A Covert Affair (46 page)

Then began what Jane described as the “great battle” to get her money back. When they learned from the theater owner that Morros was negotiating to buy a film in Vienna, George dashed off to confront him and wound up punching him in the face and breaking his two front teeth. Morros, who was never down for long, proposed making restitution in the form of a 50 percent interest in his new acquisition, a quasi-Russian propaganda film called
Marika.
As soon as George phoned Jane with the news of this new venture, she hopped a train to Vienna and put a stop to it. When she threatened legal action, Morros agreed to pay her back the full amount when he returned to Paris in a few weeks. Months passed. Sometime in the winter of 1950, Morros telephoned to say he had the money and would meet them in Zürich, together with the Sobles. Jane and George arrived to find that the $4,000 had been deposited in her Swiss account.
“Undoubtedly,”
she noted with grim hindsight, “it came from the FBI/CIA.” They had lunch at the Baur au Lac hotel, and then she and George headed back to Paris with “no intention of ever seeing any of them again.”

The problem was, she did see Morros again. Feeling “bored” and lonely with George away in Italy, she succumbed to his dubious charms. Thinking he might have
“amusing stories”
to tell, she agreed to meet him for lunch at the Hôtel Plaza Athénée. At one point during the meal, he pulled out a notebook and asked her to write something for him. “Anything,” he prompted. “Hieroglyphics. Anything in your own handwriting.” Naturally, she refused, “but the request seemed so bizarre that I did not realize it was a provocation.” Later, when they were walking down rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, he stopped in front of the Lanvin store to admire some ties, then asked if she would pick out a dozen for him and send them via airmail as he was leaving for the United States that afternoon. “I have absolute confidence in your taste,” he cajoled. This time Jane had the sense to ask for the money up front. Morros demurred.

At some point in the interrogation, around four or five in the morning,
the DST officers asked for permission to search Jane and George's apartment in their presence. Jane agreed and signed the release. She had told George that she was cooperating fully, and he had followed suit. When they brought him to her, his voice was hoarse from the hours of talking and smoking. The police drove them to rue Mazarine. Upon entering the apartment, they were assaulted by their poor poodle, Maggie, who had been locked up for sixteen hours. George, accompanied by a DST officer, took the dog for a quick walk. Then Jane and George sat on the sofa while the policemen went through their desk drawers, letters, and papers. Jane gave them her last remaining copy of the now “famous” OSS report on Indonesia.

When the interrogation resumed, the questions focused on her relations with Bill Browder, brother of Earl Browder, the former leader of the American Communist Party. Jane admitting knowing Bill Browder and explained that she had been introduced to him by Martha Stern before the war and they had met on several occasions for drinks at various Greenwich Village bars. She recalled that he had told her she would be more helpful to the Party if she was
“more discreet, and that Martha reiterated this more than once.”
She explained that she did not “understand his reasoning” but welcomed the suggestion as a way to get out of selling papers and other Party tasks that were not her idea of fun. When she went to Washington in 1942, he had introduced her to a young woman who would help her “keep in touch with the Party.” Jane never recalled the woman's ever asking anything about her work or anything important but remembered that she had once brought a message from Browder telling her not to accept an overseas assignment from the OSS. Presumably, Browder was directing her into underground operations, much as he had done with Whittaker Chambers twelve years earlier, but she was not as receptive. As usual, Jane said, she “rebelled and refused to comply.”

The French police seemed very interested in this “shadowy woman” from fifteen years before and asked Jane if she could pick her out in any of the photographs they supplied. She could not. A little while later, the short, round policeman gathered all the typed pages of her statement into a neat stack and asked her to initial them. The interrogation had
lasted precisely twenty-four hours, “the legal limit.” She and George were free to go, although they would be called back for additional questioning. It was then explained to them that the fact that they were not being arrested meant that their case would not be remanded to a grand jury for a hearing.

