Operation Solo (13 page)

The FBI worried that some thoughtful professional in the KGB or International Department might wonder about Morris' supposed wealth and ask questions. Where does his money come from? Is his wife really all that rich? If he is in business, how can he afford to leave at any time and travel abroad for weeks or months?

To answer such questions, Freyman, Hansen, and Boyle, with the support of SAC Marlin Johnson, established a mail-order firm for Morris. They rented presentable offices in downtown Chicago; embossed a sign on the door, “Women in White”; placed
advertisements in medical and trade journals offering nurses' uniforms and accessories; and arranged to procure them if anyone ordered something. But who could be trusted to be in the office all the time, to fabricate records showing phantom shipments and profits, to fill orders and to know the purpose of the whole sham?

Morris nominated his younger brother Ben, who was a shoe salesman at Marshall Field's, then one of America's premier department stores. He had a good job and was good at it. Taught about footwear by his cobbler father, he could expertly advise customers. His bosses appreciated him, and he worked in elegant surroundings and had security. After Morris, Freyman, and Boyle talked to him, Ben at age fifty-two agreed to give it up and become manager of Women in White; his wife also gave up a secure job to be his assistant. When Hall next came to Chicago, Morris took him to the offices of Women in White, and Hansen and Boyle made sure the phones rang incessantly while he was there.

With the connivance of a friendly corporate executive, the FBI leased a three-room suite of offices in a high-rise building situated roughly midway between its offices and those of Women in White. The building had a large lobby and multiple street entrances, as well as an entrance through an underground arcade, heavily trafficked, that ran from the railway station. Its manager and maintenance and custodial staff understood that the offices were used by researchers, including a retired professor, employed by an eccentric multimillionaire investor. The FBI lined the walls with books and furnished the place to look like a research center. Whenever Morris came to the building, agents followed him to be sure he was not being followed; they also guarded against surveillance of themselves. Many of the most critical deliberations of SOLO took place in this suite, and over the years it proved to be an ideal sanctuary for conspiracy.

The FBI and KGB, as if partners rather than adversaries, both insisted that Morris travel to the Soviet bloc under a fictitious name. Both knew that the CIA and West European intelligence services tried to track Westerners venturing into the bloc. Unless the traveler was a diplomat, journalist, or someone with a conspicuously legitimate purpose in going there, he or she might fall
under suspicion and, if repeated trips were detected, be investigated. The Soviets obviously did not want Morris investigated. The FBI did not want him or anything pertaining to SOLO to come to the attention of the CIA or other Western services. It was not a matter of distrust. The small coterie of FBI personnel involved in SOLO simply followed a fundamental rule of espionage: If someone does not have a clear need to know something, then don't let him or her know anything, and if you have to tell someone a little, tell only a little.

Freyman and the SAC applied this rule strictly to their own colleagues and subordinates in the Chicago field office. They isolated Boyle in a commodious office on the ninth floor of the federal building next to the room where wiretaps were monitored. It was a special and privileged redoubt overlooking a courtyard opening onto State Street. The walls were covered with soundproofing tile. No one except SOLO initiates could enter; only Boyle and his partner were allowed to answer the phone. The bookshelves were crammed with communist tracts and radical literature. Except during chance encounters in the corridors or garage, Boyle rarely talked to his fellow agents; he did not lunch, drink, or party with them; he could not ask for advice or help from them. Only one veteran stenographer possessing the highest security clearances took his dictation and typed his reports. Colleagues, most of them skilled investigators, regarded him as a man of mystery, a recluse who worked in “Sleepy Hollow.” Some wondered whether he worked at all because he appeared in the federal building irregularly, sometimes not showing up for days, and no one ever saw any results from him. Perhaps because his envied office adjoined the wiretap room, others more kindly speculated that he was engaged in some extraordinary electronic eavesdropping operation.

