Operation Solo Read online

  Burlinson did not expressly state that in addition to arresting the fugitives, the FBI needed to penetrate the leadership of the underground. Once Jack sensed this objective, he blurted out, “Look, Morris is your ticket to the top.”

  Jack was an apparatus man, never a party leader. Morris was a prominent leader. Jack knew a lot of people, and some liked him. Morris knew everybody who counted, and except for Foster and a few other snakes, everybody loved him, including the Soviets. Jack could seek people out; people would gravitate to Morris.

  Would Morris cooperate? “He may if he’s well enough,” Jack answered. “But you can’t deal with him like you did with me. He and I are different. When I screwed that Kraut knockout in Berlin, I at least took off my money belt. Morris, he wouldn’t have taken off his money belt because he’d be afraid of losing commie money. Hell, Morris wouldn’t even have screwed her. He’s too straitlaced, too proper. You can’t just walk up and proposition him cold. You’ve got to bring him along gently. You’ve got to send someone proper, a gentleman and someone who really understands all that communist crap.”

  They agreed that Jack would visit Morris and try to persuade him at least to listen to the FBI. Before seeing Morris, Jack conferred with Carl Freyman in a Chicago hotel room. Had he not known otherwise, Jack might have taken Freyman for a soft-spoken, pipe-smoking professor of communism. The knowledge he evinced of the party and Morris at first amazed, then reassured him. Freyman happened to be exactly the man he had described to Burlinson.

  Strict Catholic elementary and high schools in Iowa afforded him a superb education as did an Evangelical Church college that required daily Bible study. After graduation from the University of Iowa Law School, he started his own law practice in his hometown of LeMars near Sioux City. He was doing well for a young attorney when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. The next day he drove to Omaha to enlist in the navy only to be rejected because of deficient eyesight. The day after that he applied in Des Moines to the FBI, and in January 1942 it accepted him. At the end of his training in Quantico, Virginia, a supervisor said, “You’re a farm boy, so we’re going to send you to the big city and polish you up.”

  In New York, Freyman learned about counterintelligence, agent handling, and deception after the FBI arrested a German spy and converted him into a double agent. British intelligence had asked for American help in reinforcing Hitler’s obsessive conviction that the Allies intended to invade Europe through Norway. One day Freyman took the German to a Brooklyn dock, and they watched as troops purposely clad in heavy arctic clothing filed aboard a transport. In a radio transmission to Berlin, the double agent detailed the embarkation and advised that the clothing obviously meant the troops were going “someplace very cold.” When the Allies invaded Normandy, sixteen Wehrmacht divisions remained in Scandinavia guarding against an attack in Norway. The little play staged by the FBI was only part of an overall deception scheme implemented mostly by the British but it dramatized to Freyman the importance of recruiting double agents.

  Transferred to Chicago in 1946, Freyman proved to be one of the FBI’s best recruiters. He liked people, and his religious beliefs made him considerate and tolerant of others—some said too much so. Though he rarely discussed religion, he was at heart something of an evangelist. The FBI at the time had difficulty recruiting black agents. Freyman in short order recruited three, including two sons-in-law of Olympic track star Jesse Owens.

  Because of his counterintelligence experience in New York, the FBI assigned him to direct investigations of the party and its fronts in Chicago. He tried to qualify himself by reading Marx, Lenin, Soviet history, party publications, the writings of former communists, and voluminous FBI files. All the while, he taught himself how to think like a communist and how to talk to a man like Morris Childs.

  Jack, coaching Freyman about how best to approach Morris, suggested that he not press for a prompt decision. He likened his brother to a chess player who deliberates before each move, thinking far ahead. Once Jack spoke with him, he would start thinking about the ramifications of collaboration; still, he would want more time.

  When Freyman called and asked to see him, Morris said, “I’m not in the movement any more. I have no contacts. But if you want to talk to me, come on over.”

