Operation Solo (20 page)

By the mid-1960s, public demonstrations, published articles, and border clashes provided visible evidence of Chinese animus toward the Soviet Union. But there remained in the American intelligence community those who argued that these indicators were superficial shams devilishly concocted to dupe the West. Other analysts held that despite the obvious differences between China and the Soviet Union, there still was much more to unite them than divide them and that in their mutual interests the most powerful communist nations eventually would negotiate an end to their disputes.

This long had been the Soviet view and hope. The documents Morris saw and the statements Soviet leaders made to him revealed that it no longer was. Ponomarev unequivocally declared that there was no possibility of reconciliation. The Soviets were resolved not to modify their basic positions even if adherence to them meant widening the breach with the Chinese. They were contemplating intensifying their ideological counterattack on China and were urging foreign parties to do likewise.

Mao rudely had told the Soviets to their face that the Chinese had no desire to settle their differences, that they were determined to maintain the split, and that Chinese ideological assaults would continue for a hundred or a thousand years. The Chinese aspired to shatter the worldwide communist movement dominated by the Soviet Union and out of the shambles build a movement dominated by them. They were making subtle, covert diplomatic and trade overtures to the West, and they consciously were accepting clandestine commercial ties with the United States through third countries.

In the Chicago cover office, Morris undertook to explain to Boyle the thinking of both the Soviets and Chinese. The Soviets envied the economic and technological prowess of the United States and feared its military might. They would continue to be its enemy, to try to equal or surpass it militarily, and to outmaneuver it internationally. In the internal lexicon of the International Department, the KGB, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the
United States for years had been referred to as the “Main Enemy” (
Glavny Vrag
), and the lesser informed still used that term. But the Soviets believed that the United States would act rationally and that when necessary they could have logical talks with the American government. On the other hand, the Soviets now hated the Chinese and did not count upon them to behave rationally. Americans were not clawing at the Soviets' borders or laying preposterous claims to large swaths of their territory, and anti-Soviet statements emanating from the United States sounded positively decorous compared to the vitriol spewing out of Peking and out of Chinese embassies around the world. If the Soviets launched a nuclear strike against any country, it would be China.

As for the Chinese, ideology and dogma committed them to public enmity toward the United States, and for the time being they would oppose American interests on many fronts, including Vietnam. But their assistance to North Vietnam would be measured and limited and would entail no action that might precipitate military conflict with the United States; hence their refusal to coordinate aid with the Soviets, allow Soviet aircraft to fly over Chinese territory, or permit Soviet ships to unload supplies for Vietnam in Chinese ports. The Chinese did not believe that the United States threatened their territory or sovereignty. Morris recalled that in 1958 or 1959 Chou En Lai said to him that, if political philosophies were set aside, China and the United States as nations were not natural enemies. The Chinese did feel threatened by the Soviets, and they looked upon Soviet rulers as traitors to communism, as naked imperialists who were greedier than the Europeans or Americans because they were needier. Daily, the Chinese party tried to indoctrinate the entire Chinese population with the conviction that the Soviet Union was the “Main Enemy.”

There was in the data and analysis Morris supplied an implicit and instructive message for American policymakers: When playing poker with the Soviets, play the China card; when dealing with the Chinese, play the Soviet card. Ultimately, the message was heard, comprehended, and acted upon.

After filing all the reports of a mission and answering consequent questions from Washington, Boyle and Morris customarily
sat down and reviewed the mission again, dwelling upon incidents and details not incorporated into the reports. These reviews sometimes stimulated insights more enlightening than many of the specifics reported to headquarters, and, in going over the statements Brezhnev made to him and Hall, Morris articulated one of them: Ideology could blind the Kremlin to reality.