To deny other government agencies as well as its own personnel the least clue about SOLO, the FBI granted those running it wide latitude to enlist civilians as unwitting conspirators in the operation. In New York, Burlinson and his men recorded the serial number of every dollar bill the KGB passed to Jack. The Federal Reserve Bank in New York detected in circulation $50 bills, which the arcane arts of money men determined at one time had
been in Cuba, and suggested the FBI ascertain how and for what purpose the Cubans were getting dollars into the United States. The serial numbers of the $50 bills matched some of those provided by the Soviets. People at the Federal Reserve simply and very competently were doing their job—too competently. The FBI could not tell them to back off without telling them something about SOLO. Yet if the Federal Reserve persevered and traced more money from Cuba or the Soviet Union to the American party, a public hue and cry about foreign funding of American communism probably would ensue and end SOLO.

Burlinson took advantage of a standing invitation to lunch at the Yale Club with a lifelong friend, an eminent New York banker, and asked a peculiar favor. Could his bank accept from the FBI large sums of cash—hundreds of thousands, maybe more than a million dollars annually—and give back equal sums in different cash, and keep the transactions absolutely secret and make no profit from them? The banker thought a moment before saying, “I suppose this is important.” Burlinson nodded. “All right, I will handle it myself.” Imposing further, Burlinson asked if the FBI could rent safe deposit boxes under fictitious names and addresses. The banker laughed. “This is turning out to be a very expensive lunch. Maybe we should have gone to a Mafia restaurant; I feel like I'm talking to a don.”

Boyle, after making a background investigation, recruited a travel agent who agreed to issue multiple plane tickets for the same journey under any name specified. These allowed Morris to shift his itinerary at will, enabled him to enter and leave the Soviet bloc by different routes, and gave him the option of pausing in Western Europe before proceeding home. Boyle did not have to present a passport or parry inquiries about why people for whom he picked up tickets so often went behind the Iron Curtain. In time, the travel agent taught Boyle how to write plane tickets and permitted him to issue them himself.

Morris always took along lots of medicine for himself and his Soviet friends. For their headaches and hangovers, the Soviets craved aspirin, which seemed hard to get, and Alka-Seltzer, which they did not have. They also prized decongestants such as Contac.
Ponomarev, one of the most privileged men in the Soviet Union, once spent several minutes extolling the wonders of Contac and he counted on Morris to keep him supplied. The labels on bottles of prescription medicine Morris needed had to match the name and background under which he was traveling. Again after a background investigation, Boyle recruited a pharmacist who provided the medications and appropriate labels. If Morris was about to travel as, say, Mr. Peter Schroeder of Cleveland, the labels showed that the medicine was prescribed for Mr. Peter Schroeder and had been purchased from a Cleveland pharmacy.

The FBI considered each reentry of Morris into the United States a time of potential trouble. He carried a false passport and often Soviet documents likely to arouse the curiosity of customs officials who were paid to be curious. Sometimes he also had unusual amounts of cash; not the huge sums such as the KGB delivered to Jack in New York but much more than a businessman or tourist normally would carry. Therefore, the FBI required that whenever he landed an agent be at the airport to persuade customs and immigration authorities to admit him without examination, to take care of trouble if it did arise, and to file a preliminary report of the mission as quickly as possible.

These receptions could not be scheduled in advance because Morris rarely knew in advance when he could leave the Soviet Union. So it was agreed that once he reached the West, usually Switzerland or Scandinavia, he would telephone Chicago. But whom to call? And what kind of number would be answered without fail twenty-four hours a day? Boyle thought,
a physician's number
.

After considerable searching and investigation, Boyle found a Chicago physician who agreed to relay from his home or office at any hour day or night cryptic messages from an unknown overseas caller to Boyle.

The travel agent, the pharmacist, and the physician never received any reward of any kind; they never knew just why they were asked to do what they did. They only knew that their services were important to the United States, and they were.

Morris was supposed to represent the American party at a
Moscow conference in May 1963, but a mild recurrence of his heart problem precluded travel and, as the Soviets had been asking to see Jack, Hall sent him instead.

