by Tim Weiner
The FBI had never fully grasped the workings of the spies who had given up their lives and their identities to serve the Soviet state outside the comfortable confines of embassies and consulates. Birch and his fellow agents kept Abel under constant surveillance, four three-man squads working around the clock. He never did anything remotely illegal. The FBI was “trying to find out what kind of apparatus he had going for him in New York,” Birch said. “I don’t think we ever found any … and after awhile, the Bureau finally said, as the Bureau always said, ‘Enough is enough.’ ”
The arrest of Colonel Abel on June 21, 1957, was the spy story of the decade. But it was a source of endless frustration for Hoover. The colonel could not be charged with espionage; the FBI’s evidence was hearsay. The arrest was executed by immigration agents under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, the statute that Justice used when a spy case could not be made in open court.
The Bureau needed to break Abel. Agents “interviewed him like crazy, every day,” for months on end, Birch said. “He was telling them nothing.” The first series of interrogations took place in a makeshift prison for illegal immigrants outside McAllen, Texas, on the Mexican border. Abel was being held in “a wetback camp, in a wire cage, which was hot and uncomfortable,” said the FBI’s Ed Gamber, who questioned Abel eight hours a day for six weeks. “He was a real stand-up guy for the Soviets. He was a gentleman; he was polite; he was a nice guy—except when you asked him about the KGB.”
Teams of FBI agents, one after another, spent more than two years questioning Abel in a cell at the Atlanta federal penitentiary, one of the toughest prisons in the United States. “I’ll talk with you about art, mathematics, photography, anything you want to talk about, but don’t ask me about my intelligence background,” Abel said to the FBI’s Alden F. Miller. “I made the resolution when I was arrested in New York and I have not said anything, and I’m not going to now.” The best the FBI could do was to photograph Abel’s artwork and search it for signs of steganography—a message hidden in an image. They found none.
The FBI’s understanding of the case took years to sink in. The Bureau eventually learned that Abel was not Abel; nor was he a Soviet. His true name was Willie Fisher, and he had been born in 1903 in Newcastle-on-Tyne, England. He was living proof of the fact that the Soviets had a spy network in America served by men who could come from anywhere, under any name, commanded by spymasters in Moscow whose patience was hard for Americans to fathom. Fisher had been living under deep cover in the United States for nine years; his training and his legend traced back to the early 1930s.
One thing he told the FBI stuck in Birch’s memory almost fifty years later: “American intelligence walks in baby shoes,” the spy said.
The Abel case infuriated Eisenhower. At a National Security Council meeting, with the vice president and the attorney general at the table, he spoke in anger and frustration. “If we discovered a Soviet spy, we would have to expose all our intelligence sources and methods in order to obtain a conviction,” the president said. “About all the FBI can do is keep spies under surveillance.” Eisenhower muttered that he would not forget about the Abel case. He never did. And the colonel never talked. Five years later, the United States swapped him for Francis Gary Powers, the imprisoned American pilot of a downed U-2 spy plane.
The case had one consequence of lasting value for the FBI. It helped convince Hoover to go forward with the operation code-named Solo, the Bureau’s boldest plan to penetrate the Soviet Union.
SOLO
The FBI’s most valued secret agents of the Cold War were two brothers, Morris and Jack Childs. The operation the Bureau built on their work posed great risks and the promise of even greater rewards.
Morris Childs was a Russian Jew, born Moishe Chilovsky outside Kiev in 1902. He came to America in 1911 and became an important figure in the Communist Party in the 1930s and 1940s, serving as the editor of its newspaper, the Daily Worker. He had fallen out with the Party in 1948. Three years later, the FBI approached him and his younger brother Jack as part of a new program called TOPLEV, in which FBI agents tried to talk top-level Communist Party members and officials into becoming informants. Jack Childs, a born hustler and a bag man for the Party’s underground financial operations, readily took the offer. He eventually convinced Morris to join him as an undercover Communist for the FBI.
