Operation Solo

by John Barron

  Morris had to leave immediately for Havana to represent the American party at the Eighth National Assembly of the Partido Socialista Popular (the Cuban party). Mingling with communist delegates from all over the world, he gained new insights into developing alliances between their parties and the Cubans. From the Cubans themselves, he brought back more intelligence showing that communist influence on the island was growing.

  As the war of insults between the Chinese and Soviets escalated, the Soviets convened a conference in October 1960 in hope of securing a truce and mediating differences, and Morris attended as the American representative. The Chinese, while making fleeting reference to the desirability of unity among all communists, remained intransigent and bellicose. They disdained the most reasonable and conciliatory appeals the Soviets could make without groveling, and refused the least compromise. Instead of improving relations, the failed conference further poisoned them.

  When traveling to the Soviet Union, Morris rarely could be sure exactly how long he would need to stay. The men with whom he regularly dealt were important and busy. Unexpected demands upon their time and attention sometimes forced them to reschedule appointments; new subjects could arise necessitating lengthier discussions than planned; occasionally he had to wait until someone he had to see recovered from illness. If he was scheduled to be in Moscow only a couple of weeks or so, he was given a suite at the party hotel on a floor set aside for secret communists or national liberation foreign dignitaries. If he was to be around longer, he lived in an apartment. That was the case in the fall of 1960 when he was a delegate to a conference of eighty-one parties that did not end until December.

  The well-heated apartment was situated on an upper floor of a centrally located building whose garbage chutes and stairwells did not reek of clogged refuse and stale urine. It had a parlor, a bedroom, a study alcove, a large safe for storage of secret documents he was allowed to study but not keep, and a decent bath and kitchen. A cook/housekeeper maintained an ample supply of food and drink, and replenished it daily. Before leaving for the day, she insisted on preparing a cold supper even if he was dining out. On such occasions, she took the supper home with her.

  Morris soon discovered that members of the International Department liked to visit him in the evening. They may have been sincere in their professed desire to discuss “general problems” or “general intelligence.” They undoubtedly were sincere in their enjoyment of the unlimited quantities of whisky and vodka they could imbibe for free. Morris welcomed them and all the inside information they imparted, wittingly or unwittingly. Now and then he did plead fatigue and suggest that prospective callers stop by later. On those evenings, he meant to copy documents by hand.

  Ponomarev in late November or early December gave Morris two documents to study. One provided a chronology of events that culminated in the breach between the Soviets and Chinese; the other was a Soviet analysis of the gravity of the breach. Upon receiving the documents from the FBI in late December, the State Department declared them to be “of unique importance.”9

  By the end of 1960, Freyman, Burlinson, and the few others in the FBI who knew about SOLO could be proud of its results.

  At the time, some prestigious journalists, academicians, politicians, and foreign affairs analysts in the United States still believed Fidel Castro to be a crusading votary of liberty and independence for the Cuban people. To them, any suggestion that he might be willing to sell Cuba to the Soviet Union in return for personal status as an absolute dictator would have seemed nothing short of paranoid. The early intelligence emanating from SOLO, however, warned U.S. policymakers of what was likely to happen—and what in fact did happen—in Cuba, and thereby allowed them to plan accordingly.

  To much, perhaps most, of the world, the Soviet empire and Peoples’ Republic of China in 1960 appeared to be a fearsome monolith occupying a fourth of the earth’s land surface and comprising more than a third of its population. Later, when little signs of trouble between them inevitably surfaced, they were widely dismissed as inconsequential. “Experts” could and did argue that far more united than divided the communist partners. For years, some influential U.S. intelligence officials even contended that the indicators were deceptions, part of a grand disinformation scheme.

  Almost from the inception of the Sino–Soviet split, authentic SOLO intelligence gathered at the highest echelons in Peking and Moscow showed that the breach was real, widening, and perhaps irreparable.

  Soviet leaders now welcomed Morris and Jack into their confidence; they relied on them to maintain the financial lifeline of American communism and trusted them to work with the KGB.

