Operation Solo

by John Barron

  Friendly and solicitous, Mostovets expressed Soviet concern about Morris’ health and suggested he come to the Soviet Union and rest in a party sanitorium. Morris explained that, although he would like very much to come, doctors had forbidden him from traveling any long distance. Mostovets said that all of Morris’ friends looked forward to the time when he could travel and resume work.

  The FBI concluded that none of the SOLO leaks had yet reached or been understood in Moscow. But in late spring 1980, Steinbeck warned that, because of information made public in the suit brought by the widow of the party member, headquarters believed that Morris was in danger, and Boyle alerted him to be ready to flee at any time.

  Morris usually kept hidden in Chicago substantial amounts of Soviet cash upon which Hall could draw if for any reason Jack was unavailable. On May 28 in New York he falsely told Hall that neighbors reported men had been making inquiries about him and that he feared he suddenly might have to go into hiding. Therefore, he wanted to return all party funds in his possession, and he gave Hall $225,437 in cash. Hall, himself a former fugitive, understood and agreed that for the time being he and Morris should communicate through their wives or Jack. Elizabeth on June 2 flew to Chicago and collected from Eva the remaining party funds Morris had retrieved from a hiding place.

  Jack, who suffered from chronic bronchitis, emphysema, and heart problems, fell ill. In his place Morris five times in June signaled the KGB requesting a personal meeting in hopes of discussing a possible successor to himself. For reasons no one understood, the KGB in New York did not respond.

  Worried about Jack, Hall on June 29 visited him at his home and urged him to go to the Mayo Clinic, which seemed to have worked wonders for Morris. On August 11, an ambulance transported Jack to a New York hospital. On August 12, 1980, Steinbeck called Boyle: “69 just died of cardiac arrest.”

  Eva said, “Morris was very sad. He and Jack were different. But they were brothers for seventy years and they’d been through a lot together and they were close. We all were close. Morris’ youngest brother was killed in the war. Ben [the brother who ran the cover business in Chicago] had died. All his brothers were gone.”

  The FBI could still talk to the Kremlin through the old-time Comintern radio operator, NY-4309S*, and they exchanged messages that culminated in a meeting on August 21 between KGB officer Konstantin Koryavin and Morris. Koryavin said the Politburo and all of Morris’ friends in Moscow deeply regretted the death of Jack and inquired about Jack’s family. Morris replied that the family was all right but that he feared he might be under FBI investigation. Given that and his failing health, he and Hall were thinking about someone to succeed him. Then he introduced a man code-named “Caesar” as a candidate. Koryavin stated he would relay the proposal, and the two agreed to meet again on September 6. At that meeting Koryavin provided detailed instructions for a rendezvous between “Caesar” and the Soviets in Vienna on September 23. “Caesar” evidently passed Soviet examination, and it looked as if the FBI through him might be able to start a new operation. But not long after he returned from Europe, “Caesar” died.

  The Soviets continued to send messages through 4309, and Eva and Elizabeth stayed in touch until the summer of 1981 when headquarters warned it believed that Morris was in imminent danger.

  A HUGE VAN PARKED in front of Morris’ apartment building and out of it stepped a fine-looking moving crew. Their overalls were immaculate; none had a pot belly; each had a bulge in his pocket, the kind a revolver makes. The chief of the crew was Walter Boyle, and that day he launched Morris and Eva, Agents 58 and 66, on their last FBI mission—this one to a lovely, hidden home watched over and visited by men and women of the FBI.

  The window into the Kremlin and the minds of the men in the Kremlin finally had closed.

  nineteen

  DANGEROUS DARKNESS

  WHAT HAPPENED AFTER THE window into the Kremlin closed provides another measure of the importance of Operation SOLO to the United States, and to the world.

  A Royal Air Force helicopter on September 16, 1985, landed CIA Director William Casey in the courtyard of an old fortress by the sea in England. It was a redoubt of British intelligence, alternately known as MI-6 and the SIS. Among those awaiting Casey were Christopher Curwen, director of MI-6, and Oleg Gordievsky, who for some sixteen years had spied for the British from the upper reaches of the KGB.