  Frail, bedridden, scarcely able to raise his head, Morris looked pitiful, and Freyman realized he mustn’t stay long. He began by saying that through his work he had come to know Morris as a man of character and intellect who had sacrificed most of his life to a cause. Freyman wondered aloud whether the sacrifice was worthwhile, and he would be grateful if Morris considered a few questions. Had not Stalin betrayed all the ideals of Marxism? Had not communism exterminated millions of innocent men, women, and children? Was it not so that Soviet and Nazi persecution of Jews differed only in method and scope? Which did he think most benefited individual human beings and the world, Soviet communism or American democracy?

  “We both know the answers,” Morris said.

  “How could a good and decent man serve such a cause?”

  “When you’re in the movement, you learn to close your mind to anything that might erode your faith. You cannot allow yourself to ask, is this right or wrong.”

  “You said you’re not in the movement anymore.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Then you can ask.”

  “I suppose so.”

  Suddenly, Morris paled and took a dose of nitroglycerin. Freyman rose, apologized for overly imposing and asked if they could talk again.

  “Come whenever you wish. I don’t go anywhere these days.”

  Freyman knew that Morris was so attached to and dependent upon his benefactor Sonny Schlossberg that he would not cooperate without her assent. As she ushered him to the door, he paused to talk and casually asked her what she now thought about communism.

  “I hate it. I hate it for what it’s done to Morris, to Jews, to everybody.”

  “In that case, will you help us?”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Help us persuade Morris.”

  “All right.”

  Only two people from the party ever visited Morris after Sonny brought him back to Chicago. He occupied himself by reading—the Bible, the Torah, the Koran, John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and all the works of his favorite author, Thomas Mann. Pleasureful as reading was, he was lonely and increasingly he looked forward to visits by Freyman, whom he liked.

  Morris said he knew nothing about where Hall, Thompson, Gates, and Green might be hiding, and he reiterated that he had no contacts in the party.

  “You mean you have no current contacts,” Freyman remarked. “You have many friends. With our help, you easily could renew contact with them.”

  “My God, man. I’m not physically able.”

  “The first thing we’re going to do is improve your health. Later we’ll set you up in a cover business so you can travel and have a visible source of income. But we’re not going to do anything until we get you well.”

  Sonny again urged him to work with the FBI and pledged to stand by him if he did. Finally, Morris decided. “All right, I’ll do as much for you as I can.”

  Freyman had no authorization to commit the FBI to pay for the expensive medical treatment of someone who had performed no services and might not live long enough to perform any. On the spot, he exercised his own judgment and initiative, hoping his superiors would agree. Once they did, through FBI friends in the medical profession he assembled a team of outstanding cardiologists to treat Morris as long as needed at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.

  A question arose: How could Morris explain where he got the money to pay for the costly treatment? In New York, Jack gave Burlinson the answer.

  “I’ll go to people all over town and tell them that doctors think they can cure Morris if he goes to the Mayo Clinic and stays there long enough. I’ll say these famous doctors and this famous hospital cost a helluva lot of money, and Morr
is is dead broke, so we’re asking our old comrades for donations to save his life. Almost none of those assholes will contribute a dime. But no one will ever say he didn’t contribute.” Jack noted that the solicitation also would provide a pretext to call on party people and begin restoring relations.

  The treatment and new medications administered at the Mayo Clinic transfigured Morris. Color returned to his face, he gained weight, he spoke firmly and walked easily, and he could converse for hours without tiring. Doctors predicted that, if he adhered to the prescribed regimen of diet and exercise, and increased his exertions only gradually, he should be able to resume normal activities in six months or so.

  To Freyman, the change in Morris’ spirit was even more pronounced than in his body, and he understood why. The party had stripped his life of meaning and purpose, and thereby deprived him of incentive to recover. His decision to cooperate with the FBI restored purpose, and he left the hospital eager to start anew, to lose himself in a new cause.

