Operation Solo (26 page)

The Moscow apartment was attended by a staff, but for this evening of work he wanted to get rid of his favorite staff member, Yekaterina, his cook/nursemaid, who would linger after supper to see that all was well—and to take home food after he retired.

This evening Morris told his driver to stop at the “speakeasy”—the Kremlin store where, with a special card, he could walk in and collect imported luxuries, which were promptly delivered, all for free. Morris never entered without feeling
hypocritical, and normally he went there only to replenish his supply of presents for his Soviet hosts and hostesses. But that afternoon, he acted just like any other greedy oligarch, ordering piggish quantities of sausage, wurst, caviar, smoked fish, and chocolates. At the apartment, he gave the package to Yekaterina as a present from Eva and sent her home.

After writing down all Suslov said to him, Morris began the analysis he would give to Boyle. In July, Kissinger and Chou En Lai had concluded substantial agreements; yet in September, the Soviets remained ignorant of them. Neither did they seem to know that Kissinger was about to return to China. Morris concluded they either had lost or been unable to communicate with the well-placed source he believed they had in Peking.

Suslov said the Soviets were not sure whether Nixon and the Chinese would “reach agreement” and, if they did, he wondered whether it would be an “anti-Soviet agreement.” Morris thought,
What other kind of agreement could it be?
When Morris last spoke with the Soviets in April, they were angry, bitter, and mistrustful of the United States, and contemplating actions to undermine it. Now they were confident that they could trust the United States to come to acceptable terms with them. And Suslov vowed that no matter what Nixon and China agreed to, “We are going to negotiate with the U.S. constantly, and we will continue to do so.”

Morris did not know what produced such a stark reversal in attitude in such a short time. He did know that the White House forthwith should be informed that in dealing with China it need not be inhibited by apprehensions about Soviet reactions.

The next day, the Central Committee entrusted Morris with a position paper regarding China, and he copied it almost verbatim. The paper recited the history of failed Soviet efforts to negotiate with the Chinese and dramatized once again the intractable enmity between the two former allies:

For Morris, the position paper affirmed conclusions drawn from Suslov's statements and stimulated a few more. The Soviets did not understand that China and the United States in principle already had made a profound deal and had only to elaborate and formalize it. By keeping the Soviets ignorant, the Chinese were exhibiting competence and good faith toward the United States. The Soviets were vulnerable to great self-delusion. For years, the specter of American technology, wealth, and “cowboy violence,” as Mostovets once said, aligned with a billion Chinese enemies on their borders, had tormented them. In the past couple of years, they repeatedly had told Morris that this nightmare very well
might become reality. Though they did not know what Kissinger and Chou En Lai said to each other, there were conspicuous signs that what they themselves predicted was coming true. Mao, Chou, Nixon, and Kissinger were not sitting down with each other just for herbal tea and roasted duck. But the Soviets could not accept the indications that their own calculations were correct. They preferred to comfort themselves with the hope that the Americans and Chinese might not be able to get together, after all, because of “deep-seated contradictions.”

Morris realized that the FBI first would want any information that might benefit Kissinger and the United States in the next secret negotiations with the Chinese, and that he had no right or reason to dispute this priority. But he did scribble a reminder on the back of the envelope containing his plane tickets, “TWA-DD.” To him, the notation meant after we've answered all the questions, after I'm finished with the technocrats, tell Walt about dangerous delusions.

 

 

MORRIS AND BOYLE WERE still filing reports and answering queries from Washington when Kissinger returned to Peking in October 1971, ostensibly to arrange for Nixon's forthcoming visit. Actually, he and Chou engaged in cordial, candid, and wide-ranging dialogue about major world issues. At the same time, they established an enduring and friendly personal relationship.

Back in Moscow in December for the regular year-end review, Morris found the Soviets again drifting away from reality. The impending accords between China and the United States in a few weeks would dramatically alter the balance of power against the Soviet Union. Yet the Soviets had convinced themselves that the “crisis of capitalism is deepening and that imperialism is in retreat.” A relatively minor economic recession in the United States persuaded them that the West was verging on collapse.

What the Soviets long had feared and forecast came to pass in February 1972 when Nixon, Mao, Kissinger, and Chou achieved understandings that, from the perspective of the Soviets, were
worse than their gloomiest predictions. In a joint declaration issued at the end of their talks—the so-called Shanghai Communiqu é—China and the United States pledged jointly to oppose “the hegemonic aims of others [i.e., the Soviet Union] in Asia.” As Kissinger wrote, “In plain language, the United States and China agreed on the need for parallel policies toward the world balance of power.” In plainer language, the two nations publicly and formally entered into an anti-Soviet alliance.

That was bad enough, but much more went on in private. The Chinese made it clear that they did not want China and the United States just to be “former enemies,” but real friends and partners. Domestically, each nation should abide by its own political, economic, and social principles. Internationally, they should act jointly despite their ideological differences. Kissinger wrote, “Mao took the proposition a somewhat cynical step further by indicating that we would strengthen domestic support for our cooperation if we took occasional potshots at each other—so long as we did not take our own pronouncements too seriously.” The Chinese exhorted the Americans to maintain the strongest possible armed forces and weaponry, to stay close to Western Europe and NATO, to forge an anti-Soviet alliance stretching from Pakistan through Iran and Turkey into the Middle East, and, above all, despite domestic pressures steamed up by an unpopular war in Vietnam, to assume and maintain a preeminent role in world affairs. In sum, they did everything within their power to encourage the United States, short of singing “The Star Spangled Banner.”

