Operation Solo

by John Barron

  Dennis also was Moscow’s man. A graduate of the Lenin School, he demonstrated his allegiance to the Russians by leaving his small son Timothy in the Soviet Union for them to raise. He succeeded Morris in Milwaukee and the two long had been friends, or so Morris thought.

  The account Dennis gave may be summed up thus: Browder, by disbanding the party, had angered the Soviets and forfeited their confidence. They wanted a vigorous, organized American Communist Party back in the business of spreading communism in the United States. At their behest, Dennis and William Z. Foster had engineered the expulsion of Browder and had reconstituted the party. Dennis was now its leader, and his most urgent task was to reconcile factions loyal to Browder with those loyal to Foster, who had become national chairman. He wanted Morris to help by serving as his deputy in New York.

  Soon Dennis had another problem. Louis Budenz, editor of the Daily Worker, renounced communism and joined the Catholic Church, creating much mirth among anticommunists. Dennis needed someone with prestige, in and out of the party, to replace him as editor. Would Morris take the job? After Dennis dismissed his protests that he had no journalistic experience, Morris, the good soldier, agreed.

  The ensuing correspondence evokes something of the atmosphere of the time. Party Treasurer Charles Krumbein on September 18, 1945, wrote Morris:

  Received word from Comrade Fine that the district paid you through September 20. We therefore are placing you on our payroll starting with the above date. We have set wage rates in the National Office that places [sic] you at $60.00 gross per week. From this is deducted $6.60 withholding tax (based upon two dependents, wife and child), 60¢ for social security tax and $5.30 for war bonds, which goes to your credit. On the basis of this and suggestions made to me, I am enclosing a check for $475 for ten weeks’ wages which pays you up to December 1.

  Dennis on October 5 wrote:

  We have been anxiously waiting to hear from you regarding the doctor’s verdict. If you don’t mind, I wish you would drop me a note and let me know what is what on the state of your health. Furthermore, I wish you would give us a tentative idea as to when you will be able to take up your new work.

  However, some of the party leadership virulently opposed the appointment of Morris on grounds that he was a “Browderite.” Dennis on December 17, 1945, sent word that his opponents had been routed:

  We reached agreement on the following proposals which have been submitted to the DW [Daily Worker] staff and confirmed by an overwhelming consultative vote. Childs—Editor; Milton Howard—Associate Editor; Alan Max—Managing Editor; Rob Hall—Washington Editor; Claudia Jones—Negro Affairs Editor. The other two main editorial posts will remain as now, with either Jim Allen or Joe Starobin Foreign Editor and George Morris, Labor Editor.

  When you return I will inform you fully of the very prolonged and both lively and heated discussion which took place around these questions and around the broader issues of what must be done to affect [sic] drastic political and journalistic improvements in the paper. You should know that some of the comrades of the Staff were dubious at first regarding bringing in an editor who has had only a very limited acquaintance [sic] with the direct problems of editing and publishing a paper. It is well that these questions were raised because in the discussion most all the comrades acquired a more clear and correct Communist understanding and Communist character [sic] of our paper and the prime requisites which an editor must have. We asked for a consultative vote at the conclusion of the meeting and you received 26 votes for, 2 against and 2 abstentions.

  Warmest regards to you, Helen and Billie. Season’s greetings to you all.

  Comradely,

  Gene Dennis

  Morris moved to New York and began his duties as editor in early 1946. Shortly afterward, Sam Carr unexpectedly burst into his office in high alarm. Code clerk Igor Gouzenko had defected from the Soviet embassy in Ottawa and identified a number of people, including Carr, as Russian spies. “I can’t go back,” he said. “I need to get in touch with the Russians but I don’t know how. What shall I do?”

  While Jack sequestered Carr in the home of a wealthy party sympathizer, Morris telephoned Tim Buck in Canada. A week or so later Soviet agents spirited Carr off to Moscow. As far as United States and Canadian authorities were concerned, he simply vanished.