Brezhnev cited as a major advantage of Soviet agriculture the fact that it was “socialized”; however, this was the root cause of the chronic agricultural problems. That should have been obvious to Brezhnev and everybody else. Peasants were allowed to till tiny private plots as they judged best and sell for their own profit whatever they grew. While these plots constituted less than 1.5 percent of the land under cultivation in the Soviet Union, they yielded more than half the potatoes and eggs and a third of the vegetables produced in the entire country. The clear reality was that, left to their own devices and given incentives, Soviet farmers could produce prodigiously; the heavily regulated and bureaucratized collective and state farms could not, as they annually demonstrated. No amount of tinkering with this congenitally inefficient and irredeemable system could change this reality. Brezhnev really seemed to believe that by throwing out a few little sops he had brightened overnight the mood of peasants across the land. Indeed, he depicted them as being so overjoyed that by the millions they had taken to their desks, pen in hand, to compose letters of gratitude. The reality was that nothing had changed. The peasants still were enserfed in mean huts on primitive and frequently isolated collectives where almost nobody gave a damn about what was produced or whether machinery ever was repaired or whether crops rotted in open fields. However, ideology decreed that the system of state and collective farms was the best; ergo, it was the best and Brezhnev boasted of it as an “asset.”

“Some day that kind of thinking could be dangerous,” Boyle remarked.

“Yes, it could be,” Morris said. “Look at what it's cost them already.”

nine

PLAYING WITH THE KGB

NIKOLAI TALANOV STOPPED HIS car at the edge of a deserted lane that wound through the woods and estates of Westchester County, raised the hood, and focused a flashlight on the engine as if trying to ascertain what was wrong. Another car approached and its headlights blinked a message. He is coming. As far as we can determine, you have not been followed. It was a given that the driver of the second car and his female companion would be watching and guarding from down the lane.

Jack parked behind Talanov, got out, and asked, “Do you need help?”

The FBI had difficulty making Jack pay attention to details he considered mundane or inconsequential. But if Jack sensed that he was to be a central actor in a grand scheme or scam, he acted out his role enthusiastically, and that night he followed the FBI script flawlessly. The script was written to minimize potential threats to SOLO.

Because of atmospheric vagaries, the KGB in Manhattan
sometimes could not hear radio transmissions from Moscow. The FBI, with the best equipment in the world, always received them and passed the decrypted contents to Jack. Why could Jack always hear the transmissions when the KGB could not? The KGB, the International Department in Moscow, and Gus Hall collectively were levying upon Jack more tasks than one man reasonably could be expected to perform. How could Jack do so much and do everything unerringly? How could he, upon doctors' orders, periodically retreat to Florida in the winter and still get back to New York whenever something needed to be done? The FBI feared that sooner or later the KGB would ask such questions.

Having identified the problems, the FBI proposed a solution in the form of NY-4309S*, code named “Clip.” An American of Russian descent, Clip was an accomplished radioman and photographer. During the 1930s he served as a Comintern agent and throughout Western Europe taught members of the communist underground how to set up and use clandestine radio transmitters and receivers. After the United States entered World War II, he volunteered for the Marine Corps and served honorably. Morris once said of Walt Boyle, “You can take the boy out of the Marine Corps, but you can't take the Marine Corps out of the boy,” and that was also true of Clip. After the war, Clip approached the FBI, reported his communist past, offered his services to the United States, and became a reliable, productive FBI asset.

If the KGB could be swindled into enlisting Clip as an assistant to Jack, his presence would largely answer the questions the FBI feared. He lived a considerable distance outside New York, and atmospheric conditions there well might differ from those around the KGB radio room in midtown Manhattan. If the Soviets asked Jack why he heard transmissions they could not hear, he could say that Clip picked them up. Soviet files would portray Clip as an experienced, skilled conspirator; the Comintern had trusted him with knowledge of much of the European underground before the war, and he had vindicated that trust; surely he now could be trusted to relay radio messages and service drops.

