Operation Solo

by John Barron

  Jack and Morris smiled, and Miller saw why headquarters had continued to let New York and Chicago run the case since its inception.

  THE CONFIDENCE THAT ALL felt upon leaving the conference was shortlived. Through the summer and into the autumn of 1973, the ongoing Watergate circus, the disclosures of secret information, and the political attacks upon the CIA and FBI mortified Morris and Jack. A barrage of allegations, true or false, compelled Gray to resign as interim director of the FBI (he was accused, among other things, of removing documents from headquarters and throwing them into the Potomac River). At the behest of Boyle, Chicago SAC Richard Held warned headquarters that Morris and Jack again needed some high-level handholding. Morris was due to fly via Europe to Moscow on November 21, so the FBI arranged another operational conference in New York on November 20. Inspector Andrew Decker and Supervisor Brannigan came up from Washington to preside over it, and at first it was a repetition of the May conference.

  Decker started by saying that SOLO intelligence was “invaluable and unavailable from any place else,” that there were many means of tracking, numbering, and evaluating weapons and military forces, but that “insights into what people were thinking” were more important and rarely attainable.

  Morris responded with a review of SOLO accomplishments in the 1970s: Every time there were negotiations about arms control or Vietnam or anything else, we knew in advance what they were thinking and afterward we knew what they thought. “We were always one step ahead.”

  Morris always had been scared; now Boyle more acutely than ever appreciated just how scared he was. Morris said he thought he understood the United States and the FBI; he understood political disagreements—after all, they were part of what America was about—but he could not understand politicians who struck at the institutions that existed to guarantee the right to disagree; and he frankly wondered whether the FBI still was functional. “This has been a very bad year. How can a person feel secure in these circumstances? We have said if this thing blows, there isn’t a place on earth that could hide us. If they found out that for all these years we have duped all of them—Mao, Chou, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Suslov, Ponomarev, the head of the KGB, and the whole KGB—if it was the last thing they did, they would try to exterminate us. Hundreds of men would vie for the honor of doing that. Tomorrow I leave for Moscow. It is not easy in Moscow. I am a member of the club. I have my own apartment, servants, and driver, and a card that gets me into the speakeasies and anything I want. I can deal with them; I’ve done that most of my life.”

  The minutes of the meeting paraphrased Morris’ next statements (and anyone is entitled to guess why). Despite these amenities, Morris and Eva, when she was along, lived in fear of making the most minute mistake and the necessity of making every nuance right. A little example of how careful they had to be: The Soviets discerned that art galleries and exhibitions delighted Eva, and they took her and Morris to an exhibition of paintings by a Jewish artist who had been “rehabilitated.” Several beguiled Eva, and she asked Morris if he had enough rubles with him to buy one. Curtly, Morris told her no; later he explained, “They know I am Jewish; I don’t want to remind them of it.”

  Still, they could manage in Moscow. But they could not manage in Washington; the greatest fear they had in Moscow was of what might happen in Washington. They feared the politician, the journalist, the climbing bureaucrat—the congressional or White House aide—who, from ambition, ignorance, avarice, or malice, might exploit any knowledge of SOLO and thereby betray them.

  Like Miller in May, Decker took his time and thought about what to say, and like Miller, he was honest. “The FBI is back on an even keel. Morale never was bad at the operating level. Pat Gray used terrible judgment, abysmal; but we rode it out. If some politicians knew about this operation they probably would exploit it. But they never, ever will know… John Dean would have betrayed his mother, if he had anything on her. There can be a traitor in any organization. Jesus had one. But so far as we know the FBI has not had one. Doubtless someday we will. But he won’t be part of SOLO.”