  In 1947 Dennis asked the Soviets for permission to send a Daily Worker correspondent to cover a Moscow conference of foreign ministers beginning in March. They replied, “We want Morris.” After Labor Editor George Morris applied for a visa, they sent another message: “We want Morris Childs.”

  Rumors that Stalin had renewed systematic persecution of Jews circulated in New York, and Paul Novick, editor of the Yiddish newspaper Morning Freiheit, urged Morris to appeal to the Soviets to cease the persecutions. He also gave Morris penicillin and other medicine to take to Jewish artists and intellectuals in Moscow.

  Morris flew to Moscow in the company of thirty-four other American correspondents, among them such noted journalists as Walter Cronkite, Howard K. Smith, and Kingsbury Smith. Molly Perlman, a South African communist working in Moscow, came to the hotel where the press corps was lodged and announced that the Soviets had designated her to act as his secretary. She gave him a ticket to the ballet and told him he absolutely must attend.

  The next evening two representatives of the International Department (aka Comintern) joined him in a box at the ballet. They pressed him for details of all that had transpired in the American party since 1943, an appraisal of its current condition, and evaluations of its principal leaders. They also asked for an appraisal of President Harry Truman. Morris characterized him as a “tough bird” and said he was not as sure as the American press seemed to be that Truman would be defeated in 1948.

  During the day, Morris followed the routine of other correspondents, attending press conferences and briefings and filing stories. On most evenings he secretly conferred with the Soviets. When he raised the issue of persecution of Jews, they feigned shock that anyone but malicious imperialists could even imagine such a thing. It just wasn’t so, and they would be glad to send Soviet Jews to New York to reassure the Jewish community. As for the artists and intellectuals, for whom he had medicine, they were in dachas or sanitoria receiving good medical treatment.

  As gifts for old friends from his days at the Lenin School, Morris brought Kentucky bourbon, Camel cigarettes, medicine, perfume, nylon stockings, and Spam, a canned meat made popular in Moscow by American wartime aid. The presents won him invitations to Russian apartments where heavy drinking was customary. He ordinarily did not drink alcohol but among Russians he forced himself to drink to show that he was one of them and to be one of them.

  During long drinking bouts, he heard appalling confidences. The Jewish artists and intellectuals were not in dachas or sanitoria; they were in prison awaiting almost certain execution. Other mutual friends had disappeared. Morris already knew that Carl Radek, Leo Kamenev, Grigori Zinoviev, and Nikolai Bukharin, all of whom lectured at the Lenin School, had been shot. So had countless other loyal party members, generals, scientists, intellectuals, and intelligence officers. Millions of peasants and their families had been deported to slave labor camps, and in Ukraine Stalin had deliberately starved hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, to death. Moreover, Stalin, no strategic genius, had bought time to gird Soviet defenses by making a deal with Hitler. He was a fool who trusted Hitler and believed that through a union of German industry and Soviet natural resources, communists and Nazis together could dominate the world. His trust had been so complete that he had unconscionably rejected warnings from both Soviet and British intelligence services of the impending German attack in 1941. When the predicted attack came, it rendered him literally speechless. He skulked in shock for days, and Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov had to be the first to call the nation to arms.

  Collectively, these revelations from unimpeachable confidants confirmed the vilest of anti-Soviet slanders and struck at the
foundation of his faith. And, Morris thought, I have been an apostle of all of this for almost twenty years.

  The other American correspondents refused to accept Morris as a colleague. They regarded him as a Soviet apologist rather than a bona fide journalist, and they scorned the Daily Worker as a “commie rag.” Howard K. Smith who, as a result of seating assignments, shared a table with him in the hotel dining room, was polite but avoided serious conversation. The rest spoke to him either curtly or not at all.

  At a reception given for the press by the U.S. ambassador, General Walter Bedell Smith, Morris stood awkwardly and conspicuously alone until Mrs. Smith approached and asked why he was not joining in the festivities.

  “I’m a communist,” he said. “I’m a skunk. No one wants to have anything to do with me.”

  She smiled. “I do. Will you favor me with a dance?”

  “I’ve never danced. I don’t know how.”

  “Well, you should learn. Just follow me.”

