Operation Solo (23 page)

Hall also asked Jack's advice about how to react to a cashiered FBI agent who, angered by his dismissal, approached the party with an offer to supply FBI secrets. Jack did not have to feign concern because he was very concerned. Again he thought quickly. He said that the approach was an obvious FBI provocation, an attempt to entrap Hall. If he accepted classified information, the FBI would arrest him for espionage. Hall told the former agent to stay the hell away from him.

Another good sign appeared in June 1967 after a chalk mark summoned Jack to an emergency meeting with his KGB handler
that evening. The KGB officer handed him a copy of a speech Soviet Premier Kosygin planned to deliver to the United Nations about the Seven-Day Arab–Israeli War that had just ended. It was an apologia for Soviet actions and a denunciation of American actions in the Middle East. The Soviets wanted Hall to study the speech in advance so he would understand the positions the American party was to adopt regarding the war. Given the text, the State Department and U.S. Ambassador Arthur Goldberg prepared a devastating rebuttal before Kosygin spoke. Goldberg told the FBI that prior knowledge of just what Kosygin would say was enormously valuable: “I don't know where you got it, but if you get anything else like this, please let me have it.”

Manifestly, the Kremlin still trusted MORAT. Whatever suspicions Kazakov may have harbored, the KGB had been unable or unwilling to pursue them, and its failure illustrated the Soviet vulnerability the FBI so long exploited. The KGB had responsibility for conducting the operation and determining operational procedures; it had no control over policy governing the operation. The Politburo, Central Committee, and International Department dictated overall policy, the content of messages, how much money the American party would receive, when Morris came to Moscow. And when he came he talked most of the time to members of the Politburo, Central Committee, and International Department—and to the KGB only at their behest and his convenience.

After a Saturday night exchange of money and microfilm in the New York countryside, the FBI, using a cipher and code the KGB issued to Jack, sent a message to Moscow in his name. Typically, a message said: “To Able-Kit. Received 300 pairs of shoes April 6. Spring.” “Able-Kit” meant the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics; “300 pairs of shoes” meant $300,000; “April 6” meant April 3 (in messages, three days were added to the actual date of delivery); “Spring” meant Jack. The absence of other words meant the exchange occurred without incident and that Jack arrived home safely with the money.

The routine told the SOLO team much. Jack and Morris reported directly to the Central Committee rather than to the KGB.
The Central Committee asked them to verify for it that the KGB had followed its orders and had not purloined any of the cash. The Soviet leadership unwittingly had made Jack, Morris, and their FBI confederates superiors of the KGB by retaining all authority over the operation without accepting any responsibility.

Morris warned though that the breach could swiftly and fatally close at any time. Seeing Jack in the veritable embrace of his political bosses, Kazakov retreated. If he had suspicions, he had no proof and was afraid to proceed without it. But if, as a result of some leak in Washington or mischance with documents in Moscow, the KGB ever acquired hard evidence, the patronage of Soviet rulers could not save Morris and Jack. Indeed, the rulers would turn on both of them with a vengeance.

Between October 1967 and June 1968, Morris journeyed into the Soviet bloc four times and mingled with communist leaders from North Vietnam, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary as well as the Soviet Union. He reported that the Vietnamese were as determined as ever to wage war and that the Soviets were organizing all communist parties in the Western Hemisphere into a campaign to force the United States out of Vietnam. He also brought back seven thousand feet of film that showed imprisoned crewmen of the
USS Pueblo
, which had been seized off the high seas by the North Koreans.

In Moscow, Ponomarev expressed concern for the safety of Morris and Jack and the security of MORAT. He said that Morris should continue to deal personally with chiefs of foreign parties and attend international communist conclaves as a secret delegate. However, in the United States the Soviets intended to use MORAT “only for confidential, urgent, and illegal matters.”

