Operation Solo (14 page)

Suslov, who had attempted to be conciliatory and pleaded for civil, comradely discourse, replied, “Do you really expect to turn the world communist movement back to a situation in which one person rises like a god above the people?… How could you expect the Soviet people, who paid for the personality cult with the blood of millions upon millions of innocent victims, including their best communist sons, to support such a demand?… Why do you justify Stalin's errors and crimes? Why?”

The Chinese then accused the Soviets of cowardice for not looking forward to nuclear war. Some ten months before, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Suslov sat with Khrushchev and Politburo members as officers of the Soviet General Staff gave their objective, professional judgment of the consequences of nuclear war. He echoed that judgment in his response to Teng: “It is clear that you do not recognize the possibility of preventing a world war. This means that you deny that war can be prevented… Scientific data on modern war and its consequences cannot be concealed from the people. It is estimated that between 700 million and 800 million people would die in the first nuclear blow.” Suslov then accused the Chinese of treating the Soviets as enemies, of “intolerable rudeness,” and of shouting “slander and lies.”

Two days later, Teng countered with charges that the Soviet Union sought better relations with the United States and India than with China. “You are working wholeheartedly and cooperating with American imperialism… It is quite evident that our differences are of a very serious nature… Your great power chauvinism creates a serious threat of a split in the world communist
movement… As the saying goes, ‘Rein in your horses in the nick of time before you plunge into the abyss…' There is an old Chinese proverb: ‘Good medicine is always bitter but beneficial.' We gave you much good advice. Take it.”

Morris pointed out to Freyman and Boyle that these exchanges occurred over a span of ten days. After each exchange, Suslov and Teng had time to reflect and consult their respective governments or parties. So the import of the insulting words was graver than the words themselves because they represented the considered and calculated positions of the Soviet Union and China toward each other. Neither man had succumbed to a fit of personal pique and in anger said things he did not really mean.

Continuing his interpretations, Morris said that while Mao himself might be a little crazy, and the Chinese might sound crazy, and their Stalinist beliefs might be crazy, given their premises they were acting logically and there was some truth in their allegations. The Soviets indeed had renounced Stalin and policies resulting in the mass murder of their people. Soviet leaders were chauvinists: they put their personal interests first and perceived Soviet interests above those of international communism. They did behave toward foreign communist parties as Teng said—“like a father toward a small son”—and they did try to buy or control foreign parties for their own benefit.

At the same time, Soviet leaders, given their premises, were acting with equal logic. Since the 1920s they had been governed by a doctrine, the Correlation of Forces, which dictated that you never initiate a war or battle unless the balance of power so favors you that victory is certain or the enemy will realize the futility of even resisting. In a nuclear war with the United States, victory was far from certain; obliteration of all Soviet cities and basic industry was. Soviet strategists comprehended that whatever the other outcomes, nuclear war would leave them with a depopulated, primitive agrarian society vulnerable to hordes of Chinese. The Chinese professed not to fear nuclear war because they did understand the force of atomic weapons, but they believed they could afford to lose a few hundred million people, people being the one thing they had in abundance. Hence, the
Soviets, in defiance of what the Chinese considered fundamental rules of fraternal Marxism, refused to share nuclear weapons and withdrew technical assistance.

Morris taught Freyman and Boyle that the intentions of the Soviets often could be divined from what they said if you knew how to decipher the meaning of their words. The slogans “peaceful coexistence” and “peaceful competition” did not augur the end of efforts by the Soviet Union to expand its empire through espionage, subversion, propaganda, intrigue, and “wars of national liberation.” They meant only that the Soviets would not wittingly risk provoking nuclear war with the United States, as Khrushchev very nearly did in Cuba.

In Morris' judgment, Sino–Soviet differences could not be reconciled; rather, they were destined to worsen because the Chinese would not moderate their ideological demands and the Soviets could not possibly accede to them. Events had proven Morris' past analyses so correct and insightful that Boyle thought he would be derelict if he did not allow headquarters and policymakers to consider this one. So after Sunday morning Mass, he devoted most of the day to incorporating it into a report. Neither Freyman nor Boyle ever uttered profanity, not so much as a “damn”; to them use of obscenities reflected ignorance of the richness of the English language and disrespect for others. But Boyle came close upon reading the headquarters response to his report: “We are an investigative organization; not a think tank. We are interested in facts; not opinions. Take note.”

 

 

ON NOVEMBER 1, 1963, Morris began what is recorded in an informal FBI history of SOLO as the “Fourteenth Mission.” By now the Soviets had established a routine that required him to come to Moscow each autumn to receive instructions for the American party, to submit a budget detailing what the American party proposed to spend in the forthcoming year, to answer questions and offer opinions about conditions and personalities in the United States, and generally to survey the world and discuss strategy. Almost always during these
annual consultations, he spent many hours with Suslov, Ponomarev, and Politburo members; usually he also saw Khrushchev and, later, Leonid Brezhnev as well as senior KGB officers. That November he thought he discerned among those with whom he drank, dined, and conferred collective gloom and individual uncertainty.