The furtive meetings in the countryside were brief, so the FBI script was economical with words. Jack re-created a fictitious
encounter that supposedly occurred on the street outside his office (a well-furnished cover office the FBI leased for him at 3 Battery Place). He chanced to run into an old friend and comrade from the 1930s (Clip), whose true name he gave. Clip asked if Jack still was active in the party, and after Jack assured him that he was, Clip requested a favor. Could Jack ascertain what happened to Clip's father in Russia? The request suggested to Jack that Clip retained sentimental ties to the “Mother Country,” and it suggested to him an idea. Jack was worried about his capacity to continue by himself to do all that was being asked of him; he needed help and it seemed to him that someone as proven and reliable as Clip could be an ideal assistant, especially with the radio. The comrades knew best; Jack hoped they would think about the possibility.

Talanov a few weeks later gave Jack a photograph of the grave of Clip's father and a sympathetically worded account of his father's last year. He also gave an order to Gus Hall: Investigate Clip. Hall assigned Jack to oversee the investigation; Jack reported that Clip seemed ideologically sound but that both he and Morris wanted the comrades to make the final decision. The KGB then asked if Clip was willing to come to Moscow for talks. In Moscow, Clip passed the ideological examinations; the technical tests by the KGB of his communications skills ended abruptly after only about thirty minutes. The KGB examiner said, “There is no point in going on. You know more than I do. Why don't we have a good lunch?”

To protect both Clip and SOLO, the FBI for many years let Clip think that, in dealings with Jack and Hall, in recording the radio messages—in all he did—he was spying on a Soviet spy ring. Clip, the Comintern agent turned U.S. Marine, did not learn the truth until toward the end. His contributions always were valuable; toward the end they were invaluable.

 

 

THE SOLO TEAM ACQUIRED a new and main member in 1966 when the FBI assigned John Langtry to be Al Burlinson's deputy. Langtry soon became a principal handler of Jack and one of the best friends of Burlinson, Boyle, Morris, and
Eva. In selecting him the FBI, whether by sagacity or luck, once again picked exactly the right man.

Langtry was born May 10, 1924, on Long Island, the son of a striking Scottish mother and an American father of Scottish–Irish descent. His father was doing well, managing the family construction business until 1929 when he was killed in an accident. The crash of the stock market that same year wiped out the family assets, and his mother was left a widow without any money. While millions were jobless during the ensuing Depression, she was fortunate enough to obtain employment by a wealthy New York family as a governess. However, alone and working full time, she felt unable to provide the kind of family environment she wanted for her son, so she packed him off to his grandparents in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia.

There, discipline reigned. One morning at breakfast Langtry refused to eat his oatmeal. “You must eat it, wee laddie,” said his grandmother.

“I will not.”

Because the public school was only three blocks away, Langtry walked home for lunch. That noon, the only food on the table was the breakfast oatmeal. Again, he spurned it. At dinner he once again faced the cold and now repulsive oatmeal. His grandmother said, “You'll have no other food until you finish your oatmeal.” Famished, Langtry forced it down—and learned not to disobey.

He made his own bed, washed dishes, and helped with the laundry. In the winter he stoked the furnace and stacked firewood; in the summer he mowed the lawn and tended the garden. Until he completed his chores and homework, he could not listen to the radio, and he could not look at the newspaper before his grandparents read it. If he complained about being punished at school, his grandparents said, “You deserved it.”

At the same time, his grandparents enveloped him with affection; his mother wrote often and sent presents, particularly books; and he was happy. On winter evenings by the fire, his grandfather enthralled and excited him with tales of the Victorian era, of Scottish brigades in India, and of Kitchner at Khartoum. The works of Rudyard Kipling and Alfred Tennyson further fired his
imagination, and he dreamed of charging with the Light Brigade and marching behind the bagpipes of a Highland regiment.

The Canadian Maple Leaf flew daily from a tall flagpole in the front yard, but on Langtry's birthday and the Fourth of July his grandfather raised the Stars and Stripes, and the phonograph blared out “The Star Spangled Banner.” And throughout Langtry's childhood and adolescence, his grandfather imbued him with an ethos embodied in three words—“God, Flag, Truth.”