Operation Solo (10 page)

Timmy Timofeevich, the son of Eugene and Peggy Dennis, left in Moscow for the Russians to raise, treated Jack to a good dinner and an enlightening evening. Timmy had grown up with the privileged and pampered children of the Soviet oligarchy, had many friends among them, and circulated among their families.

According to Timmy, from the Soviet perspective the situation in Cuba had become “very good and happy” since Fidel Castro seized power. Castro's brother Raul and two other members of the new Cuban cabinet were steadfast communists loyal to the Soviet Union. The Soviets were gleefully confident that through Castro they could transform Cuba into their first outpost in the Western Hemisphere. They already enjoyed secret relations with him, and formal diplomatic relations would be announced after the forthcoming visit by President Eisenhower to the Soviet Union.

In compliance with Mostovets' order, Hall instructed Morris to arrange talks with the Cubans. Morris arrived in Havana on May 5, 1960. Anibel Escalante, executive secretary of the Cuban party, briefed him for the better part of four days, outlining the web of ties the communists had woven around Castro and inroads they had made into the regime. Escalante too was confident that they would prevail in Cuba.

With a false passport supplied by the FBI, Morris in July 1960 flew to Prague. Following procedures he would duplicate many times there and in other east European capitals, he showed an airport security officer a letter of instruction. The security officer promptly telephoned the International Department of the Czech party, and one of its representatives soon appeared. Morris stayed in a comfortable party apartment while the Czechs arranged a flight to Moscow and notified the Russians when he would arrive.

In Moscow, he met two KGB officers who treated him with deference rather than as a subordinate. They explained that they were to supervise transfers of money and clandestine communications with the American party on behalf of the International Department.
For several reasons, they wanted to start handing money directly to Jack instead of sending it in driblets through Canada. The fewer people involved in any operation, the better. Worthy as Comrade Mascola was, she, unlike Jack, had no professional training.

The sums of cash to be passed in the future, the KGB officer continued, were likely to be greater than an amateur could safely handle. Thus a KGB officer and an alternate in New York would be assigned to work with Jack, and he would know them both. One would meet him secretly outside the city in carefully planned rendezvous. To reduce the frequency of meetings, large sums would be delivered at each and messages could also be exchanged. In time, Jack would be informed of methods by which he and the International Department could communicate through the KGB without personal meetings. One of the officers gave Morris a list of code words to be used in future messages. Each word designated a person or nation. For example, Morris was “Mr. Good” (in later lists he became “Hub”); “Madison” meant the Soviet Union; China was “Hamilton”; and Castro was “Peach.”

The FBI would prize all this information, but it paled in comparison to what Morris learned from the International Department. During a closed meeting with leaders of east European parties, Khrushchev venomously denounced China and Mao Tse Tung for “endangering world peace.” He ridiculed the Chinese contention that nuclear war “is nothing” and poured scorn on Mao for claiming that the United States was “a paper tiger.” Likening Mao to Stalin, Khrushchev accused him of subverting socialism by creating “a cult of personality” around himself and decreed that his writings no longer would be published in the Soviet Union. Heretofore, the Soviets had muted their reactions to Chinese calumny and tried to be conciliatory. Khrushchev's present denunciations amounted to a Soviet declaration of ideological war.

After Morris returned on July 30, 1960, the FBI sent the State Department a report of these statements, and it forthwith responded with an evaluation: “This is the most important single item the FBI has ever disseminated to the Department of State.”

Morris had to leave immediately for Havana to represent the
American party at the Eighth National Assembly of the Partido Socialista Popular (the Cuban party). Mingling with communist delegates from all over the world, he gained new insights into developing alliances between their parties and the Cubans. From the Cubans themselves, he brought back more intelligence showing that communist influence on the island was growing.

As the war of insults between the Chinese and Soviets escalated, the Soviets convened a conference in October 1960 in hope of securing a truce and mediating differences, and Morris attended as the American representative. The Chinese, while making fleeting reference to the desirability of unity among all communists, remained intransigent and bellicose. They disdained the most reasonable and conciliatory appeals the Soviets could make without groveling, and refused the least compromise. Instead of improving relations, the failed conference further poisoned them.

