STEPHEN KOCH
31
tracks. In his speech Otto told how he had betrayed the Revolution by
serving Trotsky and Lord Beaverbrook in conspiracy with (among others)
that ruthless agent of the Imperialists, Claud Cockburn.
What was their real connection? By a curious coincidence, sometime
between Amsterdam-Pleyel and the day Otto arrived in London for the
Counter-Trial, Claud Cockburn had summoned up a London rumor
sheet, an insider's political rag known as the
Week.
The idea behind the
Week
was to publish for the select few a weekly paper filled with the very
best political gossip, all carefully but ingeniously arranged to serve the
hard-left and Stalinist position at any given moment. It was plain that the
Week
could and should not have a mass or even a large circulation. The
gratifying sense of being in the select number of those truly on the inside
does not flow from reports in
Time
and
Newsweek .
The
Week
has been
called a "conspiracy theory bulletin." Its targets were precisely the insiders
it was designed to reach: a splendid strategy. For a number of years,
Franklin Roosevelt based many of his most important decisions on infor–
mation about British and European politics he'd found in the
Week .
He
never missed an issue.
But where on earth did Cockburn pick up this stuff? There were
plenty of lies in the paper, but much of its information was dead-on accu–
rate, and often
very
much from the inside. From which desks were these
sizzling tales lifted? Cockburn always shrugged off the question. He got
his stuff from pals, he said; he had all kinds of pals. Nothing much more
than the babble of the boys in the pubs of Fleet Street, where to be sure
Cockburn was an inveterate habitue. That and certain ... well, let's call
them "correspondents" in Germany. Certain "friends" in Paris. You
know. People. Here and there.
Perhaps. But the
Week
was founded very shortly after Cockburn had
a high-level meeting in Berlin with Willi and Otto. Its appearance in
London political life coincides precisely with the period of Cockburn's
most significant intimacy with Katz. Is it mere coincidence that Otto was
a witting agent of both the Comintern and the NKVD, trained by Willi
and Radek for precisely this kind of information and disinformation? Can
that fact really have no relevance? More likely, some significant part of
the rumors Cockburn spread in the
Week
originated with the
apparat
and
were supplied by Claud's best guide through that wilderness of mirrors,
Katz.
Some such thing probably took place in New York, as well. Ralph
Ingersoll was an influential friend and colleague of Henry Luce, who in
the 1930s became the lover of Otto's devoted political protege, and dear
friend, Lillian Hellman. Not only was Ingersoll besotted with Hellman,
but under Hellman's guidance the political life of this senior executive in