  The sight of the ambassador’s wife dancing with the leper attracted attention, and many watched as she afterward led Morris to her husband. “Bedell, this is Mr. Childs,” she said. “His colleagues are ostracizing him because he’s a communist.”

  An erect, imposing man, General Smith had been a wartime deputy to General Eisenhower; soon he would be director of the new Central Intelligence Agency. “Mr. Childs, as a citizen of the United States you are welcome at the embassy at any time,” he said. “As a citizen, you are entitled to your political opinions and you may surmise that yours differ from mine. But when Americans leave their country, they leave their political differences behind and stick together.”

  “You should tell that to the other journalists,” Mrs. Smith interjected. “Have a word with them, Beedle.”

  “I will.”

  Morris never knew what General Smith said to the correspondents. He obviously said something because the next day they began talking to him and exchanging notes and opinions, and some even became friendly.

  Over breakfast Morris mentioned that someday he would like to visit his brother’s grave in France, and Howard K. Smith suggested that he do so en route back to New York. Morris confided that though he was returning by way of Paris he did not have enough money for a side trip. At breakfast the day Morris departed Moscow, Smith handed him a sealed envelope and requested that he not open it until he boarded his plane. Airborne, Morris found inside the envelope a terse note: “We thought you should make that side trip so we took up a collection. Your fellow Americans.” The envelope also contained three hundred U.S. dollars.

  Above the grave in an immaculately maintained Normandy cemetery stood a white cross inscribed with the Star of David and the words: “Phillip Childs—First Lieutenant, United States Army—1918–1944.” Morris knelt and offered an earnest prayer.

  Flying homeward, he contrasted the spontaneous kindness of General and Mrs. Smith and the correspondents with the Stalinist terrors whose occurrence he no longer doubted, and he asked himself, have I perverted my whole life?

  In New York, Morris returned to face more feuding and bickering. A clique headed by Foster caviled at Dennis and his followers, and Foster ridiculed Morris and his direction of the paper, accusing him of “Browderism.” Dennis surprised Morris by not rising to his defense.

  Unable to will away worsening chest pains, Morris consulted a physician who insisted that he temporarily stop working. Morris then asked Dennis for a short leave of absence from the paper. At a meeting of the National Committee in June 1947 Morris blanched in disbelief as Dennis formally proposed that Morris be granted an indefinite leave of absence and that John Gates replace him as editor of the Daily Worker. Foster seconded the motion, and it passed unanimously, every comrade in effect voting to fire him and purge him from the party leadership.

  Earlier, Morris’ wife had left him and taken away their son because she felt he neglected her for the party. Now the party, his deity, had forsaken him, as had everyone else except his brothers. He had no job, no income, no savings, no future, and no faith. Nor did he have recourse to protectors in Moscow because the party could tell them that he was incapacitated. Soon that was true. He rented a room in a Greenwich Village boarding house, and there a massive heart attack left him near death.

  Jack, who had established a business selling electrical and painting supplies, took care of Morris as best he could and paid his medical bills. Ben also sent money. Still, except for visits by Jack, he was utterly alone until Sonny Schlossberg, a former party member in Chicago, heard of his plight. She had always admired and looked up to him, and she brought him from New York to her home in Chicago and acted as his nurse.

  Had it not been for his ouster and illness, Morris doubtless would have been arrested. Congress in 1940 passed a law, the so-called Smith Act, which made it a crime to advocate violent overthrow of the United States government. After the Cold War began, the Truman administration applied the law to communists and the FBI arrested the top twelve active leaders of the party: Dennis, Foster, Gates, Gus Hall, Ben Davis, John Williams, Robert Thompson, Jack Satchel, Irving Potash, Gil Green, Henry Winston, and Carl Winter.

  The government considered arresting Morris; the FBI subjected him to “spot” or periodic surveillance, and the watching agents saw that he was almost completely enfeebled. After walking only fifty steps or so he had to sit down on the street curb and rest for several minutes to regain strength enough to stand up again. Given his condition and the fact that he no longer was active in the party, the Justice Department decided not to bring charges against him.