  Freyman and Burlinson had every professional reason to believe that, if security and Morris’ health held, there would be much more to come.

  five

  THE LUCK OF THE FBI

  NO ONE PROGRAMMED the events that made two new members available to the team. But Carl Freyman took full advantage of the good luck.

  During the annual inspection of the Cryptanalysis Section at FBI headquarters in late 1960, Supervisor Walter Boyle stood accused of two transgressions.

  The section chief, Churchill Downing, observed that some of his young civilian analysts and clerks voluntarily were staying after hours or coming in on weekends to do work they thought must be done. Their zeal impressed him all the more because they claimed neither overtime pay nor credit. “Walter, we ought to find some way to reward this extra effort,” he said. “You’re here all the time. I’d like you to start keeping a record of who’s here in off hours so I can note it on their fitness reports.” Someone found out about the informal log and filed a complaint that Boyle was attempting to coerce employees into working unpaid overtime.

  Then there was the issue of the pretty girl, or “slut,” as the inspector chose to call her. While her husband was away taking corporate training, the attractive clerk entertained a male FBI employee overnight at her home. Somehow the FBI learned about the tryst and at 4 P.M. on a Friday fired her for moral turpitude. The woman, who was twenty-three or twenty-four, reacted hysterically. She and her husband had just purchased a house, and they needed two incomes to meet mortgage payments. She did not know what to tell him and feared that dismissal from the FBI would so stigmatize her that she could not obtain another job.

  Boyle telephoned his wife at their home in suburban Springfield, Virginia, and told her what had happened. “Friday afternoon is the worst possible time to fire anyone. She will brood all weekend, and she’s suicidal. Could we invite her to dinner on Sunday night so she’ll have something to look forward to?” A girlfriend dropped her off at Boyle’s house; he consoled her by advising that in job hunting she could cite him as a reference, and after a pleasant dinner he drove her to her home in Maryland. Evidently the girlfriend told people in the office of the dinner; in any case, the inspector learned of it.

  Leaning across a desk, he kept shaking his finger at Boyle while lecturing him about consorting with immoral former employees. “You stick that finger in my face one more time and I’ll break it off,” Boyle shouted. For that insubordination, the FBI demoted him from supervisor to street agent and banished him to Chicago through a “disciplinary” transfer.

  A garbled account of the incident preceded him to Chicago, and he arrived there in early 1961 with the reputation of a piranha. No one asked him to lunch, for a beer after work, or to join a carpool, and no supervisor would accept him on his squad—until Freyman spoke up. “I’ll take him. Let’s give the man a chance and judge him by what he does.” That was typical of Freyman. But he also had gone to the trouble of examining Boyle’s background, which in ways paralleled his own.

  Boyle was born April 6, 1929, in Jersey City, New Jersey, into an extended family that included three brothers, a sister, aunts, uncles, and grandparents. His father was a professional barefist boxer, then a stevedore, a dock foreman, and a salesman, and his mother had worked as a secretary in New York. Both parents read widely, quoted literatur
e at the dinner table, and on Saturday afternoons gathered the children around the radio to listen to broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera. Under a pseudonym, his mother, a member of the Third Order of Saint Frances, wrote book reviews for the Carmelite magazine published for priests.

  Like Freyman, Boyle benefited from remarkable parochial schoolteachers who disciplined, stretched, and excited young minds. Sister Catherine Pierre was scarcely taller than her first-grade pupils at Saint Cecilia’s Grammar School in Englewood, New Jersey, yet she did not hesitate to give their faces a sharp slap or an encouraging pat. She taught Boyle to read and to love reading. “It is a magic key that opens the door to the world.” She so thoroughly ingrained in him the multiplication tables that by age seven he could multiply, add, subtract, and divide without pencil and paper. All his life he remembered her with gratitude. He also looked up to the football coach at adjacent Saint Cecilia’s High School. His name was Vincent Lombardi.

