Operation Solo (4 page)

Josef Chilovsky reacted to the pogroms and other oppressions by engaging in sedition against the Russian czar, and one night Morris watched police drag his father off to prison and subsequent exile in Siberia. At age twenty-eight, Josef fled across Russia to the Black Sea and slipped aboard a freighter that, on March 15, 1910, landed him at Galveston, Texas. Josef made his way to New Orleans, then up the Mississippi River, and finally to Chicago, where he melded into the large community of east European emigrés.

Josef was an expert cobbler able to fashion leather into fine boots, and in less than two years he saved enough money to send for his wife and sons. They arrived on Ellis Island in New York December 11, 1911, and embarked by train for Chicago. Their coach was unheated, its wooden seats hard, and on the third day of the journey the mother told the boys they had no more money for food. A woman seated across the aisle overheard and said to them in Russian, “I have much food.” From a basket, she gave them bread and sausages, and during the remainder of the trip other passengers shared food with them.

Parents and teachers at a demanding Jewish school constantly impressed upon Morris the importance of work and “self-elevation.” Though at age fourteen he went to work as an apprentice in his father's small shop and as a messenger in the Chicago financial district, he continued to study. He read Russian classics, philosophy, and American history; took courses at the Chicago Institute of Art; and on Sundays attended free lectures delivered at the Hull House by notable speakers such as Clarence Darrow. He also explored the architecture and landmarks of Chicago, including the stockyards that promptly turned him to vegetarianism.

At the art institute, Morris fell under the influence of radical students who, despite their incoherence, disposed him toward
radicalism. He and his father avidly followed reports of the Russian Revolution, and the more he learned of communism, the more its promises to humanity enthralled him. To obtain a job driving a horse-drawn milk wagon, he joined a union peopled with a few young communists and began to agitate with them. When various factions coalesced to form the United Communist Party of America, he formally joined at age nineteen and was considered a charter member.

Whatever the party asked, Morris did. He proselytized so energetically among union members and customers that they called him “the Red Milkman.” Twice police arrested him during street demonstrations, and once they pummeled him with banana stalks. Now and then he questioned party tactics. Roused in the dead of night to stuff leaflets into residential mailboxes, he asked, “Why do we have to distribute these damn things at 2 A.M.? People might take us for burglars and shoot us.”

He was told, “Because, this is the way the Bolsheviks did it.” At the time, such an answer sufficed to silence any doubter.

The milk company paid deliverymen according to the number of customers served, and by adding new clients to his route, Morris earned relatively high pay. The births of two more brothers, Benjamin and Phillip, overcrowded the family house, and now that he could afford to do so he moved into a nearby apartment of his own. It became a kind of party social center and hostel for itinerant comrades who soon learned that he usually was good for a loan of a few dollars and he did not dun for repayment. Sharing was the essence of the communism he then understood.

Morris in the mid-1920s caught the attention of an important party functionary, Earl Russell Browder, who probably affected Morris' life more than any other man except Carl Freyman. A radical from Kansas who wore his prison term as a badge of honor, Browder served as the primary American agent of the Communist International (Comintern) established by the Soviets to control foreign communist parties. His wife, a Russian, still lived in Moscow; in the factional fights rending international communism, he ardently supported Josef Stalin; and the Soviets trusted him totally. Perhaps seeing in Morris something of his younger self, Browder favored him with enduring patronage and friendship.

The Comintern dispatched Browder to China on what amounted to espionage assignments. Other American party members who were sent had failed to return, and so before leaving Browder entrusted prized books and memorabilia to Morris. “If I don't come back, they're yours.” On his return, Browder's accounts of adventures in China fascinated and excited Morris. He told of visiting a park in the former British extraterritorial zone near Shanghai and seeing signs that said “No Dogs Or Chinese.” Browder told Morris that the Chinese liked Americans in part because the United States never exercised treaty rights to extraterritorial privileges and also because of the good works of missionaries.

