[1] Enthralled with the radical left, Karr began writing at a relatively young age for the Communist Party USA publication, the Daily Worker.
During the war, Karr was investigated twice by the FBI, once after obtaining a secret report on Soviet leader Joseph Stalin prepared for President Roosevelt by Oskar Lange, another NKVD source in the administration.
Roth told Jaffe that Karr could obtain "a lot of stuff on the Far Eastern things that the other guys don't get because of his Treasury connections.
Karr became a good friend of the son-in-law of Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin, Dzherman Gvishiani, and was granted both North and South American trademark rights to Misha the Bear, the mascot of the 1980 Olympic games.
Along with Hammer, he formed a joint venture to make and sell Olympic commemorative coins,[3] an enterprise estimated to be worth some U.S. $200 million.
Karr frequently boasted of having close ties with prominent US senators and presidential candidates and that he transmitted information between the Soviet and American governments on such issues as détente, trade, and strategic-arms negotiations.
This firm in turn was connected to a French-American company, Finatec S.A., which was run by a competent KGB source, the prominent Western financier D. Karr, through whom opinions had been confidentially exchanged for several years between the General Secretary of the Communist Party and Sen. Kennedy.
[5]In late 1978, as Occidental Petroleum was attempting an unfriendly takeover of the Mead Corporation, Karr told a bizarre story in secret testimony before the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Karr said that one night in 1972, he was summoned to a hotel in Moscow to find Hammer in his pajamas, in tears and on his knees, pleading with two KGB agents not to arrest him.
Seven months later, in July 1979, hours after returning from a trip to Moscow, Karr was found dead in suspicious circumstances in his Paris hotel room.