by John Barron
Ponomarev calculated that the Soviets could give the Americans $75,000 in 1958 and $200,000 in 1959. He solicited suggestions from Morris about how the cash might be delivered, saying he did not want to transmit it through the Soviet embassy in Washington and that a secure channel must be found lest discovery of the subsidies stigmatize the American party as a “paid whore.” Morris noted that Tim Buck was willing to be a conduit and that, were the money passed through Canada, it would be more difficult to prove that the Soviet Union was the source.
Morris’ old mentor and friend Suslov dined with him twice and shared the Soviet view of world affairs, which in the main was optimistic except with respect to China. Ponomarev had indicated that Soviet relations with China were not all they should be; Suslov said they were bad and worsening.
The Russians were considerate hosts. They spaced discussions so as not to tax Morris physically, and doctors examined him briefly each morning. He dutifully submitted although he had held Soviet medicine in low esteem since 1947 when a Russian physician treated Howard K. Smith for influenza by putting mustard seeds in his socks and prescribing vodka with garlic. A card admitted Morris to the International Department building and its buffet, which offered delicious fare—caviar, smoked salmon, herring, sturgeon, sardines, and a whitefish unfamiliar to him; lamb and veal cutlets, German wursts, and Hungarian sausages; cheese from Denmark and Holland; a kind of deviled eggs; pickled beets, marinated cabbage, and a variety of potatoes; and good, hearty bread and fresh butter. Usually, there was fresh fruit, then a rarity in Moscow. Always there was alcohol: vodka, Johnny Walker Black Label scotch; wines from the Soviet Republic of Georgia, Rumania, and Hungary; sparkling wines and brandy from Georgia. The Soviets knew Morris was Jewish and probably knew that he preferred to be a vegetarian. But he determined never to remind them that he was either and ate whatever Soviet hosts presented. He begged off alcohol during the day by truthfully citing doctors’ strictures.
The card also admitted him to what he termed the “speakeasy.” Past a plain, unmarked door and guards on the inside, he entered a cornucopia of Western food, drink, and merchandise available to almost no one in Moscow, and it was all free. He had only to point to what his whim fixed upon; all he specified was packaged and soon delivered to his hotel suite.
From the Soviet Union, he flew to Peking to renew relations of the American party with the Chinese, who accorded him an even more lavish reception than had the Russians. Mao Tse Tung conversed with him alone, except for the pretty young woman who interpreted, for nearly five hours. Mao declared that Khrushchev, by his 1956 denunciation of Stalin and subsequent policies, had betrayed the revolution, and the contempt he expressed for him in curdling terms astonished Morris. Other Chinese leaders with whom he spoke were less blunt but their comments persuaded him that the Chinese animus toward the Soviets was real and deeply rooted.8 Wang Chia Hsiang, a member of the Secretariat of the Chinese party, took him aside and offered to give money to the American party on the sole condition that it not divulge the gifts to the Soviets. Clearly, the Chinese intended to compete with the Soviets for influence in the international communist movement.
Morris returned to the United States July 21, 1958, with the first hard, authentic intelligence that a breach was developing between the Soviet Union and China. The Sino–Soviet split long would preoccupy and torment the Soviets, and be the subject of many more reports by Morris.
Soviet cash began to flow from Canada on September 8, 1958, when Elizabeth Mascola came to New York with $12,000 for Jack; on September 19 he picked up $15,000 from her in Toronto. A few days later she brought $17,000 to Morris. Buck handed Morris $6,000 in Toronto, and Mascola gave Jack $25,000 in New York.
By forging relations with the Soviets and Chinese at the highest levels and by producing money, Morris made himself indispensable and securely positioned himself atop the hierarchy of the American party, just as Freyman had foreseen. He, Jack, and the FBI were now in business, business being espionage against the Soviet Union, China, and communism everywhere. The FBI retitled the operation “SOLO,” because the operation centered on two spies, 58 and 69.
