by John Barron
Morris meandered through the history of SOLO and its successes and, almost pleading, tried to make all understand what he considered now at stake. “This trip or this congress is very important. Most of it will be open. The secret stuff the congress won’t hear but I will. And I am experienced enough to analyze a speech and go beyond the words. In addition, when I am in that city [Moscow], I meet party leaders from all over the world, friends, and you get information from them you never could get elsewhere and facts the biggest experts couldn’t deduce… Everybody is talking about the defeat of the communists in Portugal. Well, we knew a year ago that the Russians were trying to pull the Portuguese communists back. We knew the Soviets didn’t care about a defeat in Portugal, that this is where they didn’t want to take us on.”
Summing up the long soliloquy, Morris rambled a bit: “Within the next two or three days, pending a final decision, I have to move. Because if we decide that I am going or I should say we are going because Eva has been invited and she has been getting more calls about the trip than I have… because we must go on in the usual way just as if nothing has happened, although we know that some things have happened in the last two months…
“I have been talking a lot, but I want you to know what is in our minds and hearts. I don’t expect a yes or no from you about whether we should make this trip.”
After some moments Wannall spoke slowly and obviously not from a script. “I don’t know of any agent, myself included, who has had in the last twenty to twenty-five years the impact on our government’s policies that you have had. I say that to tell you how valuable you have been not just to the FBI, but to the United States. There was no question that we were going to tell you everything that has happened, not just because of moral obligation. You have been a part of us; you are part of the family. I want you and your wife to make this decision knowing what all the facts are. Despite the value we put on this operation, we put a higher value on you…
“Next Sunday if you are not on that plane, you will still be FBI as far as we are concerned. No one could ask anybody to do as much for his country as you have done. Our concern is that you get over and get back, if you go. We know that you have gone beyond your physical endurance many times. But you are more valuable than any mission. I want to tell you that this is the greatest operation we ever have had. You are not only giving information; you are giving yourself. If anything happened to you, I would not be able to live with myself. If you decide not to go, we will still be working together; we still will be associates and friends. I cannot tell you to go or not to go. I have to be as honest and forthright with you as I can be.”
The disorganized response from Morris suggested to Boyle that the sentiment and sincerity of Wannall’s spontaneous words affected him—maybe decisively: “I talked to my brother and we know that no one can make up our minds for us. There is no such thing here as taking a vacation or stopping temporarily. I should have been in the hospital many times but to those people you never talk about how you feel; that doesn’t count… I am glad that you have come here today but I am kind of embarrassed and feel kind of bad that you had to come all the way out here. I raised it with my guy [Boyle]. If it were safe, I would have gone to Washington to see you but that would be the worst place for me today… I must tell you that I am sorry to see you leave [retire]…
“You know, in these discussions we cannot always solve every problem; there is not always a neat solution. I don’t want to make the situation worse by quitting. I still feel that unless our government agencies go berserk, there is a need for this operation. I am trying to anticipate the final outcome of the investigations and of things that might seem insane. But I know what our country needs.”
Morris then digressed and talked about dying. He recounted the adventures of an old Bolshevik friend, a classmate from the Lenin School, who had spied for the Comintern in China at a time when they chopped off the heads of spies, and later in Nazi Germany, where they did worse things to spies. His friend survived to die peacefully in anonymity. But that was how Morris hoped to die. That was not the way he would die in Moscow. Nor would Eva die in peace and dignity. The betrayed wives, quivering under the lash of their own betrayed husbands, would cry like banshees for a degrading death to prove their loyalty.
No one spoke. No one said, Come on, Morris, that won’t happen; they wouldn’t do that to you or Eva. Everyone knew that the Soviets had done just that myriad times and continued to do it, albeit on a lesser and more discreet scale, in the mid-1970s.
They waited for Morris, the captain, to announce the tentative course. “Well, as things stand now, no one can make the decision for us. For reasons I gave before, there can be no interruption [of his trips to Moscow]. Once there is an interruption, we must expect total stoppage. Despite all the heartaches and thoughts and physical problems, we are going along now as if we are to travel.
“I have asked my son to come from the West Coast to talk to me. I won’t give him any details, but he knows what is going on generally. I feel proud I kept him out of the party all his life. So he will come, and we will talk things over. I don’t know that it will change anything. At least, we will have seen each other.
“So I am preparing. Until the moment I leave, until Walt says goodbye, we won’t know whether we will go. I am not asking for guarantees. I am thinking about what can be done by the people in Washington, by the Bureau. You must be alert. You must make sure accidents don’t happen and that in these FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] cases something doesn’t get out. The only other thing I can say is let’s see what happens in the next few days. Next Monday will be the latest I can leave.”
Throughout their deliberations, Eva insisted that Morris decide for both of them and did nothing to influence him. On Saturday he said they could no longer delay and demanded that she tell him what she thought. Eva demurred. Morris insisted.
“You’re my partner. I have a right to your judgment.”
“Well, we’ve come a long way. Shouldn’t we go all the way?”