  Morris said that in Moscow he probably would be asked about a small story in one of the Chicago newspapers alleging that the Soviets were funding the American Communist Party. Decker replied, “The story was written by a notorious anticommunist, and their records will show that. The story offers no specifics or proof or indications of how the supposed funds are being delivered or what they amount to or what they are being used for. You can be sure that if the reporter had any specifics or evidence, he would have reported them. He did not and everyone ignored the story for just what it is: informed speculation by a young anticommunist. Anyone can ask, ‘Who else would give money to the American Communist Party except the Soviet Union?’ So it is nothing. You can say, ‘The FBI would love to catch Jack or me with the money, and it would have all American television photographing us as they carted us off to jail and it would do that without asking anybody.’”

  Decker asked if that would wash in Moscow. Morris answered in one word, “Brilliantly.”

  Burlinson, Langtry, and Boyle read Jack well; whereas in May he might have been theatrical, he now was earnest and seeking professional counsel. “The Russians have been keeping very quiet. The last time it took four days to meet my contact. When I did meet him, he kept questioning me about security. Then he talked about setting up contingency plans in the event contact is broken.”

  Jack paused, stared at Decker and Brannigan, and asked, “What did the Watergate committee see?”

  Decker replied, “Absolutely nothing, zero.”

  “Well, the Russians’ experience is that an apparatus lasts five years, no longer,” Jack said. “But we are still going after five times five years. This gives them cause to reconsider this operation from every angle. My Russian contact worries all the time. He asks me how I am feeling. Then he begins to ask me about Morris. They are very vigilant. Gus is also very vigilant. Sometimes he lets out information to see what will happen. He is testing… The Russians have changed procedures. My Soviet contact will meet and ask if everything is O.K. Then he goes away and comes back in fifteen minutes or half an hour. Also there is a strict order: no messages or talking while handing over money.”

  Decker’s response took Langtry back to the woodlands, rolling hills, and meadows of Virginia, to Quantico where Marines and future FBI agents trained, and he could hear his instructor: Someday you will have to be the director. There will be no supervisor or manual to consult; there will be no telephone. You alone will have to decide, then and there.

  Within hours, Morris had to leave for Moscow. There was no time to assemble a committee or make a study; Morris and Jack would construe any ploy to lead Burlinson, Langtry, and Boyle out of the room for even a few minutes of consultation away from them as a sign of distrust; the FBI—the United States—very much needed the trust and services of these two men and their wives, all now in their seventies. So Decker on the spot decided and became for the moment the director. In essence, he proposed or ordered that the FBI and the SOLO team turn things upside down, that they turn quite rational Soviet concerns with security into American advantage.

  “For a while, things should be quiet. Jack should miss a few meetings, ostensibly for security reasons. You must realize that their security on meetings is going to be tougher and tougher. They cannot afford to have this operation compromised. They must be scared to death that at any moment the FBI will jump on them.”

  After missing a meeting, Jack should signal through the “rubber duck” or micro transmitter that he was all right, that something made him think the rendezvous was unsafe, and that he would meet at the fallback date and place. When he met Chuchukin he should appear worried, but not paranoid. He should say that all of his concerns were perhaps irrational; nevertheless, he wanted to report them. Then he should recite a series of fictitious and unverifiable incidents: a van that did not belong to anybody in the neighborhood loitered around his house; a young man and woman parke
d near his house and kissed and caressed, but his street was not a lovers’ lane; his telephone sometimes failed, and the telephone company said it was having problems with squirrels gnawing at its lines—all right, the squirrels were pests, but up until recently they hadn’t cut his telephone service.

  If the KGB interviewed Morris in Moscow, as it normally did during his year-end visits, he should express concern about security, ask if there had been any more defectors, and demand reassurance that knowledge of MORAT was being tightly held. However, a fine balance had to be struck between convincing the KGB that Morris and Jack were acutely concerned with security and frightening the KGB into believing that the operation had been compromised. Jack should make clear that he was willing to go on, but that everyone had to be very careful. Morris should not bring up security matters with his Politburo buddies; they didn’t give a damn about such petty matters, but if they asked about them, he should defer to the KGB. In talking to the KGB, Morris should point out that he had not voiced his apprehensions to the Politburo; in operational matters, he put his trust in the KGB.