The DST interrogations continued sporadically for several more weeks. The short, round policeman was joined by a half-dozen others with varied expertise, who proceeded to comb through their documents and compare and analyze their answers to see if their stories matched. In order to satisfy the French authorities, Jane and George agreed to tell everything they knew about Soviet espionage in France and anyone they knew who was involved in Communist causes and fronts. In the end, Jane admitted to passing on some material but claimed she had never been more than a dupe and had been unaware at the time of the Sterns' collusion with Soviet intelligence. According to FBI records, the French service advised that Jane felt Martha had “led her to become involved in espionage on the belief that she was working for international Communism on an ideological basis.” Once Jane was caught in the Stern-Soble web, she found it difficult to extricate herself. She could not go to the authorities at that point because all of her friends were Communists and she could not bring herself to inform on them. Angry at having been made a tool of the NKVD (Soviet secret police under Stalin) and the mess it had made of her life, Jane gave the French police chapter and verse on the clandestine activities of her former comrades. Ironically, after years of standing on principle, she was naming names. She told herself it was not the same thing, but in the end she did it for the same reason as all the others—to save her own neck.

In her memoir, Jane is circumspect about the extent of her disclosures to the DST. She never acknowledged taking part in any espionage, and even attempted to insinuate that the French authorities did not think she was particularly guilty, suggesting that the reason she and George were allowed to go free was that neither of them impressed the DST as nearly slick enough to have pulled off the sophisticated covert operation outlined in the indictment:

It seemed highly
unlikely to the DST that the Russians would recruit open Communists like George and myself and, knowing that Boris Morros was a double or triple agent and an
agent provocateur
, the DST began to consider the possibility that the so-called
Stern-Soble-Zlatovski
“spy network” was, in reality, a simple
réseau bidon
, i.e. false network, immobilizing a large part of the CIA while the Russians did their dirty work through agents who really were
agents.

Like most rationalizations, this argument had an element of truth to it. The Stern-Soble network was a fairly sorry, minor-league operation, and Jane and George among the most underemployed and unreliable of recruits. While Jane understandably preferred to trivialize their contribution, implying that the French had let them walk because of their utter incompetence and unimportance, the fact remains that they were released because they cooperated and provided valuable information about illegal Soviet activity within France. They purchased their liberty the same way Elizabeth Bentley had bought hers a decade earlier—by betraying those who had betrayed them.
*

In March 1957, Jane had another breakdown. The weeks of relentless questioning and demeaning admissions were too much for her. She entered a
maison de santé
—a French euphemism for
“not exactly nuthouses but rest homes for people with nervous depressions.”
She underwent what was fashionably known in those days as a
cure de sommeil
, a treatment that involved being pumped so full of tranquilizers she was “in a constant state of somnolence.” Her worried parents, who had flown to Paris to provide moral support, made the arrangements and footed the bill.

Jane had been in the hospital about two weeks when she was informed that two high-ranking American officials, Assistant Attorney
General William Tompkins and Special Assistant Attorney General Thomas B. Gilchrist, were waiting at the DST headquarters to question her about the Sobles. Despite being woozy on whatever drug cocktail she had been given that morning, she got dressed and went to meet them. When she walked into the room, the first words out of Tompkins's mouth were
“Mrs. Zlatovski, we would like you to come back to America for a few days to testify in the Soble case.”
She refused. Much to the Americans' irritation, she persisted in speaking French, drafting one of the DST officers as interpreter. They explained that they had brought a U.S. Air Force plane specially to take her to New York, and she would travel round-trip in comfort. She insisted on having their remarks translated. Then she refused again, in French, and waited for her meaning to be conveyed. She would not say a word in English. It was a small act of rebellion, the only one she could manage under the circumstances. At the end of their tense exchange, she asked to be driven back to the
maison de santé.
Jane talked the driver into stopping off at a bistro along the way, and they both had an aperitif. It was “very human and very French.”

When she got back to the hospital, she climbed into bed and slit her wrists. As political protests go, it was remarkably effective. When she woke up, both arms were bandaged up to her elbows and the special attorneys had been sent home. She had lost a lot of blood, but she had made her point. She would rather die by her own hand in France than return to the United States to die in the electric chair. From then on, a special nurse was assigned to stand guard in her room, but she had no more visits from the police.

