Canadian Press, 7 Feb 10: Johnny X is Canada’s spy who came in from the cold. An enigmatic secret agent, he spent a lifetime covertly battling Nazis and Communists on several continents while living under a death sentence.
Johnny X, one of his many shadowy aliases, appears only sporadically in the historical record of 20th-century espionage. And he ended his days in obscurity in Brockville, Ont., as a proud new Canadian running a shabby waterfront hotel to earn a modest retirement income. His remarkable life, which included dangerous undercover work in wartime Canada, has eluded historians partly because espionage archives have remained largely under lock and key. But a new book for the first time lays bare the story of Johann Heinrich Amadeus de Graaf, as he was christened at his birth in 1894 in Nordenham, Germany.
“The tale you are about to read is an incredible one,” authors Gordon D. Scott and R.S. (Bob) Rose write in their introduction to Johnny: A Spy’s Life
. . . Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service MI6, for whom Johnny X worked as a double-agent beginning in 1933, refused to open its archives for the project. The government of Argentina, the scene of some of Johnny’s exploits, was similarly unhelpful. Even so, Rose extracted much compelling material from the FBI, the RCMP and others to put meat on the bones of the memoir, often using freedom-of-information laws.
The result is a sweeping tale of a courageous agent who pretended to work for the Russian intelligence service, which trained him in Moscow in 1930, and even for the Nazis, while actually serving Britain and Canada. His globe-trotting operations took him to Britain, Germany, the Far East, South America and Canada. Canadian readers will be especially drawn to the final chapters, as Johnny is hired by the RCMP to infiltrate Nazi groups in Montreal during the Second World War. . . .
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