You can pick and choose from any number of disasters, but it is clear that long years immersed in the heavy-metal simplicities of the later Cold War left U.S. intelligence agencies ill-prepared for the complexities of the global struggle with Islamism—a contest in which ideology, ethnicity and national interest collide and an overwhelming technological advantage is not, by itself, enough to deliver victory. The porous borders and shifting contours of this slippery new world require something subtler, something new. Yet they would have seemed strangely familiar to Otto Katz (1895-1952), a Soviet agent of the interwar era and now the subject of an engrossing, endearingly gossipy biography.
Born into German-speaking Jewish prosperity in Habsburg Bohemia, Katz was a member of a doubly despised minority, stranded in the ancestral lands of yet another people with no country to call their own and under the sway of an enfeebled ancient authority that was alien to both. It's no great surprise that the young Katz was drawn to the certainties and promises of socialism, an attraction only deepened by the time he spent as a reluctant soldier on the battlefields of World War I.
Brief forays into business after demobilization failed to reconnect Katz to his bourgeois heritage. Family money did, however, help fund his involvement in the artistic scene (first in Prague, then Berlin), which was creatively stimulating, deliciously hedonistic (Marlene Dietrich!) and saturated with a radicalism that was much more than chic. Katz was energetic, charming, a committed leftist and a better journalist than the playwright he also had pretensions to be. It was probably inevitable that he would fall in with Willi Münzenberg, an old acquaintance of Lenin's based in Berlin and running a pro-Soviet propaganda network. Despite criticism by some comrades of Katz's questionable class background, Münzenberg sent him to Moscow in 1931 for further work within the propaganda apparat and, more important, for training as an "illegal."
When Katz finally rejoined his mentor a couple of years later, it was as one of the pur et dur—ready to do whatever it took to bring capitalism down—a transformation that his biographer, Jonathan Miles, never quite manages to explain. Intelligent and with a well-honed taste for life's pleasures, Katz witnessed the poverty and paranoia of the Soviet experiment at first-hand ("a hard, but promising reality" was his carefully euphemistic description) yet apparently emerged not deterred, but reinforced, in his faith.
Mr. Miles talks of Katz's belief in "the magnitude of the socialist vision" and, less loftily, suggests that he was hooked on intrigue and the thrill of pretense. Maybe. We should not overlook the accidents of time and geography that left him with scant affiliation to any nation or established social order—a vacuum that communism filled. More practically, its internationalism also offered a route for an ambitious, doubly—or was it triply—deracinated wanderer to rise to the top. Then came the Nazis, a phenomenon of disturbing resonance for a Jew brought up in lands stained by centuries of anti-Semitism. Hitler provided Katz with an enemy— always a good motivation—and yet another reason to stick with the Soviets.
The struggle against fascism defined Katz's career. In a darkening Europe (fans of thriller writer Alan Furst will relish this book), he worked as journalist, spy, agent of influence and propagandist, adding executioner to his résumé in Civil War Spain. Across the Atlantic, as "Rudolph Breda," he charmed the Hollywood elite with elaborate yarns of bogus derring-do. Katz's Red Pimpernel was the inspiration for Kurt Muller in "Watch on the Rhine" and, more or less, Victor Laszlo in "Casablanca."
The war years—largely spent in Mexico—were an anticlimax, but the divided world they created left little room for men like Otto Katz. He returned to Czechoslovakia in 1946 as foreign editor of the Communist-controlled Rudé Právo, Prague's best-selling daily, but time was running out. He was arrested in 1952, tortured, tried and hanged as one of the 14 defendants (11 of Jewish origin) in the Slánský show trial, one of Stalin's final encores, striking mainly for the bluntness of its anti-Semitism.
By then the internationalist veneer had been scraped off the Red Star. The venerable ethnic muddle of Katz's Mitteleuropa was gone. Utopia was off the agenda. The struggle between the Soviet Union and its enemies had degenerated into a traditional great-power rivalry: home team versus away, white hat against black. The era of the "cosmopolitans" was over, a fact nicely illustrated by the undistinguished postwar career of the distinctly cosmopolitan William Fisher.
