From 1940 until his death in 1966, Walt Disney served as a secret informer for the Los Angeles office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, according to documents that have come to light under the Freedom of Information Act.

Details about the film maker’s F.B.I. connection emerge for the first time in “Walt Disney: Hollywood’s Dark Prince,” an unauthorized biography by Marc Eliot to be published in July by Birch Lane Press.

Mr. Eliot, who has written several books on popular culture, provided a copy of the Disney file to The New York Times so that information and direct quotations in the book could be verified against the Government documents. Experience with similar F.B.I. dossiers leaves no doubt that the material submitted by Mr. Eliot is authentic. As it happens, because many of the 570 pages in the Disney file are blacked out or withheld for national security reasons, it cannot be determined what names of Hollywood figures Disney passed on to the bureau as Communists or subversives.

During a strike of animators at the Disney studio in 1941, however, he publicly accused the strike leaders of “Communistic agitation,” according to an advertisement taken out by Disney in Variety on July 2, 1941. And when Disney, whose right-wing leanings were well-known, testified before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in Washington, he named several of the animators who had led the strike as Communists. What Hoover Got in Return

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http://www.nytimes.com/1993/05/06/movies/disney-link-to-the-fbi-and-hoover-is-disclosed.html