  At the apex of his Soviet career, Gordievsky was acting Rezident in charge of KGB operations in the United Kingdom; in other words, all KGB officers in London were taking orders from a British spy. In 1985 Gordievsky fell under suspicion, he believes, because of betrayals by one of the most squalid traitors in American history, CIA officer Aldrich Ames (responsible for the execution of at least ten U.S. agents in the Soviet Union; in 1994 he was sentenced to life imprisonment). The KGB recalled Gordievsky to Moscow, put him under virtual house arrest, and began an interrogation. In accord with an emergency contingency plan, Gordievsky signaled MI-6 that he was about to be caught, and, in one of the most daring feats of peacetime espionage ever, the British plucked Gordievsky out from under the eyes and clutches of the KGB. (The rescue plan was so audacious that the British ambassador in Moscow reportedly threatened to resign if it was attempted. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher is said to have replied, “Chris [Curwen] probably will resign if we don’t try it. I need Chris.”

  While Gordievsky was stationed in London, meetings between him and MI-6 occurred only about once a month and usually lasted less than an hour. Much of that time was devoted to agreeing upon arrangements for the next meeting, and Gordievsky did not have a chance to elaborate on what he was reporting. He did manage to tell the British something about a worldwide KGB operation code-named “RYAN” (RYAN is the transliteration of a Russian acronym for the words Raketno-Yadernoe Napadeni, which mean “nuclear missile attack”). To the British, the operation sounded crazy—because it was crazy.

  Casey came to the fortress to glean insights from Gordievsky that might benefit President Ronald Reagan during his first meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev, soon to take place in Geneva. Among other subjects, Gordievsky brought up Operation RYAN and Casey was so stunned that he asked if the remainder of the conversation could be recorded so that Reagan himself could hear it. Gordievsky said he would be honored.

  In the Oval Office of the White House, Casey handed Reagan an MI-6 report composed of forty pages of basic text and twenty-two pages of appendices. Casey told him the report was exceedingly important. The president sat down and without pause but with mounting dismay, read every word. Then, in alarm, he summoned his national security advisors.

  One of them, David Major, the first FBI agent ever to serve on the National Security Council, says, “It was a masterful report. What the British had to tell us was incredible, sometimes comical. But they told us in such detail and in such a way that we could see for ourselves that what they were reporting was true.”

  The British report showed that some of the dangerous possibilities against which Morris warned had come to pass. In the early 1970s, Morris began to discern specific, factual examples of how the increasingly old men who owned the Soviet Union were increasingly isolating or insulating themselves from reality—that they were making themselves captives of their own boilerplate cant and propaganda. Consequently, they could ignore or misinterpret authentic information, just as Stalin did when both British and Soviet intelligence warned him that the Nazis were about to invade the Soviet Union.

  They read little from the Western press, and what they did read about political or military affairs they distrusted as propaganda. They were congenitally conspiratorial and gave more credence to what some spy told them than to what some respectable journalist wrote. Morris exploited this ignorance by regularly reading the more enlightening publications of the United States and United Kingdom. He also read newspapers published in Chicago, New York, Washington, and Los Angeles as well as Soviet publications, and he learned to judge which journalists and comm
entators were the most reliable and astute. Consequently, he dazzled Soviet rulers with the breadth of his knowledge and the depth of his insights. They marveled at the intelligence-gathering capabilities of the loyal American party, and they believed Morris because he was their spy; he was nahsh—“ours.” Back home, Morris warned that the old men in the Kremlin could misconstrue ordinary and unrelated events into a horrific conspiracy. This is very dangerous, he would emphasize, because they act upon their thoughts. They are susceptible to dangerous delusions. And many times in Moscow Morris jotted down “TWAs”—reminders to “tell Walt about” some dangerous Soviet delusion.

