Operation Solo (3 page)

The FBI immediately arrested her and to protect Morris planted rumors attributing the capture to the acumen of field investigators and their supervisors. Headquarters felt guilty about crediting others for what Morris had done and proposed to compensate him with a cash bonus. To the Chicago official, it said: “Name any amount; we'll pay it.” Boyle protested that Morris was not working for money and would resent being treated like a mercenary informant; he would most appreciate a brief letter from Director J. Edgar Hoover. Headquarters was adamant. By locating Angela Davis, Morris had saved the government millions of dollars that a continuing search would have cost, and he deserved a reward.
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The Chicago SAC (special agent-in-charge), Boyle, Morris, and Eva sat around a big desk in the back room of the cover office the FBI maintained for the operation. After congratulatory remarks, the SAC started laying $100 bills, one by one, on the desk. Morris glowered at Boyle, elbowed the cash away, and inched his chair to the right, further distancing himself from the money. Barely speaking, he joined Boyle in escorting the SAC through the suite to the door. When they returned to the back room, the money, $10,000 in all, was gone; Eva had pocketed it.

Boyle and his wife had adopted six children, two of them black, through Catholic Charities of Chicago, and Morris knew that Boyle actively supported the charity. The next time Boyle came to the cover office, he saw on the desk in the back room an envelope addressed to him. Inside, he found a cashier's check payable to Catholic Charities of Chicago in the amount of $10,000.

The so-called CIA deal said still more about Morris' disdain for money and his motivation. While the FBI kept the CIA ignorant of the source, it necessarily shared some of the intelligence Morris
provided, blandly prefacing reports with the phrase, “A source who has provided reliable information in the past advised…” However, CIA evaluation and subsequent verification of the often spectacular reports made clear that they emanated from someone with extraordinary access to communist rulers or maybe even a ruler himself.

Ultimately, the CIA tried to buy the operation, or buy into it, without knowing exactly what it was buying. It offered the FBI
any
amount—“there is no limit”—in return for “some control” of the operation and promised to pay the principal source an annual, tax-free salary of $250,000 for starters.

The FBI had no intention of selling “the family jewels,” as Boyle put it, but it felt obliged to relay the offer to Morris. The FBI paid him a small salary and he spent much of it on operational expenses. To earn a quarter of a million a year, he had only to keep on doing what he long had done.

It took Morris about thirty seconds to categorically and emphatically reject the offer. His loyalty resided with the FBI. “You have got to get people who devote themselves to this work because they believe in the Bureau and our country; not because they want money.”

This idealism impelled Morris to jeopardize his health, risk his life, and submit to all sorts of indignities. Although he and Eva were people of means, they themselves had to scrub the floors and toilets of their apartment because Morris judged it unsafe to admit a maid or any outsider into the apartment. Once when Morris, sick and exhausted, reported to Gus Hall upon returning from Moscow, Hall dragged him to his Long Island home and put him to work digging in the garden. His small body was weak and frail; his will was not.

A waitress interrupted Fox and Boyle to inquire if they wanted to order lunch. Again, they instead ordered more martinis and continued their reminiscences.
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When Boyle first learned that Gus Hall referred to Morris as his “secretary of state,” he thought it was some kind of joke. Morris assured him that Hall was quite serious. “To you, it sounds ridiculous. But if you think like they think, the title is quite logical. And you've got to learn to think like they think.” Much of Morris' genius as a spy derived from a remarkable ability to think just as the Soviets thought and thereby exploit their delusions and myopia. For years he adroitly exploited Soviet delusions about the American Communist Party.

According to Soviet interpretation of Marx and Lenin, the laws of history ordained that the American party ultimately would be the ruling party of the United States. Hence, to the Soviets the party represented the bona fide government of the United States, “temporarily out of power” but predestined eventually to assume its rightful rule. These premises were fantasies, yet if the Soviets repudiated the dogma that spawned them, if they admitted that Marx and Lenin were fallible, then how could they justify continuation of their power? Because they clung to foolish dogma, they behaved foolishly by treating “that ignoramus” Gus as president and Morris as secretary of state, “temporarily out of power.”