A confidential memorandum from the American Embassy in Paris to the director of the FBI, dated May 28, 1957, reveals the diplomatic stalemate she had achieved:
“In view of Jane Zlatovski's attempted suicide and her mental attitude, the Zlatovskis have not been reinterviewed.”
Shortly after the attorney general issued the indictment, and while the American papers were having a field day running the most dramatic parts of Morros's testimony, Tompkins flew back to Paris to again formally request their extradition. Another memo from the American Embassy to the FBI, dated July 24, reflects that Tompkins again returned
home empty-handed. The embassy official reiterated the view that no useful purpose would be served in trying to question the Zlatovskis
“because of their knowledge of the United States' trying to obtain their return, and because Jane might attempt suicide again.”

In the meantime, the French authorities had reached their decision. A high official in the Quai d'Orsay, the French foreign office, summoned the Zlatovskis for a meeting. As Jane was still too ill to go, George met with
monsieur le ministre
, who gave him his assurance that the French government would never allow them to be extradited. The French authorities' official recalcitrance made the headlines in the following day's
Herald Tribune:
“PARIS REFUSES TO GIVE U.S. TWO ALLEGED SPIES.”

By the time Jane returned from the hospital a few weeks later, a mob of hostile reporters was permanently camped outside their building on rue Mazarine. They swarmed the sidewalk, staircase, and landing and
“acted like a pack of jackals,”
she recalled, incessantly ringing the doorbell, banging on the door, and shouting insults. Even the “respectable” papers were venomous, offering large bribes to the housekeeper and printing rumors and ill-informed scuttlebutt. Jane became a virtual prisoner in the apartment. Not that it mattered terribly. The drugs in the hospital had left her in such a weakened state that she was in for a long recovery. She stayed inside and out of sight. Apart from George's initial comments to the press, they decided to grant no interviews. They kept silent and waited for the furor to die down.

While she was recuperating, her New York lawyer, Leonard Boudin, sent her a copy of the indictment. She read through the five counts and all thirty-eight charges, spelled out “in barbarous, presumably legal language” over twenty pages.
“It was THE BIG LIE,”
she wrote in her memoir. “For all its gobbledegook, lies, errors, imprecisions, contradictions and sheer nonsense, it was devastating. How
does
an individual fight THE BIG LIE? We were utterly helpless against the judiciary of a powerful government, which wanted another Rosenberg case.”

She also learned that in exchange for turning state's evidence—and presumably their promise “to reveal a vast Soviet spy network”—the Sobles had gotten off relatively lightly: Jack was sentenced to seven years and Myra to five and a half, though in return for all her assistance
her sentence was reduced again and she served only four years. According to press reports, while awaiting trial Jack Soble was kept in the psychiatric ward at Bellevue Hospital. Directly after being transferred to the Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary after sentencing, he swallowed a handful of nuts and bolts stolen from the machine shop. He was then transferred to a medical facility for federal prisoners and later received shock treatments. Jane thought the prosecutor must have been “greatly relieved” to have Jack Soble's guilty plea, as he would have been a pathetic sight on the witness stand.

To her family and friends, Jane would angrily hold forth about the
“glaring inaccuracies and discrepancies”
contained in the thirty-eight charges and how most of them were based on innuendo and “sheer ignorance.” To begin with, she argued, counts 1 through 8 did not even mention either her or George by name and had to do with other members of the ring. Counts 9 and 10 alleged she had met Soble in December 1945, when she was still aboard the “USS Unspeakable” on her way home from the war, as could easily be corroborated by the ship's manifest. She actually met Soble six months later, in April or May 1946. Counts 14 through 18 had her traveling to Paris “five times” between May 1948 and February 1949 to meet with unnamed Soviet agents, when she was there only twice, and the second time was to meet her parents—“those two well-known spies, Dr. and Mrs. Harry Emerson Foster”—with whom she traveled through Europe for the next few months until returning to Paris in March 1949, at which point Paris became her permanent home.