Operation Solo (2 page)

From 1962 on, Boyle embarked Morris and Eva on and recovered them from every mission and wrote the mission reports. When they were in the United States, he talked to them almost every day. He made the daily operational decisions and was consulted at all the major operational conferences in Washington, New York, and Chicago. No one was closer to Morris and Eva; no one knew more about them and the operation than did Boyle. Fortunately for history, Boyle kept a log of his career.

Langtry in New York administered an elaborate clandestine communications system designed and built by the Soviets. Through this system the FBI regularly received messages from the Kremlin and, in the name of Jack or Morris, sent back whatever the United States wanted the Soviets to hear. Langtry handled many millions of dollars smuggled into New York by the KGB, and he drafted the reports of what the KGB and communist leaders told Jack. After he retired, the FBI recalled Langtry to write a secret “in-house” history of the operation and put at his disposal all the documents he required. Langtry personally saw much of the operation; he read everything about it.

Boyle and Langtry, in countless interviews and conversations, generously shared with me their unique knowledge and insights. They took time to scrutinize, criticize, and correct the manuscript. Certainly I alone am responsible for any errors or defects in this work, but the book could not have been written without such gifts from Morris, Eva, Boyle, and Langtry. The names and contributions of other important benefactors are cited in the Acknowledgments.

There are four appendices. Appendix A lists the dates and destinations of each of the fifty-seven missions into enemy territory Morris, Eva, or Jack accomplished under FBI control. Appendix B lists, year by year, the amount of money the Soviet Union illicitly supplied the U.S. Communist Party from 1958 to 1980. Appendix
C identifies the KGB officers who worked in the United States with Morris and Jack from 1958 to 1982. Appendix D replicates documents that illustrate various phases of the operation.

A minor caveat. Eva proved herself to be the kind of source a researcher covets, the kind of witness a lawyer likes to put on the stand. Many times she had said, “No, it didn't happen that way,” or “I can't remember,” or “I don't know.” In short, she was a stickler for facts.

However, Eva now and then had a problem recalling dates. She vividly remembered an intimate dinner with Fidel Castro at the Cuban embassy in Moscow, down to the menu (steak) and the smell of cigar smoke; however, she could not remember the date she and Morris dined there. There was one date she adamantly refused even to discuss: the date of her birth. I had to know how old Eva was, so I inquired of government sources who said that Eva Lieb Childs was born March 24, 1900. Asked if that was correct, Eva indignantly exclaimed, “No! I'm not
that
old.” I then asked, “All right, Eva, in which year were you born?” She said 1910.

Doubtless, some clerk got it wrong and Eva is right. Regardless, anyone caring to read further will meet a lady who, at whatever age, for nearly two decades served alongside valorous and daring men with an equal amount of valor and daring.

one

WE WON

THE FBI EFFACED RECORDS of the death, and no newspaper made mention of it. The United States had kept the secret for thirty years, and the FBI intended to keep it still. The communists never knew what had happened to Morris after he vanished, and they hunted him in vain; let them keep looking for him, and wondering.

Elaine Fox overheard her husband, Assistant FBI Director James Fox, say over the phone, “When did it happen?… Yes, I will be proud to do it.”

Reading the sadness on his face, she asked, “Is the old man gone?” Fox nodded yes and said he had agreed to speak at the funeral, then he retreated to his study to reflect and compose.

If Jim Fox could have arranged the funeral, it would have been like a state funeral. He envisioned a long line of FBI agents and troops standing at attention on a ridge in Arlington National Cemetery overlooking Washington. He saw and heard the Marine Band marching and playing a dirge in front of a horse-drawn caisson bearing the casket draped with a new American flag. Perhaps
even the president would be there. After all, Ronald Reagan had offered personally to decorate 58
¹
at the White House.

Had Fox been at liberty to tell the real story of the greatest espionage operation in FBI history, he could have justified such a funeral and he might well have begun the eulogy by saying, “Here lies the greatest of American spies.”

Morris risked his life on fifty-two missions into the Soviet Union and other parts of its empire, most lasting several weeks. For more than twenty years, the highest Soviet rulers—from Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, and Yuri Andropov on down—treated him as an intimate friend. They confided to him their innermost thoughts, ambitions, and apprehensions; their strategy and plans; what they would do and dared not do; their reactions to world events; and their real attitudes toward the United States and its leaders. Often they solicited his opinions and advice, and often they heeded it. The Soviets so trusted and esteemed him that on his seventy-fifth birthday, Brezhnev hosted a banquet at the Kremlin in his honor. The Soviet dictator eloquently thanked Morris for more than half a century of service to the Soviet Union and international communism, then awarded him a medal, the Order of the Red Banner.

In the United States, Morris secretly served as the principal deputy to the head of the American Communist Party, Gus Hall. In effect, an FBI spy was the second-ranking figure in American communism. The Soviets smuggled money to the U.S. party through Morris and his brother, Jack Childs, and over the years they received from Moscow more than $28 million, which the FBI counted down to the penny.

The voluminous secrets Morris stole from the Kremlin for more than two decades enabled the United States to read the minds of the men who ran the Soviet Union, to anticipate their actions, and to exploit their problems, most spectacularly their problems with
China. It was like playing poker, knowing which cards everyone else at the table held.