Morris understood that the Soviets also valued and sustained the American party because they vastly overestimated its influence, erroneously believing that in the 1960s and 1970s it could duplicate its successes of the 1930s. Because the party ardently supported the antiwar movement, the Soviets judged that the party was the primary instigator and manipulator of the movement. It was the same with any other movement or demonstration; if the party and noncommunists happened to agree on an issue and made common cause, in Moscow the party received the credit. Neither Hall nor Morris ever said to anyone in Moscow, “Yes, we were involved but our role was relatively minor.” And the men in Moscow responsible for directing the party had every incentive to exaggerate its importance and the results of their labors.

Comprehending the Soviet view of him and the American party, Morris acted out the role of the secretary of state or foreign minister of a Soviet satellite nation. As such, he regularly dealt with Soviet rulers and addressed most of them by their first name.

Fox and Boyle agreed that even Morris probably could not have accomplished what he did had it not been for unorthodox actions by the FBI.

They never knew the identity of the executive responsible but someone at headquarters cast the basic mold of the operation well before they joined it.

Morris returned from Moscow and Peking in 1958 with stunning intelligence imparted to him by Nikita Khrushchev, Mao Tse Tung, and Chou En Lai, and the FBI recognized that the operation now had unprecedented potential. Thus far, the Chicago and New York field offices had made and executed all the operational decisions without seeking approval or advice from headquarters. A question arose in Washington. Given the suddenly apparent potential of the operation, shouldn't headquarters assume direct control of it?

According to FBI lore, the winning argument ran as follows: New York and Chicago created this operation. Chicago saw where it might go when none of us here dreamed it could go as high as it is going. New York and Chicago have brought us this far; they obviously know what they're doing; they have done everything right. Why should we substitute our judgment for theirs? If you have players who are scoring touchdowns, you keep giving the ball to them; you don't take it away from them. Let Chicago and New York run wild. We can always rein them in if necessary.

The decision not to change winning strategy and tactics had many enduring consequences. The FBI allowed New York Agent Alexander C. Burlinson to stay in the operation for twenty-four years. The FBI kept Walter Boyle in it for twenty years, John Langtry for fourteen years, and Carl Freyman for thirteen years. Never, before or since, has the FBI kept agents on the same case for so long.

The Chicago and New York offices as a result accrued a unique body of experience and expertise, and thus a capacity intuitively to make fine judgments and discern what was most significant. Boyle came to know more about Boris Ponomarev and Mikhail Suslov, two of the dominant Soviets with whom Morris most often dealt,
than most people in Moscow; together with Morris, he could glean intelligence from their facial expressions. Langtry in New York came to know everything about the KGB officers who worked with Jack Childs, including which pasta their wives preferred.

Experience taught Morris and Jack they could count on their longtime FBI partners, with whom they could speak in “shorthand.” And a uniting spirit grew among what Eva called “our little American team.” Sometimes people on the periphery of the operation at headquarters accused Boyle and Langtry of “being too close to their assets.” The few people who really knew, who were recipients of the hurrahs from the White House, CIA, and State and Defense Departments, did not care how close they were.

Until the last years when events beyond the control of the field offices created dangers with which only headquarters could cope, headquarters granted Chicago and New York the broadest of liberties, allowing them to do what Americans do best—adapt, invent, innovate, imagine. If Boyle wanted to recruit a physician who would take cryptic calls from Morris overseas at all hours, a pharmacist who would supply false labels on prescription medicine for Morris, a travel agent who would issue multiple airline tickets under fictitious names, he just did it. As Fox said over the fourth martini, “We always followed the rules. Of course, when we saw the rules weren't working, we made up new ones.”

