Double Lives: Spies and Writers in the Secret Soviet War of Ideas Against the West.

Double Lives: Spies and Writers in the Secret Soviet War of Ideas against the West, by Stephen Koch

(Free Press, 404 pp., $24.95)

THE name Willi Munzenberg is familiar to readers of Arthur Koestler and Manes Sperber, writers whose chronicles of European and German Communism first told us of his work on behalf of the Comintern. But it has been the unique task of Stephen Koch, who was able to utilize material hidden until recently in the archives of the former Soviet Union, to tell us the whole story of how this remarkable Comintern operative fashioned a widespread network of agents--"Munzenberg's men," as Mr. Koch calls them--who created a propaganda apparatus that gained the allegiance of the most prominent writers, intellectuals, artists, and politicians in the major capitals of the Western world.

Indeed, the network Munzenberg fashioned went beyond merely creating Communist propaganda. Rather, it was at times indistinguishable from an espionage organization. Munzenberg's chief operatives--the urbane Otto Katz, a Sudeten German born in Prague, and the "elegant but slightly seedy" Louis Gibarti, a Hungarian-- were most likely not only Comintern agents, but NKVD cadre as well. And the task they accomplished went to the heart of what Stalin wanted to develop in the West: a legion of true believers who could be counted upon to justify the most egregiously brutal Soviet policies and practices. Their task, as Mr. Koch explains, was to propagate the idea that to "criticize or challenge Soviet policy was the unfailing mark of a bad, bigoted, and probably stupid person, while support was equally infallible proof of a forward-looking mind committed to all that was best for humanity and mankind by an uplifting refinement of sensibility."

In that task, Munzenberg succeeded all too well. With willing victims ranging from Lillian Heilman, Josephine Herbst, and Dorothy Parker in America, to Thomas and Heinrich Mann in Germany, to Elsa Triolet and Louis Aragon in Paris, Munzenberg's agents, led by Katz and Gibarti, used the lure of "anti-fascism" to attract their prey, and a strong lure it was. At its center was the distinction these gullible intellectuals made between Communism and fascism. The former, they thought, derived from the Enlightenment, and hence they were incapable of discerning the evils stemming from a Marxist-Leninist state. "Protecting the progressive ideal," Mr. Koch explains, "seemed to rest on denying or evading the manifest horrors that had sprung from their radical application. And within the needs of such a denial, Munzenberg and his heirs moved and found their element."

Again, that element was "anti-fascism." It is perhaps Mr. Koch's signal contribution to reveal, in a complex and textured analysis, that in reality this anti-fascism was a complete illusion. From the very beginning Josef Stalin planned a secret working relationship with the Nazi Party and Hitler's Germany. That pattern began, Mr. Koch shows us, with the real story of the Reichstag Fire trial in 1933 and the role played by Comintern leader Georgi Dimitrov. For decades, it has been part of the fiction of received history that the Nazis themselves burned down the Reichstag, blaming it on the Communists and subjecting the Bulgarian Dimitrov to a mock trial--in which Dimitrov, due to an outstanding performance and to world support, turned the tables on the Nazis and gained his acquittal.

The truth, until Mr. Koch's discoveries, has lain buried in the vaults of the Comintern and, as one might have suspected, is much more complex and nuanced. Of course, the passions roused against fascism were quite genuine, and justified. Hence the "progressive" world was enthralled by Dimitrov's unflinching and seemingly brave challenging of the Nazis from the Leipzig courtroom. What Mr. Koch tells us is that Dimitrov was brave for one reason alone: "He was in no danger and knew perfectly well there was nothing for him to fear." In effect, the Nazis had rigged the trial in Dimitrov's favor. It was all part of a covert operation organized jointly by the NKVD and the Gestapo, "through which he was assured of acquittal and a triumphant return to Russia at the end of what was a propaganda charade played out as a whole high drama of defiance."