Morris rose higher and higher in the secret hierarchy. He won the trust of the Party’s leaders. In the summer of 1957, they proposed that he serve as their international emissary in an effort to reestablish direct personal, political, and financial ties with the Kremlin. If Moscow approved, the FBI had a chance to place a spy inside the highest councils of the Soviet Union. Morris Childs would be reporting to Hoover as the foreign secretary of the Communist Party of the United States of America.
Hoover’s intelligence chief, Al Belmont, could barely contain his excitement. “We have been trying for some time to produce direct evidence of the fact that the CPUSA follows orders and takes direction from the Communist Party, Soviet Union,” Belmont wrote on August 30, 1957. “If we are able to develop such evidence it would not only strengthen our case against the CPUSA but it would enhance tremendously the Bureau’s prestige as an intelligence agency.”
The FBI’s first debriefings of Morris Childs, running 166 single-spaced pages, were declassified in August 2011. They reveal how powerfully his work affected President Eisenhower and Vice President Nixon. They help explain several mysteries of the Cold War, including Hoover’s ferocious opposition to Martin Luther King, Jr., and the civil rights movement, Eisenhower’s failure to go forward with the CIA’s plans to invade Fidel Castro’s Cuba, and Nixon’s first thoughts about a détente with the Soviets.
On April 24, 1958, Morris Childs boarded TWA Flight 824 to Paris, on the first leg of his long trip to Moscow, at the invitation of the Kremlin, where he met the Party’s leaders over the course of eight weeks. He learned that his next stop would be Beijing. On July 6, he had an audience with Chairman Mao Tse-tung. Was the United States planning to go to war in Southeast Asia? Mao asked. If so, China intended to fight, as it had during the Korean War. “There may be many Koreas in Asia,” Mao predicted.
Returning to Moscow that summer, conferring with leaders of the Party and the KGB, Morris received a formal invitation to attend the 21st Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and he accepted promises of cash payments for the CPUSA that would come to $348,385 over the next few months; the money would be delivered personally to Morris by a Soviet delegate to the United Nations at a restaurant in Queens, New York.
In January and February 1959, at the Party’s Moscow convention, Morris Childs met Communist leaders from around the world and intelligence officers who oversaw espionage against the United States. Though the trips exhausted him, leaving him a physically broken man, he went abroad two or three times a year over the course of the next two decades. He undertook fifty-two international missions, befriending the world’s most powerful Communists. He controlled the income of the American Communist Party’s treasury and contributed the insights for its foreign policy. His work was undetected by the KGB and kept secret from all but the most powerful American leaders.
Solo’s reporting gave Hoover an unquestioned authority in the White House. The United States never had had a spy inside the high councils of the Soviet Union or the People’s Republic of China. Morris Childs would penetrate them at the highest levels and provide the FBI with insights no president had ever possessed.
Hoover briefed the cabinet about the Solo mission on November 6, 1958. For the next two years, he sent summaries of his reporting directly to the president, the vice president, the secretary of state, and the director of Central Intelligence. He took pleasure in concealing the source of his intelligence from Allen Dulles and the CIA: “I flatly refuse to disclose the disclosure of the informant irrespective of any ‘fits’ Allen Dulles or anyone else throws. H.”
Hoover reported that the
world’s most powerful Communists—Mao Tse-tung and Nikita Khrushchev—were at each other’s throats. The breach between Moscow and Beijing was a revelation to President Eisenhower. It had been the consensus of American intelligence that the Communist leaders were of one mind. For years, Eisenhower had been relying on flawed intelligence from the CIA and the Pentagon about the military and political strengths of his enemies. Solo’s reporting provided Ike with insights that no eavesdropping satellite or spy plane ever could deliver, portraying Communist leaders as confused and quarreling.
Hoover said Moscow had decided that “the main task of the Communist Party, USA, is to fight for Negro equality and integration.” The FBI noted that the Kremlin had asked Solo to send a copy of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s first book, the newly published Stride Toward Freedom, written with the help of Stanley Levison, King’s close adviser and a former member of the Communist underground. This evidence of ties between international communism and the American civil rights movement was electrifying to Hoover. The idea that they were connected through covert operations was an elemental part of his thinking and his conduct for the rest of his life.
