<p/><br></br><p><b> About the Book </b></p></br></br>"Karr started in life as a leg man for scandal-monging columnist Drew Pearson. He was long accused of being a card-carrying communist. He avoided a career crash-and-burn when anti-communism peaked, by claiming to have been working for the FBI. This was certainly untrue. Karr did PR for political campaigns, then the private sector. His political background was obviously a source of his unscrupulousness, and it certainly gave him an edge in business. Many hated him and thought him unethical; others admired his drive and aggression. Karr succeeded in charming an elderly French hotel owner to sell her prize Paris hotel properties to Forte, after many others had failed. Karr is also rumored by his competitor for business in Russia, Armand Hammer to have sold arms to the PLO. Karr's counter-rumor is that Hammer was caught in a scheme calculated to endear himself to Brezhnev, by stealing some letters of Lenin, then arranging to buy them back in an auction, then grandly to return them to Mother Russia. However, he was caught at this by the KGB. Karr soon found himself as a top executive of an industrial firm, but running a company turned out not to be his talent. A ladies' man, Karr had a succession of well-connected wives. He also wound up richer than anyone exactly expected. The sudden discovery by his heirs of big bucks spawned a nasty and colorful legal battle among his ex-wives and children. There was a lot of reporting in New York and Paris speculating that the Soviets had done him in. Aristotle Onassis; Bobby Kennedy; President Lyndon Baines Johnson, Bobby's hated rival; Kennedy pal and Ambassador to France Sargent Shriver; Palestinian terrorists; and various KGB agents fill this book chockablock with intriguing stories one after another."--Provided by publisher.<p/><br></br><p><b> Book Synopsis </b></p></br></br>By the time he died under mysterious circumstances in Paris in 1979 at the age of sixty, David Karr had reinvented himself numerous times. His remarkable American journey encompassed many different worlds--from Communist newspapers to the Office of War Information, from muckraking columnist to public relations flack, from corporate raider to corporate executive, from moviemaker to hotel executive, from international businessman to Soviet asset. Once denounced on the floor of the Senate by Joseph McCarthy, he became a trusted adviser to Sargent Shriver, Scoop Jackson, and Jerry Brown. <p/> As a New York businessman Karr orchestrated a series of corporate takeovers, using a variety of unscrupulous tactics. With virtually no business experience, he became CEO of Fairbanks Whitney, a major defense contractor, only to be quickly ousted by outraged stockholders. <p/> After settling in Paris, he arranged the building of the first Western hotel in Moscow, obtained North American rights to the marketing of the 1980 Moscow Olympics mascot, and won the contract to sell Olympic commemorative coins. <p/> Karr died suddenly and mysteriously in 1979. The French press exploded with claims he had been murdered, naming the KGB, CIA, Mossad, and Mafia as suspects. A British journalist later accused him of plotting with Aristotle Onassis to assassinate Robert Kennedy on behalf of the PLO. <p/> With three ex-wives, one widow, five children, an outdated will, and millions of dollars in assets, Karr's estate took a decade to unravel. Based on extensive archival research and numerous interviews, <i>The Millionaire Was a Soviet Mole</i> aims to unravel the perplexing question of whose side he was on during his tumultuous career.<p/><br></br><p><b> About the Author </b></p></br></br>Harvey Klehr is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor Emeritus of Politics and History and former chairman of the political science department at Emory University, where he taught from 1971 to 2016. He is the author, co-author, or editor of thirteen books, three of which have been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. <i>Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America</i> was published by Yale University Press in 2009 and praised by Anne Applebaum as a "genuinely important and darkly fascinating book." He has also written more than 120 articles and reviews for professional journals as well as for <i>Commentary</i>, <i>The New Republic</i>, <i>New York Review of Books</i>, <i>Wall Street Journal</i>, and <i>Weekly Standard</i>. <p/> He was the recipient of the Emory Williams Distinguished Teaching Award for Emory College in 1983 and was recognized as the University Scholar-Teacher of the Year by Emory in 1995. He also served a six-year term as a member of the National Council on the Humanities.