E. Light, an associate editor with Belfrage's newspaper, the National Guardian.

[26] This book was one of the first to list major covert CIA operations, including against Guatemala, and overthrowing the Mossadegh government in Iran in 1953.

Marzani continued to correspond with his intelligence contacts as late as 1979, keeping abreast of their views of foreign affairs including the Iranian Revolution and developments in China.

[1] The Marzani and Munsell publishing house "was destroyed in a mysterious fire" in December 1968, ending the run of books, pamphlets, broadsheets and reprints chronicled in the Bibliography below.

[16][28] Gornick described the impression he made on her while she was researching this work, in her review of the first volume of his autobiography: At the age of 62 he talked longer, harder, faster than anyone I'd ever met.

As he talked he smoked, drank, cut the air with his hands, leaped up from his chair, paced the floor, grasped the arm of his listener.

His dark eyes grew darker, his brows came together in (mock) ferocity, his white spade beard made him look now a patriarch, now an intellectual, now a con man.

His politics in turn had undoubtedly shaped the character of his emotional life, tempered his daily judgments, widened the scope of his relationships, made all things human interesting to him.

In 1972 he authored Wounded Earth,[32] a well-respected book on environmental matters, at that time an unusual interest for a man associated with orthodox Marxism.

In a note appended to the article he commented "I have only two claims to fame: that I was the first political prisoner of the Cold War and that I wrote the first revisionist history of it."