Morris dialed Boyle at home and said, “Tomorrow, we’re making the first leg of the trip.”
They flew to New York Sunday morning for a last visit with Jack, and on Monday Boyle took them to Kennedy Airport. Once their plane was airborne, Boyle called Wannall in Washington. “We’ve launched.”
Representatives of the International Department and Nadezhda, Eva’s latest personal escort, greeted them at the airport outside Moscow with hearty embraces. In the limousine en route to their apartment, they as usual were presented with a crowded schedule—appointments with Suslov and Ponomarev, banquets, private dinners, a luncheon hosted by Politburo wives in honor of Eva. Brezhnev hoped to talk with Morris but with so many party leaders in Moscow for the congress, he presently couldn’t fix a date. Clearly, in one of the world’s most exclusive clubs, Morris and Eva were still members in good standing.
Without any evidence, they assumed that their apartment was honeycombed with listening devices and spoke accordingly. “Everyone is so nice here. I’m sure we’re going to have a good time,” Eva said.
“Yes. I’m looking forward to seeing all our friends.”
During the four weeks in Moscow, anxiety about what might happen in Washington added to the physical stress imposed by a business and social routine that would have exhausted a much younger and healthier man. When they landed in Boston March 13, 1976, Morris looked so drained that Boyle refused to let him board another plane. He telephoned Langtry and asked him to inform headquarters that 58 and 66 (Eva was CG-6653S*) had returned safely and that he was driving them to their apartment in New York. He also asked Langtry to arrange for a physician to come to the apartment that evening. Of course, asking Langtry if he could help was akin to asking the pope if he is Catholic.
Boyle rented the biggest, most luxurious car available and they set out for Manhattan. As they drove, Morris, despite his exhaustion, related what he had heard and seen in Moscow, and he and Boyle mentally composed
the first report to headquarters.
Perhaps the most important report from Mission 54 was, on its face, the dullest. The Soviet Union was suffering grievous economic difficulties, and Morris’ Kremlin friends recited a long litany of woes: poor quality control; low worker productivity; an inadequate transport system, which delayed shipments of both raw materials and consumer goods; idle factories and empty store shelves; wastage of grain owing to lack of transport and storage facilities; sloth and indifference on state and collective farms; reluctance or outright refusal by industrial managers to put new machinery and technology into use; and an increasing inability to match Western innovations in computers and electronics.
Every industrial economy periodically runs into bad patches, and Morris had heard of Soviet economic difficulties before. But in the past the Soviets had blamed them on aberrations or transient factors that could be overcome by better management, and they seemed to believe their own propaganda. In fact, the KGB Disinformation Department planted press stories of grand economic growth in the foreign press, then presented these stories to the hierarchy as evidence that even Western “experts” admitted Soviet successes and potential economic superiority. At home, the government-controlled media constantly disseminated statistics showing growth and prosperity. All these official data also influenced Western thinking, and thus even sophisticates at the CIA consistently overestimated the gross national product of the Soviet Union while underestimating the proportion of it consumed by military spending.
(Once Morris showed Eva a CIA analysis that the FBI had asked him to evaluate. It concluded that per capita income in the Soviet Union was about to exceed that of Italy. Eva through her own eyes had compared life in Rome, Milan, Florence, and Venice with that in Moscow and Leningrad, and she asked, “Is this some sort of intelligence trick?” A smile from Morris told her it was a serious U.S. government document, and they both laughed out loud.)
Now the men who owned the Soviet Union were acknowledging among themselves that their problems were not temporary and that the economy, upon which their power depended, was steadily deteriorating. And they admitted to Morris that nobody had any idea how to reverse the deterioration.
A second report spelled out in three words—peace and disarmament —the themes that would undergird and dominate Soviet foreign policy, propaganda, and “active measures” for nearly a decade to come. Morris stressed that these words did not mean to the Soviets what they meant to Americans. Peace meant no armed conflict with the United States, not a surcease of local or regional conflicts instigated or supported by the Soviets in an effort to alter the world balance of power or “correlation of forces.”
To Americans disarmament negotiations implied “Let’s sit down in good faith and rationally discuss how we mutually and gradually can reduce our respective arsenals so that neither of us has cause to fear attack from the other.” To the Soviets, disarmament meant “Let’s stop your young warmongers sitting behind their computers in Silicon Valley, Southern California, around Dallas, Austin, and Boston from designing these hellish new weapons. Let’s stop Boeing, General Dynamics, McDonnell Douglas, Texas Instruments, Hughes, Rockwell, General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler from inventing the means to produce weapons more efficiently and reliably. Let’s stop the Pentagon from picking out teenage geniuses, secretly paying their way through engineering schools at Purdue or Georgia Tech or Texas A&M, then through doctoral programs at Stanford and MIT so they can contrive ever more diabolical weapons.”
The Soviets had no intention whatsoever of negotiating any meaningful erosion of their military power. They had every intention of dissuading the United States from entering into a real arms race, which they were running as fast as they could. “Walt, they know now that they could not win.”
