Compare Marc Eliot's version of the events of August 22, 1944 with the FBI report.

Another distortion of the truth is Eliot saying Disney traveled to Reno and gave an "impassioned" speech. The FBI file says Mary Pickford read a telegram sent by Disney to the Reno event. Eliot quotes what he claims to be part of the speech, but actually he quotes the entire telegram! He knew full well Disney didn't travel to Reno.

Disney was made a Special Agent in Charge - Contact (SAC-Contact) by the FBI on January 12, 1955, which means he was recognized as an unpaid reference person that they could trust and call upon for information. Eliot calls the position a promotion for Disney and claims (but offers no proof or examples) that other spies reported to Disney once he became an SAC-Contact. As a friend of the FBI he did meet with them on a few occasions. He made a four-part newsreel about them for the Mickey Mouse Club and he once discussed making a film with their help about child molesters. He probably provided them information from his company's employment records, probably answered general questions about subjects that he was an expert on and possibly suggested where they might go to find information about questions he couldn't answer. According to news stories that came out after Eliot's book was published, Walt Disney never knew he was called an SAC-Contact by the FBI. It was simply an in-house specification that they used to designate trusted friends.

If you still feel there is something more sinister in the FBI calling Disney an SAC-Contact, you may recall that President Nixon met with Elvis and made him a drug officer. Photographs of the occasion have been published in recent years in history books and as postcards. They show Elvis and Nixon shaking hands. Does the meeting between Elvis and the President mean Elvis busted drug rings and turned in doctors who gave drug prescriptions to people with pill habits?

Eliot was really sloppy in developing his yarn. At one point he writes Disney filed his last FBI report in 1956 and that after 1957 "he seized every opportunity to ridicule the Bureau's personnel and tactics in his films." If Eliot is correct and Disney was not of service to the FBI after 1956, why does a memo dated October 11, 1960, from the head of the L.A. office to J. Edgar Hoover ask that he send SAC-Contact Walt Disney an autographed copy of his book Masters of Deceit? In the memo and in others up until the time of his death in December 1966, Disney was called "a valued contact of this office."

As for Disney trying to ridicule the Bureau, the only possible suggestion of this is the studio making two live-action slapstick comedies. In Moon Pilot, 1962, the script called for an FBI agent, but the character's title was changed to security officer at the request of the FBI before the film was made. The memos in the FBI file make it clear that Hoover disliked the idea of an agent in a comedy, but they also state that film critics and the public did not see the film as an attack on the Bureau.

Read more conflicting information taken from Marc Eliot’s version and the FBI report.

When Disney purchased the rights to That Darned Cat he called the FBI office in L.A. (7/8/63) to tell them he was going to do the film. A memo about the call says, "He stated that this is a comedy, and that the FBI will be depicted in a very respectful manner. He stated he would never do anything which would depict the FBI in any other light."

When the FBI sends you a copy of Walt Disney's file they say there are pages missing and they don't explain what they might contain. Eliot decided they were sinister things, but most likely they concern more mundane problems. Several people testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee that they had been members of the Communist Party at the time they worked for Disney (1930s). Papers regarding those people would have been in Disney's file if they stated where the person worked. They are not in the records released to the public. Other pages might have been about the studio doing secret work for defense contractors during the Cold War (several had exhibits at Disneyland).

The list of errors and fabrications can go on and on. Besides there being more problems with his facts based on the FBI file, it appears he has almost no knowledge or interest in animation history. He makes serious errors that anyone who has carefully read Leonard Maltin's Of Mice and Magic would notice. I also wonder how he managed to quote so many conversations that took place decades ago between people that had been dead for many years.

Other Unauthorized Histories of Disney
The first unauthorized biography appeared in 1968, two years after his death. Richard Schickel's The Disney Version outraged Disney fans as he claimed Walt couldn't and didn't draw Mickey Mouse (true) and he couldn't sign his name in the fancy script that is the company logo (true). The next unauthorized biography, Bob Thomas' Walt Disney, An American Original, stuck close to an authorized biography written in 1957. In 1985 Leonard Mosley's Disney's World revealed a dubious story that Walt was born out of wedlock in Spain to different parents. Mosley's research is so poor that he gives a detailed description of Winsor McCay's Gertie the Dinosaur, 1914, but his description describes a different film.

On November 30, 2001, the Guardian in England published "The Spanish Connection," an extremely long article by their staff writer Giles Tremiett. He reports that Marc Eliot and Christopher Jones, son of a Disney press agent, are working independently to prove Walt was born in Spain. While the tale may make great reading for some, there is one bit of evidence the authors don't bother to explain. Walt looks too much like his brother Roy to be the bastard son of a Spanish nobleman and a washerwoman. Even if this were true, does anybody really care who his parents were? It is the man's outstanding contributions to 20th Century popular culture that is important.