by John Barron
Brannigan also tried. “We told them this was a sensitive operation and that if they exposed it, the country would be the loser.”
Unmollified, Jack shouted, “This is serious and shocking.”
“I also am surprised and shocked,” Morris said. “Once something goes beyond a tiny group of people we no longer have a secret. The danger is that politicians or staff members will betray information for their own self-aggrandizement. We know little about these staff members or their relatives. We must admit to ourselves that we no longer have a secret.”
“I would be a fool to disagree,” Leavitt said.
“It could reach other senators and congressmen with bigger ambitions. One of them could leak it to the press; that’s happened. We have no assurances. Then what about the communists? Do we know all the connections of the communists? We would be fools to think so. From long experience, I know they have connections in Washington. Information gets to them sooner or later. ‘Fatso’ [a porcine party member, also known as ‘Tiny,’ who claimed to have entrée to some congressional offices] used to have that job for them.
“There is also an ongoing campaign to use the Freedom of Information Act to ferret out info. The communists are just beginning in that area. The communists’ lawyer was censured for being too slow about it… The implications are tremendous both from security and our personal viewpoints. We are in danger of exposure. We have no control over these individuals.”
Jack added, “There is a great deal involved here. It’s not just the apparatus; it’s our families.”
Brannigan responded, “We must tell you, as members of our family, that this is what we thought we had to do. Mr. Kelley, all of us, agreed. We cannot give you any guarantees and that is why we are here. We were trying to head off much worse. We were trying to protect you and this operation. This is the most valuable thing the FBI has.”
Jack still was not appeased: “The operation is no longer the great secret it was up until now. There were dozens of FBI people involved over the years, but we felt secure. The word of the Bureau was its bond.”
Boyle saw that Morris was paying little attention to what anyone said; characteristically, Morris was trying to analyze, to think ahead, and as he did so he mused aloud, speaking more to himself than anyone else. “If they ever found out that we duped all these leaders and the KGB and all the governments that work with them, including Mao, and guys like Gus, they would hound us to the ends of the earth. There is no place on earth where we would be safe. Even the kindest of individuals would want the honor of destroying us… Today Jack received a message from the Soviets to Gus asking, ‘Can you see our ambassador?’ Tonight I must give the message to Gus. Do you think it is easy for me to see Gus? I am worried. Do I have to carry around a pocket radio to find out when my life is in danger?”
Leavitt interrupted, “I realize this is like being hit between the eyes with a baseball bat, and I understand your feelings.” And he proceeded to list the unique security safeguards protecting SOLO—the special safes; the armed couriers; the willingness of the highest people in government to read reports and then hand them back; the fact that only the president, the secretary of state, and the attorney general knew about SOLO. He recited all this and stated that the FBI at any time could “resettle” (i.e., uproot and hide) Morris, Eva, Jack, and Roz. Meaning to pay tribute, he repeated something Morris had heard at least a dozen times: “This is the most important intelligence operation the United States has.”
Morris said, “But there’s something new, isn’t there?”
Leavitt admitted there was. The FBI could control what it did; it could not control what congressional committees and their staffs did. And yes, the KGB or anyone schooled in the history could deduce from salient portions of the King file the identities of sources (58 and 69). The Church committee had given its word and thus far honored it. But it could offer no guarantees about the future.
Morris was scheduled to go to Moscow in February 1976 as a secret delegate to the Twenty-fifth Party Congress. Failure to attend this exalted ritual would raise questions and perhaps suspicions. So might Eva’s failure to accompany him. By now, the Soviets expected her to be along, and the wives of Soviet rulers looked forward to her gifts, her company, and the invitations to grand banquets. But now Morris was not sure whether they dared go. “We will play it cool. We have to think things out. In view of all that’s going on in Washington, we better think. If I am able to go, then we must exert superhuman energy to prevent anything from happening—even if somebody who is supposed to testify has to get sick.”