  The prosecution of Foster was delayed because he too had become very ill, but the other eleven leaders were convicted. The Supreme Court, by a 6-to-2 vote in June 1951, upheld the constitutionality of the Smith Act and the convictions. Hall, Gates, Thompson, and Green jumped bail and fled; the rest were imprisoned. Granted Supreme Court authorization and goaded by wartime passions, the FBI rounded up more than one hundred lesser communist functionaries around the country and virtually all were convicted. The remaining party officials, besieged and largely leaderless, then went underground.

  In hope of catching the fugitive leaders and breaking into the underground, the FBI instituted a program titled “TOPLEV” and formed Underground Squads in New York and Chicago. The squads began the hunt by analyzing investigative and intelligence files to ascertain with whom Hall, Gates, Thompson, and Green most frequently associated. Then they undertook to identify former or inactive party members who had links to them. This search led to the file of Jack Childs, which indicated that he had not been active in the party since 1947 and hence might be disaffected.

  On the night of September 4, 1951, Agents Edward Buckley and Herbert Larson stopped Jack as he walked near his home in Queens. Other party members they approached had profanely rebuffed them, and when Jack smiled sardonically they expected another rebuff. Instead, he said, “Where in the hell have you guys been all these years? I could have sired and raised a son during all the time you’ve been screwing around.” He agreed to talk to them the next evening in a room at the Tudor Hotel. During that first interview, Jack withheld information about some aspects of his past and dissembled about others. But he honestly answered the most critical question put to him: Yes, he wanted to help the FBI.

  The real debriefings took place in a spacious country home perched on a hillside in Westchester County. It belonged to Alexander C. Burlinson, a slender FBI agent with a granite face and searching gray eyes. A graduate of Fordham Preparatory School, Fordham College, and Fordham Law School, Burlinson was an accomplished writer, pianist, and linguist. He composed poetry in Latin and sometimes exasperated superiors by expressing his own exasperations in Latin. The front of his expensive shirts, which he changed daily, was usually soiled at the end of the day because he so often rubbed his stomach to assuage an ulcer. The ulcer and admonitions of his doctor notwithstanding, he smoked two packs of cigarettes a day and drank copious quantities of Scotch whisky i
n milk.

  Some FBI agents prefer the excitement of street work and the gratification of arresting somebody who threatens everybody. Burlinson liked intellectual detective work, the quest for clues from old archives or new sources. He also enjoyed playing deception games with the communists and impudent games with bureaucrats. Traveling to Washington to attend a conference of assistant directors, he once told an apprehensive subordinate, “Don’t worry. They only know what we tell them.” Although he had little personal ambition, his talents were such that colleagues thought he inevitably would wind up in an executive position at headquarters. As a result of events that began in 1951, he stayed in New York and for the next twenty-four years concentrated his career and life on one case.

  The personalities of Burlinson and Jack Childs were quite dissimilar, yet the two were a good match. Burlinson was a great listener and Jack was a great talker, and they soon became friends and partners.

  At the outset, Jack declared he “never really believed any of that communist bullshit.” He joined and worked for the party for the sake of his brother. He now loathed the communists because they callously threw away his brother and when Morris was in terrible need they sent him not one dollar, not even a postcard. He was grateful to be an American. Until a few years ago, he had not perceived the Soviet Union as a dangerous enemy of the United States; now that he did, there was no question on whose side he stood. For these reasons, he would work for the FBI.

  There was another reason at which he later hinted. “Look, I’m basically a con man. If I had a choice between entering a house by walking through the front door or crawling through a back window, I’d go through the window because that’s more exciting.” While his business was prospering, selling paint and light fixtures was not exciting. The prospect of taking on the Communist Party was.

  In the next weeks, Jack recounted his training in Moscow, his two trips to Berlin, and the frolic there with the beautiful wife. He admitted supplying the party with birth and death certificates and illegally obtained passports. He also detailed party finances, named donors, and told of the secret Reserve Fund. Sure, he knew Sam Carr and many other communists about whom Burlinson asked, and he was willing to try to renew relations with them.