The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and a Forbidden Book

by Peter Finn

  The consul-general sent a dispatch to the State Department about Katkov’s visit: Pasternak “fears serious personal difficulties, however, if a Russian edition is first published in the United States or by some organization abroad which is generally known to have American backing, either official, commercial or private.”

  Katkov said there were no “anti-American implications” to Pasternak’s request, only “considerations of personal safety.” For the same reason, Katkov said, he would advise against a Russian-language publication in France or England. Katkov suggested Sweden as a neutral publishing venue. Alternatively, he noted that the academic branch of Mouton & Co., a distinguished publishing and printing house in the Netherlands, was already negotiating for the rights to a Russian edition; Pasternak had asked one of his French translators to manage a Russian-language edition and they had a meeting with the Dutch firm in December 1957. And Pasternak was enthusiastic about the possibility. “Don’t let the opportunity pass, take it with both hands,” he wrote the following month to Jacqueline de Proyart. Pasternak knew that Mouton was a house that specialized in Russian texts but was not connected to any émigré groups.

  The consul also reported to Washington that after a preliminary check in Munich there was no indication of any plans by Russian émigrés, or similar groups, to bring out a Russian edition of Doctor Zhivago.

  In Washington, the dispatch was forwarded to the CIA.

  Inside the CIA, covert activities such as the radio stations in Munich and the book programs were normally managed by the International Organizations Division headed by Cord Meyer. But the Soviet Russia Division was also involved in getting books into the hands of Russians under a program code-named AEDINOSAUR, whose activities included the purchase of books to be given to tourists visiting the Soviet Union so that they could casually distribute a handful of copies. (The letters AE designated a Soviet Russia Division operation, and DINOSAUR was a randomly generated cryptonym.) After internal discussions, it was decided that the Soviet Russia Division would manage Doctor Zhivago under AEDINOSAUR.

  The CIA had now received two warnings, from British intelligence and indirectly from Katkov, not to publish the novel in the United States or reveal any American involvement. That ruled out using émigré front organizations in Europe, as they were widely regarded as creatures of American foreign policy even if the CIA’s specific role was hidden. The agency decided to use a New York publisher to prepare a Russian-language edition in the United States but take the proofs to Europe for printing so no American paper stock, which would be quickly identified as such in Moscow, would be used. If the European printer obtained the rights from Feltrinelli, all the better. If not, the CIA decided, “we’ll do it black.”

  The CIA selected the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair as its target for distributing Doctor Zhivago. The 1958 Brussels Universal and International Exposition, the first postwar World’s Fair, was already shaping up as a Cold War political battleground. The fair opened on April 17 and would run until October 19, 1958; in all, about 18 million visitors came through the turnstiles. Forty-two nations and—for the first time—the Vatican were participating at the five-hundred-acre site just northwest of central Brussels. Both the United States and the Soviet Union built huge pavilions to showcase their competing ways of life. And what was especially interesting to the CIA: the fair offered one of those rare occasions when large numbers of Soviet citizens traveled to an event in the West. Belgium issued sixteen thousand visas to Soviet visitors.

  “This book has great propaganda value,” a memo to all branch chiefs of the CIA Soviet Russia Division stated, “not only for its intrinsic message and thought-provoking nature, but also for the circumstances of its publication: we have the opportunity to make Soviet citizens wonder what is wrong with their government, when a fine literary work by the man acknowledged to be the greatest living Russian writer is not even available in his own country in his own language for his own people to read.”

  To get Doctor Zhivago into the hands of Soviet tourists in Brussels, the agency would have to move quickly. And in its haste, the operation almost collapsed in farce. The CIA’s publishing partner in New York—a civilian cleared by the agency’s Office of Security for participation in a covert operation—nearly proved to be their undoing.