Under the sway of Browder, Morris aligned himself with the Stalinists and against American party leader Jay Lovestone, who had made the mistake of propounding a thesis some dubbed “American Exceptionalism.” It argued that because capitalism was flourishing in America, capitalism's demise would occur later than in European nations and consequently party tactics in the United States and Europe might have to differ. Lovestone compounded his mistake by traveling to Moscow to gain formal Soviet approval of his thesis, which Stalin regarded as rankest heresy.

Browder told Morris that Stalin ordered Lovestone detained in Moscow, but Trotskyites alerted him and with the connivance of foreign diplomats Lovestone escaped and was en route to the United States. At Browder's instructions, Morris led a group of Stalinists who physically seized national party headquarters in Chicago and stood guard to prevent Lovestone and his followers from reoccupying the building. After the party moved its headquarters to New York, the Comintern expelled Lovestone from the party and anointed Browder as the new leader of American communism.

Meanwhile, Morris helped unmask an industrial spy in Chicago, a private detective infiltrated into the party by a utility company, which blamed communists for strikes bedeviling it. Some comrade beat up the detective, who turned to police friends for revenge and apparently named Morris as one of those responsible for his undoing. Warned that the police were hunting Morris, the party hid him in a safe house and arranged to spirit him away to Moscow. At age twenty-six, Morris took all this melodrama
seriously when, viewed only in the light of circumstances in Chicago, it was silly. Morris had committed no crime, and the police, upon questioning the oaf who hit the detective, released him. Real gangsters interested them more. Years later, Browder explained the theatrics. He deliberately exaggerated the gravity of the incident and the danger to Morris so the Soviets would grant his protégé sanctuary at the Lenin School, which trained future leaders of worldwide revolution.

The party equipped Morris with a false passport and identity papers, a ticket aboard the
Ile de France
, two hundred U.S. dollars, some French francs, and a new overcoat. Sewn on the lining was a small red patch that would tell any Comintern representative that he was bound for the Lenin School. He crossed Europe by train and reached Moscow in January 1929. A carriage mounted on a sled took him through caverns of snow to the school housed in the former palace of a Russian nobleman.

There he joined men drawn from all continents and from similar backgrounds. All were under thirty-five, came from the working class, had been a charter member of their national party or worked in it for five years without making a recorded mistake, and enjoyed the personal endorsement of their national party leader. The most illustrious communist theoreticians and politicians came from the Soviet Union and abroad to lecture or tutor them. In fact, in those days if you had not been invited to speak at the school, you probably had yet to make a mark in international communism. The standard course lasted two years, with summers given over to “practical studies” in factories or the countryside. Exceptional students were invited to remain a third year for specialized study under the direction of individual tutors.

Morris surrendered his passport, which indicated he had been born in Detroit, to the school administrator and in return received a card identifying him as Harry Summers, an auto worker from Detroit. Evidently not realizing that the passport was bogus, the school recorded his place of birth as U.S.A. After passing a physical examination, he underwent extensive oral and written examinations that enabled the Soviets to assess him politically and personally as well as gauge his general knowledge. Shortly
thereafter, the administrator informed Morris that he would bypass the first year of the course and advance directly to the second, then spend another year in tutorials.

In addition to theoretical and political subjects, he studied the violent and clandestine techniques of making a revolution: rural and urban guerrilla warfare; sabotage; robbery; use of firearms; secret communications; and underground operations including maintenance of safe houses, courier and escape routes, and caches of money and explosives. He learned how to drive a train and blow up a train, how to ride a horse and wield a sword, and how to frustrate police by sticking hairpins into their horses. Sometimes he inwardly laughed at visions of himself, all five feet three inches of him, confronting mounted Irish cops back in Chicago with a sword and hairpins.

Except for the Chinese, who were consigned to segregated sleeping quarters, the students lived together in dormitories and dined at a cafeteria inside the palace where classes were conducted and there was little need to go outside into the cold. When they did venture out on the streets in springtime, Morris saw swarms of gaunt men with outstretched hands begging for bread or a few kopecks. Upon learning that they were former czarist officers or Orthodox priests who were prohibited from working, denied ration cards, and forbidden to enroll their children in school, he thought,
My God! What kind of society are we building?
An indefinable instinct caused him on the spot to make a decision which decades later would greatly benefit him and the United States.