Dennis became terminally ill, and the International Department chose Gus Hall to assist and succeed him. The two selected Morris to lead the U.S. delegation to the Twenty-First Communist Party Congress in Moscow beginning in January 1959.
The party congress appointed Morris a recording secretary and assigned him a vault in the Kremlin to store documents. Late one night he accidentally closed the vault door on the little finger of his left hand, completely severing about a half inch. When doctors started to administer anesthesia before sewing up his finger he refused it out of fear of what he might say if anesthetized. Instead, he stoically stuck out the finger while the doctors did their work.
Word of the incident spread and after the congress reconvened in the morning Khrushchev took the podium and melodramatically described the heroism of a comrade who had endured terrible pain rather than risk spilling state secrets even to trusted Soviet physicians. “That comrade is among us today,” he bellowed, motioning Morris to join him at the podium. There he embraced him, and holding up the injured hand, shouted, “I give you the last of the first Bolsheviks!” Khrushchev then announced that the remnant of the finger would be interred in the Kremlin wall.
Perhaps merely to test a new channel or perhaps because of temporary problems in Canada, the Soviets sent KGB officer Vladimir Barkovsky on April 23, 1959, to give $50,000 directly to Jack in New York. Payments through Canada resumed May 21, however, when Mascola delivered $41,000, and she returned with lesser sums throughout the year. After one delivery, she took back a letter from Dennis and Hall with a request that Buck forward it to Moscow. The letter certified that henceforth Morris Childs alone was authorized to represent the American party in dealings with the Soviets and Chinese.
After Morris had recovered from his heart attack, Freyman issued him an ultimatum: either marry Sonny or move out of her house. They married, and she, as promised, stood with him in all the intrigues. Doctors in the summer of 1959 discovered that she had inoperable cancer and had less than six months to live. Morris wanted to brighten the last of her life with a trip abroad, and the Chinese encouraged him to bring her along to ceremonies commemorating the tenth anniversary of communist assumption of power in China. They departed for Moscow September 23, 1959, and there Khrushchev incorporated them into his entourage to Peking.
The Chinese sought to detach the Americans from the Soviet delegation by placing them in palatial quarters remote from the Soviets, surrounding Sonny with a medical team led by an English-speaking doctor, and inviting them to remain as official guests for a couple of weeks after the ceremonies. They made it impossible for Morris to decline by adding that both Mao and Chou En Lai wanted to talk to him.
The Chinese soon provided compelling evidence that the deterioration in Sino–Soviet relations had accelerated. When Khrushchev concluded his speech on September 30, they condescendingly insulted him by folding their hands and withholding applause. During a long audience granted Morris, Mao engaged in a disjointed, meandering diatribe against the Soviets and Khrushchev, whom he characterized as “uncouth, crude, and vulgar.” The Soviet Union, he rambled, had become just as imperialistic as the United States, and Mao did not care if the two countries went to nuclear war. China would remain aloof “on the mountaintop and watch as two tigers clawed each other apart in the valley below.” The Soviets had broken their word by abruptly stopping their assistance to the Chinese nuclear research and development program. China in turn had foiled Soviet tricks by rejecting a proposal to form a joint Soviet–Chinese naval fleet and refusing to allow emplacement of long-range Soviet radars on its territory. The unprincipled and opportunistic Soviets thought only in terms of five-year plans; the Chinese thought ahead a hundred years, nay, a thousand years. The world would not always remain as it was in 1959. Someday the United States would approach China and court its cooperation. But u
ntil the Soviets apologized for Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin and repudiated policies adopted at the Twentieth Communist Party Congress (in 1956), there could be no reconciliation between China and the Soviet Union. China did not want one.
To Morris, Mao seemed to fluctuate from brilliant, logical analysis to illogical, almost incoherent ranting, to raw racism and chauvinism that exalted the inherent traits of the Chinese and their culture above those of all other peoples and societies. Thinking back, he wondered whether if upon visiting the lavatory Mao did not also consult an opium pipe.