  Boyle’s father taught his four sons to box, and they settled disputes by putting on the gloves in a makeshift ring he created by tying rope around four trees in the yard. At school, Boyle thought it only natural to resolve arguments with his fists, and the more prowess he demonstrated, the more challenges he provoked. Endowed with quick reflexes and body coordination, trained by an experienced boxer, and naturally pugnacious, he invariably won, and parents of his antagonists called his parents to denounce him as a hoodlum, menace, and disgrace. “You’re acting like a mean, nasty kid and you’re going to get us run out of town,” his father warned. “If you get into one more fight, when you come home you’re going to have to fight me.” After the Saturday opera, his father gave him a basketball, took him to Saint Patrick’s parochial schoolyard, and taught him to shoot baskets, and Boyle developed into an outstanding basketball player.

  In the eighth grade at Saint Patrick’s, a tall, bent, and frail sister, Maria Helena, ordered him to stay after class, and he wondered what he had done wrong. “I think there is something special about you,” she began. “I want to talk to you about a special chance.”

  A wealthy Catholic laywoman dreamed of an academy that would mold brilliant boys into a cadre of Catholic intelligentsia with an education equal to the best in the world. To this end, she built a handsome four-story building on East 84th Street between Madison and Park Avenues in New York and there founded and endowed Regis High School. The Church staffed it with gifted Jesuits and scholastics and imposed an inflexible, classic curriculum: Latin, four years; Greek, two years; French or Spanish, two years; logic and ethics, four years; Shakespeare, two years; literature, two years; English composition, four years; ancient and modern history, four years; math (algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and calculus), four years; and religion, every day. The excellence of the school was so renowned that graduates were virtually guaranteed admission to any university, and it cost nothing to attend.

  The problem was that thousands upon thousands of boys applied each year and only 140 were accepted. The sister told Boyle that she believed he could be one of them if he was willing to be tutored by her each day after school for the entrance exams.

  Boyle entered Regis High School in September 1943, and from the first day it was tough. A Jesuit announced to the freshmen that the rules and standards of the school were unbending, and that probably only half of them would do well enough to be graduated. Boyle commuted by bus and subway from New Jersey, and had to get up at 5 A.M. to be on time for morning communion. Priests cheered the Regis basketball team that he captained but gave him no quarter the next morning, though they knew he could not have gotten home before 1 A.M. After a night game, he was sure to be called upon first. “Mr. Boyle, will you begin the reading?” Practices and games subtracted from his study time, and he struggled academically. But in 1947, he was one of 69 of the original 140 to be graduated.

  Columbia University, being a proper Ivy League school, did not deign to offer athletic scholarships to buy professionals. A basketball coach put it to Boyle in a more sophisticated way: “You will receive a loan sufficient to pay all the costs of your tuition, books, clothes, and living expenses. At the end of four years, the loan will be forgiven. You will owe nothing.”

  Boyle was proud. He could attend a great university, study physics, play basketball, and make his family proud without burdening them. His father, who had quit his job at the docks as a result of an ethical dispute with Henry Ford, president of the Ford Motor Company, gazed upon him with a look that connoted both dismay and sadness. “Borrow thousands of dollars without any intention of repaying them! That’s swindling or stealing. Don’t you know right from wrong? No son of mine will be part of such a fraud.”

  Instead of an Ivy League university, Boyle enrolled in small Saint Peter’s College, so close to home he could walk to it. He studied physics until the nuclear physics program was dropped for lack of students, then majored in mathematics. After Regis, college was easy; he starred in the classroom and at basketball, and looked forward to marrying a childhood sweetheart upon graduation in 1951. When the North Koreans invaded South Korea in 1950, he tried to join the Marine Corps only to be collared by his father. “An educated fighter is a better fighter. You get your degree first.”10

  Upon graduation, he joined the Marine Corps which, after officer training, commissioned him a second lieutenant and sent him to the army artillery school at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. He liked Oklahoma—vast plains perfumed by sage and wildflowers, limitless skies, the purest of air and friendliest of people. At the Bachelor Officers’ Quarters, he for the first time in his life had a room all to himself. Some evenings he browsed at the bookstore in nearby Lawton; it was usually crowded, and the interest people out on the prairie evinced in books impressed him. Later he realized that the popularity of the bookstore might owe something to the fact that the town bootlegger dispensed his wares from the floor above it.