At the same time, the Chinese wished to be a worthy and constructive partner. Insofar as their resources permitted, they would covertly abet Sino–American policies around the globe. Delicately, they hinted they would assist in solving mutual problems in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. And they noted that the United States and China were natural trading partners who had much to offer each other commercially.

Morris at the time knew nothing of these historic negotiations because in February 1972 he and Eva were in Poland and Moscow, dispatched there by Gus Hall on an important mission—laying the groundwork for acquisition of Arabian horses to be
sold by the American Communist Party (or Hall himself). But in Moscow Morris gathered some truly important intelligence showing that the Soviets really had gone 'round the bend. Three disparate and relatively trivial events persuaded them that the United States had set out “to worsen relations” on the eve of disarmament negotiations: (1) A U.S. Coast Guard cutter had hauled in a Soviet fishing vessel flagrantly poaching in American territorial waters; (2) the FBI had caught and arrested KGB officer Valery Markelov as he tried to steal designs for the new Navy F- 14 fighter plane; and (3) the State Department had denied visas to Soviets seeking to attend a convention of the American Communist Party.

Awareness of the Soviet delusions enabled the United States to dispel them by communicating with the Soviets through different channels. Privately and repeatedly, the United States had requested the Soviet Union to keep its trawlers and “factory ships” out of U.S. waters. A Coast Guard officer, acting on his own in compliance with standing orders, simply did his duty in corralling the intruding Soviet trawler. The FBI by law was charged with catching spies, and when it caught a spy, it arrested him without consulting anybody. Markelov was guilty as hell, and if the Soviets had any doubts they could consult the KGB. Nixon was being upbraided by many of his supporters for consorting with Chinese communists who were contributing to the deaths of American soldiers in Vietnam. Why should he invite more outcries by helping the Communist Party stage its convention?

The “TWA-DD,” “tell Walt about dangerous delusions,” again worked.

 

 

THOSE WHO KNEW MORRIS and what he really did knew him to be an extraordinarily brave man, all the more brave because he fully understood the risks he took and the consequences of being found out in the Soviet Union. At the Lenin School in 1930 when his teachers included bomb-throwing, bank-robbing, old-time Bolsheviks, he heard a lecture by a professional Cheka/OGPU torturer. He thought the torturer evil incarnate until
he realized that the man, who spoke calmly and smiled frequently, was an insane pervert, a classic candidate for a mental institution. But the torturer obviously was good at his trade. He explained that the trick in torture is not to kill or render a victim senseless until you have extracted what you want. No one can resist skilled, prolonged torture, and you don't have to have sophisticated equipment—a set of chains, a pair of pliers, and a box of matches would do just fine. “Give me a night with a man and I don't care how brave or strong he is, by morning he won't have any teeth or fingernails and he'll wish he didn't have any scrotum, and I'll have him confessing he's the king of England,” he had said.

Morris also knew that under his friend Yuri Andropov, the KGB had perfected techniques of destroying minds and wracking bodies with deranging drugs. The FBI promised that, were he arrested, it would try to ransom him by releasing jailed Soviet agents. But Morris believed that Soviet rulers would never agree to an exchange that would show how completely they had been duped. Rather, he was certain that should he be caught in the Soviet Union, his death was guaranteed—and it wouldn't be painless. Yet he kept going back.

For all his courage and audacity, he gave to those who did not know him well the impression of being a reticent, even shy man. It derived in part from his habit of listening to others rather than talking himself. When he did talk, he spoke sparsely and rarely delivered speeches, although he was an experienced and able public speaker.

Morris made an exception on an evening in early March 1972 while he, Eva, and other team members were guests of Al and Ann Burlinson at their lovely old house in Scarsdale, New York. Morris was among his best friends, his mood was expansive, and he spoke as a coach might in addressing a team that had just won the championship.

Everyone could be proud of what they together had accomplished over the years and especially proud of their accomplishments regarding China. He said anyone could speculate about “what might have been.” He proposed to talk only about what he was sure “had been.” Recounting his first visit to Peking in 1958,
he reviewed the history of SOLO reports about China and Sino–Soviet relations. From 1958 to now, they gave the United States the benefit of the highest and best Soviet intelligence and estimates pertaining to China while revealing the thoughts and intentions of Soviet rulers toward China. The reporting accurately charted the degeneration of the Sino–Soviet partnership into implacable enmity while tracking the evolution of Chinese attitudes toward the United States. Ultimately and collectively, the SOLO reports showed that, if the United States wanted the Chinese as allies against the Soviet Union in international affairs, it need only ask. And it could be confident of China's answer.

Morris pointed out something else that few others were in a position to appreciate. In personal dealings, the Chinese had for years treated the Soviets rudely or scornfully. As Kosygin complained after another futile negotiating session in Peking, they displayed “none of the characteristic Oriental civility and politeness.” Instead, they barely masked their raw contempt. Even the cultured Chou remained frostily aloof and refrained from any gesture suggesting the least goodwill. But from what Morris had been told, he concluded that the Chinese from Mao and Chou on down received Nixon and Kissinger warmly and graciously, speaking to them as if they were old colleagues. Chou and Nixon were well on their way to becoming personal friends. To Morris, that meant the Chinese were trying to tell the Americans,
We really mean it
.