  By 1958, Felix Morrow had made a very New York journey from Communist to Trotskyite to willing Cold Warrior for the CIA. The transformation of the fifty-two-year-old was representative of a larger intellectual migration from left to right among the city’s radicals. Their disillusionment with the Soviet Union was first crystallized by the show trials of the old Bolsheviks. Stalin’s treachery was confirmed by the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact. With the rise of the Cold War, they drifted, almost ineluctably, into the embrace of the new national security state, which found its ablest agitators among the disillusioned left. One loyal Trotskyite said the “loss of faith” among Morrow and others was caused by “Stalinophobia—abhorrence at Stalinism to the point of seeing it as the principal evil force in the world.” Within New York’s intellectual life “organized anti-Communism had become … an industry,” and the CIA was its lavish paymaster. One of the agency’s largest front organizations, the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, which supported the Paris-based Congress for Cultural Freedom, was stocked with every shade of ex-Communist. Many years earlier, the American Committee’s first chairman, Sidney Hook, had been Morrow’s philosophy teacher at New York University; they became lifelong acquaintances. Hook, a former revolutionary Marxist, was a “contract consultant” for the CIA and negotiated directly with CIA director Allen Dulles for committee funding.

  When Morrow was facing expulsion from the Trotskyite Socialist Workers Party in 1946, he experienced a moment of disbelief at his imminent apostasy. “You can’t expel me; I’ll live and die in the movement!” he shouted to the party delegates. Ten minutes later, the ousted Morrow found himself “tripping down the stairs of the convention hall with the greatest sense of glee and freedom.”

  Morrow was a charming, brilliant man, a former opera singer, and a natural storyteller. He had first worked as reporter for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle when he was sixteen and covered the Depression for the Daily Worker. His dispatches were translated into Russian and published in Moscow in 1933 as Life in the United States in This Depression.

  After his break with the Trotskyite movement, Morrow entered publishing. With the help of Elliot Cohen, the editor of Commentary, who would later sit on the board of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, Morrow got a job at Schocken Books, a well-regarded New York publisher. At Schocken, Morrow quickly rose to the position of vice president. In 1956, he branched out on his own, founding University Books, which specialized in the occult. Morrow was drawn to the subject when he was involved in the publication of the best seller Flying Saucers Have Landed in 1953.

  Morrow formed contacts with those fighting the Cold War and occasionally lunched with CIA officers he had met through a friend who worked as a CIA consultant. A senior official in the agency’s security division periodically visited Morrow at his house in Great Neck, Long Island, just outside the city, always arriving with a bottle of whiskey and a box of chocolates.

  In early June 1958, Morrow was asked by a CIA officer if he was interested in preparing Doctor Zhivago for publication. The agency told Morrow that it planned to distribute the books in Brussels and asked him to also “make arrangements with anti-Stalinist trade unionists in Amsterdam and Brussels to distribute copies of the book at nominal cost to sailors” on ships bound for the Soviet Union. Morrow thought it “an astonishing and attractive task.” And he believed he could get the printing done in Amsterdam, where, he said, the police chief, an ex-Trotskyite, was an old friend of his.

  Morrow described himself as an “entrepreneur,” and he bargained hard with the CIA for the maximum amount of money, including bonuses. The agency found Morrow’s prices high but “probably warranted in view of the time factor.” On June
23, 1958, Morrow signed a contract with a private lawyer acting for the CIA. Morrow was provided with a manuscript copy of Doctor Zhivago and was told that he would soon be provided with a publisher’s note or preface to be included after the title page. The agency wanted a “major literary figure” to write a preface, but a staffer at the Soviet Russia Division also prepared a publisher’s note as a backup. Initially, the agency was interested in printing 10,000 copies of the novel. Morrow was required to arrange the layout and design work to prepare the manuscript for typesetting; proofread the typeset copy; and produce two sets of photo-offset reproduction proofs. The contract said he would get an additional bonus for every day he came in before the July 31 deadline. The agency also said it would pay him to investigate where the novel could be printed in Europe and that there would be a separate, second contract for any printing in Europe.