How could this be? Indeed, how could the totalitarian Nazi regime allow its courts to free the top Comintern leader, who supposedly was using their courtroom to expose the Nazis' own perfidy? As is often the case with espionage, we here enter the wilderness of mirrors. Katz and Munzenberg had already created the world-famous Brown Book of Hitler Terror, which appeared simultaneously with the Leipzig trial, and which did so much to inform the Western world of the nature of German fascism. As Mr. Koch says, every informed person was aware of its contents, and the volume was a best-seller throughout the West. But close examination reveals the limits of its anti-fascism. Stalin's real policy, as Mr. Koch writes, was "overt anti-fascism plus secret appeasement." The Brown Book of Hitler Terror, despite its title, let Hitler off the hook. As did the Reichstag trial, and the Western response. Mr. Koch writes:

Hitler's persecution of German Communism was almost certainly pursued in full collaboration with Stalin and the full knowledge and direct personal co-operation of the future head of the Communist International, using the Comintern's "anti-fascism" as cover. Almost certainly, the acquittal of Georgi Dimitrov was the result of secret arrangements with the Nazis, and the founding scandal of the Soviet-sponsored anti-fascist movement, one of the leading forces in the moral life of this century, was created in direct collaboration with Hitler himself.

As Mr. Koch explains, this charade was really not as surprising as it may at first seem. The Brown Book, as it turns out, and the expose of the Nazis by Dimitrov, concentrated on the paramilitary Brown Shirts, or SA, a group Hitler had come to see as a major contender for power, and which he rightly saw as standing in the way of his own authority. Stalin, meanwhile, feared the SA's ability to militarize Germany quickly, and he believed the stabilization of the new regime by Hitler would forward his own interests. Hitler and Stalin alike saw that the SA and its leader, Ernst Rohm, had to be prepared for slaughter, and Hitler thus allowed Dimitrov to use his courtroom pulpit, as Mr. Koch puts it, "to discredit the SA, prior to its elimination."

In that effort, the propaganda apparatus of Munzenberg sprang into action. A "counter-trial" was held to much fanfare in London, and the gullible "progressives" in the West flocked to sign up for service in various Munzenberg fronts. And there were many.

It should be acknowledged here that the idea of a Dimitrov conspiracy orchestrated jointly by Hitler and Stalin seems preposterous on the face of it. Is the evidence that Mr. Koch has unearthed in the Comintern files confirmed elsewhere? Reviewing this book in The New York Times Book Review, Maurice Isserman states definitively that no historian has "ever stumbled across evidence of the Hitler-Stalin partnership of 1933." In fact, that is not so. In Robert Tucker's important biography, Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928-1941 (1990), Mr. Tucker points out that, in seeking stability, Moscow saw that its "best bet, from Stalin's point of view, was a diplomacy of accord with Germany." Fearing a non-Communist socialist Germany should fascism be defeated, Stalin sought a Nazi takeover, which he thought would give him a better chance of cementing his power in Russia. Hence, as Mr. Tucker puts it, "Stalin abetted the Nazi victory," by engaging in "a certain amount of collaboration."

Mr. Tucker goes on to document precisely what Mr. Isserman denies: that in 1933, "Stalin signaled his interest in doing business with Berlin." That cooperation included secret diplomacy carried out by Comintern head Karl Radek in October 1933. The policy continued into the late 1930s. And like Stephen Koch, Mr. Tucker refers to "the mask of anti-fascism," and shows how Stalin used the Popular Front as cover for his purge against such actual anti-Nazi elements as Field Marshal Tukhachevsky. Among other historians, Walter Laqueur, in his own book on Stalin, notes that the documents used to frame Tukhachevsky were forged for Stalin by the Gestapo.

While Karl Radek orchestrated the policy in Moscow, Munzenberg's men carried it out with zeal in the West. Munzenberg's had his greatest success in the United States. Indeed, one of his most notable victories was his courting of the Hollywood liberal Left, with its writers, directors, and actors whose new-found wealth during the Great Depression led to pangs of guilt, and made them willing participants in Otto Katz's legion of front groups. The key to success was the Popular Front, portrayed as a broad anti-fascist alliance.

