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The Millionaire Was a Soviet Mole: The Twisted Life of David Karr. by Harvey Klehr, New York: Encounter Books, 2019. 288 pp. $25.99.

2020; The MIT Press; Volume: 22; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1162/jcws_r_00942

1531-3298

Steven T. Usdin,

Intelligence, Security, War Strategy

Harvey Klehr has written a book about a philandering, narcissistic, New York real estate developer with ties to Moscow-based intelligence agencies. No, not that one!Although the parallels are startling, David Karr, the subject of Klehr's The Millionaire Was a Soviet Mole, is in many ways far more interesting than Donald Trump. Unlike Trump, Karr did not inherit his fortune and the opportunities for fame and power that came with it. Instead, he had to hustle and scramble relentlessly in pursuit of success and recognition, continually reinventing himself, erasing or obscuring previous lives, and leaving friends, wives, children, and business partners in the dust.Klehr is the author and coauthor with John Earl Haynes of pathbreaking books that reveal the scope of Soviet espionage in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s and chronicle the subservience of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) to the Soviet Communist Party and state security apparatus. Over decades of mining archives around the globe for insights into Soviet state security and military intelligence operations targeted at the United States, Klehr kept coming across traces left behind by Karr. Klehr became fascinated, almost obsessed, by the man whom he describes as the “Zelig of twentieth-century American life.”Karr, the son of a prosperous jewelry manufacturer, was born in Brooklyn in 1918. He started out in life as David Katz and, in the first of many transformations, changed his name to Karr soon after graduating from high school. Ditching Jewish-sounding names was common in the 1930s, a time when anti-Semitism was routine, jobs were scarce, and many young men were more interested in getting ahead than in retaining links to their past.Karr's dream was to become a reporter. He managed to get a few freelance articles into the Chicago Herald Examiner, but that opportunity quickly fizzled out when one of his left-leaning stories caught the attention of the paper's conservative publisher, William Randolph Hearst. The Daily Worker, the main mouthpiece of the CPUSA, was more receptive.In later years, when affiliation with Communism became a liability, Karr vehemently denied that he had ever been a party member or sympathizer. Although Klehr has not uncovered conclusive proof of Karr's membership, he suggests it is unlikely that someone who had never pledged allegiance to the cause would have been permitted to contribute to The Daily Worker. “If not formally a member, Karr was a member in all but name. He associated with Communist Party members, sympathized with its positions, and was hostile to its critics.”Karr infiltrated the fascist German American Bund and warned the Worker’s readers about the threat from Nazi spies. From this he was asked to contribute to a Life magazine story about the rising threat of fascism in the United States. The connection with Life spurred the American League for Peace and Democracy to hire Karr to give speeches about Nazism.Karr parlayed his expertise into a job at the American Council against Nazi Propaganda, a Communist front group. He interviewed and wrote about the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan and exposed the ideology and activities of fascist organizations such as the Silver Shirts that were feeding on the fears and prejudices of a society weakened by years of economic depression.Karr moved a few steps toward the mainstream of U.S. politics in June 1939 when he jumped from the Communist-dominated American Council to Transradio Press Service. A year later he was granted a leave of absence to work on the reelection campaign of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and he then rejoined Transradio in its Washington bureau. During the campaign Karr started what became a lifelong habit of cultivating relationships with older men who came to view him as a surrogate son. The first was Gardner (Pat) Jackson, a well-connected New Dealer who introduced Karr to a wide circle of Washington insiders.In the early months of World War II, Alan Cranston—who later represented California in the U.S. Senate—hired Karr to join the Office of Facts and Figures, a government propaganda agency, as liaison to the foreign language press. An anonymous letter denouncing Karr as a Communist prompted investigations by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Office of Facts and Figures. They uncovered Karr's association with the Daily Worker but not the fact that claims on his résumé to fluency in French, Spanish, and German were bogus. Employing a formula that would save him many times over the coming decades, Karr deployed a combination of charm, lies, bluster, and references from respected men to persuade the government that he was a loyal American and had never been a Communist.By 1943, the Office of Facts and Figures had been renamed the Office of War Information (OWI), and Karr had risen to become assistant chief of its Foreign Language Division. This position was significant enough to bring him to the attention of the most zealous red-baiter in Congress, Martin Dies. A staffer for Dies learned that Karr had insulted his boss years earlier in the pages of The Daily Worker, and the congressman set out to even the score. At Dies's request, the FBI launched a new investigation of Karr, as did the congressional Un-American Affairs Committee chaired by Dies.Karr muddied the waters and annoyed FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover by telling the committee and anyone else who would listen that his connections to Communists had been a pose, that in fact he had been working undercover for the FBI. As the FBI told the Dies Committee, this was a fabrication. In speeches and statements printed in the Congressional Record, members of Congress denounced Karr as a Communist and demanded his immediate termination.After resigning from the OWI under a cloud, Karr went to work on a futile campaign to persuade the ailing Roosevelt to retain Henry Wallace