by John Barron
The furtive meetings in the countryside were brief, so the FBI script was economical with words. Jack re-created a fictitious encounter that supposedly occurred on the street outside his office (a well-furnished cover office the FBI leased for him at 3 Battery Place). He chanced to run into an old friend and comrade from the 1930s (Clip), whose true name he gave. Clip asked if Jack still was active in the party, and after Jack assured him that he was, Clip requested a favor. Could Jack ascertain what happened to Clip’s father in Russia? The request suggested to Jack that Clip retained sentimental ties to the “Mother Country,” and it suggested to him an idea. Jack was worried about his capacity to continue by himself to do all that was being asked of him; he needed help and it seemed to him that someone as proven and reliable as Clip could be an ideal assistant, especially with the radio. The comrades knew best; Jack hoped they would think about the possibility.
Talanov a few weeks later gave Jack a photograph of the grave of Clip’s father and a sympathetically worded account of his father’s last year. He also gave an order to Gus Hall: Investigate Clip. Hall assigned Jack to oversee the investigation; Jack reported that Clip seemed ideologically sound but that both he and Morris wanted the comrades to make the final decision. The KGB then asked if Clip was willing to come to Moscow for talks. In Moscow, Clip passed the ideological examinations; the technical tests by the KGB of his communications skills ended abruptly after only about thirty minutes. The KGB examiner said, “There is no point in going on. You know more than I do. Why don’t we have a good lunch?”
To protect both Clip and SOLO, the FBI for many years let Clip think that, in dealings with Jack and Hall, in recording the radio messages—in all he did—he was spying on a Soviet spy ring. Clip, the Comintern agent turned U.S. Marine, did not learn the truth until toward the end. His contributions always were valuable; toward the end they were invaluable.
THE SOLO TEAM ACQUIRED a new and main member in 1966 when the FBI assigned John Langtry to be Al Burlinson’s deputy. Langtry soon became a principal handler of Jack and one of the best friends of Burlinson, Boyle, Morris, and Eva. In selecting him the FBI, whether by sagacity or luck, once again picked exactly the right man.
Langtry was born May 10, 1924, on Long Island, the son of a striking Scottish mother and an American father of Scottish–Irish descent. His father was doing well, managing the family construction business until 1929 when he was killed in an accident. The crash of the stock market that same year wiped out the family assets, and his mother was left a widow without any money. While millions were jobless during the ensuing Depression, she was fortunate enough to obtain employment by a wealthy New York family as a governess. However, alone and working full time, she felt unable to provide the kind of family environment she wanted for her son, so she packed him off to his grandparents in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia.
There, discipline reigned. One morning at breakfast Langtry refused to eat his oatmeal. “You must eat it, wee laddie,” said his grandmother.
“I will not.”
Because the public school was only three blocks away, Langtry walked home for lunch. That noon, the only food on the table was the breakfast oatmeal. Again, he spurned it. At dinner he once again faced the cold and now repulsive oatmeal. His grandmother said, “You’ll have no other food until you finish your oatmeal.” Famished, Langtry forced it down—and learned not to disobey.
He made his own bed, washed dishes, and helped with the laundry. In the winter he stoked the furnace and stacked firewood; in the summer he mowed the lawn and tended the garden. Until he completed his chores and homework, he could not listen to the radio, and he could not look at the newspaper before his grandparents read it. If he complained about being punished at school, his grandparents said, “You deserved it.”
At the same time, his grandparents enveloped him with affection; his mother wrote often and sent presents, particularly books; and he was happy. On winter evenings by the fire, his grandfather enthralled and excited him with tales of the Victorian era, of Scottish brigades in India, and of Kitchner at Khartoum. The works of Rudyard Kipling and Alfred Tennyson further fired his imagination, and he dreamed of charging with the Light Brigade and marching behind the bagpipes of a Highland regiment.
The Canadian Maple Leaf flew daily from a tall flagpole in the front yard, but on Langtry’s birthday and the Fourth of July his grandfather raised the Stars and Stripes, and the phonograph blared out “The Star Spangled Banner.” And throughout Langtry’s childhood and adolescence, his grandfather imbued him with an ethos embodied in three words—“God, Flag, Truth.”
