Various intelligence agencies kept a close watch on real and imagined Communists in Hollywood, even during the war when the ostensible basis for anticommunism—the USSR’s supposed designs on the United States—had been submerged. Sidney Buchman, “executive producer and assistant to Harry Cohn” of Columbia, was identified by military intelligence as a “strong communist sympathizer; possibly a fellow traveller.” Intelligence’s “mail cover” on Buchman revealed that he subscribed to a Red newspaper.87 With precision the military analyst described Buchman as 5′9 1/2″ tall and 165 pounds, with a “freckled scar on right cheek.”88 It was not altogether clear why military intelligence would be so concerned with writers and Hollywood figures—but they were. Theodore Dreiser was described as a “communist fellow traveller or an ‘intellectual communist’”; he “has served the cause of the party,” it was reported, “as faithfully and probably more effectively than the rank and file of known party members.”89 The screenwriter Sheridan Gibney was deemed a “communist sympathizer.”90