  In New York Jack threw out the bait little by little: Reports from the Mayo Clinic were encouraging. It looks like Morris is going to recover. Morris is up and about. I talked to him on the phone last night, and he sounded great. Morris is out of the hospital, and he’s walking a mile a day. Morris wants to go back to work, and in a few months he’ll be strong enough.

  In 1954, the party underground bit.

  Morris telephoned Freyman at a number reserved for him. “An anonymous caller just ordered me to be at a certain telephone booth on the North Side by 2:30 P.M. and to wait there for a call,” he reported. “I don’t know who it is or what it’s about. I’ll go and contact you as soon as I can.”

  Superiors demanded that Freyman at once put Morris under surveillance so they could identify anyone he might meet. Freyman absolutely refused. “Someone is using classic tradecraft, so he will be looking for surveillance,” he said. “If he detects it, we lose the whole case. If Morris meets anybody, he’ll tell us.”

  At about 2:35 P.M. the phone in the booth rang and the same anonymous caller instructed Morris to come to a room in the Sovereign Hotel.

  The man awaiting him there was Phillip Bart, who had been organizational secretary and chief security officer of the party, and who now was a leader of the underground. He welcomed Morris as an old friend and began an interrogation to ascertain if what Jack said about his recovery was true and whether Morris was bitter about being deposed as editor.

  Morris said that though he had not fully regained his strength and stamina, doctors assured him that he would and he felt good. He was also grateful for the donations that made possible his treatment at the Mayo Clinic. Certainly, he harbored no ill will toward the party. Because of his health, he could not possibly have continued working at the paper. Besides, there was no room in the party for pettiness.

  Then was he willing to resume party work in the underground?

  What sort of work?

  “The Reserve Fund is exhausted and we have to have money,” Bart said. “To get money, we must reestablish contact with the Russians. You were always close to them. Could you put us in touch?”

  Morris promised to try and asked, “How can I reach you?”

  Bart said that because he always was on the run, he relayed and received messages through Betty Gannett, who had been office manager at party headquarters in New York. She was of insufficient rank to be prosecuted, and Morris could safely deal with her.

  As if by afterthought, Morris mentioned that efforts to contact the Russians might entail travel, and he was not sure when the doctors would allow him to travel. If need be, could he use Jack?

  Bart thought that an excellent idea.

  Freyman, who had stayed at the office, heard from Morris about 2:30 A.M. “I had a very successful meeting. As soon as security permits, I’ll tell you about it.”

  Once headquarters learned that a meeting had taken place, it teletyped an order to Freyman: “Get out there and interview him.” Again, Freyman refused. If Morris judged it safe to meet immediately he would not have said “as soon as security permits.”

  When the two did confer, Morris said, “It was Phil Bart.” Freyman smiled broadly. After Morris reconstructed the conversation, he smiled even more broadly, suddenly envisioning new and grand possibilities. The leader of the underground had invited Morris and Jack into the underground. If Morris could deliver Soviet funds, he would make himself indispensable and securely reposition himself in the highest councils of American communism. He probably would be the principal intermediary to the Soviets, who liked and trusted him. Should he establish clandestine relations with them, he could conceivably insinuate himself into their councils. An operation that began with relatively limited and modest objectives, it now held out the promise of vastly more.

  The FBI initially code named the operation SASH. It gave Morris the code designation CG-5824S*; Jack was NY-694S*. Among themselves, FBI agents referred to Morris as “58” or “George”; they referred to Jack as “69.” An asterisk at the end of a source designation denoted that the source could never testify in court or be otherwise identified. Usually that meant that the source was a telephone tap, a bug, or a burglary. Uninitiated analysts poring over reports from 58 and 69 for years thought that the FBI was running one hell of an eavesdropping operation.

