The Dangerous Otto Katz: The Many Lives of a Soviet Spy
Shifting from a fine history of a painting (The Wreck of the Medusa, 2007), Miles depicts a high-profile publicist of the Communist Party line. Involved in books and movies in the 1930s and 1940s, Otto Katz also likely attempted to rub out former Russian spy Whittaker Chambers, but his Stalinist dedication was repaid in tragedy: after a show trial, Katz was executed in 1952 in Prague. Navigating in detail Katz’s many clandestine guises, Miles detects the multilingual Czech in Communist and literary circles in 1920s Berlin. Following apparent recruitment by Soviet intelligence, Katz operated from Paris with another Soviet-controlled propagandist known to students of this subject (The Red Millionaire: A Political Biography of Willi Münzenberg, 2003, by Sean McMeekin), pumping out anti-Fascist and pro–Popular Front tracts under a string of aliases. So debonair was Katz he swept through Hollywood posing as a refugee from Nazidom. Touching on famous stage names with which Katz’s agitprop career intersected (Noël Coward, Marlene Dietrich, Lillian Hellman), Miles’ book may appeal to culture mavens as well as those interested in espionage. --Gilbert Taylor