Operation Solo (35 page)

To Wannall, it was clear Eva spoke for Morris. She starred in a cabaret written, directed, and staged by him, essentially a reprise
of the blackmail he had perpetrated on the Soviets in Moscow. But Wannall was a forthright man, and so he spoke to Morris frankly: yes, the Bureau was considering transferring Boyle to headquarters—what did Morris think? Morris said Boyle was his best friend, and he could not imagine SOLO continuing without him.

Having listened to Wannall's report of his findings and his conversations with Morris and Eva, Kelley asked him if he thought Boyle was innocent. Wannall recited available facts: To the extent investigators could check Boyle's written account, they had corroborated all he said. They had not located any witnesses to the encounter between him and the complaining customs official in Seattle, but no one else interviewed there thought he had been “under the influence”; none of his present or past associates interviewed had ever seen him drink to excess, much less on duty. Boyle had received a disciplinary transfer to Chicago in 1962, evidently for threatening an inspector with physical violence, and not long afterward headquarters had reprimanded him—the reason was unclear. Ever since, his record had been exemplary, as outstanding as it could be. Boyle had for years maintained an intimate professional and personal relationship with the most important asset the FBI had, and the results spoke for themselves.

Do you personally think Boyle can and should remain a linchpin of SOLO?

Unequivocally and emphatically, Wannall said yes. Thereupon, Kelley ordered the allegation against Boyle dismissed and effaced, and decreed that he would remain in Chicago; Wannall was to inform everybody; and if there were any residual problems at headquarters, Kelley himself was to take care of them.

 

 

CONGRESS ENACTED LEGISLATION, effective in 1975, mandating that FBI agents retire by age fifty-five, and as Burlinson was nearing seventy, he had to leave after thirty-five years of service. He and Freyman were the fathers of SOLO, and for other team members his departure was akin to the death of a family patriarch. Headquarters continued to make the policy decisions and support the field offices. But in terms of daily
operational decisions and the nurturing of Morris, Jack, Eva, and Roz, Langtry and Boyle were now the fathers.

In one of the most odious duties of their careers, the “fathers” soon had to put Morris and Jack under surveillance, placing wiretaps on their home telephones and otherwise looking for indicators that they might be double agents actually working for the Soviet Union. Neither had done anything whatsoever to warrant such suspicion. On the contrary, both had for more than two decades loyally, bravely, and brilliantly served the United States. Again and again, the intelligence they produced had proven to be accurate, and numerous evaluators likened it to intellectual gold.

The FBI decision to investigate its two most important assets and reassess its greatest operation resulted primarily from pressures exerted by CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton. A man of formidable intellect, Angleton wielded considerable influence in the American intelligence community and had a personal following in other government agencies, including the FBI. Perhaps as a counterintelligence chief should, he looked skeptically upon defectors and Soviet nationals recruited by the CIA, viewing them as possible double agents sent or made available by the Soviets to purvey deceptive information or infiltrate U.S. operations.

There was a notable exception. Angleton reposed inordinate confidence in KGB Major Anatoly Golitsyn who in 1961 fled from the Soviet embassy in Helsinki where he processed intelligence reports. From these reports, Golitsyn supplied clues that eventually led to the arrest of dangerous Soviet spies in Western Europe, and as long as he presented factual data, he was a very valuable defector.

But there came a time when Golitsyn had no more new facts to give. He replaced them with imaginative theory and conjecture. According to one of his theories, the conflicts between the Soviet Union and China were not real; they were a hoax, a grand disinformation scheme. The trusting Angleton embraced this view until the end of his career. Golitsyn also asserted that the next Soviet defector to arrive in the United States would be a controlled KGB agent dispatched to worm his way into the CIA and to assist other spies on the outside.

The next significant defector to arrive was Yuri Nosenko, who came in 1964. After Angleton and his lieutenants thought they detected serious discrepancies and falsifications in Nosenko's account of himself, the CIA incarcerated and psychologically tortured him in an effort to extract a confession, but he never confessed. The FBI, which possessed information unavailable to the CIA, always considered Nosenko a bona fide defector and ultimately the CIA agreed, as did all other Western security services that interrogated him. Angleton, however, remained unconvinced.

