Arthur Derounian (born Avedis Boghos Derounian (), April 9, 1909 – April 23, 1991), also known as John Roy Carlson among many pen names, was an Armenian-American journalist and author, best-selling author of Under Cover.
Derounian wrote for the Armenian Mirror-Spectator, Fortune Magazine, the Council Against Intolerance and the Friends of Democracy. In the 1950s he founded and managed the Armenian Information Service, which made a number of publications. His exposé writing has been the subject of lawsuits.
Derounian is also notable for editing the manifesto of Armenia's first Prime Minister, Hovhannes Kajaznuni.
Personal life
He was born to Boghos Derounian and Eliza Aprahamian in Dedeagach, Adrianople Vilayet, Ottoman Empire (today Alexandroupoli, Greece). The Balkan Wars and First World War had an unsettling effect on the entire region, and his hometown repeatedly changed hands. The family moved several times, spending time in Turkey and Sofia, Bulgaria, where his brother Steven Derounian (who was later elected to the U.S. House of Representatives as a Republican from Long Island) was born. Eventually the family emigrated to the United States, settling in Mineola, New York. He went on to study at New York University's School of Journalism. Later, he married Marie Nazarian and had a daughter named Elyse and a son named Robert.
He died of a heart attack on April 23, 1991, while researching at the library of the American Jewish Committee on East 56th Street.
Undercover work
In 1933, Archbishop Leon Tourian was assassinated at the altar of his New York church. The assassins were members of the Dashnaks, a radical Armenian group who accused the Archbishop of treason to the Armenian national cause. Deeply shocked, Derounian spent the rest of his life opposing the Dashnaks as well as other violent radicals - in particular, fighting fascism and all forms of racism.
During the 1948 Israeli-Arab War, Derounian also infiltrated among the Arabs fighting the newborn Israel, travelling extensively in the Arab parts of the expiring Mandatory Palestine as well as in Egypt and Syria. His position on the Israeli-Arab Conflict, at the conclusion of his book "Cairo to Damascus", was that "In the simplest of terms, Israel, as I saw it, represented Good; the Arab world represented Evil".
"The Plotters"
"Under Cover" "Under Cover: My Four Years in the Nazi Underworld of America - The Amazing Revelation of How Axis Agents and Our Enemies Within Are Now Plotting To Destroy the United States" became a best seller when published in 1943.
Derounian was a tireless investigator of subversive activity, and infiltrated numerous "patriotic" groups, some of which he listed in the opening of his book Under Cover: German American Bund, Christian Front, American Nationalist Party, American Women Against Communism, The Gray Shirts, America First Committee, Christian Mobilizers, The American Defense Society, Anglo-Saxon Federation of America, National Workers League, Yankee Freemen, Flanders Hall, American Patriots among many others.
Among the groups he also helped expose was the international Nazi propaganda news agency World-Service.
He was also the chief investigator of the anti-fascist organization, Friends of Democracy.
In a speech Representative Arthur G. Klein attempted to give in the US House in 1944 and which was printed in The Nation, Klein praises Derounian's book Under Cover:
Lawsuits related to Under Cover
This expose made him enemies, and several parties instituted actions against him for alleged libelous material. Three of the four cases failed the consolidated case before the jury, leaving a verdict in favor only of lawyer Jeremiah Stokes, which was later overturned. The lawsuit claimed that Derounian had held Stokes up for ridicule. Stokes is first mentioned on page 365 of Under Cover, and his patriotism questioned in the next chapter, which begins: I was in the room alone with two men. The one who had pumped both my hands in welcome was a small round man with a bald dome and rotund face. He had small, beady eyes and he peered at you from behind rimmed glasses. He was definitely of the single-track, uncompromising zealot type. Jeremiah Stokes had let his law practice slide and was devoting the major portion of his time to the writing of "patriotic" tracts.