During the discussions, Boyle said almost nothing. Headquarters had not consulted or notified him before baring SOLO secrets to seven people outside the FBI. He understood the necessity of keeping the committee out of the King files. But, like Morris and Jack, he felt betrayed. However necessary the revelation, the Bureau had broken its word and dramatically increased the risks they were running. For all Boyle knew, the congressional staff members Wannall briefed might all be honorable, discreet patriots. But he agreed with Morris, who had said, “I think some of those committees are hiring people who in normal times couldn’t have gotten a security clearance to use a government urinal.” So what was there to say? Ultimately Morris alone would decide whether to go on.
Morris would of course tell Eva that journeys to Moscow now were much more dangerous and ask if she wanted to go on. Boyle could hear her answer: It always has been dangerous; how dangerous can dangerous get? If you think it’s best to go, let’s go. In other words, I’m your wife. I’ll accompany you to hell and back, if we can get back. If not, well, there is an end to every story and we have lived a pretty good one. You decide. For all her cultured grace and coquettish charm, Eva at age seventy-five was still a very tough lady, an American patriot, and a very good spy. If the vote were left to her, it would be “go.”
Morris would consult Jack, who was very adept at irreverently giving him, the FBI, and the KGB advice. To the KGB: Stop making these money deliveries in damned blizzards. Stop acting like creeps, spooks, and children. In New York, people don’t talk to each other with chalk or crayons or graffiti. They just pick up the telephone. You may have tapped every telephone in the Soviet Union, and I don’t give a damn about that. The FBI has sworn to Congress—and they can’t lie to Congress unless they want their balls and money cut off—that it has taps on the phones of fewer than two hundred people and I’m not one of them. Morris and I have played a lot of tricks to prove that. To the FBI: We need medical insurance; I need it for my wife and children. I can’t run around twenty-four hours a day kissing Gus Hall’s ass and screwing the KGB and still run a business. Can the Bureau arrange that? Or does it want to prosecute me for taking 5 percent from all the commie cash I bring in each year?
Outrageous as he may have been, Jack more often than not was right. The FBI came up with the medical insurance. The KGB agreed that if there was a snowstorm everyone could wait until roads were passable, and that phone calls could be made now and then (it never fully abandoned the old-time communications procedures—marks by chalk, crayons, graffiti, and the radio signals that said, “We have nothing to say”).
But Jack was a tactician, or as he said in the early days, a “street man,” rather than a strategist. In the end, as he had done all his life, he would do whatever his revered brother told him to do.
As the conference adjourned, Langtry asked Boyle, “Do you have time to lift some weights?”
“Absolutely. I need the exercise.”
After Langtry’s last physical examination, an earnest female medical assistant said to him, “For a man of your age—I mean you are not really old; you’re only fifty—but you’re in superb condition. You must be an athlete.”
“Yes, I am. Almost every night I lift weights.”
“I should have guessed from your muscles. What sort of weights do you lift?”
“Scotch on the rocks.”
seventeen
TO GO OR
NOT TO GO?
AGAINST A LIGHT SLEET, Boyle threaded his way along streets crowded with shoppers, past storefronts brightly decorated for Christmas. The trumpeters and buglers of the Salvation Army in their operatic uniforms were still at it, just as they had been when Morris studied and tried to learn from them in the 1930s. They blared out carols, compensating with vigor for what they lacked in concert skill, and a small woman, who looked to be in her sixties, added to the volume by pounding an immense drum as if it were the devil himself. Thinking of Morris in the 1930s, he dropped a few dollars into the kettle.
About ten minutes after Boyle entered the cover office, the young agent who had trailed him telephoned, signaling that he had detected no surveillance. Boyle liked the agent personally, but then he tended to be prejudiced in favor of all FBI agents who had served as military officers in Korea or Vietnam. You didn’t need a doctorate in personnel management to figure out that past combat and danger prepare men for future combat and danger. It was late, Christmas was near, and Boyle ordered the agent to go home to his family instead of hanging around just to follow him back to the FBI offices.