The FBI had recruited a KGB officer, code named “Fedora,” who posed as a Soviet diplomat at the United Nations. Queried by the FBI, Fedora confirmed some of what Nosenko had told the CIA and said he was a genuine defector. In Angleton's eyes, he thereby convicted himself of being a double agent participating in a plot to foist off another double agent on the CIA. Angleton thereupon commenced an unremitting campaign to convince the FBI that Fedora was a Soviet plant.

Fedora informed the FBI that the KGB had a contact in the American Communist Party and that it gave money to the party. A few times he notified the FBI that a colleague was preparing to meet the contact and urged the FBI to follow him and identify the contact. Some of those in the FBI swayed to Angleton's view of Fedora later argued that the fact that he provided information pertaining to SOLO indicated that the operation was “contaminated.”

On the basis of a statement Ponomarev made to Morris, the FBI, without revealing its source, in September 1973 advised the CIA that the Soviet Union appeared prepared to grant diplomatic recognition to Israel. A short time later, on October 6, Egypt attacked Israel. Angleton then accused the FBI of disseminating disinformation spread to cause the Israelis to relax their vigil when war was imminent.

Finally even those in the FBI who rejected all of Angleton's theses as spurious, and they were a majority, acknowledged that SOLO had gone on for an extraordinarily long time and that a reappraisal might be appropriate.

While also trained to be skeptical, Boyle and Langtry leavened their professional skepticism with common sense, logic, and a
regard for demonstrable facts, and both would have bet their lives on the honesty and fidelity of Morris and Jack. Boyle observed to Langtry that, even if Morris were conspiring with the Soviets rather than against them, this veteran conspirator would say or do nothing in the United States to implicate himself because he could talk to the Soviets securely in Moscow almost any time he wished. Hence, telephone taps would be futile. Langtry in turn pointed out that, if Jack were colluding with the Soviets, he gladly would accept their invitations to come to Moscow instead of dodging them, as he had done since 1967. Nevertheless, Boyle and Langtry could not argue professionally against an investigation of Morris and Jack. Espionage can be ugly, and they now embarked upon the new and ugly duty of helping to spy on their friends.

They could, however, argue for adoption of special procedures. Neither Boyle nor Langtry had any income outside their FBI salaries, and Boyle was raising six children. Over the years, both spent their own money on SOLO, in some months quite a bit relative to their incomes. Boyle was authorized to go anywhere at any time at government expense without having to explain why he went; and every conversation with Langtry in a way constituted “official business.” Yet when he flew to New York to talk privately with Langtry about “what to do right” within the FBI, he paid for his ticket out of his own pocket.

After talking privately in New York on a Sunday, the two began making some demands of headquarters. The transcripts of conversations recorded by taps on the telephones of Morris and Jack should be read and evaluated by experienced field agents who had nothing to do with SOLO. Such evaluators could not be accused of bias. More important, those involved in SOLO should not see the transcripts because in talking to Morris and Jack they might inadvertently reveal knowledge that could only have come from private telephone conversations. The tapes and transcripts should be destroyed immediately after analysis, and no records of them should be kept anywhere.
Do you have legal authorization for these wiretaps? Would you like someday to discuss them with a congressional committee?

Headquarters agreed, and the investigation began. Boyle and
Langtry dutifully watched for the least duplicity by Morris and Jack, as they always had—that was their job. Selected analysts in Washington reviewed SOLO files for reports that might have been inaccurate or misleading. The files dated back to 1951. Except for the first weeks when Jack was parrying with the FBI, they found no inaccurate reports. The analysts dismissed as absurd the CIA complaint that the FBI purveyed disinformation by reporting that the Soviets appeared ready to recognize Israel. The fact that war broke out in the Middle East shortly after Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, among others, told Morris this did not prove that what the Soviets said and Morris reported was untrue. It was preposterous to dream that Israel, then surrounded by fiercely hostile neighbors, would drop its vigil on the basis of a single report from an unknown, third-hand source about what the Soviets might do.