  There were signs of trouble from the beginning; Morrow either didn’t understand or was unwilling to comply with the agency’s demand for secrecy. Even before he signed a contract, he was discussing the operation with outsiders. At a meeting with a CIA officer on June 19, Morrow said he had already used his contacts to explore printing possibilities in the United States. Morrow had close ties to the University of Michigan Press, where his friend Fred Wieck was the director. Morrow was admonished by the CIA that he had no authority to contact any American publishing house.

  Morrow also did not tell the agency that he had “credentialed Russian scholars check both the original and the repros”—an indiscretion that might account for rumors among émigrés in New York that a Russian-language edition was imminent. Moreover, the Doctor Zhivago reproductions for the CIA were prepared by Rausen Bros., a printing house in New York that was closely tied to the city’s Russian community.

  Once the European printing was complete, the CIA told Morrow that he could buy the rights to the Russian-language version of Doctor Zhivago from the agency—a deal that would have shocked and astonished Feltrinelli, who believed he had exclusive world rights to the novel, including in Russian, because the novel was not published in the Soviet Union. Morrow, however, was balking at the CIA’s terms. In a July 7 letter, he said he couldn’t secure a willing European publisher and get the printing done in eight weeks. Instead, he said, he could deliver the books with the imprint of an Amsterdam publisher, but he suggested that he would actually print them in the United States. Morrow also had a warning for the CIA: If the agency didn’t back his plan and buy copies of the novel in bulk, he would simply commandeer the reproduction proofs and take them elsewhere. He informed the CIA that when the operation was over he planned to publish his own edition of Doctor Zhivago with the University of Michigan Press. “I can publish anywhere else I please,” he told the agency.

  The CIA’s plans were unraveling. Two weeks later, to the consternation of its officers, the Soviet Russia Division was informed that the University of Michigan Press was planning to publish Doctor Zhivago in Russian. Not only that, officials in Washington received an inquiry from the academic press’s offices in Ann Arbor about how many copies the government might be interested in purchasing. CIA officers were frantic and immediately wanted to know where and how the university press got its copy of the novel. They suspected that Morrow gave a copy of the manuscript to his friend Fred Wieck and the two had decided to publish the novel in some kind of joint venture.

  A week later the CIA got even more of a jolt. The university press made a second inquiry about selling copies of the novel to the government and wanted to know about “the CIA’s interest in the book and whether or not the agency was subsidizing the publishing of the book in Europe.”

  “It appears that [Morrow] in his dealings with [Michigan] has gone entirely too far and may well have committed one or more security violations,” thundered the agency’s Commercial Staff. The CIA decided it had to stop the University of Michigan Press, and its opening salvo was to have its lawyer in New York contact Ann Arbor and “bring out the fact that the Italian publisher is prepared to sue anyone publishing the book in Russian.”

  The academic publisher was unimpressed with the CIA’s self-serving argument about Feltrinelli’s rights. Lawyers for the University of Michigan had made a legal judgment that no one held the rights to the Russian-language edition of the novel for the United States because there was no treaty with the Soviet Union on copyright. The university publisher informed the CIA it was planning to bring out Doctor Zhivago in “five or six weeks or sooner” and refused to reveal the source of its manuscript.

  At an internal CIA meeting, the Soviet Russia Division representative argued that the University of Michigan Press should not be allowed to publish “in advance of distribution of that edition being published in Europe under Agency sponsorship. Not only is there the question of reducing the effectiveness of the European edition, but there are also the important factors of protecting liaison services with other agencies involved.”

  On August 25, an officer from the Soviet Russia Division and a second CIA official flew to Michigan to meet with Harlan Hatcher, the president of the University of Michigan. The Soviet Russia Division officer had been given a series of talking points prepared at headquarters in Washington, a series of temporary buildings on the south side of the reflecting pool on the National Mall.

