RUTHFULLY YOURS

Karr, writes Harvey Klehr in his riveting biography of the man, was something else entirely: He was the young American communist on the make, his eye “ever alert for the main chance,” his hand ever open to Soviet largess. Born in Brooklyn in 1918, the son of Jewish immigrants, he gained access to power—and methodically amassed a $10 million fortune—by his wits, intelligence, radiant personality and, above all else, a matchless talent for Soviet-American networking. His early career was that of an idealistic sympathizer, working first as a freelancer for communist and far-left periodicals, including the Daily Worker. His later career, however, saw him assume an array of overlapping, ever-shifting personae, “from muckraking columnist to public relations flack, from corporate raider to corporate executive, from moviemaker to hotel executive, from business fixer to Olympic Committee confidant.”

According to some sources—and to stories unverifiable because the corroborating evidence remains classified or kept from public view by his former associates—Karr was also an “arms smuggler, . . . protector of Jewish emigrants from Russia, [and] behind-the-scenes political fixer.” Throughout it all, writes Mr. Klehr, “Karr cooperated with Soviet intelligence agencies, tried to act as a middleman between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S. on several issues, and attempted to get close to American officials and politicians at the behest of the KGB.” He had an uncanny ability to befriend major American business figures, including corporate raider Art Landa, health-care innovator Henry Kaiser and Occidental Petroleum’s Armand Hammer. He knew or met with every president from FDR to Gerald Ford and was a trusted adviser to many politicians, including Sargent Shriver, Scoop Jackson and Jerry Brown.

Was he a double agent? Whose side was he really on? Mr. Klehr would seem to have answered that question definitively with his title, “The Millionaire Was a Soviet Mole.” But no: The author’s final verdict is that while Karr began as a communist true believer, he ended, at age 60, as an amoral monster, an “unscrupulous and driven” man who in all his business dealings—especially those between Russian and Western parties—played both ends against the middle, using his connections mainly to enrich himself, no matter who got hurt.

Having barely graduated from high school, and having been rejected by the armed services because of partial deafness in one ear, Karr parlayed his left-wing journalist’s string book into a wartime position in the Office of War Information. In 1943 he was one of five OWI employees called before a House committee investigating communists in government jobs, but, after claiming under oath that he was an FBI informant, he was dismissed. (The facts behind Karr’s claim remain, due to redactions to Karr’s FBI files, rather murky.) He then became the chief legman to Drew Pearson, a journalist whose dishy syndicated column, Washington Merry-Go-Round, attacked conservatives, championed Roosevelt and was notoriously soft on Stalin. (Jack Anderson, who in 1948 succeeded Karr as Pearson’s assistant, called Karr a great cultivator of sources—“the most articulate and persuasive man I ever met”—but a superficial reporter whose stories were “more glib” than investigative.) For years Karr and Pearson remained close friends, and in 1950 Sen. Joseph McCarthy denounced Karr as “the connecting link between Drew Pearson and the Communist Party.”

During the Red Scare, Karr left Washington for New York to reinvent himself as a public-relations expert. “He attracted major clients based on his ability to orchestrate successful proxy fights,” writes Mr. Klehr, and by 1959, at the age of 41, he’d seized control of a major corporation all for himself: Fairbanks Whitney, an American defense contractor and the parent company of today’s Colt Manufacturing. Three years later, Karr’s inexperience and limitations as a CEO “led to a stockholder revolt that shoved him out the door.”

In a fallow period during the early 1960s, Karr dabbled in show business, co-producing Broadway plays, Hollywood films and television pilots. In 1966 he moved to Paris, his base of operations for the rest of his life. He set up a Swiss holding company, which he owned in partnership with Lazard Frères, to do financial consulting for corporate clients in Europe and the U.S. One of his first ventures was to obtain world licensing rights to Misha the Bear, the official mascot of the 1980 Moscow Olympics.

Karr’s final triumph was another Olympic tie-in: Hotel Kosmos (25 stories, 1,777 rooms, 59 suites), the first Western-financed luxury hotel in Moscow. Two days after its dedication, Karr died in Paris, in 1979. His scheduled cremation was halted by his widow, who had obtained a court order for an autopsy: She was convinced he had died under suspicious circumstances. His biographer can’t rule out foul play but thinks that Karr more likely died of an overstressed heart.

Mr. Klehr, an emeritus professor at Emory University and a leading historian of American communism, has spent his professional life tracing, in his 13 books, the links between U.S. and Soviet espionage. He writes a controlled prose supported by meticulous documentation. “The Millionaire Was a Soviet Mole,” the product of 30 years of research, is a work of tenacity and obsession; it traces the contours of Karr’s life with great detail and precision. Though he’s a man obssessed, Mr. Klehr is always scrupulously fair toward his subject, unswayed by dubious accusations and conspiracy theories. He leaves no available document unturned and ferrets out all that we can know about David Karr. Given how slippery Karr could be, that’s an impressive achievement.

Mr. Evanier, a former senior editor of the Paris Review, is the author of 10 books. He is writing a biography of the American communist spy Morton Sobell.