Shortly after Morris returned from Moscow on June 29, 1968, Jack's KGB handler, Vladimir Aleksandrovich Chuchukin, signaled Jack to come to an emergency meeting. The Soviets wanted Hall and Morris to know the political situation in Czechoslovakia was rapidly deteriorating and there might be trouble. Referring to the Czech leadership under Alexander Dubcek, Chuchukin angrily declared, “If those revisionists don't stop, something will have to be done.” Chuchukin summoned Jack twice more in the next ten
days to advise him that Soviet efforts to reason with the Czechs and persuade them to return to the party fold, as defined by Moscow, had failed. All Chuchukin said proclaimed to Jack and Morris that the Soviets were about to act against Czechoslovakia. Accordingly, Burlinson notified headquarters that “A Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia appears imminent.”

At the time, Assistant Director William Sullivan controlled dissemination of SOLO intelligence and he deemed the report too vague to be forwarded to the White House, State Department, CIA, or anyone else. After Soviet tanks rolled into Prague in August 1968, New York and Chicago vehemently protested the failure of headquarters to circulate vital intelligence that the United States might have used to deter the invasion. Headquarters lamely responded, “You didn't tell us how and when.”

When the invasion began, the Central Committee flashed a message to Jack for Hall, exhorting him and the American party to support the Soviet military intervention. If the Soviets had outlawed the baking of bread or sexual relations between husband and wife, Hall would have supported them. But he needed to know what to say and how to defend what in the eyes of many in the West, including many Western communists, was indefensible. To find out, he dispatched Morris to Moscow on August 23, barely two days after the invasion.

When Morris arrived, Ponomarev was engaged in discussions with representatives of the Czech regime newly installed in Prague with the help of tanks and bayonets. While waiting for him, Morris conferred with Mikhail Polonik, who had succeeded Kazakov as the KGB's Moscow manager of MORAT. Polonik spoke to him courteously and respectfully in excellent English, and asked whether he could recommend any operational changes and if he had any complaints about the performance of the “New York [KGB] comrades.” Morris saw an opportunity and gently picked it up.

He had no complaints; he had only admiration for men who left their wives and children at night and on weekends to do their duty at personal risk. He also admired the sacrifices of the communications and cryptographic personnel who had to work nights
and weekends to service MORAT. Morris had to account for the money, so he was familiar with the deliveries and their dangers, and he could recall only one time, a time when ice and snow made countryside roads impassible, that the New York comrades failed to deliver as scheduled. The radio messages always had been transmitted as scheduled. As for operational techniques, he really was not as qualified as Polonik and his comrades to judge—they had worked impeccably thus far—but he would ask Jack. And speaking of Jack: Sometimes he could be rude, even insolent, to your comrades. He really does not mean to be. He is just letting out emotions he cannot let out anywhere else. Remember, he is constantly risking the ruination of his wife, children, and himself.

Polonik politely interjected that everyone understood the pressures under which Jack labored and that everyone regarded him as a very able and devoted comrade. He thanked Morris for his evaluation of the New York comrades and hinted all might profit if it were repeated to some of Morris' confidants, i.e., members of the Politburo.

The final draft of a communiqué pledging solidarity of purpose and action between the new Czechoslovakian regime and the Soviet Union was completed August 26. Just an hour afterward, Ponomarev received Morris. He looked gray, haggard, and in need of sleep yet seemed glad to see his old friend, someone he could really trust. And he spoke personally and frankly.

The Soviets regretted the necessity of interceding in Czechoslovakia but they had no choice. The “revisionist” policies of Dubcek, his “socialism with a human face,” were like a cancer that, unless excised, would grow and spread into Eastern Europe and even the Soviet Union. Unchecked, they conceivably could have propelled Czechoslovakia out of the Warsaw Pact alliance and splintered the international communist movement. Ponomarev acknowledged that the invasion had “created tensions with some parties” in Western Europe and asked if the Soviets could count on the “solidarity” of the American party.

Morris assured him that they could; under the leadership of Hall, the party was disciplined and reliable. A few dilettantes and poseurs might defect, but they did not matter.

“What is the general reaction in the United States?” Ponomarev asked.