  At FBI headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue, some supervisor, whose name cannot be retrieved from available records, bravely acted upon an intelligent insight. Freyman, during his FBI career, received seven formal letters of censure from J. Edgar Hoover (along with nineteen commendations). Unbeknownst to Hoover, however, Freyman refused to obey a direct order twice in twenty-four hours. Either refusal surely would have provoked Hoover to censure him or do worse. But Hoover never knew because the unknown supervisor reinforced an earlier headquarter decision: Burlinson and Freyman have brought the case along. Thus far, they’ve done everything right. They’re on the spot; they know what they’re doing. Why pester them? Let Chicago and New York run the case and work with each other directly.

  That is pretty much what happened for many, many years.

  four

  THE FIRST LIMITS

  MORRIS CONCEIVED AN OPERATIONAL plan that Jack put into effect by calling upon Betty Gannett and suggesting that he ask Tim Buck in Canada to reopen lines of communication between Moscow and the underground American party. On March 25, 1954, Gannett, probably having consulted Bart, emphatically instructed Jack to go to Toronto as soon as possible.

  Although Jack knew Buck, at this meeting he represented himself as an emissary of Morris acting under the authority of Gannett, who presided over a skeletal staff at party headquarters in New York. Buck was more than willing to help. He cautioned, however, that in the aftermath of Stalin’s death the year before, chaos still reigned in the Soviet party and that the Canadians themselves were having difficulty communicating. They agreed that Jack should return to Canada periodically and that in an emergency Buck would send his friend Elizabeth Mascola to New York as a messenger.

  The first results were discouraging. Throughout 1954 and 1955 no word came from Moscow. Morris and Jack did succeed, however, in reestablishing themselves among the comrades. They demonstrated that the Soviets controlled the American party much more massively and minutely than even the FBI suspected, and that Soviet intentions sometimes could be divined from directives to the party. All that was useful, even important. Still, Freyman and Burlinson hoped for much more.

  They got it in the spring of 1956 when Jack came back from Toronto with a document Buck characterized as “devastating.” Buck attended the Twentieth Communist Party Congress in Moscow and afterward stayed a few days to tend to administrative business with the International Department. En route to Canada he stopped in Warsaw to see his friend, Wladyslaw Gomulka, chief of the Polish party and the puppet Polish government. Gomulka confided that on the night of February 25–26, 1956, there had been a secret session of the congress at which Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin and reci
ted some of the atrocities Stalin visited upon the Soviet people. The Soviets did not intend for the speech to be made public, and foreigners were barred from the secret session. But they did send a copy to Gomulka, and he made one for Buck.

  The FBI gave the State Department the copy Buck passed on to Jack and after a couple of weeks asked what the State Department proposed to do with it. The State Department denied having received the speech. Thereupon, an irate J. Edgar Hoover produced a letter in which the State Department had thanked the FBI for delivering it.6

  Publication of the speech by the State Department wrought moral havoc on communism. It had the same effect on many party members, sympathizers, and intellectuals that the revelations Morris had heard in 1947 in Moscow had had upon him. In the minds of honest and informed people, Soviet communism never recovered as a spiritual force.7

  A tangled federal court ruling in 1956 in effect made further prosecutions of communists under the Smith Act impossible and allowed them to emerge from the underground. The party consequently in 1957 openly convened a national convention that degenerated into a near brawl as antagonistic factions clashed over the implications of the Khrushchev speech and the Soviet invasion of Hungary. At least, though, the party was again functioning. Released from prison, Dennis appointed Morris his deputy and designated him to deal with the Soviets, Chinese, and all other foreign parties. The Soviets finally resumed direct communications by inviting Morris to Moscow in late April 1958.

  Morris rode from the airport in a curtained limousine to the party hotel, which he entered through a door reserved for foreigners. Having rested a few days at Soviet insistence, he began conferences with Boris Ponomarev, head of the International Department. Ponomarev was a hard-headed, dogmatic ideologue who in the 1930s compelled the American party to stop using a slogan, “Communism Is 20th Century Americanism,” on the grounds that communism was an international movement. Now he very much wanted to revitalize the American party as an instrument of Soviet policy, and he professed to be delighted that Dennis had made such an able and trustworthy comrade as Morris its de facto foreign minister.