Chou En Lai, without any of Mao’s bombast, also tried to enlist Morris as a Chinese ally in ideological warfare against the Soviets. He said that the Soviets had proven themselves to be unpredictable and untrustworthy, and reiterated the offer of money for the American party. Chou also took an interest in Sonny, and at a reception he stroked her derriere several times, apparently indifferent to what Morris or anyone else thought. Toward the end of their stay, he said it would be a shame for her to come all the way to China and not see something of the country, and insisted that they avail themselves of a plane put at their disposal for sightseeing.
Accompanied by the medical team, they flew to Shanghai where, in a park, were the signs Browder had described in the 1920s: “No Dogs Or Chinese.” The communists had retained them as symbols of colonialism.
On his way back to the United States with Sonny, Morris stopped in Moscow to report his conversations in Peking. The Soviets reacted somberly to his account and said that unfortunately it was consistent with their other intelligence. Ponomarev also advised that the International Department would raise the 1960 subsidy to the American party to $300,000 and that it was considering means of funneling the cash straight to Jack Childs in New York. To discuss this and other operational matters, they wanted Jack to come to Moscow in early 1960.
Upon landing in Chicago on November 5, 1959, Morris telephoned Freyman from the airport: “Sonny is dying.” Barely conscious and unable to walk, she had to be carried from the airport. Soon she lapsed into a coma from which she never recovered.
To distract Morris from his grief and remind him that there was still much left to do in life, Freyman burdened him with work. One assignment required a detailed personal evaluation of Gus Hall (aka Arvo Holberg) who, with Dennis’ incapacitation, had become general secretary, or boss, of the party. “He is a man without a friend in the world,” Morris began.
Hall was a fair, handsome, jut-jawed man, born in Minnesota of Finnish parents who were communists. He joined the party in his early twenties, attended the Lenin School, and worked as an organizer among union members in Minnesota and Ohio. During the 1930s he openly advocated overthrow of the government and was implicated in bombings perpetrated by unionists against nonstrik-ers. He pled guilty to a misdemeanor charge of maliciously destroying property and paid a $500 fine. After his conviction under the Smith Act, he fled to Mexico, where authorities eventually arrested him and deported him to the United States and prison.
Morris portrayed him as a cold, humorless, robotic caricature of a bomb-throwing Bolshevik and an “ignoramus.” Hall once asserted that “ballet is just an excuse for pornography” and that the Bolshoi Ballet should be more accurately named the “Bolshoi Burlesque.” The Hermitage in Leningrad exhibited some of the world’s most prized paintings but Hall found it wanting. Returning from the men’s room, he grumbled, “They’ve some nice paintings here. They ought to sell a few and buy some toilets so you don’t have to use a hole in the floor.” Most people disliked Hall; in fact, Morris knew of no one who actually liked him.
Hall had reaffirmed the status of Morris, assisted by Jack, as his principal deputy responsible for liaison with the Soviets and all other foreign parties. The primary reason, in Morris’ judgment, was that they were producing what Hall craved most—money. He was by nature exploitive and avaricious, and the deprivations of prison intensified his greed. During his incarceration, neither the party nor anyone in it gave any help whatsoever to his wife and children, and he was determined that they would never again be impoverished.
And as long as the flow of Soviet cash continued through Morris and Jack, they would not be. After Burlinson or agents working with him counted and recorded the serial number of each bill, Jack would put the money in safety deposit boxes and subsequently disburse it as the general secretary dictated. Whenever Hall wanted money for the party or himself, he had only to call Jack.
Morris summed it up: The more money we can extract from the Soviets, the more Gus will be at liberty to pocket. The more he pockets, the more secure we and the operation will be.
The Soviet summons of Jack to Moscow heartened Freyman and Burlinson and made them laugh. Clearly, the Soviets intended to use Jack just as the FBI was using him—as a clandestine assistant to Morris. That was splendid.
