Herb Sorrell

Herb Sorrell was head of the Conference of Studio Unions (CSU) in the late 1940s.

He got a job in a sewer pipe factory in Oakland when he was 12 years old, and worked with union leader Harry Bridges.

Peter Schweizer says that archives released by the Russian government after the fall of Communism show that Sorrell was a Soviet spy. Under the Bridges' guidance, he organized two violent, Communist-funded strikes.

It was, Schweizer writes, Sorrell's ambition to gain control of Hollywood's labor unions and thus provide the Soviet Union what the People's Daily World called:

"complete control of the greatest medium of communication in history"

and what Lenin called:

"the most important ... of all the arts"

In September 1946 he called a strike against the Warner Brothers film studio, secretly funded by the National Executive Council of the Communist Party.

A former boxer, Sorrell had brought in "sluggers" from San Francisco to help strikers:

"There may be men hurt, there may be men killed before this is over, but we are in no mood to be pushed around anymore." [1]