He found that he still could understand Russian, which his family had spoken before emigrating, and his comprehension was rapidly increasing. He was able to keep this a secret because he did not have to use it at school; lectures simultaneously were translated into multiple languages and transmitted to students through earphones, so no one knew. Now he resolved never to let the Soviets know that he understood their language very well, just as he had decided not to let anyone know that he had studied art and music, lest he be considered an intellectual.

While a blizzard raged through Moscow in early 1930, an instructor at the end of the day's classes told Morris that there was
a message for him in the administration office. The regular staff had left, and a lone, middle-aged man greeted him in passable English. The stranger, who smoked and coughed incessantly, began to chat amiably without troubling to introduce himself. He was happy to report that Morris' parents and three brothers, to whom he referred by first name, were all well. He also was happy to hear that the faculty rated Morris one of the most able and popular students. That did not surprise him, considering Morris' party record in Chicago. He especially was impressed by Morris' feat in ferreting out a capitalist spy. And he wondered: Had Morris ever considered that the imperialists might try to insinuate spies and “wreckers” into the Soviet Union in the guise of students? Had he considered that in the Lenin School itself there might be disguised Trotskyites or other “deviationists” who could infect students?

Morris acknowledged all possibilities.

Well, then, would Morris welcome an opportunity to help detect such subversives?

Momentarily, the question puzzled Morris because it connoted a request rather than an order. If the party wanted him to do something, it had only to tell him what to do. The maxim most drilled into him in Chicago and Moscow was obedience. The doctrine of “Democratic Centralism” in theory allowed free debate within party councils. But once the debate ended in the promulgation of a particular policy or order, the doctrine demanded absolute, unquestioning obedience from all. An instructor put it thus: “If the party says you're going to China, you'll be on the next train or boat to China. If the party tells you to climb a flagpole at midnight and hoist a banner saying ‘Power to the Peasants,' you'll scrape your balls climbing that flagpole at midnight. If the party tells you to quit and go underground, at that instant you're underground.”

Then Morris realized that it was not the party but the OGPU, the secret political police, that was importuning him to become an informant. The OGPU might be able to bribe, blackmail, or otherwise coerce almost any Soviet citizen into doing almost anything. As an American whose goodwill the Soviets coveted, Morris needed to be courted. The distinction did not matter to him. He
was honored to serve communism by any means desired. Soon he was appointed a class secretary, a position that required visits to the administrative office where people could talk securely.

The OGPU encouraged him to make friends, and he made many. For administrative purposes, students were grouped into sections. Morris' included future party leaders from around the globe: two Chinese destined for senior positions in their party; two Mexicans; a Hindu; and an Australian. He got along well with them all, particularly the Chinese with whom he sympathized because they generally were shunned outside class. His best friend was a wiry little man who had immigrated from the Soviet Union to Canada and had anglicized his name to Sam Carr. A gifted orator and leader, Carr spoke six languages and could mesmerize equally well in English or Russian. Morris suspected that he also collaborated with the OGPU; regardless, they formed a significant friendship that lasted until Carr's death decades later.

During his second year, Morris also formed personal relationships with instructors who tutored him in more advanced subjects: manipulating unions and popular movements by creating secret communist cells or “nuclei” within them, establishing front organizations, exploiting temporary alliances of expediency with noncommunists, and inciting violence to provoke official repression. Kuusinen and Suslov were his closest mentors. Comintern member Kuusinen was a main architect of Soviet subversive methodology. His protégé, Andropov, ascended to the Central Committee of the party, ran the KGB for fifteen years, and ultimately ruled the whole Soviet Union. Suslov emerged as the premier party ideologue and long headed the Ideology Department. Suslov felt a special tie to his pupil. After arcane intrigues cast Suslov into disfavor and Stalin took away his ration card, Morris daily smuggled food to him from the school cafeteria. Suslov was a pariah for only a few weeks and doubtless could have survived with sustenance from others. Nevertheless, for the rest of his life, Suslov remained a benefactor of Morris.