Hoover told the White House that Solo had met with Anibal Escalante, a political leader of the newly victorious revolution in Cuba, a confidant to Fidel Castro, and the most highly regarded Cuban Communist in Moscow. Escalante said that the Cubans knew the United States was planning a paramilitary attack to overthrow Castro. This reporting gave Eisenhower pause as he weighed the CIA’s proposal to invade the island with a force of anti-Castro Cubans undergoing training in Guatemala. He never approved the plan.
Hoover reported directly to Nixon as the vice president prepared to go to Moscow in July 1959, where he would engage Khrushchev in a public discussion on the political and cultural merits of communism and capitalism. Solo had met with the top Communist Party officials responsible for American affairs. Hoover distilled their thinking about the leaders of the United States and the qualifications of the leading candidates in the 1960 presidential election. Moscow liked Ike: he understood the meaning of war and he was willing to risk the chances of peace. The Democrats were less appealing: Senator John F. Kennedy was judged as “inexperienced” and Senator Lyndon B. Johnson was “a reactionary.” As for Nixon himself, the Communists thought he would be a capable president, though he was “cunning” and “ambitious.”
Nixon learned from the Solo debriefings that Moscow could conduct rational political discourse; a decade later, the lesson served him well as president when he sought a rapport with the Soviets.
Nixon personally introduced Khrushchev to Hoover at a state dinner in the Eisenhower White House on September 15, 1959. The jet-lagged Soviet leader wore a medal in his lapel. Nixon, already preparing to run for president, was formal and unctuous; Hoover was all ears as a translator leaned in to join their conversation with Khrushchev.
“When I introduced him to Hoover, he immediately perked up, and he says, ‘I think we know some of the same people,’ ” Nixon remembered. “I think it was a very astute comment on Khrushchev’s part: ‘We know some of the same people, so don’t trust anybody.’ ”
They did know one man in common. Morris Childs returned to Moscow with Khrushchev the week after the state dinner at the White House.
The counsel of the world’s top Communist—“Don’t trust anybody”—sounded like wisdom to Hoover as he prepared for the end of the Eisenhower years and the election of the next president of the United States.
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IMMORAL CONDUCT
HOOVER CALLED FOR a full check of the FBI’s files on John F. Kennedy as soon as it was clear that the senator would win the Democratic nomination, a victory gained after a freewheeling, free-spending primary campaign run by his brother Robert and financed by his father, Joseph.
Hoover knew Joe Kennedy well: a buccaneering businessman worth hundreds of millions of dollars, a famous philanderer, and a fierce anti-Communist crusader. Their friendship had survived Hoover’s refusal to accept a $100,000-a-year offer to run the Kennedy family’s security interests.
Hoover was getting to know Robert Kennedy; the two men had met at least three times in connection with Kennedy’s work as the chief interrogator for the Senate Rackets Committee from 1957 to 1959. The committee’s hearings on organized crime featured a dramatic confrontation between Kennedy and the boss of the Chicago Mafia, Momo Salvatore “Sam” Giancana. The mobster took the Fifth Amendment, snickering at Kennedy. Bobby shot back: “I thought only little girls giggled, Mr. Giancana.”
Hoover felt a rivalry with the Rackets hearings; he relished moments when Robert Kennedy stumbled due to his inexperience and zeal. In March 1959, the young crusader raised a charge he could not prove: that a key witness had offered money to Senator Kennedy’s presidential campaign if the committee eased up on him. “This is what happens when the prodigal son gets too far away from home and papa,” Hoover wrote in a sneering aside to an internal FBI report on Robert Kennedy and the Rackets Committee.
Hoover had wanted nothing to do with the Mafia, whose existence as a force in American economic and political life was by now an open secret. In 1959, more than four hundred FBI agents based in New York covered the Communist threat; only four covered the mob. Hoover had argued that crimes like racketeering and extortion were matters for state and local law enforcement. He thought that investigating the Mob would create the risk that agents would be bribed and bought off, recalled the FBI’s Graham Desvernine: “The ensuing problems and publicity—that would overcome any of the benefits.” Hoover had shied from infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan for fear his agents would be seen as aiding and abetting cross-burning racists. He balked at undercover work against the Mafia on the chance his men would be corrupted. Different reasons, same rationale: Don’t embarrass the Bureau.
