Illustration by Golden Cosmos

My grandmother’s close friend and, I later learned, occasional lover was, in the fullest sense of the phrase, an international man of mystery. He had a lavish apartment in Manhattan, across from Lincoln Center, and another in London, as well as homes in Israel and France, and he travelled from one to another, showing up suddenly and disappearing just as quickly. He told me sometimes about his impoverished childhood, in Lithuania and in New Jersey; it was never clear exactly how he had become wealthy. There was talk of “interests” in various firms, of lucky real-estate investments, of his time running the production company that made the James Bond films. Much later, not long before his death, in 2004, I learned the truth, revealed by documents unearthed after the fall of the Soviet Union: Joseph Katz was an important Soviet agent in New York and Europe in the nineteen-thirties and forties. His cover was running businesses that his Soviet bosses had created for him. He had a front company that manufactured gloves, another that owned parking lots, and a third that did importing and exporting.

I thought of Joe recently when I heard about the meeting between Donald Trump, Jr., Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, and a group of Russian, British, and Georgian businesspeople, some of whom have connections to Russian intelligence. The meeting, which was held in Trump Tower, last June, was arranged by a pop star (whose billionaire father, a Russian real-estate mogul, had financed his career) and his British public-relations man, who, apparently, was happy to add international intrigue to his list of services. The guests included Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer who has represented the F.S.B., her country’s intelligence service, and Irakly Kaveladze, a financier who has been investigated by Congress for laundering Russian money through companies in Delaware. The ostensible agenda for the meeting ranged from the political (possible dirt on Hillary Clinton) to the financial (lifting American sanctions on Russian oligarchs and their companies).

In Joe’s time, there was a sharper distinction between business and espionage. Joe once wrote that he had “dreams of creating a better world.” His motivation was ideological, and his companies were a tool whose value—whose very existence—would disappear when Communism won. The meeting at Trump Tower is an example of the crude form of capitalism that ultimately triumphed in Russia. Now business is both goal and tool, inducement for coöperation and its reward.

“There’s a natural fit between business and intelligence,” Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a former C.I.A. operative who runs intelligence and defense projects at Harvard’s Kennedy School, told me. Spies carefully assess the commitments and vulnerabilities of potential sources; when camps are set up along moral lines, such as pro- and anti-Communist, it is difficult to move somebody from one to another. Businesspeople are less of a challenge. “Anytime you have money involved, it’s perfect for intelligence officers,” Mowatt-Larssen said.

This doesn’t mean that businesspeople are knowingly aiding foreign intelligence services for a few bucks. Rather, it suggests that it is far easier for spies to gather information when it comes out of a business relationship. Indeed, Russian intelligence has demonstrated something of an obsession with the real-estate and finance industries. Vince Houghton, the curator and historian at the International Spy Museum, in Washington, D.C., reminded me of the last major Russian spy scandal, in 2010, when the U.S. government arrested ten Russian agents living in America undercover. One, a woman born Anya Kushchenko but going by Anna Chapman, hid her activities behind her online real-estate startup. Another, Lidiya Guryev, who used the alias Cynthia Murphy, attended Columbia Business School and sought relationships in New York finance, particularly with Alan Patricof, a billionaire who co-chaired Hillary Clinton’s 2008 Presidential campaign. Guryev’s handlers in Moscow urged her “to build up relations little by little” with Patricof (she wasn’t successful); they also thanked her for uncovering details of the gold market.

The methods of today’s Russian spies are similar to those of their Soviet predecessors, with one significant difference. “To big-business types,” Houghton said, “the Soviets could not offer financial incentives worth their time.” Today, Russians “can offer incentives in the billions: ‘We’ll bring you into a Russian natural-gas consortium.’ ” A business deal can be an opportunity for profit as well as a lure into a murkier relationship.

Joe Katz ultimately rejected Soviet Communism, in part because of a K.G.B. purge of Jewish agents. He parlayed his front businesses into a profitable career, and into a life of good food, fine drink, and romantic liaisons. A recent article about him in Commentary revealed that Israeli intelligence and F.B.I. officials puzzled over this former Soviet agent: Was he loyal to Russia? To Israel? To America? What seems clear from Joe’s personal correspondence, collected in a moving book, “Letters to My Brother,” is that, for Joe, it was not an ideology that replaced Communism: it was money. ♦