as vice president. Karr's next stop was a brief stint on The Washington Post city desk.After the Post fired Karr, Drew Pearson, the most famous—and feared—journalist in the United States at the time, hired him as a “leg man.” The job required someone who was part journalist, part private detective, and wholly without principle. The job required lying, stealing, extorting, and bribing. Karr was perfect for it. He specialized in collecting dirt that Pearson could use to blackmail members of Congress.However, what got Karr in trouble was not his ethical transgressions but his political past. As the world slid into a Cold War, Washington became an uncomfortable place for anyone who could credibly be accused of having sympathy for Iosif Stalin. FBI Director Hoover and members of Congress pressured Pearson to fire staff who had Communist connections, including Karr.In 1948, Karr moved to New York and shifted from journalism to advertising and public relations. But he could not shed his past. In a series of stories attacking Pearson, the columnist Westbrook Pegler denounced his rival for hiring Karr, whom he described as a dangerous Communist.Senator Joseph McCarthy repeated and amplified the attacks on Karr in speeches starting in 1950 and continuing for years. McCarthy alleged that Karr was Pearson's Communist controller, conveying orders that originated in Moscow and Beijing. McCarthy called Pearson and Karr “the grease monkeys of the communist conspiracy that is trying to conquer us.”The attacks did not deter ardent capitalists from hiring Karr. He provided public relations services in support of a corporate raider, wrote a how-to book on proxy wars, and then got into the game himself. Eventually Karr climbed to the top of the capitalist pole, becoming president of a publicly traded holding company with more than 5,000 employees. Because the company had contracts with the Department of Defense and other government agencies, Karr was subject to renewed investigations by the FBI. The scrutiny reinforced Hoover's view that Karr was a rotten person but did not uncover unequivocal evidence that he was or had been a Communist.Karr, who was utterly unschooled in the intricacies of business, presided over the disintegration of his company. Fortune magazine compared him to “a ninth grader chosen to be mayor for a day.” After the board eventually fired Karr, he moved to Hollywood, dabbled in movie production, divorced his second wife, became engaged to an actress, and abandoned her in favor of a wealthy French woman.The next phase of Karr's life is the most interesting—and the murkiest. His wife provided a luxurious apartment with servants and a view of the Eiffel Tower. She also gave him an entry route into elite social circles. Karr worked these connections; for example, gaining the trust of an aged heiress and charming her into selling the George V hotel to an English businessman. This led to a stint as an executive in an expanding empire of luxury hotels.Karr befriended Armand Hammer, a U.S. businessman with close ties to Soviet leaders, and accompanied him on trips to the USSR. The two collaborated on business deals. Some were lucrative for Karr, and all of them helped line the pockets of his Soviet associates. There is evidence, according to Klehr, that Karr become an asset for Israeli intelligence at this time, when he had already been recruited by the Soviet State Security Committee (KGB).Extraordinary access to an eclectic collection of powerful men made Karr a valuable source. He socialized with the diplomat Sargant Shriver and with Aristotle Onassis, and he met in the White House with Lyndon Johnson. Close friends included California Governor Jerry Brown, along with Senators Cranston and Edward (Ted) Kennedy. Notes from the KGB archives smuggled out of Russia by Vasili Mitrokhin indicate that Karr was briefing the KGB on these connections and that in 1976 he provided Soviet intelligence with information about Jimmy Carter's presidential campaign.Klehr notes the irony that, although Karr in the 1950s was innocent of the charges McCarthy and others had made that he was a Soviet spy, those charges came true two decades later.Karr served as a confidential liaison between Senator Edward (Ted) Kennedy, a serious presidential contender, and the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, and between Kennedy and the KGB. Kennedy sought to assure Soviet leaders that, if elected president, he would de-escalate conflicts over Afghanistan and other issues. Karr passed the torch to Kennedy's chief of staff, who remained in close touch with Soviet intelligence officials. “Thus,” Klehr reports, “one of Karr's services to the KGB was to set up the process by which one of the most prominent figures in the Democratic Party regularly communicated with the Soviet Union to explore ways to undercut the foreign policy of his own country.”Karr raised alarm bells in the White House and at the Central Intelligence Agency during the presidency of Gerald Ford, when he tried to act as a back channel between the Kremlin and the White House. He facilitated a romance between a Russian man and Christina Onassis, who had inherited much of her father's wealth.Even as Karr's career as a businessman bridging East and West was prospering, and he was simultaneously serving Soviet and Israeli intelligence agencies, his personal life deteriorated. He dominated and abused his children and left his third wife for a woman who was charitably called a model and not so charitably labeled a prostitute. The aftermath of a gaudy romance was a marriage that lasted one day. A few months after their separation, but before an annulment or divorce could be finalized, Karr was found dead in his Paris apartment.Karr's death was as tumultuous as his life. His ex-wives were convinced that he had been murdered, and they proposed a confusing list of assassins. The Soviet Union, the FBI, Hammer, and other business rivals were accused. Multiple investigations failed to uncover solid evidence of foul play. After laying out the evidence, Klehr states, “Was Karr murdered? The only answer that can be given with any certainty is … maybe.”The results of Klehr's investigations are not, however, ambiguous. He has written a book that reads like a thriller and illuminates previously unknown corners of Cold War history.