Eva and Morris came carrying presents she had selected and wrapped for Boyle’s children, and they gathered in the back room. Morris as usual seated himself in the tall leatherbound chair behind the big desk, a chair reserved for the chairman, the captain, the boss. During one of the New York conferences, Morris remarked that everyone has “a little vanity,” and everyone recognized that by seizing the chair whose occupancy connoted command he was indulging his “little vanity,” something he did nowhere else.
Years later, reminiscing in her eighties, Eva offered insights about why Morris behaved differently in the back room. “I think he felt more at ease there than anywhere else. You have to understand that in Chicago we always were careful, just like in Moscow. Going to the office wasn’t like going to the market or just anyplace. The FBI, they followed us to see if anybody else was following us. Morris told me they even followed Walt when he came to meet us there. Walt and Morris made the guards and cleaning ladies and handymen think we were retired professors and consultants. We gave them presents around Christmas and were nice to them, and they were on our side. The FBI checked the office to make sure nobody had hidden any bugs, so nobody could listen to us. Then there was Walt. You know, Walt always carried a gun, even on airplanes, and you better not fool around with Walt. If anybody barged in on us, well, that would have been just too bad for them. And if we wanted lunch or supper, we could just call one of the delicatessens and pretty soon it would be brought in. So we could just be ourselves and not be afraid and say whatever we wanted. Morris had a study at home and an office at his phony business but he thought of the back room as his real office.”
That late afternoon just before Christmas 1975, Morris from behind the desk assessed SOLO. Time and thought had dissipated the consternation and indignation he had felt in New York, and he was thinking ahead calmly, as Boyle had often observed him do.
He feared that disclosure of SOLO to Church and committee staff members portended the beginning of its end. The question was, when and how would it end? Twenty-three years had passed since he met Carl Freyman and agreed to work with the FBI. During those years, there had been some “goofs,” leaks of fragmentary information that could have cost him and Jack their necks, but the Bureau had managed to keep SOLO itself secret from outsiders because everyone followed the rules. With a slight smile, he said, “Maybe Walt, Al, and John along the way now and then made up a few new rules of their own. But we followed the most basic rule: if you want to keep a secret, don’t tell anybody.” Because the Bureau had to break that rule, SOLO no longer was really secret; experience proved that once a secret is let loose, it multiplies and spreads. Having been breached, the wall of security could not be repaired. The breach dramatically increased the dangers to him and Eva. He wondered if it would be rational to continue missions into the Soviet Union knowing that at any time while they were there the secret of SOLO might reach the press, the party, or the KGB.
Morris paused, perhaps hoping that Boyle would contradict him or present some secret or insight showing he was wrong. Boyle could do neither.
To Boyle, the United States in December 1975 seemed to have sunk to a post–World War II nadir. In the aftermath of the American debacle in Southeast Asia, hundreds of thousands of Cambodians, Laotians, and South Vietnamese were being massacred or enslaved by communist conquerors. If friends of the United States were looking at its disarray with dismay, what might the Soviets be thinking and planning? Now more than ever the United States needed to read their minds through SOLO. Yet how much can you ask of an elderly man and woman? The air force, navy, and Marine Corps withdrew young pilots after they had survived a certain number of combat missions. The FBI had already sent Morris on forty-nine missions into enemy territory, and from 1962 on Eva accompanied him on most. You can only roll the dice so many times without losing, and there was no disputing Morris; events in Washington had worsened the odds.
Boyle said, “Morris, honestly I don’t know what to tell you.”
“Thank you for your honesty, Walt.”
Stepping out of the office building, Boyle instinctively looked around and through a minor maelstrom of wind and sleet glimpsed the agent he had ordered to go home. The agent also had orders to cover Boyle and those were the orders he chose to obey. Boyle thought, You can take the boy out of the Marine Corps, but you can’t take the Marine Corps out of the boy.
