Robert G. North

Robert Guilford North (January 26, 1913 – December 20, 1954) was an American film writer and producer who reportedly served as an undercover CIA agent in Thailand.

North, who served in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II, was a minor screenwriter in Hollywood before moving to Thailand with his wife Maxine in 1950, where he established the Far East Film Company with Thai producer Ratana Pestonji, co-producing Santi-Vina before his death in 1954.

[12][2] After graduating, he continued onto law school at Stanford,[13] but was suspended in 1938 over a prank where he and a group of students performed a burlesque mocking university president Ray Lyman Wilbur.

[18] In Honolulu after the Battle of Kwajalein in early 1944, North met General William J. Donovan, head of the Office of Strategic Services (the United States' wartime intelligence agency and precursor to the CIA), who recruited him to the OSS.

After training in Washington, D.C., North was deployed for special operations in China, where he conducted intelligence missions behind enemy lines for the Fourteenth Air Force.

[a][19] He was able to compel a local Chinese magistrate to supply troops to help reclaim the equipment, which allowed American planes to attack Japanese convoys passing through the observed areas.

[15] After the war, North settled in Los Angeles and resumed his writing partnership with Cummings, penning scripts for producer Sol Wurtzel, who was a serial maker of B movies for 20th Century Fox.

[28] Several later sources have claimed that North was an undercover agent of the Central Intelligence Agency, and that the Far East Film Company was a front for CIA activities in Thailand, importantly serving as a funding conduit to supply the Kuomintang in Burma.

[36] North had a large social circle; an obituary for his mother in Thailand's Standard newspaper in 1963 called him "one of the most popular Americans who have ever lived in Siam".