When traveling to the Soviet Union, Morris rarely could be sure exactly how long he would need to stay. The men with whom he regularly dealt were important and busy. Unexpected demands upon their time and attention sometimes forced them to reschedule appointments; new subjects could arise necessitating lengthier discussions than planned; occasionally he had to wait until someone he had to see recovered from illness. If he was scheduled to be in Moscow only a couple of weeks or so, he was given a suite at the party hotel on a floor set aside for secret communists or national liberation foreign dignitaries. If he was to be around longer, he lived in an apartment. That was the case in the fall of 1960 when he was a delegate to a conference of eighty-one parties that did not end until December.

The well-heated apartment was situated on an upper floor of a centrally located building whose garbage chutes and stairwells did not reek of clogged refuse and stale urine. It had a parlor, a bedroom, a study alcove, a large safe for storage of secret documents he was allowed to study but not keep, and a decent bath and kitchen. A cook/housekeeper maintained an ample supply of food and drink, and replenished it daily. Before leaving for the day, she insisted on preparing a cold supper even if he was dining out. On such occasions, she took the supper home with her.

Morris soon discovered that members of the International Department liked to visit him in the evening. They may have been sincere in their professed desire to discuss “general problems” or “general intelligence.” They undoubtedly were sincere in their enjoyment of the unlimited quantities of whisky and vodka they could imbibe for free. Morris welcomed them and all the inside information they imparted, wittingly or unwittingly. Now and then he did plead fatigue and suggest that prospective callers stop by later. On those evenings, he meant to copy documents by hand.

Ponomarev in late November or early December gave Morris two documents to study. One provided a chronology of events that culminated in the breach between the Soviets and Chinese; the other was a Soviet analysis of the gravity of the breach. Upon receiving the documents from the FBI in late December, the State Department declared them to be “of unique importance.”
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By the end of 1960, Freyman, Burlinson, and the few others in the FBI who knew about SOLO could be proud of its results.

At the time, some prestigious journalists, academicians, politicians, and foreign affairs analysts in the United States still believed Fidel Castro to be a crusading votary of liberty and independence for the Cuban people. To them, any suggestion that he might be willing to sell Cuba to the Soviet Union in return for personal status as an absolute dictator would have seemed nothing short of paranoid. The early intelligence emanating from SOLO, however, warned U.S. policymakers of what was likely to happen—and what in fact did happen—in Cuba, and thereby allowed them to plan accordingly.

To much, perhaps most, of the world, the Soviet empire and Peoples' Republic of China in 1960 appeared to be a fearsome monolith occupying a fourth of the earth's land surface and comprising more than a third of its population. Later, when little signs
of trouble between them inevitably surfaced, they were widely dismissed as inconsequential. “Experts” could and did argue that far more united than divided the communist partners. For years, some influential U.S. intelligence officials even contended that the indicators were deceptions, part of a grand disinformation scheme.

Almost from the inception of the Sino–Soviet split, authentic SOLO intelligence gathered at the highest echelons in Peking and Moscow showed that the breach was real, widening, and perhaps irreparable.

Soviet leaders now welcomed Morris and Jack into their confidence; they relied on them to maintain the financial lifeline of American communism and trusted them to work with the KGB.

Freyman and Burlinson had every professional reason to believe that, if security and Morris' health held, there would be much more to come.

five

THE LUCK OF THE FBI

NO ONE PROGRAMMED the events that made two new members available to the team. But Carl Freyman took full advantage of the good luck.

During the annual inspection of the Cryptanalysis Section at FBI headquarters in late 1960, Supervisor Walter Boyle stood accused of two transgressions.