  At American behest, the British brought Gordievsky to Washington, and David Major ushered him into the Oval Office to talk to the president. Meanwhile, MI-6 and the CIA pooled resources to confirm and expand upon what Gordievsky had reported. The following is a summary of what Gordievsky reported and of Anglo–American conclusions.

  KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov at a Politburo meeting in May 1981 announced portentous news. “The new U.S. administration [the Reagan administration] is actively preparing for nuclear war and a surprise attack upon the Soviet Union is a distinct possibility.” Andropov somberly explained that the threat was all the graver because NATO, China, and Japan (which had no offensive military capability) were conniving with the United States to start World War III. Therefore, discovery of when this fiendish international cabal planned to strike must henceforth be the overriding priority of all Soviet intelligence. This worldwide operation would be code-named “RYAN.”

  Senior KGB officers in the field recognized that the underlying premise of RYAN—that Ronald Reagan suddenly had united the entire industrialized world plus China in a plot unprecedented in history to kill hundreds of millions of people—was insane. So, initially, they regarded the operation as a transient absurdity, something not to be taken seriously, something that would soon pass, like a sudden summer rainstorm. That did not happen.

  With this seminal information from Gordievsky, the British and Americans traced the paranoia of the Soviets back to the late 1970s when they learned that the United States was perfecting guidance systems that would enable missiles and bombs to hit within a few feet of any target. (During the Gulf War, televised films showed for all the world to see missiles going down the ventilation pipes of buildings or demolishing narrow bridge spans in Iraq.) Then the KGB or GRU learned that President Jimmy Carter, in consequence of the new accuracy of the weaponry, had authorized a study to determine whether it might be practicable to revise American nuclear strategy from “counter-city” to “counterforce.” Bluntly put, the question was, should we blow up Soviet missiles and weapons instead of Soviet people?

  If Morris still had been sitting in the Kremlin three or four times a year, he would have explained to the Soviets: This is a study. It is not policy. It’s like four guys sitting around at their club after a few sets of tennis and drinking iced tea or orange juice and speculating with each other. You know I am not a military man and your generals will know best and if you want our party to find out more, we will try. I have the impression that generals when they have nothing else to do always are gabbing with each other about what might be.

  But Agent 58 was no longer sitting down three or four times a year in the Kremlin.

  The imminent advent of two new American weapons systems, the cruise and Pershing missiles, magnified the paranoia. The cruise missile flew only at about the speed of a commercial jet airliner. But a combination of new technology—space, photographic, computer, and microelectronic—empowered any one of the U.S. armed forces to program it to fly so low over water, hills, and dales, through any weather, that no Soviet radar could detect it. The Pershing flew fantastically fast, so fast that if launched from West Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, or the United Kingdom it could hit Moscow or any target in the western Soviet Union within ten to twelve minutes. No Soviet interceptor or missile could stop it. Both the cruise and Pershing missiles carried miniaturized thermonuclear warheads many times more powerful than the atomic bombs that obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The men who owned the Soviet Union had constructed for themselves lavish underground shelters stocked with provisions to survive nuclear war. What they proposed to do upon emerging from their caves into a devastated and depopulated land is unclear. But now Soviet scientists told them that no shelter, however deep and heavily armored, could withstand the accuracy and blasts of the new American missiles. And the Soviet oligarchs needed more than twelve minutes’ notice to get themselves and their families to the bunkers. Hence, the potentates felt personally threatened.

  Other factors joined to feed the paranoia. From 1977 or so until 1984, the Soviet Union essentially was leaderless. As Eva reported to the FBI, Brezhnev by 1977 was almost comatose. Upon succeeding him, Yuri Andropov soon became mortally ill and nonfunctional. His successor, Anatoly Chernayov, was both a nobody and senile and soon died. Boris Chernenko and Mikhail Suslov also died.