  Moscow was as cold and laden with snow as when Morris first rode through its streets on a horse-drawn sleigh in 1929, and he and Eva welcomed the warmth and sanctuary of their apartment. By decorating the apartment with small Russian antiques and paintings, Eva had tried to make it into a second home, like the apartment in New York. They kept there extensive toiletries and clothing, including a plaid woolen robe, fleece-lined slippers, and flannel pajamas Eva had given Morris. Morris put them on while Eva gathered supper from the refrigerator, which as always was amply stocked with delicacies. Doctors told Morris that a couple of glasses of red wine a day would do him no harm, might do him some good, and were preferable to sleeping pills, so they uncorked a really fine bottle of Burgundy and before supper looked out on the falling snow that made the city appear pristine. Eva remembered because Morris, who would be seventy-two in May, suddenly and tenderly embraced her and said, “You are the greatest thing that ever happened to me. What a comrade you are.” Hastily, Morris corrected himself. “I meant partner.” They laughed and proceeded to enjoy the delicious borscht Yekaterina had prepared along with good, chewy Russian bread. Morris thought, Bread is the one good thing communism has given the people. No, that’s not right. In my childhood we had good bread, and we exported wheat instead of begging for it from the United States and Canada. Before they fell asleep, Morris said, “Don’t forget to make Irina [Eva’s escort] get the postcards tomorrow.”

  Before an extended mission, Morris, with the help of Boyle, loaded big suitcases with all sorts of odds and ends as well as with the customary gifts. When Boyle asked why he was packing some peculiar items, Morris habitually replied, “Just in case.” The FBI rented a post office box to which Morris would send cryptically worded picture postcards from Moscow addressed to Mr. Justin Case, as in “Just in case.”

  It took time for the cards to wend their way to Chicago, and Morris could write relatively few words on them. So the cards were not the ideal means of saying something to the FBI while in the Soviet Union; but they were the only means. By asking the escort to buy cards and the housekeeper to mail them, Morris could proclaim to the KGB his innocence.

  Morris in the morning told Ponomarev that the American party needed $3.6 million for 1974; the Soviets, as Morris knew they would, agreed to $1.8 million. Ponomarev and Kazakov, not very delicately, instructed Morris to make Hall understand that “detente with the United States is now the cornerstone of Soviet foreign policy.” They did not say it outright but they clearly conveyed a message for Hall: This is the party line and you had better follow it, whether or not you like it.

  There was something else Hall must understand. The Soviets recognized that the United States, because of its relatively influential Jewish population, had a special interest in Israel and the Middle East. The Soviet Union also had strategic interests in the Middle East, which was “much closer to us than it is to them.” Soviet and American interests in the Middle East conflicted and so the area was a “flash point,” which Morris interpreted to mean an area where events could get out of hand and lead to war. The Soviets were prepared to accept American interests if the United States would accept theirs. In return for American concessions and acknowledgment of its right to have a say about what went on in the Middle East, the Soviet Union was ready to declare to the Arab world that Israel had a right to exist as a sovereign state and to establish formal diplomatic relations with it. Thus far, Nixon and Kissinger had been frank and honest in negotiations. True, they had not spoken about their “billing and cooing” with the Chinese (“billing and cooing” were the words used by an erudite and diplomatic Soviet interpreter; the Russian words were different and vulgar). But the (obscenity) Chinese had not been the subject of discussions; so they did not lie about that. Nixon and Kissinger also had honored their word about keeping negotiations and communications secret. But if the negotiations succeeded, everything, or most of it, would come out, and Hall should be ready for the results and ready to applaud them.

  The Soviets, who liked Eva and Morris, exhausted them with hospitality. Almost every night there was a dinner with a member of the Politburo or Central Committee; at each Morris tried anew to explain Watergate. But to men who had colluded in the extermination of millions of their fellow citizens, including longtime comrades, Watergate still made little sense.