  The CIA officer told Hatcher that the U.S. government had been “instrumental” in arranging the publication of Doctor Zhivago in Russian. “It is felt,” the CIA officer told Hatcher, “that to have the greatest psychological impact upon Soviet readers the Russian edition of this book should be published in Europe and not in the United States. To accomplish this, the U.S. government has made certain commitments to foreign governments.”

  The CIA officer also emphasized that “Pasternak specifically requested that the book not be published in the United States for his personal safety and other reasons. We have made every effort to honor the author’s petition.” The officer said that the CIA believed the University of Michigan Press got the proofs in “an unorthodox manner” and that they were, in fact, “the property of the U.S. government.”

  Hatcher was sympathetic and saw no reason why the publication of Doctor Zhivago couldn’t be delayed at least until after it was published in Europe. The two officers met Wieck, the editorial director, the following day. They asked if they could examine the Michigan copy of Doctor Zhivago to compare it against the CIA’s page proofs they had brought with them. The comparison was made with a magnifying glass and there was no dispute: they were identical. After some negotiation, the University of Michigan Press agreed to hold off on any announcement of its plans to publish Doctor Zhivago until the agency’s edition appeared in Europe.

  All that remained to tidy up was the mess with Morrow. The CIA agreed to a confidential settlement, but not before huffing about the publisher’s duplicity. “It is our desire that it be made completely clear to [Morrow] that we are aware of his untrustworthy behavior during our relationship, and that we feel we are being most lenient in our final dealings with him.”

  When the CIA’s difficulties with Morrow began, they prompted the agency to contact the Dutch intelligence service, the Binnenlandse Veiligheidsdienst (BVD). The CIA was already following reports of the possible publication of Doctor Zhivago in Russian by Mouton Publishers; a deal between the Dutch house and Feltrinelli appeared likely. Kurt Wolff, Pasternak’s American publisher, had also heard rumors of a Mouton edition, and in May Feltrinelli confirmed a deal; Mouton offered to print three thousand copies at a cost of $4,160. The CIA wanted to know from their Dutch allies if it would be possible to obtain an early run of the book from Mouton.

  The two intelligence agencies were close. CIA subsidies in 1958 paid for about 50 of the 691 staffers at the BVD, and new Dutch employees were trained in Washington. Joop van der Wilden, a BVD officer was dispatched to the U.S. embassy to discuss the issue with Walter Cini, a CIA officer stationed in The Hague. Cini told him it was a rush job and the agency was willing to pay well a
nd in cash for a small print run of Doctor Zhivago—but again there should be no trace of American involvement or of any other intelligence agency.

  The Dutch reported back to Washington that Mouton could complete the work, but would need to get started quickly to meet an early September deadline. The Soviet Russia Division decided around the end of July that it wanted to proceed “along this line provided the details [could] be suitably negotiated.” On August 1, the reproduction proofs prepared by Morrow were sent to The Hague.

  The BVD decided not to deal directly with Mouton but instead turned to Rudy van der Beek, a retired army major who ran the Dutch branch of an anti-Communist group, Paix et Liberté. Van der Beek’s organization published a range of anti-Communist propaganda, including a recent attack on the Soviet pavilion in Brussels. A few days after the proofs arrived, Peter de Ridder, a Mouton Publishers executive, along with one of the company’s printers, met with van der Beek in the large marble foyer of a grand town house on Prinsessegracht in the center of The Hague—probably number 27, the headquarters of the Dutch Red Cross, whose president served on the Dutch board of Paix et Liberté. The three men spoke for twenty minutes and van der Beek gave de Ridder the proofs of the novel and guaranteed to buy over a thousand copies.

  “There was something mysterious about the encounter,” said de Ridder, but he decided to take the deal. De Ridder was never clear about what motivated him. Later in 1958, he told a newspaper reporter for Haagse Post that van der Beek warned him that if he didn’t print the book he would go elsewhere, and de Ridder feared that that would ruin the planned Mouton edition being negotiated with Feltrinelli. De Ridder said he tried to reach the Milanese publisher but was unsuccessful because he was on vacation in Scandinavia.