The Soviets were more exasperated, even enraged, by the Chinese than they had been in the summer. They claimed that China with premeditated malice was arming wild revolutionary bands around the world with Soviet weapons so that the Soviets would be blamed for the mayhem and murder committed with them. It appeared they deliberately had set out to incite enmity toward the Soviet Union both in the West and Third World. Their strident insults and calumny made it difficult even to talk to them, and Suslov despaired, “The more reasonable and conciliatory we try to be, the more unreasonable and bellicose they become.” The KGB colonel, who liked to drop by Morris' apartment in the evening for “general intelligence,” lots of bourbon, and Camel or Chesterfield cigarettes, expressed Soviet frustrations more grimly. “They don't understand what nuclear bombs can do. If they keep on, someday we may have to give them demonstrations.”

The Chinese were competing with the Soviets for ideological influence in the Third World and were courting Castro, who by himself was vexing enough. He had started smuggling arms to guerrillas in Venezuela and promising arms to revolutionary or ragtag gangs elsewhere in Latin America without, Morris inferred, first securing Soviet concurrence. The Soviets did not object in principle to arming insurgents and terrorists; they did that themselves, directly and indirectly. But you had to know what you were doing, what you reasonably could expect to gain, and what you might lose. The Soviets were not sure Castro knew what he was doing and worried that he was becoming more intent upon mythologizing himself as a world leader than in advancing the global interests of the “socialist camp.” As he was being sustained by their economic largess and military protection, they considered him obligated to consult them and abstain from impulsive theatrics that might drag them into another nuclear confrontation
with the United States. Still, to retain their base in Cuba, they were willing to put up with a lot and indulge him as one would a temperamental child—up to a point.

The Politburo still hoped to use the American party as a means of influencing Castro and communicating discreetly with the Cuban party. Ponomarev observed that when Jack and Castro met in Moscow, each seemed to like the flamboyance of the other and Jack successfully flattered Castro with his inflated accounts of all the American party was doing to help him in the United States. The Soviets hoped to transform this embryonic personal relationship into an auxiliary tool for spying on and influencing Castro, and they proposed that Jack go to Havana under the pretext of delivering a formal communication from Gus Hall. They would make the necessary arrangements, pretending to be acting only as an intermediary of Hall and at his initiative. And they would explain that, to circumvent restrictions prohibiting U.S. citizens from traveling to Cuba, Jack would fly to Havana from Moscow. Thus, they could brief him before the trip and debrief him after his visit to Havana. Ponomarev or maybe his deputy suggested that Jack bring along his wife because her presence might enhance social entrée in Cuba.

Both Morris and Ponomarev understood that the annual review of the next American party budget was largely a charade. Morris laboriously wrote down how much the party needed to maintain headquarters activities in New York; to sustain front groups and publications; to travel, demonstrate, and proselytize; and to pay the salaries and expenses of party leaders. (Much of this was fiction written by him and Boyle.) On the other side of the ledger, he put down how much the party expected to receive from Hollywood and Manhattan donors and from others of the monied radical chic who thought it cute or deliciously daring to contribute. Always there was a deficit, which amounted to what Hall wanted the KGB to slip to Jack at night around New York.

 

 

MORRIS WAS IN MOSCOW on November 22, 1963, when President John Kennedy was assassinated. As Soviet
rulers hastened to ask him about the possible causes and import of the assassination, he witnessed firsthand the consternation it produced among them. They first of all feared what the assassination might portend for them, but some also seemed personally to regret the murder of the charismatic young president, even though he was an enemy. Having survived the many murders ordered by Stalin, they had tacitly agreed among themselves that after future power struggles in the Soviet Union, the victors would not kill the vanquished, and the specter of political assassination in America mystified and frightened them because in their minds it denoted unpredictability and instability.

The initial confusion produced many questions. Did not well-qualified bodyguards protect the president when he traveled? How could their protection fail unless some of them had been coopted into a plot? Could the assassination be part of a right-wing or fascist coup? How was it likely to affect the United States' foreign policy and more particularly policy toward the Soviet Union? What kind of a man was the new president, Lyndon B. Johnson? How would he differ from Kennedy?

To these and numerous other queries posed during the day, Morris could offer few factual answers because about the events in Dallas he knew only what the Soviets had told him and he had no special knowledge of Johnson. He did understand the political history and processes of the United States, and, drawing upon this understanding, he offered Soviet leaders analyses that later enhanced his reputation among them as a remarkable seer. In essence, he told them:

Ponomarev was talking to Morris in his office about Johnson when subordinates burst in, their faces ashen. Unaware that Morris understood Russian, they ignored him and at once informed Ponomarev that Dallas police had arrested Lee Harvey Oswald for the murder of President Kennedy. Other ostensible facts they rapidly reported explained their alarm, which bordered on panic.

Oswald, a former U.S. Marine, had defected to the Soviet Union and lived there with his Russian wife. Soviet psychiatrists who examined him after he attempted suicide in Moscow concluded that he was very abnormal and unbalanced, if not insane. When he asked to return to the United States, the Soviets were
glad to be rid of him and they had no contact with him until a few weeks ago. Then he appeared unbidden at the Soviet embassy in Mexico City and requested a visa to go back to the Soviet Union, saying he intended to travel via Cuba. The embassy, following standard procedures, routinely asked Moscow for guidance. KGB headquarters reviewed his record, adjudged him a useless misfit, and ordered the embassy to brush him off. Accordingly, the Soviets in Mexico City advised Oswald that they could not issue a visa until he obtained a visa to enter Cuba. Forewarned, the Cuban embassy told him it could not issue a visa until he obtained a visa to enter the Soviet Union. This contrived runaround succeeded in turning Oswald away, and the Soviets heard nothing more from or about him until just now.