Operation Solo (45 page)

Morris Childs never saw the British report that so shocked both
William Casey and the president. It would not have shocked him; he, like they, would have been very alarmed, but not surprised. “TWA-DD”—tell Walt about dangerous delusions.

According to the report, Vladimir Kryuchkov, the head of the First Chief Directorate, the man in charge of all foreign KGB operations, made the following statements at a conference of the KGB leadership in January 1984. (Morris warned that Soviet rulers had made themselves prisoners of their own “cant and propaganda,” and, with the exception of a few technical references, what Kryuchkov said could have come from a Bolshevik manual Morris studied at the Lenin School in 1930.)

The Center in February 1984 cabled to the
Rezidencies
a directive that evoked wide-eyed disbelief. Declaring that nuclear war might erupt at any moment, it ordered officers to recruit spies in banks, insurance agencies, hospitals, church organizations, and slaughter houses:

Post offices were sure to know when the attack was coming because “these institutions are used to make a preliminary check on addresses of mobilization contingents and for measures to ensure stable functioning of national communications.” As “mass slaughter of cattle” would precede the attack, butcher shops and slaughter houses needed to be watched. The Center was sure that Western governments would tip off “leaders of national and international religious organizations, the Vatican, and institutions abroad” about their war plans.

The directives conjured up this surrealistic scenario:
The whole Western world, plus China and Japan, was plotting a surprise nuclear attack. Everyone had been so secretive that the Soviets could not find any clue about the impending attack. However, on the eve of the attack, government, military, or security emissaries throughout the West would drop by the bank or the post office, or call their insurance agent, and say, in effect, “We're going to attack the Soviet Union next week. Make sure the mail gets through; get my credit card statement out on time; keep my policy in order.” To meat packing companies or their local butcher: “We're going to attack the Soviet Union next week, so we'll need some extra meat.” And of course the French, British, or American ambassador in Rome would request an audience with the pope: “Your Holiness, I just stopped by to let you know that next week we're going to blow up the Soviet Union. We thought you might want to say a prayer for all those commie bastards we're going to kill.”

Some honest KGB officers in the field protested to their superiors that Operation RYAN had become insane. But the operation had gained such powerful patronage and momentum in Moscow that no one in authority dared try to stop it. On the contrary, some KGB bosses or
Rezidents
in the field cynically inflamed Kremlin paranoia by forwarding ridiculously meaningless reports.

Having been rebuked for making insufficient contributions to RYAN, London
Rezident
A.V. Guk on March 9, 1984, a Soviet holiday, summoned a subordinate to the nearly empty Soviet embassy. According to a radio report, British and American troops that day were conducting a joint exercise at Greenham Common where cruise missiles were based. The fact that the British press and radio publicized the exercise made clear that it was routine, that there was nothing secret about it. Nevertheless, at Guk's orders, the junior officer flashed to the Center a message assigned the highest priority and labeled “of strategic importance.” It said: “In connection with our task to watch for signs of enemy preparations for sudden nuclear missile attack against the Soviet Union, we report that on 9 March the U.S. and British armed forces conducted the first field exercises with cruise missiles based on Greenham Common.”

For reporting what the British press and radio had reported, the London
Rezidency
received a commendation, and a few days later it won another. The Center had explained that nuclear explosions burn people and that treatment of burns requires blood plasma; therefore any attempt to increase supplies of blood plasma was a prime signal that the West was about to pounce. Great Britain annually asks public-spirited citizens to donate blood. In several reports the
Rezidency
represented this yearly well-publicized appeal as a sinister phenomenon related to RYAN and for that received praise.

Not being fools, other
Rezidents
, like Guk, sensed the message:
Show us what we want to see and you prosper; show us nothing and you will suffer
. Hence, the KGB locked itself and its masters into an accelerating cycle of fear and increasingly strident alarms.

In April, then again in May 1984, the Center warned that war was about to erupt at any minute. On July 4, 1984, it ordered
Rezidencies
to report every two weeks on RYAN
even if they had nothing to report
, and its levies grew even more unrealistic. For example, officers in the field were to report at once any infiltration into the Soviet Union of “sabotage teams equipped with nuclear, bacteriological, and chemical weapons.” It was as if the Center expected Western governments to invite KGB officers out to a
military airfield or submarine base to wave farewell to the departing saboteurs, who presumably had shown them the nuclear weapons they had in their hip pockets.

It got worse. The Soviets estimated that no more than ten days would elapse between the time the West finally decided to attack and the attack began. They concluded that, even if they learned of the decision to attack the moment it was made, ten days would not be enough for them to organize and launch a first strike of their own. Therefore, on a wall at KGB headquarters, they put up a kind of doomsday graph. A number of red bars on the graph represented separate “indicators” that the West was about to strike. If reports caused enough bars to rise to a specified level on the graph, the Soviets automatically would launch missiles in a massive preemptive strike against North America, Western Europe, China, and Japan.

Former National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane recalls that Americans returning from Moscow reported that Soviets told them they knew they were about to be attacked. He says, “The idea was so preposterous that we couldn't make any sense out of those reports and we dismissed them.”

Having escaped to London in 1985, Gordievsky detailed the full history of RYAN. He said that, after Mikhail Gorbachev assumed power in March 1985, L.P. Zamoyski, deputy director of the KGB's Analytical Directorate, declared that RYAN was “absolutely useless”; the KGB admitted it had failed to gain insights into “the real thinking of NATO and the U.S.” But as far as he knew, the operation continued and the doomsday graph with those awful red bars still was on the wall.