There evolved in Washington a mental set which held that the responsibility of headquarters was to
support
the men actually running the operation rather than tell them what to do. Consequently, headquarters and the special agents-in-charge of the Chicago and New York offices made available all that was needed—cover offices, special offices within the field offices, special stenographers, photographers, cipher and communications personnel, surveillants, money, and autonomy. Until nearly the end, headquarters let Chicago and New York “run wild” against the Soviet Union.

Also until nearly the end, headquarters kept the faith and the secret. It induced powerful men with powerful egos to undergo an implicitly humiliating ritual: You may read this report right now in my presence. You may not retain or copy the report. I must take
it back to a special safe at headquarters. The few who knew never told their best colleagues—and this went on for almost thirty years.

When congressional meddling threatened to expose the operation, FBI Director Clarence Kelly and Assistant Director Raymond Wannall gambled as wildly as had Morris, Jack, Eva, and all the men in the field. Wannall told Senator Frank Church, chairman of a Senate committee investigating the FBI, that he was about to destroy the most important espionage operation the United States ever had sustained against the Soviet Union and that he was about to kill the most valuable American spy.

Visibly shocked, Senator Church asked, “Can you explain?”
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“I can show you.” Wannall thereupon displayed a photograph (see photo section) of Morris seated with Brezhnev and Politburo members in the Kremlin. He identified each Soviet in the photograph and explained how each helped rule the Soviet empire. He pointed to the image of Morris. “This is our man, the man you are about to kill.” Wannall, with the concurrence of Director Kelly—but without that of Morris, Jack, Boyle, or Langtry—then outlined the history of Operation SOLO.

Church sank into his chair. “You have put a terrible burden on me.”

Wannall said, “Yes. We are betting everything on your honor and patriotism.”

Church thought for a while, then said, “I only wish the American people could know. This certainly would open their eyes. It has opened mine.” Church pledged to keep Operation SOLO secret, and he kept his word.

Unbidden, the waitress brought a feast: antipasto, steaming pasta,
brusca
bread, and a bottle of superb red wine the proprietor reserved for real friends, such as FBI agents.

Fox asked the waitress, “Who ordered this?”

“The gentlemen in the corner.”

When Fox and Boyle had stepped out of the funeral home, two young FBI agents had greeted them, invited them to lunch, and offered to drive them to the airport or do anything else for them. One, the custodian of the Chicago SOLO files, looked them both in the eyes and said, “I know something about what you did. I am very proud to meet you.”

Assistant FBI Director James Fox, Eva's “favorite Baptist Indian,” had accomplished a lot but he had never learned how to lie and he didn't even try. “Thanks for coming out. I'll thank the SAC for sending you. Right now I just want to talk alone with Walt Boyle.”

But the two agents followed.

“Our baby-sitters,” Fox said.

“Our tribunes,” Boyle said.

They buried Morris Childs, Agent 58, on June 5, 1991. On December 22, 1991, with the signing of the treaty of Alma Ata, the Soviet Union disintegrated itself, and Fox called Eva.

At first, Eva could not comprehend. “It doesn't exist anymore,” Fox explained. “It's broken into pieces.”

“Then, Jim, that means we have won.”

“Yes, Eva, we have won.”

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MOSCOW'S MAN

MANY OF THE MOST FAMOUS figures of international communism personally knew Morris Childs and addressed him as “Morris.”
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To them, his credentials as a consecrated Bolshevik were impeccable, classical, ideal. His heritage and background show why they so thought, why they trusted him, and why he could do what he did.

Morris, whose original name was Moishe Chilovsky, was born June 10, 1902, outside Kiev, the first son of Josef and Nechame Chilovsky. As a child, he sometimes heard his mother call out,
“Father, I see brass buttons.” The brass buttons appeared on the uniforms of czarist police who came in the night to beat Jews. Morris and his younger brother Jack (aka Jakob) would run out the back door while their father and mother took blows from police truncheons in the hope that the police would not look for the children.