Boyle advised headquarters that Morris was engaged in an anguished debate with himself about whether to quit and thereby terminate the operation. If he were to attend the Twenty-fifth Party Congress, he would have to leave for Moscow no later than February 16, 1976. So he would decide before then.
Although Wannall was about to retire, he retained responsibility for SOLO, and he consulted Kelley about the dilemma that necessitated a fundamental policy decision. Kissinger, doubtless with the concurrence of the president, only recently had ordered SOLO continued, declaring it indispensable to formulation of foreign policy. Wannall believed the Church Committee would protect the secret, but he could not guarantee that to either Kelley or Morris. Undeniably, the dangers of continuing the operation had increased and Morris’ new apprehensions were justified.
Kelley remarked, “Ray, as I said, you have the most interesting job in the FBI.”
On a dreary Sunday night, February 8, 1976, Wannall flew to Chicago to meet Morris and Boyle in the cover office early Monday to discuss the future of SOLO. They were joined by Section Chief Brannigan, Supervisor Houser, and Special Agent Ronald Fries, then working as Boyle’s partner. Brannigan later recalled, “Ray and 58 did almost all the talking. The rest of us just sat there. It was like watching history being made.”
Instead of broaching the overriding issue that brought them together, Wannall began obliquely by giving Morris an insider’s view of relations between the FBI and Congress. “There are two phases in this work: one is foreign, and one is domestic. They have pretty much left our foreign intelligence activities alone. I know on the domestic side we are going to have problems. You see, one of the problems is that some of those congressional staffers were in the student riots of a decade ago. When the streets were burning, they were part of it. So they say, ‘How come you are investigating this stuff?’ Not the [terrorist] bombings; they think we should be investigating that.”
Fearful of spreading panic, the FBI had not fully publicized the threat posed by terrorist bombings but they represented an increasing danger. “In 1973 there were twenty-four bombings; in 1974 there were forty-five; and in 1975 there were eighty-nine bombings. So they seem to be about doubling every year.”
Wannall disclosed highly classified details of how the FBI had prevented bombings by penetrating terrorist organizations. “There were three rented cars, packed with explosives and detonators, parked by an Israeli bank and the El Al warehouse in New York. Experts say that if they had gone off, each
would have cleared an area a hundred yards around it. If one had exploded in the middle of downtown New York, it would have killed or injured hundreds, probably thousands of people.”
The candor and confidences had the desired effect—a relaxed rapport—and Morris lectured about the history of twentieth-century terrorism and the difference between anarchism and Marxism. “Of course, real Marxists approve of mass terror but not individual terrorism. The same was true of individual expropriation [robbery]. In 1917, they would shoot someone for this individual expropriation. Any real Marxist would fight against individual terrorism.” But there were always those individuals who would desert Marxist orthodoxy and try to “speed things up” by fostering “alienation” through indiscriminate bomb-throwing.
Then Morris on his own came to the point, just as Wannall, Kelley, and Boyle hoped. “But we are getting away from the problem of the day. I want to preface my statements by telling you that when I think of our operation, I never separate it from what is happening in the world at the moment. You said, without giving guarantees, that the committee will lay off the foreign aspects pretty much, but we will run into problems on the domestic side.”
Everyone had sense enough to say nothing as Morris proceeded to articulate and vent his anxieties and grievances; everyone was willing to listen until midnight if need be.
“The popular idea that the First Amendment can be used by the press to steal confidential government documents” threatened SOLO. “We have a president [Gerald Ford] who was not elected and the power of the president has been eroded… I am not one of those who make fun of politicians; we have to have them in our system.” But some politicians were egotists who lusted for publicity. “Such individuals with political ambitions don’t always put honor or loyalty above themselves… Be assured the Russians have people going over every line of testimony. I know that their people in this country see congressmen… There is the possibility that a politician who got some information will talk to another politician or to his wife and she will talk to another wife. So you can understand why we are disturbed… In New York, there was a statement about there being no guarantees. I understand that. We have our head in a noose, and we know it.”