In October 1985, Ronald Reagan arrived in Geneva early and before meeting Gorbachev walked around the estate where they were to talk. He looked inside a charming chalet on the grounds and told the Secret Service men guarding him that by 10 A.M. the next morning he wanted a fire blazing in the fireplace.

Upon being introduced the following day, Reagan told Gorbachev that prior to their formal discussions he wished to speak to him alone, man to man. He invited Gorbachev to bring his own interpreter and take a walk with him. Alone with Gorbachev and
the interpreter before the fire in the chalet, Reagan declared that the United States had no intention of attacking the Soviet Union and that it was dangerous to everyone for the Soviets to think otherwise. He insisted that Gorbachev come to the United States and see for himself that there were no preparations for an attack.

In large part, thanks to a British spy and loyal allies, Operation RYAN, which ultimately menaced all mankind, was finally put to an end.

Had Operation SOLO still been alive, RYAN never would have been born.

EPILOGUE

JACK CHILDS ENTERED A New York hospital August 11, 1980, and died the next day at age seventy-three. The Soviet Union in 1975 awarded him the Order of the Red Banner (awarded only to those who distinguish themselves in battle); the United States in 1987 posthumously awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom for Intelligence. Had it not been for Jack Childs, Operation SOLO would never have occurred.

Alexander Burlinson, who worked with Jack for twenty-four years, lived the life of a country squire after his retirement in 1975. He continued to smoke cigarettes, drink whisky in milk, rub his ulcer, play the piano, and compose poetry almost until his death July 4, 1990. He was eighty-five.

Carl Freyman, who recruited and developed Morris Childs into Agent 58, still lives with his wife of more than half a century in the same pleasant house outside Chicago where many SOLO sorties were planned and analyzed. He retains his mental acuity and good spirits, and for a man in his eighties enjoys good health. Those privileged to study the secret history of SOLO regard Freyman, along with Burlinson, as a legendary figure of the FBI.

John Langtry lives in New York, where his son is an outstanding young FBI agent. Although physicians have forbidden him to “lift weights” (“Scotch on the rocks”), he stills meets his many friends in neighborhood taverns and attends monthly luncheons where active and retired agents gather to renew friendships and to talk about what the FBI has done right and wrong, and what it
ought to do. As throughout his FBI career, Langtry always is one of the most popular men present.

James Fox, as assistant FBI director in charge of the New York field office, also became popular among union, business, religious, and political leaders, and most of all among the FBI personnel he led. Fox often appeared on national television to answer questions after agents under his direction arrested terrorists ultimately convicted of bombing the World Trade Center in New York in 1993. He planned to retire January 3, 1994, and on December 4, 1993, a New York television station interviewed him about his FBI career. Toward the end, the interviewer asked about the public statements of an FBI informant who claimed he had given the FBI advance warning of the bombing. Fox said, “Salem did not warn us. Nobody warned us. If we had been warned, we would have prevented the bombing.” (Testifying under oath, the informant later admitted that he had never given the FBI any forewarning, just as Fox said.)

FBI Director Louis Freeh on December 10 telephoned to inform Fox that in consequence of these three sentences he was placed on administrative leave as of 5 P.M. that day until his official retirement. In other words, he was to clear his desk, get out, and never come back.

Freeh had ordered that no one comment on the case of the bombing of the World Trade Center pending the trial. Fox agrees that by impulsively telling the truth, he violated an order. Few others, in or out of the FBI, think that by telling the truth in nineteen words Fox harmed the FBI. Nevertheless, two weeks before Christmas his long and luminous FBI career ended suddenly and sadly.

Before his suspension, between 250 and 300 people had registered to attend a retirement dinner in honor of Fox. Now he expected only about half that many, and he understood that friends still in the FBI might consider it imprudent to come. When Fox entered the banquet hall at the New York Hilton Hotel, more than a thousand men and women stood to applaud. Among them were clergymen, union leaders, financiers, corporate executives, politicians, and hundreds of men from the FBI, including a defiant delegation from headquarters. The Democratic governor of New
York, Mario Cuomo, and the Republican mayor of New York City, Rudolph Giuliani, led the tributes to the son of a Chicago bus driver, to Eva's “favorite Baptist Indian.” Fox silently prayed,
Please let mother and father see what they have done.

Today Fox is executive vice president of the Mutual of America Life Insurance Company, a columnist for
Forbes
magazine, a consultant to the Columbia Broadcasting System, and a member of the board of directors of several major corporations.

Walter Boyle officially retired in January 1980 after twenty-six years in the FBI. In declining a promotion and transfer to headquarters, he had said, “There is no way I ever will walk away from 58.” So the day after his retirement, Boyle returned as a “consultant” working out of the cover office in Chicago, doing what he had been doing since 1962. He stayed eighteen more months until Morris and Eva were safely hidden and until SOLO ended or at least until it seemed to have ended.

Today Boyle is a security director for a large conglomerate that fights gangsters instead of communists (to him they are not all that different). He lives in an attractive home with a lovely wife and at sixty-six remains in superb physical condition, weighing about the same as when he joined the Marine Corps forty-five years ago. He dotes on his children and grandchildren, whose happy lives have been made possible by him and Catholic Charities of Chicago, to which Morris and Eva donated the $10,000 bonus from the FBI. He is also close to his brothers and older sister, who has been a nun for more than fifty years. John Langtry and he talk often. As Eva said, “We always had a lot to talk about.”