The transcripts of the telephone conversations of Morris, Jack, Eva, and Roz revealed not one incriminating word, not one incongruity or contradiction, not one suspicious item. The only thing the FBI learned was that Morris and Eva played a game with each other, much like children played the game “Monopoly.” They took equal amounts of money and through separate brokers vied to see who could do better on the stock market. Eva played the game with girlish enthusiasm: “Now, don't you tell Morris I bought this.”

In sum, all the taped conversations, surveillance, investigations, and analyses showed that 58 and 69 were just what Boyle and Langtry knew them to be. After about six months, someone at headquarters, probably Ray Wannall, in effect said: Enough. Stop it. Let's get back to fighting our enemies instead of our friends.

No one now challenged the loyalty of Morris and Jack, but doubters advanced a new thesis: SOLO had lasted so long that the Soviets must be aware of it. They were using the operation as a convenient means of smuggling money and using Morris and Jack as unwitting conveyers of disinformation.

Boyle and Langtry asked some questions. Did the Soviets want the FBI to know how much money they gave the American party, down to the penny? Did they want to empower the FBI at any
time to create an anti-Soviet scandal and furor by proving that the American party was bought and paid for by them, and thereby effectively destroying the party? Would Brezhnev, Suslov, Ponomarev, Mostovets, and the Soviet leadership take time personally and repeatedly to consort with an American spy? Had they made the communist rulers of Eastern Europe collaborators in their scheme, or did they let them talk freely to Morris without revealing that he was a spy? What about Gus Hall? Had they informed him that his chief lieutenant worked for the FBI? And what about the KGB? Would it share with the FBI through Jack its most sophisticated equipment and communication procedures? And where is all this disinformation—just one example?

Well, the skeptics replied, if the Soviets had not yet realized that the FBI controlled the operation, they were bound to find out soon because the longevity and success of SOLO defied all odds.

When the FBI advised Kissinger of these fears—that SOLO might be or become a vehicle of Soviet disinformation—and that it was thinking of discontinuing the operation, he said nonsense (lore has it that he used another word). As Jim Fox said in his eulogy of Morris, Kissinger declared that no one was better positioned than he to evaluate SOLO intelligence and he would decide whether it was true or false. But he had to have the information SOLO produced. While he respected the judgment of the FBI, SOLO must go on and it would go on. Though Kissinger made no threats, the FBI comprehended that if it did not comply with his dictate, it doubtless would receive a comparable, and possibly less genial, one from the president.

 

 

THE THREATS TO SOLO from within the FBI abated, but the threats from without escalated as congressional committees expanded their investigations. Each morning Morris opened the newspaper, fearful of what he might read, and Boyle again warned Washington that he needed reassurance.

Accordingly, the FBI scheduled another conference in New York on October 10, 1975, four days before Morris was to depart for Moscow. Present were Deputy Assistant Director Thomas W.
Leavitt, Section Chief Brannigan, the new New York SAC James O. Ingram, Supervisors Raymond Ruckel and David E. Houser, and Special Agents Thomas J. Devine, Boyle, and Langtry.

Referring to the congressional investigations, Leavitt said, “The times in Washington are not the happiest at the moment but things aren't dull.”

Morris, who never learned that he and Jack had been investigated by the FBI, jumped to defend the FBI. “Regarding these illegalities they charge the Bureau with, I would say most things were done by the book. That was a sustaining factor for me. I started a fight against communism because of their extralegal methods, the unbelievable terrors. Maybe there were some capers like COINTELPRO [a counterintelligence program aimed at what the FBI considered to be subversive or terrorist groups; the Bureau has been accused of acting unlawfully in some of its investigations of these groups]. But I am talking about the organization as a whole retaining a legal outlook.”

Reiterating his daily fear of being exposed by some leak, Morris said, “It takes a pretty tough heart to work nowadays, especially inside the enemy camp, wondering whether you can go on when you see some of these stupidities. You ask, what are you working for?…