New book on Canada’s mysterious Agent 235

De Graaf

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
A new book published by the Pennsylvania State University Press sheds new light into the life and work of mysterious Agent 235, Canada’s mysterious mid-20^th-century spy known as ‘Johnny’. In Johnny: A Spy’s Life, R.S. Rose and Gordon Scott present the outcome of 14 years of research on ‘Johnny’, whose real name was Johann Heinrich Amadeus de Graaf. De Graaf was born in Germany in 1894, but later moved to Britain, and at the start of World War II worked as an informant for MI6. Although he conducted some of his operations in Germany, most of them took place in the UK, where he unmasked a number of native pro-Nazi sympathizers and agents of the Gestapo. In the early 1940s, MI6 sent de Graaf to the colony of Canada, with a mission to infiltrate the active pro-Nazi movement there, which he did, in collaboration with anti-Nazi hunter Cliff Harvison, of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). De Graaf fell in love with Canada, and after the War was accompanied there by the love of his life, Gertrude Kruger. He lived there until his death, at age 86. Throughout his career, he engaged in espionage operations in Canada, Britain and Germany, but also in the USSR, China, Japanese-occupied Manchuria, Brazil, Romania, and the United States.