  Then came Ronald Reagan. The Soviets dismissed his anti-Soviet rhetoric during the 1980 presidential campaign as political demagoguery. They anticipated that if elected he would privately come to terms with them in the mutual interests of the Soviet and American “ruling classes.” To their astonishment, Reagan once in office appeared to them to mean what he said and to be setting about doing what he said he would do. Quite openly, he set about rejuvenating the United States military into a force capable, if necessary, of fighting and winning a war against the whole world. He publicly called the Soviet Union an “evil empire”; more terrifying to the Soviets, he privately called it a “cancer” to be excised from the body of mankind; and most terrifying of all, Reagan was matching his words with deeds, and more and more Americans seemed to be applauding what he said and did.

  Then the Soviets learned, principally through their satellite Polish intelligence service, of an American program to develop a system to protect the United States and its allies against missiles launched against their people. The program was called the “Strategic Defense Initiative,” or SDI. Some American journalists, happily joined by Soviet propagandists, succeeded in pejoratively labeling it “Star Wars”—by implication, a mad, diabolical scheme to turn the heavens into a battleground and thereby defile the universe.18

  Whether SDI was a good or impractical idea is irrelevant to this story. Relevant is that Ronald Reagan considered he had a duty to protect the American people from enemy attack, and the Soviets (as Morris had warned that at any time they might) misconstrued the motives of his support of SDI. The Soviets had a reverence for American technology, ingenuity, and productive capacity. They believed that, if Americans put their heads together and decided to do something, they probably could do it. Landing American men on the moon in 1969 may have contributed little to science; maybe the grand voyage through space was a political stunt. Stunt or not, it was a technological feat the Soviets could not duplicate. The Soviets, rightly or wrongly, believed the Americans could through SDI construct a system of defenses against ballistic missiles and thereby endow the United States with the capability of striking first against them in confidence that whatever missiles the Soviets had left after a first strike could be intercepted.

  Failure of the KGB and GRU in the summer and fall of 1981 and throughout 1982 to uncover any plans by anyone to attack the Soviet Union did not alleviate fears in the Kremlin or at KGB headquarters, which officers in the field called the “Center.” To the contrary, it intensified them. To the Kremlin, the absence of evidence meant either that its many conspiratorial enemies were being devilishly clever in concealing their war plans or that the KGB and GRU were being dangerously indolent.

  Consequently, the Center progressively increased pressures on Rezidencies, or outposts around the world, to produce evidence of the existence of a plot that did not exist. In February 1983, the Center warned them of a “growing threat of war.” It emphasized that “prior discovery” of enemy attack plans had “acquired a special degree of urgency�
�� because the Soviet Union had to have advance warning so it could strike first. In June 1983, the Center cabled: “U.S. continuing secret preparations for nuclear war.” And in November 1983 the KGB formed at the Center in Moscow a special section staffed by more than fifty KGB officers to magnify RYAN.

  Still, the legions of KGB and GRU officers and all their subsidiary spies in all the capitals of the West could not come up with a single conventional indicator of an impending attack—unusual mobilizations, evacuation, or government decrees reordering civilian life. In London, Paris, Bonn, Washington, Miami, San Francisco, and Tokyo life seemed to be merrily rolling along as usual. The KGB and GRU reported they could discern no evidence, no fact hinting of an impending attack, but the same crowd in Moscow, which had doted on every word of an American spy and heeded his advice, disregarded the reassuring reports from their own people.

  Instead, the Center ordered foreign outposts to look for “seemingly unimportant developments in the civilian sector” and issued a long list of “indicators” to be spotted. It also conveyed a message that chieftains in the field interpreted to mean Tell us what they (the Center) want to hear or you will suffer.

  Continuously goaded, the Rezidencies scraped up bits and pieces of trivia, usually from newspapers or television newscasts. The London Rezidency reported that some roads and bridges outside the city were being repaired. Officers in the special RYAN section at the Center, who felt that their careers depended upon telling the Kremlin what it demanded to hear, rated this revelation quite important. After all, missiles could be transported over the roads and bridges undergoing repairs. The Center commended the London Rezidency for the report but censured it for transmitting such vital information by pouch rather than by instant cable.