By elaborate ruses, the FBI concealed the identity of Morris and the nature of the operation from everybody—the State Department, the CIA, the Defense Department, and the National Security Council. FBI agents personally took the most sensitive reports from Morris to the offices of these and other agencies. There a few people were allowed to read the reports in the presence of the delivering agent, but they had to hand them back. Not until 1975 did the FBI finally inform the president and secretary of state of the source of the intelligence for which they and other policymakers clamored.

Even now, at the funeral, Fox could disclose few of these facts. But he resolved to hint at the truth by telling as much of it as he could.

In the foyer outside the chapel of a funeral home in northwest Chicago, Fox bent down to embrace a tiny, elegantly coiffed woman who in her late eighties remained unbowed, trim, and lovely. Officially, she was CG-6653S*; Fox called her Eva because he revered her. How many elderly women would hide with their husband underneath bed covers in Moscow copying secret Soviet documents, one holding a flashlight while the other wrote? How many would smuggle out copies encased in plastic wrapped around their bodies? How many would carry hundreds of thousands of dollars in shopping bags through the streets of New York and Chicago? How many so late in life would give up their life to espionage?

Two old friends, Carl Freyman and Walter Boyle, joined them. Freyman, in his late seventies and limping slightly, reminded Fox of a courtly grandfather; Boyle looked as lean, tough, and darkly handsome as he did forty years before when the commanding general of the first Marine Division decorated him on a Korean battlefield.

The four of them—Eva, Fox, Freyman, and Boyle—belonged to the small American team that challenged the Soviet empire on its own territory and terms; they were teammates. Morris always credited Freyman with saving his life. In 1952, while Morris lay near death, Freyman persuaded him to be a partner of the FBI, put him in the Mayo Clinic, and restored his will to live. Freyman was the first to perceive that Morris someday might penetrate the highest
Soviet sanctums, and he recast the operation accordingly. And Freyman rescued Boyle's career and brought him into the operation at a time when nobody else in the FBI wanted anything to do with him.

For eighteen years Boyle embarked Morris and Eva on their every mission, and wherever they alighted back in the United States, he was there, waiting to lead them past customs and to a hideaway to draft the first flash report to Washington. He saw or talked to them every day that they were in the United States, and he was at their call night and day. Always he carried a weapon, and they knew he instantly would use it in their defense. To them, he was as a son. In consequence of a false allegation of misconduct, FBI headquarters proposed removing Boyle from the operation. To the FBI, Eva, at the behest of Morris, spoke dulcet words whose import was not sweet: If Walt goes, we quit and the operation ends. Boyle stayed.

Fox started working with Morris and Eva after being appointed Boyle's supervisor in 1971. He incidentally mentioned that his unexplainable absences at night or on weekends caused his wife to fear that he was seeing another woman. Eva's blue eyes smiled at him. “Why don't you introduce her to the other woman?” Morris and Eva became like relatives of the Fox family, and the children called them “Aunt Eva” and “Uncle Morris.” Eva in turn called Fox, who was part Sioux Indian, “my favorite Baptist Indian.” Although his ascent into the leadership of the FBI later separated him from the operation, he remained their friend and patron throughout his FBI career.

Eva asked if another team member, retired FBI Agent John Langtry, was coming to the funeral. Langtry had long worked with Jack in New York; he had assisted Morris and Eva whenever they were there, and she very much liked him. Fox explained that Langtry was unable to travel because he was recuperating from major surgery.

“Well, we can't afford to lose John,” Eva said. “Now they're only five of us left. We were a very little team. But we pulled off quite a caper, didn't we?”

Some fifty relatives of Morris and Eva gathered in the chapel for the private service. Midway through the ritual, the rabbi paused
and announced that Mr. James Fox, assistant director of the FBI, would speak. At mention of the FBI, some in the congregation gasped audibly; Boyle saw one woman, apparently unable to close her mouth, clasp her hand over it; another stared incredulously at Eva.

Fox, tall and dignified with gray hair, looked like a handsome, urbane diplomat as he stood behind the podium. “My name is Jim Fox. I am a friend of Morris Childs.” More gasps.
Morris and Eva, friends of the FBI
!

After the service, Fox and Boyle adjourned to a venerable Italian restaurant, settled into a booth, and over double martinis began reminiscing much like two generals reviewing an epic wartime campaign. Their conversation was disjointed, rambling from topic to topic. But in the anecdotes traded, they tried in one way or another to answer a basic question: How could we accomplish something so improbable for so long?

Of course, Morris himself was a large part of the answer. Boyle told a story about Morris, Angela Davis, and ten thousand dollars, a story whose climax he never reported to headquarters.

It began in 1970 during the trial of three convicts charged with murdering a guard at Soledad Prison in California. Someone smuggled weapons into the courtroom and a barrage of gunfire killed the presiding judge and three others. The FBI initiated a nationwide hunt for Angela Davis, a young communist and
college instructor accused of plotting to slip the weapons into court. The search continued for nearly two months until Morris learned from a party official exactly where Davis was hiding in New York.