As Mr. Koch writes, the Front was really Stalin's mechanism for gathering support while he carried out the Great Terror at home. His followers in the West simply could not understand that the Front was conceived, as Mr. Koch writes, to be "what no decent person could turn against, in spite of the trials." And so Willi Munzenberg devised the technique of zeroing in on the best of the adversary culture---the enlightened elite of the middle classes--using their sensibility and concern in service to the malign purposes of Stalin. It worked all too well. In England his men recruited the Cambridge spy network. In Washington, D.C., they formed the notorious Ware group, which infiltrated the ranks of the State Department and the Roosevelt Administration. Nor was the press ignored. In England Claud Cockburn's influential newsletter The Week passed along to its readers the Comintern disinformation provided by Otto Katz. In New York, Katz was instrumental in forming the supposedly independent Left-liberal newspaper P.M., which Mr. Koch describes as a "classic Munzenberg-style daily." (P.M. did employ a few prominent anti-Communists, but as cover for its generally pro-Soviet foreign-policy line.)

In Hollywood Katz touched the lives of Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett, Donald Ogden Stewart, and scores of others of the Tinseltown nobility. Here were the beginnings of the molding of Hollywood on behalf of the "right" causes, something that has continued through our own day. The purpose was "to Stalinize the glamor culture, while simultaneously giving the apparatus a cash cow capable of producing a large, untraceable supply of much-needed American hard currency to finance various operations around the world." And so Munzenberg's agent Otto Katz charmed his way through Hollywood, appearing at functions and testifying falsely about his heroic struggle against the Nazis, and asking for checks at the end of each appearance. The main concern was support for Stalin, not resistance to Hitler. When the Nazi-Soviet Pact was finally announced, not one of the Hollywood set defected. Instead, they applauded the invasion of Poland and the Soviet attack on Finland, which Miss Hellman promptly described as "a pro-Nazi little republic."

Mr. Koch presents a powerful challenge to the anti-fascist pretensions cherished by the Left from the Thirties to the Fifties. It has long been said that whatever Stalin's own motives and policies, at least the anti-fascist crusade and the Popular Front were a genuine response by idealists to the betrayal of the Western heritage. And indeed, for some, they were that. But the same well-meaning idealists allowed themselves to be used as instruments in the campaign orchestrated by Stalin to consolidate his totalitarian regime, either as actual agents (Hiss, Field, Herbst, and others), or as apologists (Hellman, Parker, and other members of the literary elite). Anti-fascism, Mr. Koch writes, "was the most urgent moral cause of the 1930s" and it was "betrayed from within precisely by the Communists who most ardently claimed it as their own." This should put to rest the claim made by the pro-Communist Left that they were fighting "the good fight." It is not surprising that writers who, like Mr. Isserman, have sought to defend that claim, now turn fiercely against Mr. Koch's findings.

The story that Stephen Koch tells, then, is not very pretty. Of course, it is a cliche that a revolution devours its own children. Katz was most likely involved in the murder of Munzenberg, who died, seemingly alone, in a woods in France in 1940. As for Katz, he was to meet his end in the Prague trials of 1952, accused of being a Western agent and convicted on the "evidence" of the American traitor and Soviet agent Noel Field, betrayed in fact by the very apparatus he had helped create in the Thirties and Forties. What Mr. Koch has shown us is nothing less than the complete involvement of the Soviet secret services in the intellectual life of the West from the years before World War II into the early Cold War. It was Willi Munzenberg in particular who shaped key operations directly for Stalin, from the Sacco-Vanzetti defense of the Twenties, to the peace movement of the Thirties. What appeared to be independent acts of protest, it turns out, were either run by Soviet intelligence from the start or taken over and orchestrated by it shortly thereafter. One hopes--given the new availability of files still to be opened and examined--that this superb effort will be but the first step toward a full understanding of what until now has been the hidden history of the twentieth century.

Mr. Radosh is Professor Emeritus of History at the City University of New York, and co-author, with Joyce Milton, of The Rosenberg File: A Search for the Truth.