Jack left February 3, 1960, for Prague, where he conferred with editors of the World Marxist Review, communists from different countries. One, Chao Yi-Min, slipped him $50,000, a present for the American party from the Chinese. In Moscow, he met Nikolai Mostovets, head of the North American section of the International Department, and his deputy Aleksandr Grechukhin. They discussed alternate ways of transferring money and asked if Jack would assist Soviet “representatives” secretly in New York. To the FBI, the most significant outcome of the conference was an order Mostovets told Jack to relay to Hall. He wanted the American party to establish direct communication lines with the Cuban and Mexican parties, which the Soviets could use if their own links frayed.
Timmy Timofeevich, the son of Eugene and Peggy Dennis, left in Moscow for the Russians to raise, treated Jack to a good dinner and an enlightening evening. Timmy had grown up with the privileged and pampered children of the Soviet oligarchy, had many friends among them, and circulated among their families.
According to Timmy, from the Soviet perspective the situation in Cuba had become “very good and happy” since Fidel Castro seized power. Castro’s brother Raul and two other members of the new Cuban cabinet were steadfast communists loyal to the Soviet Union. The Soviets were gleefully confident that through Castro they could transform Cuba into their first outpost in the Western Hemisphere. They already enjoyed secret relations with him, and formal diplomatic relations would be announced after the forthcoming visit by President Eisenhower to the Soviet Union.
In compliance with Mostovets’ order, Hall instructed Morris to arrange talks with the Cubans. Morris arrived in Havana on May 5, 1960. Anibel Escalante, executive secretary of the Cuban party, briefed him for the better part of four days, outlining the web of ties the communists had woven around Castro and inroads they had made into the regime. Escalante too was confident that they would prevail in Cuba.
With a false passport supplied by the FBI, Morris in July 1960 flew to Prague. Following procedures he would duplicate many times there and in other east European capitals, he showed an airport security officer a letter of instruction. The security officer promptly telephoned the International Department of the Czech party, and one of its representatives soon appeared. Morris stayed in a comfortable party apartment while the Czechs arranged a flight to Moscow and notified the Russians when he would arrive.
In Moscow, he met two KGB officers who treated him with deference rather than as a subordinate. They explained that they were to supervise transfers of money and clandestine communications with the American party on behalf of the International Department. For several reasons, they wanted to start handing money directly to Jack instead of sending it in driblets through Canada. The fewer people involved in any operation, the better. Worthy as Comrade Mascola was, she, unlike Jack, had no professional training.
The sums of cash to be passed in the future, the KGB officer continued, were likely to be greater than an amateur could safely handle. Thus a KGB officer and an alternate in New York would be assigned to work with Jack, and he would know them both. One would meet him secretly outside the city in carefully planned rendezvo
us. To reduce the frequency of meetings, large sums would be delivered at each and messages could also be exchanged. In time, Jack would be informed of methods by which he and the International Department could communicate through the KGB without personal meetings. One of the officers gave Morris a list of code words to be used in future messages. Each word designated a person or nation. For example, Morris was “Mr. Good” (in later lists he became “Hub”); “Madison” meant the Soviet Union; China was “Hamilton”; and Castro was “Peach.”
The FBI would prize all this information, but it paled in comparison to what Morris learned from the International Department. During a closed meeting with leaders of east European parties, Khrushchev venomously denounced China and Mao Tse Tung for “endangering world peace.” He ridiculed the Chinese contention that nuclear war “is nothing” and poured scorn on Mao for claiming that the United States was “a paper tiger.” Likening Mao to Stalin, Khrushchev accused him of subverting socialism by creating “a cult of personality” around himself and decreed that his writings no longer would be published in the Soviet Union. Heretofore, the Soviets had muted their reactions to Chinese calumny and tried to be conciliatory. Khrushchev’s present denunciations amounted to a Soviet declaration of ideological war.
After Morris returned on July 30, 1960, the FBI sent the State Department a report of these statements, and it forthwith responded with an evaluation: “This is the most important single item the FBI has ever disseminated to the Department of State.”
