From every indication, Otto Katz must have cast an undeniably powerful spell with "his charm, good looks and love of the high life. Women as worldly as Marlene Dietrich and Lillian Hellman were drawn to him without question, as if they had just arrived in town from the farm. Willi Münzenberg, Lenin's pick to head Soviet covert propaganda operations in the West, was similarly disarmed: he enlisted Katz in the cause in mid-1920s Berlin, despite warnings from Moscow that bon vivant Katz exhibited too many bourgeois tendencies. Münzenberg would later have reason to regret his choice.
"The only certainty about secret agents is that one can be certain of nothing," Jonathan Miles writes with awe in his survey of the many guises, aliases and clandestine assignments of Otto Katz between 1925 and 1952. Arthur Koestler dubbed him "the nonchalant impresario and idea-man of the great Comintern variety show," and the evidence supports that claim. Turn around once, Katz is in Hollywood raising money for anti-Fascist causes (without revealing that he funds went to Communist front organizations); turn around twice, he's engineering a propaganda coup with a much-publicized counter-trial in England regarding the 1933 burning of the Reichstag; turn around again, and he's in Spain "covering" the civil war as a "journalist." Throughout, Otto Katz went where he was sent and got the job done. As Miles notes, Katz was a blind adherent to the Soviet cause, more than willing to live in a world of double agents, disinformation, tradecraft and betrayal, with urbanity effectively masking a truly sinister and ruthless operative.
Miles tells us that early on Katz liked to go everywhere, meet everyone and have a ball, but a noticeable shift came after a training stint in Moscow in 1931. He emerged firmly committed to the Communist International Revolution; that meant total unquestioning loyalty to Josef Stalin. Witnessing Stalin's vicious purges of the mid-1930s, though, he confronted a dilemma between his dedication to Communist ideals and maintaining an alliance with the increasingly demented Stalin. Miles theorizes that Katz made a leap of faith to resolve his dilemma and remain in service to the Communist Party.
On March 21, 1946, Katz returned to Prague after years of globe-trotting. Within a few years, with Stalin on a rampage, Katz was arrested and tried during the Prague show trials of 1952. Miles notes, "Katz's anti-Fascist struggle, with its inevitable Western, pro-Jewish alliances, was used to forge a potent case against him." Stalin emerges from these pages as a monster beyond comprehension, yet we still ask why talented and indefatigable minions like Otto Katz stayed firmly in place until Uncle Joe added their names to his latest purge list.--John McFarlandShelf Talker: This breathless survey of the globe-trotting career of loyal Soviet spy Otto Katz reveals a complex time when nobody was who he pretended to be and testifies anew to the horrors of the totalitarian agendas of Hitler and Stalin.