Richard Kauder

Richard Kauder (1900–1960) was a Jewish engineer and salesman based in Vienna at the time of his recruitment, who, under the alias Fritz Klatt, led a World War II spy network called the Klatt Bureau, nominally working for Nazi Germany, which included many other radio operators, some of whom where Jews. According to Avraham Ziv-Tal (2005), Kauder acted as a double agent for the Allies, and his 'Max and Moritz' network may have contributed to key turning points in the war that tilted events toward the Allies' advantage.

A few years after the war, in 1949, Kauder was in American custody undergoing interrogation when Soviet-controlled agents, disguised in U.S. uniforms, attempted to abduct him—an effort that ultimately failed, according to U.S. and other sources. The Klatt Bureau issued several thousand intelligence reports on both the Soviet ("Max reports") and Mediterranean fronts ("Moritz reports") starting in 1941, with the Max network specifically producing around 10,700 cables on the Soviet military between 1942 and 1944. According to the German historian Winfried Meyer, only about 10 percent of the Bureau's reports on Mediterranean events corresponded to reality, with the remainder largely fictitious. An NKVD analysis noted that the German air attaché stationed near Sofia mainly forwarded false reports about the Red Army to Vienna and Budapest. During and after the war, both British intelligence (in its interrogation of the subject of file KV 2/1496‑99) and the German Abwehr (via internal reports) investigated Richard Kauder and his organisation. The British interrogators considered the possibility that he might be a Soviet agent while noting his intelligence output, and within the German Abwehr there was debate whether he was working for the Soviets or perhaps even being run by the British. According to the National Archives catalogue entry and other sources, after the war it was concluded that his principal agent Ira Longin (and possibly General Turkul) had been under Soviet control.

The Klatt Bureau was one of the primary sources of the Foreign Armies East (FHO) and its director, Reinhard Gehlen. Gehlen made great use of cables received from the Max network and leveraged the "success of Max" into a spymaster's reputation and a postwar career.