His grandfather taught other enduring lessons. Once Langtry asked, “Will God punish me if I play with Catholic boys?”
“Laddie, why do you ask such a question?”
“Father LeBlanc says that if Catholic boys play with Protestant boys, they will go straight to hell.”
The grandfather said, “No, it doesn’t matter to God where you worship. He cares only that you do worship and try to live by His word.”
With Canada at war, students underwent mandatory military training during their last two years of high school, and in 1942 Langtry wrote his mother that he intended to enlist in the Canadian army after graduation. She immediately replied, “You will do no such thing. You will join the armed forces of the United States.”
In Langtry’s mind, the fighter pilot had displaced the cavalry officer as the most romantic and heroic of figures, so he applied for admission to the U.S. navy aviation cadet program. The competition was intense, but the navy accepted him and called him to active duty in January 1943. He was not far away from a commission and, he hoped, aerial combat in the Pacific when the navy in 1944 abruptly reduced the number of aviation cadets, and he finished the war as a meteorologist at Alameda, California.
Discharged in 1946, he applied to several colleges he could afford to attend on the GI Bill stipend and entered the first that accepted him, Drake University in Iowa. The trauma of the Depression had instilled in him as a child a visceral fear of unemployment. An officer at Alameda, an accountant in civilian life, had told him that a competent, honest accountant probably always could find a job. Without much enthusiasm, he earned a degree in accounting and went on to graduate school on a scholarship.
While playing handball at the YMCA, Langtry fell in with the local police chief, who urged him to think about a career in the FBI and extended a special invitation. The chief moonlighted as a security guard in an after-hours hotel nightclub that illegally sold liquor. The FBI watched the establishment because it attracted, among others, criminals and fugitives, and one night the chief introduced Langtry to two agents. They spoke glowingly of the FBI as an elite organization offering adventure, camaraderie, and good pay; more important, it offered a man the opportunity to help protect the public and the nation, to do something of which he could be proud. The prospect of hunting down gangsters and spies seemed very romantic, like being a cavalry officer or fighter pilot, and more romantic than being an accountant.
Langtry most remembered two strictures given to his class at Quantico where he began FBI training in April 1951. One instructor emphasized that, if endangered, an agent must never hesitate to use his weapon: “Better to be judged by twelve than carried by six.” Another said, “Sometimes you are going to have to be the ‘Director’ and make decisions on your own. There will be no manual, no supervisor, no telephone.”
The first arrest he made at his first duty office in Savannah, Georgia, entailed none of the glamour he had envisioned. With search warrant in hand, he entered a room where a baby slept on a bed. From under the bed he dragged a frightened fugitive, the baby’s father. Within the year, though, the FBI posted him to Chicago and challenging duty on the Underground Squad tasked with finding communists who had gone into hiding after being convicted under the Smith Act. Now Langtry began really to learn about the Communist Party as well as how to work the streets of a huge city. He met and admired Freyman, and heard that Freyma
n was involved in some important, mysterious operation, but he knew nothing more.
Each FBI agent annually lists his “office of first preference”—the city in which, given the choice, he most would like to work. Langtry put down New York, and in 1955 the FBI transferred him to the domestic intelligence section there. For a decade, he studied and infiltrated informants into the American Communist Party. By the time he was introduced to SOLO he knew as much about the party as any field agent in the FBI, and he knew a lot about the KGB. And his knowledge had been gradually amassed from firsthand experience and the personal tutelage of veterans rather than from manuals and lectures.
Langtry also possessed another body of knowledge hard to acquire from books or lectures. He knew New York: its subways, traffic patterns, and byways, and its bars, ethnic cafés, parks, and museums. And he was almost as familiar with its suburban counties—Suffolk, Nassau, and Westchester. He was at home on the streets, in the subway, and in neighborhood bars, and he moved about the city easily and confidently. Burlinson, while waiting for Jack, was once nearly arrested by a transit officer for smoking on a subway platform. That would never happen to Langtry.
