David Karr, born in 1918 as David Katz to a Brooklyn Jewish family, led a life large enough to require the several names to go along with his multiple careers and identities. Karr is depicted by famed historian of Communism Harvey Klehr in a new book, The Millionaire was a Mole: The Twisted Life of David Karr as a man of many wives and personalities. Klehr began writing about Karr’s convoluted careers more than a quarter of a century ago before the Cold War ended. In the interim, the Soviet Union has collapsed and the Soviet archives have been opened and then closed. And on the way to his book about Karr, Klehr, meanwhile, has written several other volumes including: The Secret World of American Communism; In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage;and Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America. All are co-authored with John Earl Haynes.
The latest book on Karr is, in a sense, the dramatization of the themes of the preceding two as it centers on an American Communist—among other things—whose role could only be fully understood through revelations still contained in the Soviet archives.
According to the famed journalist Jack Anderson, Karr was the model for the window washer who worked his way to the top in the 1950s best-seller How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying. But on the way to his success, Karr—the man formerly known as Katz—started off in the 1930s as a young non-card carrying Communist writing for Party newspapers like The Daily Worker. In the early 1940s he spent a brief stint working for the Office of War Information (OWI). Government work came to an abrupt end in 1943 when he and several other OWI employees were called before the House Special Committee on Un-American Activities investigating suspected communists in the government and Karr testified under oath that he was actually an FBI informant before resigning from his post. Leaving the OWI, Karr was hired straight away as a legman for Drew Pearson, one of the most celebrated columnists of the post-WWII years. In the 1950s, the great age of corporate proxy wars, Karr became, for a time, a capitalist. In the 1960s, as he was moving though his third wife, he took up residence in Hollywood and became, for the first time, a passionate supporter of Israel. Come the 1970s as he moved towards his fourth marriage this time to a wealthy and culture Jewish French woman—he already had 5 children—Karr settled in Paris and signed on with the KGB while continuing to work as an international businessman.
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