Otto John – Patriot oder Verräter: Eine Deutsche Biographie (with Michael Wala, 2019)
In 1950 Otto John, one of the few survivors of the German resistance against Hitler, became the first chief of West Germany’s domestic intelligence service, the BfV. Four years later, while visiting Berlin, he disappeared – and reappeared at a Soviet-organized press conference. Did John defect, or did the Soviets kidnap him? Hett and Wala have poured through masses of recently declassified intelligence documents from Germany, Britain, the USA, and the USSR, and talked to surviving intelligence officers, to reconstruct this fascinating story of Cold War espionage at its most intense.
“An insightful biography. . . The trained American lawyer and historian of Germany, Hett, and the German intelligence expert and historian of North America, Wala, have obviously complemented each other well, and present a convincing version of this political crime.”
“Highly readable . . . [a] meticulous, exciting telling of the detective story.”