Langtry needed his ability to navigate the city and suburbs because he had to do or involve himself in most of what the Soviets thought Jack was doing.
The KGB radioed transmissions from Moscow three days a week, each day at a different time and on a different frequency. The FBI in Washington recorded and deciphered each transmission, using a copy of the cipher pad the KGB annually issued to Jack, and flashed the plain-language text to New York. (Sometimes a transmission consisted only of the letters SK which meant, “We have no message today; as far as we know, all is well.”) Clip also recorded transmissions composed of groups of five numerals. Because neither the KGB nor the FBI in the early years entrusted Soviet ciphers to him, he did not know what the transmissions said. All he could do was photograph the recorded numerals, pass one photograph to the FBI, and leave another in a drop for Jack. Thus, every time a message arrived, Langtry had to take the deciphered text from the FBI offices in Manhattan to Jack somewhere in Queens, then pick up the still-enciphered version from a drop Clip had filled.
Next, someone had to park a few blocks from the Soviet Mission to the United Nations and signal by means of a walkie-talkie that the message had or had not been received. Signals were effected through a small rubber doll that emitted a squeak when squeezed. Three squeaks said yes; five said no. Jack could also call for an emergency meeting, to be held the next day, by making the doll emit seven squeaks. The KGB acknowledged receipt of a signal by sending back from its doll the same number of squeaks heard in the Mission.
Before 8 A.M. five days a week, Langtry had to check a signal site for chalk marks signifying that the KGB desired contact with Jack that day. A chalked V summoned him to a brief personal meeting at 4:05 P.M., and an O to a lengthier meeting at 7:05 P.M. An X announced that the KGB would deposit a message in a drop by 4:05 P.M. (In appealing to the KGB to allow him an assistant, Jack cited the frequent necessity to locate and photograph for Soviet approval new meeting, drop, and signal sites. Actually, the FBI and particularly Langtry did most of the scouting for them.)
The KGB would hand over money directly only to Jack or, in his absence, Morris. Even so, each delivery required much preparation and work by Langtry and the FBI.
The Soviets recognized that if they were caught slipping hundreds of thousands of dollars to Jack, the operation would end, and they strictly followed set procedures to minimize that possibility. Because the KGB believed that the FBI was understaffed and less vigilant on weekends, the transfers almost invariably took place on a Saturday night. The previous Friday afternoon, the KGB officer chosen to pass the money would drive with his family from the city to the Glen Cove estate the Soviets maintained as a weekend retreat, or collective dacha. He was trying to persuade any surveillants that he was taking a respite with his wife and children, and wouldn’t be working that weekend. But on Saturday afternoon he would drive out of the compound and meander circuitously through the countryside toward the rendezvous point, followed at some distance by another KGB officer. About half an hour before the meeting with Jack, the two would stop at a service station or shopping center to talk briefly and then drive on, the officer behind looking out for the one in front. At the meeting site, Jack’s handler would park, raise the hood of his car, and peer at the engine. Jack would stop, get out of the car, and ask if he could be of help. From the trunk of his car, the KGB officer would hand him one to three large packages and a slip of paper with a telephone number and time written on it. Jack in return would give him a cigarette package concealing the microfilm container and a note cryptically listing what was on the film—intelligence reports, messages from Hall or Morris to the Kremlin, answers to Soviet questions, Morris’ travel plans. Ordinarily, the exchanges took less than a minute. After Jack drove away, his handler again would meet the colleague who followed him to detect any surveillance. If they were truthful, such KGB countersurveillants always must have reported that they saw no signs of surveillance. For at these furtive encounters among American estates, Jack was the only surveillant.
Meanwhile, Langtry would wait outside a roadside diner, tavern, or all-night pharmacy that he had selected in a previous survey of the area and, at a comparable place he had picked a mile or so away, his supervisor or other agents also would wait. Shortly, Jack would drive up and turn over the packages and slip of paper with the telephone number. “Be damn sure you call it on time,” he would say. Precisely on time, Langtry would dial the number, let the phone ring three times and hang up. The telephone numbers were in public booths around the Soviet Mission, and the three rings assured a KGB officer listening outside that Jack and the cash were safe. Langtry then relayed the money to colleagues awaiting him nearby, and they took it straight to a safe in the New York office.