Morris credited Eva with inspiring the third report. Between the door of their apartment building and the limousine, she whispered: “Keep an eye on Brezhnev. The girls tell me he’s on something.”
That had never occurred to Morris. Everyone was getting old, drunkenness was commonplace at Soviet state functions, and it was not unusual for young aides later in the evening to prop up old men they were around to protect. However, on the many occasions when Morris had been with Brezhnev, he never saw him drink too much. Although the private talk suggested at the airport never materialized, Morris twice observed Brezhnev at official functions and, prompted by Eva, realized that he appeared to be in a trance-like state—scarcely functional.
These three reports from Mission 54 turned out in ways to be as seminal as those from Missions 1 and 2 in 1958 and 1959. Analysts in those years did not believe that the breach between China and the Soviet Union was real and irreparable. Ultimately, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger did. Analysts in the mid-1970s did not believe that the Soviet economy had plunged into irreversible decline; that the Soviet Union could not militarily match the United States, much less the United States and NATO; that the Soviet Union was an eggshell society waiting to be pierced; or that it increasingly was leaderless. In the early 1980s, Ronald Reagan did believe and act—with results that everyone in the 1990s can see.
THE CHICAGO SAC HAD some good news. For years, Boyle had received outstanding fitness reports or evaluations. They did not, however, specify just what he had done, and personnel managers were suspicious of vague generalities that anybody could write about anybody. And his file still showed that he had been formally censured and demoted for threatening an inspector physically. So for fourteen years he had stayed in the same grade and the same job, the nature of which few at headquarters understood. Evidently, someone—perhaps Wannall or Kelley himself—finally interceded, for now the Bureau wanted to promote and transfer him to “an important supervisory position” at headquarters.
Boyle asked if he still would be involved in SOLO and the SAC said he did not know, but the operation could not continue indefinitely and Boyle should think of his future and the welfare of his family.
On the train home he did think about his family and how pleasant life would be for his six children in the wooded suburbs of Northern Virginia; the educational opportunities; the national museums and galleries in Washington; and the beaches, mountains, and historic sites within easy reach. Transfer to headquarters would erase the old stain on his record and perhaps lead to further advancement. The increase in salary accompanying promotion would increase his pension, and he could retire anytime after reaching age fifty. And in Washington, many an agent had made contacts that resulted in lucrative jobs after retirement.
The SAC, who admired Boyle, asked him if he would like to visit headquarters to discuss his new assignment.
“You said the transfer was not mandatory. I’m not going to Washington.”
“I’m afraid if you don’t go you won’t be promoted.”
“There’s no way I’ll walk away from 58.”
“Look! You studied to be an actuary. You know that 58 and 69 can’t go on much longer. Walt, SOLO is almost over.”
“Maybe. No one, not even Carl or Al or John or I, thought it would last this long. In any case, I’m staying until the end.”
eighteen
THE WINDOW CLOSES
BOYLE SET OUT ON November 30, 1976, with Morris and Eva for the airport well in advance of flight time and the launch of Mission 55 to Prague, Moscow, and Budapest. Traffic was surprisingly light, and having checked in at O’Hare with a couple of hours to spare, they waited in a secluded first-class lounge. Such waits tended to be awkward because there was nothing of substance to say. All preparations had been made, everything that needed to be said had been said, and the apprehension all three shared made small talk seem banal. They said goodbye at the door of the lounge, and Eva kissed Boyle on the cheek. “Cheer up, Walt, we’ll come back.”
“I know you will. I’ll be waiting.”
As things began to unravel in Washington, headquarters decreed “no more paper”; Morris and Eva henceforth were not to copy documents or make any notes. Morris, however, du
ring conversations in December with men he had known for thirty or forty years did jot down “TWA”—“tell Walt about”—a few times along with innocent reminders only he could decipher.
He found the Soviets in a state of shock, dismay, and confusion induced by the election of Jimmy Carter as president of the United States. They had been sure that Gerald Ford would win the election, and, contrary to their initial expectations, Ford had emerged in their judgment as a reasonable man with whom they could do business. After all, he had approved the Helsinki Accords by which the West, in return for a Soviet pledge to respect human rights, tacitly acquiesced to permanent Soviet dominion over Eastern Europe and the “Brezhnev doctrine,” which in essence proclaimed “What’s ours is ours; what’s yours is negotiable.”
To the Soviets, Carter was an enigma. What did a governor from Georgia know about world affairs? What sort of foreign policy would he formulate? They had heard he might select as a principal foreign policy advisor a Polish professor who didn’t even have an American name (Carter soon appointed Zbigniew Brzezinski, a scholar from Columbia University, to be his national security advisor), and Polish Americans were as bad as—the Soviets, ever deferential to Morris, caught themselves and stopped. He knew they meant as bad as American Jews.
The Soviets were working themselves into a frenzy over the tendency of West European parties now and then to make decisions and set policy independently of Moscow. They likened this “Eurocommunism” to the “American Exceptionalism” of the 1920s and the first stage of Chinese heresy in the late 1950s, and considered it a dangerous phenomenon.