The greeting at the airport, the limousine, the hotel suite, audiences with Suslov and Ponomarev, and dinners with members of the Central Committee and International Department collectively testified to Jack's new status. He still was an essential tool of the KGB; he also was, if not co-chairman, then vice president of MORAT and a personal emissary of Hall, the American head of state “temporarily out of power,” and therefore above the KGB.

Fidel Castro was in Moscow at the time, and the Soviets said all might benefit in the future if Jack got to know him; delicately, they said Castro could be mercurial and that Jack should not reveal the extent of his “friendship” and that of the American party with the Soviet Union. The Soviets contrived to bring them together as if by chance at a dinner, and Castro talked to Jack affably and at length in English, insolently ignoring his hosts. Exaggerating the influence of the American party, Jack cited its efforts to generate popular support for Cuba. Castro thanked him and said he hoped they would meet again, perhaps in Havana.

Officially, the Soviets instructed Jack to inform Hall that border disputes with the Chinese might erupt into armed skirmishes. In hopes of averting conflict and reconciling other differences, they planned to try to negotiate with the Chinese in July.

Privately, some of the Soviets confided information neither Hall nor Jack had any business knowing: In the aftermath of the Cuban crisis, the Soviet Union was relocating its intercontinental ballistic missiles. Khrushchev's power was eroding, and Politburo members were competing to grab some of it. Repercussions from the case of Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, who had been unmasked as a British–American spy, continued; General Ivan Serov, head of Soviet military intelligence, the GRU, and several of his deputies had been fired.

Jack discussed operational matters with KGB officers who showed him a microfilm container that destroyed its own contents if improperly opened. They also trained him to use a new miniature transmitter–receiver for short-range communications in New
York; it recorded a dictated message lasting up to one minute. Having fitted it inconspicuously under his suit jacket and stringing the aerial inside his trouser leg, Jack was to appear in a specified department store or other public place and at the designated moment press a button that caused the device to transmit the message in a burst of a few seconds. A comparable device worn by a KGB officer loitering out of sight in the area would record the burst transmission, and when played back slowly it would become comprehensible. If Jack was to receive a message, he had to do nothing except show up at the appointed time.

The KGB advised Jack that it would leave both the microfilm container and transmitter for him at drops around New York. Ordinarily, KGB laboratories did not design esoteric equipment for just one operation—knowledge of new espionage instruments might help detect other KGB operations around the world. So the FBI looked forward to taking apart and duplicating those promised to Jack.

Analysts were still poring over reports from Jack's mission when Morris came back from Moscow and Prague in August 1963 with much more for them. The Soviets believed that North Korea was contemplating a military attack on South Korea to reunify the two countries forcibly, and the specter of another Korean War appalled them. They were not sure what the Chinese would do; they realized that the presence of American troops in South Korea would guarantee the United States' involvement; the uncertainties were nightmarish.

Castro was behaving like a Latin egotist and prima donna, alternately bellowing and pouting, and relations with Cuba were not entirely satisfactory. The Czechs intended to seek better relations with the United States. So did the Soviets, who still were feeling tremors from the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Most important, the July negotiations in Moscow between Chinese and Soviet delegations led by Teng Hsiao-Ping and Mikhail Suslov were a calamity. Suslov allowed his old friend and pupil, Morris, to read English translations of speeches by him and Teng, and to make copious notes. Morris made almost verbatim copies that documented a fact that many, maybe most, American analysts
could not bring themselves to accept: China and the Soviet Union were becoming real, implacable, and emotional enemies.

Teng began the “negotiations” by extolling Stalin. He demanded that the Soviets recant their repudiations of Stalin, abandon the policy of “peaceful coexistence” with the West, renounce the doctrine that World War III was not inevitable, and admit that the war would not start until the United States had subjugated the Third World. In essence, he demanded that the Soviet Union, domestically and internationally, revert to Stalinism.