The section chief, Churchill Downing, observed that some of his young civilian analysts and clerks voluntarily were staying after hours or coming in on weekends to do work they thought must be done. Their zeal impressed him all the more because they claimed neither overtime pay nor credit. “Walter, we ought to find some way to reward this extra effort,” he said. “You're here all the time. I'd like you to start keeping a record of who's here in off hours so I can note it on their fitness reports.” Someone found out about the informal log and filed a complaint that Boyle was attempting to coerce employees into working unpaid overtime.

Then there was the issue of the pretty girl, or “slut,” as the inspector chose to call her. While her husband was away taking
corporate training, the attractive clerk entertained a male FBI employee overnight at her home. Somehow the FBI learned about the tryst and at 4 P.M. on a Friday fired her for moral turpitude. The woman, who was twenty-three or twenty-four, reacted hysterically. She and her husband had just purchased a house, and they needed two incomes to meet mortgage payments. She did not know what to tell him and feared that dismissal from the FBI would so stigmatize her that she could not obtain another job.

Boyle telephoned his wife at their home in suburban Springfield, Virginia, and told her what had happened. “Friday afternoon is the worst possible time to fire anyone. She will brood all weekend, and she's suicidal. Could we invite her to dinner on Sunday night so she'll have something to look forward to?” A girlfriend dropped her off at Boyle's house; he consoled her by advising that in job hunting she could cite him as a reference, and after a pleasant dinner he drove her to her home in Maryland. Evidently the girlfriend told people in the office of the dinner; in any case, the inspector learned of it.

Leaning across a desk, he kept shaking his finger at Boyle while lecturing him about consorting with immoral former employees. “You stick that finger in my face one more time and I'll break it off,” Boyle shouted. For that insubordination, the FBI demoted him from supervisor to street agent and banished him to Chicago through a “disciplinary” transfer.

A garbled account of the incident preceded him to Chicago, and he arrived there in early 1961 with the reputation of a piranha. No one asked him to lunch, for a beer after work, or to join a carpool, and no supervisor would accept him on his squad—until Freyman spoke up. “I'll take him. Let's give the man a chance and judge him by what he does.” That was typical of Freyman. But he also had gone to the trouble of examining Boyle's background, which in ways paralleled his own.

Boyle was born April 6, 1929, in Jersey City, New Jersey, into an extended family that included three brothers, a sister, aunts, uncles, and grandparents. His father was a professional barefist boxer, then a stevedore, a dock foreman, and a salesman, and his mother had worked as a secretary in New York. Both parents read
widely, quoted literature at the dinner table, and on Saturday afternoons gathered the children around the radio to listen to broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera. Under a pseudonym, his mother, a member of the Third Order of Saint Frances, wrote book reviews for the Carmelite magazine published for priests.

Like Freyman, Boyle benefited from remarkable parochial schoolteachers who disciplined, stretched, and excited young minds. Sister Catherine Pierre was scarcely taller than her first-grade pupils at Saint Cecilia's Grammar School in Englewood, New Jersey, yet she did not hesitate to give their faces a sharp slap or an encouraging pat. She taught Boyle to read and to love reading. “It is a magic key that opens the door to the world.” She so thoroughly ingrained in him the multiplication tables that by age seven he could multiply, add, subtract, and divide without pencil and paper. All his life he remembered her with gratitude. He also looked up to the football coach at adjacent Saint Cecilia's High School. His name was Vincent Lombardi.

Boyle's father taught his four sons to box, and they settled disputes by putting on the gloves in a makeshift ring he created by tying rope around four trees in the yard. At school, Boyle thought it only natural to resolve arguments with his fists, and the more prowess he demonstrated, the more challenges he provoked. Endowed with quick reflexes and body coordination, trained by an experienced boxer, and naturally pugnacious, he invariably won, and parents of his antagonists called his parents to denounce him as a hoodlum, menace, and disgrace. “You're acting like a mean, nasty kid and you're going to get us run out of town,” his father warned. “If you get into one more fight, when you come home you're going to have to fight me.” After the Saturday opera, his father gave him a basketball, took him to Saint Patrick's parochial schoolyard, and taught him to shoot baskets, and Boyle developed into an outstanding basketball player.