The Millionaire Was a Soviet Mole: The Twisted Life of David Karr by Harvey Klehr (review)

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...