But the work of the Rackets Committee, and the competition he felt from the publicity attending them, compelled Hoover to change his tune. He took the tactics he had used against Communists and started to turn them on mobsters. “The decision was made that we would take the same methods and investigative techniques that we used on the Underground Squad and apply it to organized crime,” Desvernine said. Bag jobs, hidden microphones, bugs, and wiretaps were “very effective in finding out what they were doing and what they were up to.” It couldn’t be used in court, of course—“it was strictly intelligence gathering … you gotta get intelligence first and then you find witnesses.” The FBI tapped and bugged Giancana and his compatriots in Chicago and Las Vegas, starting in the summer of 1959.
Hoover knew Senator John F. Kennedy, too, but he did not know him well at all. He did not like what he read in the FBI’s files. Dated July 7, 1960, a nine-page summary on JFK’s past made Hoover uneasy about America’s political future. It included charges of “immoral conduct”—sex stories, some of them accurate, including an allegation that the senator was sleeping with his wife’s social secretary. Hoover dimly remembered the oldest such case: back in 1942, when JFK was a twenty-four-year-old navy man, he had conducted a notorious affair with a married woman named Inga Arvad, a Washington newspaper columnist and a onetime Nazi sympathizer. The FBI, under the impression that she was also a German spy, had placed her under surveillance, tapped her calls with Kennedy, and bugged the hotel rooms where the two made love.
The FBI’s files on Kennedy also included unspecified and unverified charges of “hoodlum connections.”
On July 13, 1960, the day that JFK won the presidential nomination at the Democratic National Convention, the FBI produced a biographical sketch on the candidate for Hoover. It reported that the senator and Frank Sinatra had socialized in New York, Las Vegas, and Palm Springs during the campaign. The FBI had a long-standing file on Sinatra. The Bureau surmised that the singer was trying to use his influence with the Kennedy clan on behalf of mobsters. Sinatra’s FBI file included his association with Sam Giancana, who was later overheard on an FBI bug boasting that he had influence with the Kennedys. The FBI would so
on learn that Sinatra had introduced JFK and Giancana to a woman of easy virtue named Judith Campbell, who had sexually serviced the senator during the Democratic convention and maintained intimate relations with both men.
“THE PRESIDENT EXPRESSED AMAZEMENT”
President Eisenhower called on Hoover at an urgent meeting of the National Security Council on October 13, 1960. Crushing national security concerns faced the White House that fall. The rise of Soviet-style communism in Fidel Castro’s Cuba was chief among them. But the president spent much of the National Security Council meeting talking about sex.
The political tension was high in Washington. The election was now twenty-five days away, the race was neck-and-neck, and the third of the presidential debates between Nixon and Kennedy was hours away. (They argued on television that night about American intelligence and Soviet spies. “Communist espionage goes on all the time,” Nixon said, in the nervous voice that cost him innumerable votes. “The United States can’t afford to have a es—an es—a espionage lack or should we s—uh—lag—or should I say, uh, an intelligence lag any more than we can afford to have a missile lag.”)
The president, however, spent the better part of an hour at the October 13 meeting telling Hoover to rid America of homosexuals in high places.
Two young math geniuses who worked at the National Security Agency as code breakers had defected to the Soviet Union. Bernon Mitchell, thirty-one, and William Martin, twenty-nine, had been missing from work for eight days before anyone noticed. The universal assumption—unsupported by NSA records declassified five decades later—was that Martin and Mitchell were lovers. They had flown from Washington to Havana via Mexico City, and then on to Moscow. They surfaced at a press conference in Moscow on September 6, informing the world that the NSA had been cracking the diplomatic and intelligence codes of American allies including France, Italy, Indonesia, Egypt, and Syria.