Morris could have said: You probably have ensured that Richard Nixon will be the next president; you certainly have secured many, many billions more for the Pentagon; you have validated in the minds of the extreme Left the Chinese charge that the Soviet Union is just another chauvinist, imperialist power. But Morris was not in the business of giving the Soviets intelligence or analyses unless by so doing he served a clearly defined American interest. So he simply replied, “It is not favorable.”

They then came to Hall's question about what the party line regarding Czechoslovakia should be. It was an embarrassing question, and Ponomarev disposed of it quickly. It ran: German revisionists, in connivance with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the CIA, with Dubcek acting, wittingly or unwittingly, as their front man, attempted to organize a counterrevolution. Fraternal neighbors of Czechoslovakia detected the plot and requested the Soviet Union to join them in rescuing the Czech people from imperialist aggression.

Morris knew that, to a majority of Americans who paid any attention to it, this explanation would convict the Soviets of being congenital liars as well as a menace. A month after talking to Ponomarev, he found that the Soviet justification of the invasion had been just as ill received by West European communists.

Morris landed in Budapest September 30 as a secret delegate to a conference of European party leaders to plan a more grandiose, worldwide conference. These smaller, preparatory meetings were important to the Soviets because they wanted to guarantee the outcome of the bigger assemblies. But among themselves the delegates talked mostly about Czechoslovakia, and for the first time in Morris' memory their mood was anti-Soviet—not anticommunist, but anti-Soviet. Over dinner, a Soviet delegate gravely told Morris, “Revisionism is a virus infecting all communist parties.”

At Budapest, Ponomarev or another Soviet delegate admitted to Morris that the Soviets had failed fully to comprehend what was happening in Czechoslovakia until it was too late to do anything except use military force and that they had miscalculated the
political and international consequences of the invasion. “Our military intelligence is perfect. Our political intelligence is just the reverse.” Soon Morris saw and read ominous and, to him, appalling signs that this assessment was accurate insofar as it pertained to “political intelligence” and political understanding of the United States.

The long, black limousine that took him from the airport toward his Moscow apartment on November 17, 1968, had to stop, and Morris parted the curtains to look at the passing convoy of tanks, armored personnel carriers, trucks, and artillery. Jets whistled low overhead, and he thought he was in the midst of a military maneuver. In some of the sections of Moscow he traversed, there were more troops than civilians and armored vehicles were everywhere. It was as if the Soviets expected the city momentarily to be besieged.

After a few hours at the International Department, Morris began to understand. The election of Nixon as president of the United States had stunned and frightened the Soviets. They viewed him as a fanatic anticommunist who might attempt to annihilate or overwhelm the Soviet Union by a surprise nuclear attack. Because the Soviets tended to act upon what they believed, this crazy belief was dangerous to everybody. Morris wanted never to appear to be trying to influence the Soviets, and he offered his judgments or analyses only when they requested them. But to the extent their questions allowed, he tried subtly to nudge the new czars in Moscow back toward reality without saying, “You're crazy.”

No, the outcome of the election did not astonish him. He recalled telling everyone at the International Department back in the summer that the presidential contest appeared to be close and that either Nixon or Hubert Humphrey could win. True, Nixon was an inveterate anticommunist and he probably would turn out to be a tough adversary. He also was an astute politician adept at divining the mood of the American public, and the public, already deeply divided by the war in Vietnam, hardly was in a mood to start World War III. In any case, there was no immediate danger (i.e., no need to keep tanks rumbling around Moscow) because before undertaking any fundamental changes in foreign
policy, Nixon would need time to organize and consolidate his administration.

Boyle hoped to take a few days off during the Christmas season of 1968 to be with his children, and no one would have faulted him for doing so; for years he had been unable to use all the leave to which he was entitled. As it was, he and Morris worked until December 23, driven by the conviction that the incoming Nixon administration needed to be immediately informed of the misapprehensions the Kremlin had about it and their dangers. Much more was required than a simple, straightforward recitation of facts.