Thirty Pieces of Silver
Being Red pp.158-159
 Yet I must mention a play I wrote at the height of the witch hunt. It dealt with the betrayal, by a colleague, of a man who worked at the White House as a staff member, and it was called Thirty Pieces of Silver.
Denied production here in America, Thirty Pieces of Silver was produced in five European countries and became a sort of staple in Australia, where the play had long runs in both Brisbane and Sydney. Curiously, during the writing of these memoirs, I wrote to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, asking under the Freedom of Information Act for the files they had kept on me through the ghastly years of the repression. They sent me more than eleven hundred pages, and in these pages, there was mention of Thirty Pieces of Silver. They had become aware of the play – which was published in book form in England – from a European "informant," as they put it, and they asked for a copy of the play. Even though it was then running in three European theaters, their informants could find neither a copy nor an abstract. The FBI, as their record in my file states, then handed the problem over to the Central Intelligence Agency. After several weeks, this brilliant organization, which eats up money faster than our taxes can be collected, sent their memo to the FBI, admitting that they were unsuccessful in obtaining a copy of the Howard Fast play. It had meanwhile been copyrighted and published in the United States, but neither of these organizations – on whom, we are told, our security depends – thought of going to the Library of Congress, where the play could be had simply for the asking. So much for intelligence.
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