  They landed in New York on December 12, 1973. The heartening sight of Boyle at the airport; the general gaiety of New York preparing for Christmas; the relief from fear that hourly they are being watched and listened to; the comfort of being in an apartment that really was their own, of being able to walk a block or two to markets, delicatessens, carryouts where at almost any hour you could satisfy any reasonable hunger; the family evenings with Jack, Roz, and Langtry at the storybook home of Al and Ann Burlinson; and, compared to Moscow, the overall merriment and jocularity of the people they saw on the streets—all combined to make the first days back home happy.

  They stayed the first days in New York because the demands from headquarters were so voracious there was no time to go to Chicago. The first mission reports, once they were circulated, elicited a succession of questions; far from perturbing Morris, they gladdened him because they proved that the intelligence was being seriously analyzed by intelligent people. Like Boyle, he awakened early and was at work at least by 8 A.M.

  But on December 17, without consulting anyone except Eva, Morris made a pronouncement to the FBI: Tomorrow he and his wife were setting off on a vacation that would last until January 3. During it, he did not want to be disturbed.

  Morris lived to work, and the belief that his work was vital to the United States probably kept him alive, against heavy medical odds. As a child he worked after Jewish school, helping in the cobbler shop of his father; at party headquarters in Chicago, to help after making his rounds as the “Red Milkman,” he got up at night to stuff stupid communist leaflets into the mailboxes of Americans who would have skinned him if they caught him. Carl Freyman started the custom by which the FBI weekly assembled a package of Soviet publications for Morris to analyze. Sometimes Morris called as early as 7 A.M. on Sunday to excitedly explain the significance of something he had culled from publications delivered on Saturday. Doubtless, he would enjoy a few free days to visit relatives during the holidays. But that was not the real reason he declared a vacation. He intended to go nowhere, only to hibernate at home. But by making himself officially unavailable, he liberated Boyle to be with his wife and six children before, during, and after Christmas.

  After the tranquil holidays, on the night of January 18, 1974, Morris received a telephone call, and when he put the phone down his hand shook. The FBI had just deciphered a message from the KGB to Jack for MORAT: “Suspend all contact until further notice.”

  Headquarters demanded to know what had happened. In the first hours, Burlinson, Boyle, and Langtry had no answers. Then agents uninvolved in SOLO reported
that, on the afternoon of the eighteenth, Chuchukin, Jack’s KGB handler, without bothering to pack, bolted from New York for Montreal. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police advised that he flew from Montreal on a ticket that listed his final destination as Moscow. Why? The next day Burlinson or Langtry found the answer.

  The morning of the eighteenth a large bookstore on Fifth Avenue displayed in its front window copies of a new book about the KGB.14 The book contained a photograph of Chuchukin captioned, “Vladimir Aleksandrovich Chuchukin, a KGB officer assigned to work against Western journalists under the cover of a United Nations appointment.” An art or photo editor had placed his picture on a page with photographs, surreptitiously snapped and therefore unflattering, of three other prominent KGB officers who looked like snarling thugs. On the adjoining page appeared photographs diagramming a sinister KGB espionage device. The net effect portrayed Chuchukin as a candidate for the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted” list.

  It is hard to say who was more dismayed—people in the Politburo, Central Committee, and KGB headquarters in Moscow, or people at FBI headquarters and the Chicago and New York offices. Something they all prized, for different reasons, seemed imperiled.

  During the crisis, communications from headquarters to New York and Chicago were calm, reasoned, and encouraging, in part because of the changes in Washington. Plagued by scandal, the Nixon administration undertook to select as a new director of the FBI a man of unimpeachable rectitude, and it chose the police chief of Kansas City, Clarence Kelley, a former FBI agent. Kelley set out to surround himself with the strongest men he could find, and he appointed Raymond Wannall to be assistant director in charge of intelligence.