  Boyle had requested and received orders that directed him to proceed from Fort Sill to Korea in July 1952. Late in the afternoon, the lieutenant colonel in charge of his class proposed a change in the orders. In return for the army training its personnel, the Marine Corps obligated itself to provide instructors at Fort Sill. “You are a mathematician and artillery fire is based on mathematics. Men respect you. You are first in the class, and you can be an exceptional instructor. The army wants you to stay here, and the Marines have agreed. If you agree, your orders will be changed tomorrow and you will finish your tour of duty here.”

  “Sir, I did not enlist in the Marine Corps to serve in Oklahoma. The war is in Korea.”

  “Lieutenant, I don’t doubt that if you go to Korea you will be one good artillery officer. If you do your duty here, there will be many good artillery officers.”

  “Sir, I want to think about it.”

  “I need your answer by 0800 tomorrow.”

  That night Boyle walked around alone and aimlessly. He could marry his fiancée, live with her in a neat bungalow on the base, and take her to the Officers’ Club on Saturday night and to church on Sunday morning where patriotic families would contest for the honor of taking them home to dinner. They could have children, buy a car, take correspondence courses, and arrange for a job after discharge. He would not be maimed or killed, and he would be honorable. Logically, the colonel’s rationale was faultless. He knew he could be a good instructor and that it was the duty of any Marine to do what the service wanted rather than what he wanted.

  “What is your decision, lieutenant?”

  “Sir, I thank you and the army for wanting me. I do not want my orders changed.”

  Along with other marines and several navy nurses, Boyle flew from California in a Mars Flying Boat equipped with comfortable reclining seats and a full galley. Having ministered to torn and dying bodies evacuated from Korea, the nurses knew what awaited the young men in combat and they treated them affectionately, acting of their own initiative as stewardesses. Boyle was twenty-three, and the nurses looked to him to be about his age; he guessed nobody
in the cabin was much older than twenty-five. As they parted upon landing at Barbers Point, Hawaii, the nurses wished each marine good luck and some shamelessly bestowed unmilitary hugs and kisses. Their spontaneous sweetness and poorly masked sadness made Boyle feel like he was at his own wake. Granted four hours’ liberty, he drank cold beer and, having recoiled at the native dish of poi, enjoyed a memorable steak, and he thought with admiration of the women, to him really girls only a few years away from their dolls, who had volunteered to try to ease the agony of the maimed and dying brought from battle.

  In a spartan and noisy yet rugged and reliable DC-3, they flew from island to island, down the Japanese archipelago, and on July 7, 1952, landed in Korea. At the airport, he received his first command as a forward observer (FO). It consisted of a scout who was a corporal; three communications specialists, privates; and a sixteen-year-old Korean interpreter, “Junior.” Contemporary technology lessens the need for human forward observers; in Korea they were essential. From a bunker on a barren hillside or snowy peak, they spotted enemy movements or positions and radioed to fire control centers behind the front line (main line of resistance, or MLR) mathematical coordinates of their location. As the American 155- or 105- or 7 5 -millimeter artillery fired, the FOs watched where the shells exploded and redirected the fire (500 yards right or left, increase or decrease range 700 yards) until the shells hit the target. The Chinese and North Koreans understood that the observers spying from posts as much as a mile and a half forward of the MLR called down death upon them; they made the killing of FOs a priority. In Korea an FO’s life expectancy was short.

  Boyle and his little unit proceeded immediately to the front to support South Korean Marines and within three hours were engaged in fierce battle. He quickly learned from the juvenile interpreter a Korean phrase, Papyon, which roughly translated into English as “a shell is on its way.” Through his battery commander’s scope, he could see smoke that enemy artillery emitted upon firing and shouted to warn the Koreans to take cover. They in turn had learned to shout in English “corpsman, corpsman,” which meant someone had been hit and desperately needed medical help. On that first night and succeeding nights Boyle often heard the call for medics and often shouted that shells were on their way.