OPINION:
THE DANGEROUS OTTO KATZ: THE MANY LIVES OF A SOVIET SPY
By Jonathan Miles
Bloomsbury, $26, 366 pages
One of the Soviet Union’s crowning intelligence achievements was the creation of a vast propaganda network, the Communist International, or Comintern, charged with putting an innocent face on a brutal ideology and enlisting the support of political naifs worldwide who were too misty-eyed to see through the scam.
From the Comintern’s founding in 1919, Vladimir Lenin’s scheme was to present it as “another political party” working within the democratic process. As he wrote in the early 1920s, “In order to placate the deaf-mutes [we must] proclaim the fictional separation of [the Soviet] government … from the Comintern, declaring this agency to be an independent political group. The deaf-mutes will believe it.” (“Deaf-mutes” seems an apt description of people who often were described as “useful idiots,” a term credited frequently to Lenin but that scholars have never found in his published works.)
Jonathan Miles, a cultural scholar, vividly portrays the tangled life of Otto Katz, a German-speaking Czech Jew who at an early age was drawn into the vibrant literary and cultural life of post-World War I Prague. Here we have biography at its readable best: characters who were rogues and charlatans but unfailingly interesting. Mesmerized by the theater, chiefly because of “its ready supply of pretty women,” Katz became a figure on the European arts scene and especially the German film industry. One of his early crushes was the young Marlene Dietrich, who captivated audiences (the males, at any rate) by often “forgetting” to wear a wardrobe item that most women consider essential.
It was inevitable that Katz came into the orbit of Willi Munzenberg, a German-born rabble-rouser and intellectual who grasped the rudiments of effective propaganda: “The truth of what you said didn’t matter as much as when you said it, and what your expectations were of the effect on the people to whom you said it. Impact was given precedence over fact.” The Soviets essentially turned over their Western propaganda campaign to Munzenberg, who quickly recognized the parallel talents of Katz and took him on as his de facto second in command.
But beneath the flash and glitter, Mr. Miles makes plain that Munzenberg and Katz were peddling a Soviet version of “the big lie” just as Hitler’s propaganda machine was doing simultaneously for the Nazis. As a Comintern agent, Katz flitted from country to country, using a host of aliases, starting scores of communist-oriented journals, publishing books and providing tainted “news” to publications and wire services. During a stint in New York as a Soviet “illegal,” he worked with the Washington spy ring run by Harold Ware, which included Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers.
But it was in 1930s Hollywood that Katz made his major contribution to world communism. There he found an abundant store of “deaf-mutes” who eagerly gobbled up any nonsense he peddled about Soviet Russia. The dashing Katz went by the name of Rudolph (or Rudolf) Breda and billed himself as an “anti-fascist freedom fighter.”
Katz/Breda became a confidant of the German master filmmaker Fritz Lang, who fled the Reich in 1931. Through Lang, the spy met - and exerted a political influence on - such luminaries as Peter Lorre, Billy Wilder, Greta Garbo, David O. Selznick, Charlie Chaplin and Fredric March.
Katz shrewdly billed rallies as “anti-fascist” gatherings and enlisted such supporters as the Catholic archbishop of Los Angeles and the founder of the Bank of America. Those eager followers, as Mr. Miles writes, made up “Hollywood’s dense concentration of talent and wealth, a group with the technical capacity to send messages and spread propaganda around the globe.”
One well-publicized benefit raised more than $40,000, “a magnificent sum in 1935” (the equivalent of more than $600,000 today). Those funds went not to refugees, but to finance the Comintern.
Perhaps inevitably, Katz got caught up in the intraparty struggles that had communism in a turmoil in the 1930s. He spent much of the 1940s based in Mexico City, doing Comintern work through Latin America. The postwar years found him back in Eastern Europe. And when Stalin decided to rid himself of possible dissidents in Czechoslovakia, via the infamous show trial of 14 “traitors and Western spies,” the so-called “Slansky group,” Katz was among the 11 men hanged at the conclusion.
Persons who study the tactics of international communism over the years recognized early on the importance of the Comintern in Stalin’s quest for world domination. Jonathan Miles deserves five cloaks and five daggers for the new information he brings to light.
Joseph C. Goulden has completed an update of his “Dictionary of Espionage,” to be published by Dover Books in the fall.
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