Johnny: A Spy’s Life (review)

Johnny: A Spy’s Life is an occasionally interesting but deeply flawed account of the amazing career of Johann Heinrich Amadeus de Graaf, a Communist militant who went from German party member to Soviet agent to British double-agent. Based largely on interviews with its subject conducted by one of the authors in the 1970s, and on de Graaf’s files in British, Canadian, and U.S. records, the book is supplemented by documents from Russian archives and interviews with surviving members of his family and some of his handlers.

The authors’ foraging for sources has yielded an impressively detailed account of the activities of de Graaf, whose activities ranged around the world. From Germany to the USSR, from Romania to Berlin, from Britain to Prague, from Manchuria and China to Argentina and Brazil, he participated in an incredible variety of activities and assignments for the Comintern and the Fourth Department of the Red Army, or Soviet Military Intelligence. Becoming disillusioned with Communism and the Soviet Union, he offered his services to Great Britain in 1933 and for six years worked as a double-agent for MI6. He spent most of World War II in Canada, infiltrating pro-Nazi groups for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, posing as a German intelligence officer and participating in a double-cross operation feeding German intelligence false information from a captured spy.

The most irritating and troublesome aspect of the book is the authors’ penchant for liberally quoting exact conversations based on recollections made dozens of years after the fact. Not only are many of the conversations implausible and cartoonish, they consistently make de Graaf appear as a fount of wisdom and sagacity dealing with fools and buffoons. Although the authors acknowledge some of his personality flaws, his anti-Semitism, and the probability that he murdered his second wife, they also tell his story from his perspective, rarely acknowledging that his interpretation might be partial, deeply flawed, or simply made up out of whole cloth.

To cite just a few examples that they accept as true:

• • De Graaf claimed that while working undercover in England, he charged into a government office to protest pay cuts directed at sailors, an act no sane agent would ever undertake.

• • Just before Adolf Hitler became chancellor, de Graaf was shocked to hear a German Communist leader explain that after Hitler it would be the Communists’ turn. If so, he must have slept through the entire “Third Period,” during which “After Hitler, us,” was the slogan of German Communists.

• • They have de Graaf checking over and correcting the battle plan devised by Manfred Stern, the Soviet representative to Mao’s Chinese Communist forces. Stern then allegedly told de Graaf that he, de Graaf, should be the general and Mao should serve under him.

• • After a mission in Romania, de Graaf supposedly denounces Béla Kun at a Communist International gathering, accusing him of bribery and corruption. The authors hint that Kun’s subsequent execution for collaboration with the Hungarian secret police substantiates de Graaf’s story.

• • On a visit to Moscow in 1934, de Graaf supposedly spits at the markers honoring fallen German Communists in Red Square and tells a sentry—who agrees with him—that they were “swine,” “rats,” and “skunks.”

Such tall tales, claims of prescience, and inflation of accomplishments and toughness are all the more unfortunate because de Graaf’s story is both fascinating and rich enough to tell without embellishment and fictionalization. Johnny de Graaf, later known as de Graff, born into a dysfunctional German family in 1894, ran away from home to work as a merchant seaman at the age of fourteen. Attracted to radicalism by his opposition to World War I, he was imprisoned for organizing a mutiny. He eventually wound up as a coal miner in Ahlen, where he joined the German Communist Party and participated in the Ruhr uprising of 1920. Over the next several years, he supplied weapons to militants (including the assassins of Horst...