Fisher was born in England in 1903 to ethnic German communists who had quit their Russian homeland at the end of the 19th century, only to return with their offspring after the revolution. As "Colonel Abel," he became the best-known Soviet spy of the Eisenhower and Kennedy years, not for the little he did but for the even less he said. As Giles Whittell shows in "Bridge of Spies," Fisher's reputation rests on the tantalizing reticence he showed after his arrest in 1957 and on the fact that he was swapped for U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers in Berlin in early 1962.
Fisher is a member of the supporting cast even in a book that recounts his story. The true stars of Mr. Whittell's narrative are an extraordinary airplane and the men who flew it. The game had changed. Propaganda continued to be peddled; agents of influence still whispered sweet somethings; spies still spied; secrets were still stolen. But with the descent of the Iron Curtain, borders were back: Loyalties were no longer so fluid. Even John Le Carré, a man capable of finding ambiguity where there is none, dated the recruitment that festers at the heart of "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" (1974) to an earlier time, the 1930s. Le Carré is fiction's supreme chronicler of the Cold War, but his depiction of that long standoff favors nostalgic prewar shadow over the bright electronic glare of the new great game. As a former intelligence officer of a declining power (Britain) forced to live off its wits, it was natural for Le Carré to put the spy at center stage—it certainly made literary sense—but the real-life drama had moved on to cruel sideshow wars, relentless military build-ups and the unending pursuit of that crucial scientific edge.
By the late 1950s, the key question was not if the Soviet Union could inflict terrible destruction upon the U.S. but how. After Sputnik, panic over a "missile gap" was piled on top of suddenly old-fashioned anxieties about H-bomb-laden bombers. These fears were fed by domestic opportunists and buttressed by Ike's unwillingness to demonstrate the lack of that gap. To do so would have been to admit what the Kremlin already knew—that the Americans were peering down into the Soviet heartland from the vantage point of the U-2, a revolutionary "jet-powered glider" able to fly long distances at 70,000 feet, an elevation beyond (fingers crossed) the range of Soviet defenses.
In many respects the massed armies and fixed European frontlines of this stage of the Cold War were a reversion to conflicts of the past. Some of the most critical spy work of this period was the time-honored stuff of military reconnaissance—listening, watching, prob ing, snooping—updated for a technological age. Cloak-and-dagger counted for less than the straight arrows of the "Weather Reconnaissance Squadron Number Two" and the frighteningly fragile, terrifyingly cumbersome eyes-in-the-sky—the U-2—that they flew.
Mr. Whittell, the Times of London's Washington bureau chief, is no Tom Wolfe, but the tale he tells is effectively another installment of "The Right Stuff," with a peculiarly lethal twist: People were trying to shoot these high-fliers down. "When [Powers] saw his first MiG contrails . . . while sailing over Baku on the morning of November 20, 1957, he trusted that the MiGs wouldn't be able to reach him and flew on. (He counted fifty-six Soviet fighters in the sky below him that day.) When his electrics malfunctioned over Yerevan he calmly rerouted himself via Mount Ararat. . . . He reached Adana in one piece and had his long martini."
It's a marvelous saga of dangerous missions, helter-skelter innovation and clandestine activity, punc tuated by succulent reminders that this was the era of the Mad Men's paradise lost: the steaks, the martinis, a fight over a wife in a bar, the Buick with whitewall tires roaring past an old crusader castle. It all came to an end in 1960 with the downing and incriminating—impossible, Ike had been assured—survival of Powers and way too much identifiable wreckage (still on view today in Moscow). This shattered plans for an Eisenhower-Khrushchev summit that some believe (I'm more skeptical than Mr. Whittell) might have defused the most dangerous Cold War tensions.
The path was now open for the arms race that was to dominate the next three decades. That there never was a missile gap was ignored or denied. The intelligence pointed one way, the politics another. (Mr. Whittell draws somewhat heavy-handed parallels with the run-up to the Iraq conflict.) That the consequences—the development of towering levels of Mutually Assured Destruction—preserved peace in Europe and, ultimately, bankrupted the Soviet Union would have been an irony too far even for the serpentine Otto Katz. On the other hand, the practical, patriotic and straightforward Francis Gary Powers would have been delighted.