Once, because of impossible weather, the transfer money from Jack was delayed, and it was agreed that he would hand it over at a motel near La Guardia Airport. The FBI rented adjacent rooms and picked the lock of the interior door that joined them. Burlinson and Langtry waited in one room for Jack and Morris, who happened to be in town, to come to the other with the cash. Morris knocked on their door, then silently and urgently motioned for Burlinson and Langtry to follow him. In the elevator he whispered, “Jack’s had a heart attack.”
While Jack stood by his car in the motel parking lot clutching his chest, Morris opened the trunk to remove the packages of cash. One of the packages had broken, and the trunk was littered with $50 bills. As Burlinson and Langtry rushed to stuff the bills into a suitcase, Morris rose and banged his head sharply against the lid of the trunk. The spectacle of two old men staggering around and moaning and two younger men frantically scooping up cash entertained onlookers standing on an embankment above the lot.
Having gathered the loose money, Langtry started off with it toward his car while Burlinson helped Morris and Jack into the motel. In the chaos, Langtry had forgotten where he parked, and he paced the lanes of the lot looking for his car. A pickup truck followed him, slowly and closely, turning wherever he did. Langtry stopped and, hand in jacket, confronted the driver, “Just what do you want?”
“Your parking space.”
Cardiograms persuaded physicians that Jack had not suffered a heart attack, and they attributed his indisposition to acute indigestion. Morris, except for a cut on the head, was fine, and in his reports to Washington and New York made no mention of the incident.
A few weeks later at a Washington conference, Burlinson, Langtry, and Boyle were rebuked for not sharing more operational details with headquarters. Everyone was on the same side; lessons learned from SOLO could be applied to other operations; and wise Washington elders now and then might lend useful advice. Members of the SOLO team had no intention of telling headquarters or anybody else any more than absolutely necessary, and Burlinson did not want to be saddled with any new reporting guideline
s or operational restrictions, so he tried to make everyone forget the issue. “I admit there are some things we do not tell you. I’ll give you one example.” Burlinson then recounted, perhaps with some embellishment, the events at the motel. Amid much laughter, Burlinson asked, “Do you really want us to put such things on paper?”
“No, we would rather you tell the story when you think it should be told,” said the assistant director presiding. “To quote Shakespeare, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’” As the meeting adjourned he invited Burlinson, Langtry, and Boyle to be his guests at lunch.
His words and the conspicuous absence of a luncheon invitation to any of the other assembled FBI brass reaffirmed the unspoken rule that so long governed and sustained SOLO: Let the men who have run the case so brilliantly keep running it as they judge best.
REGARDING THE SOVIET MONEY, however, there was total openness and agreement among Washington, New York, and Chicago and all members of the SOLO team. Over the years, millions upon millions of dollars passed through the hands of Jack, Morris, Eva, Langtry, Boyle, and a few other agents who left their families on Saturday nights. Any one of them could have dipped into the cash with relative impunity but not one of them ever did, and all willingly abided by the most punctilious accounting procedures.
On Sundays, after a Saturday delivery, Langtry opened the packages of money in the presence of a supervisor and several other agents at the FBI office. Teams of two separately counted the bills, photocopied them, and logged the serial numbers of each. They then repackaged the cash according to denomination and locked it in safe deposit boxes at a branch of Hanover Trust Company at 69th Street and 3rd Avenue. When Hall asked for money, agents removed the amount requested, counted it again, listed the amount withdrawn, wrapped it anew, and gave it to Jack or Morris for transfer to him. To accommodate Hall’s demands on weekends or holidays, Jack kept up to $100,000 in a hole the FBI drilled into his basement wall. Later an FBI carpenter built a bookcase with a secret compartment, and Jack made sure Hall saw it in his study.
