A Covert Affair (44 page)

Paul ran out and bought every newspaper he could lay his hands on. He and Julia spent the morning poring over the stories in a state of shock. According to the complicated picture presented in the indictment, Jane and George were minions in a spy ring that had flourished “since 1940 and right up to this day.” They were charged with working for a Lithuanian-born Soviet agent named Jack Soble, a small-time importer of bristles and animal hair, who had been recruited by Beria to set up the Soviet intelligence cell. In January 1957, the Justice Department arrested the ringleaders, Jack Soble and his wife, Myra, and in April the two pleaded guilty to “receiving and obtaining” U.S. defense secrets. Another member of the ring, Jacob Albam, arrested at the same time, also pleaded guilty. The plea deal got them out of a tougher conspiracy charge that carried the death penalty. In return, the Sobles were being “cooperative” and were reportedly “talking their heads off” about the inner working of their spy network. As a direct result of the secret Soble testimony, which the grand jury had been listening to since January, Jane and George were indicted on five counts of spying. Bench warrants had been issued for their arrest.

A total of thirty-eight “overt acts” of espionage were listed in the indictment. The
Post
story summarized the five main accusations against the Zlatovskis:

• That the wife passed to Soviet agents a “report on Indonesia” based on information obtained while employed in the OSS.

• That “information relating to the national defense of the United States” was given to “a representative of the intelligence service of the U.S.S.R.”

• That Mrs. Zlatovski turned over information “concerning the personnel and operations of intelligence units of the U.S.A., including biographical data on American intelligence agents.

• That George Zlatovski transmitted to Soviet agents “the names of certain persons who had fled to Austria” from satellite states.

• That in December 1949, both defendants traveled to Austria “to obtain compromising information regarding the personal lives, specifically, the sexual and drinking habits, of the personnel assigned and attached to American installations in Austria.”

The last part of the story read like something straight out of Hitchcock, with all the cloak-and-dagger characters and international rendezvous of a noir thriller. According to the indictment, Jane and George, when not taking orders from Soble, did jobs for the “mysterious Boris Morros,” as the
Times
called him, a Russian-born Hollywood producer who was secretly working as a double agent. Morros, who was sixty-two, had reportedly been forced to work as a front man and courier for Soviet intelligence in an effort to protect his aged parents and in 1947 went to the FBI and offered his services as a counter-espionage agent. Morros testified that Jane, code-named “Slang,” was an active agent, handing off her valuable reports to him for delivery to Soviet representatives. George, code-named “Rector,” was not as useful, mostly gathering information on refugees, and was once ordered by Soble to go to Yugoslavia to observe conditions and make a report on what he found for the Soviet secret police. Morros, who claimed the Soviets had given him money for monthly payments to the Zlatovski “team” between December 1949 and October 1950, operated as the go-between and detailed meetings among himself, the Sobles, and the Zlatovskis in New York, Washington, Vienna, Paris, Zürich, and Lausanne. The
Times
story ended with a glum image of Jane barricaded in her Left Bank apartment, declining to comment: “I can't tell you anything, you will have to speak to my lawyer.”

The later editions of the newspapers carried a new set of banner
headlines—
FRANCE GRANTS
ASYLUM—and included quotes from George. He declared the charges to be false and ridiculous, telling the Washington
Evening Star
,
“The French have given us political asylum. We are their guests. We can say nothing which would embarrass our hosts.”
The story went on to quote a Foreign Ministry official denying asylum had been granted, saying the issue was still being discussed. George, who was photographed peering out of the doorway of his apartment on rue Mazarine, was described as “dark and youthful,” with his brown hair in a neat crew cut. He wore a pale, thin silk robe open to the waist and a pair of straw slippers. The walls of the living room, just visible behind him, were hung with vivid abstract paintings, which he explained had been done by his wife before “her health broke over this business.” Jane was nowhere to be seen. When asked to respond to their many questions, George told them angrily, “You people have already made up everything you want to, so why should I say anything more?” adding, as he closed the door, his voice barely audible over the barking of the couple's poodle, “I am sorry to be rude, but I wish you would leave me alone.” When asked by another reporter about the grand jury indictment, he said tersely,
“They've been reading too many stories of junior G-men.”

Julia and Paul were stunned by what they were reading. It was impossible to take it all in. If there was any truth to the charges, Jane and George were villains of the first order. Not only had they been conspiring against their country for years, but their treasonous services to Moscow were supposedly motivated by their long-hidden personal animus for America and everything it stood for. It was the same McCarthy madness, being replayed with tragic familiarity. Or was it? The implications left them almost speechless with fear and horror.

Over the next few days, everything they knew about Jane was played out in the pages of the newspapers in lurid fashion, from her beginnings as a wealthy, convent-educated socialite to her drift into San Francisco's “avant-garde” art scene and eventual indoctrination into New York's
“parlor pink”
Communist circles. The conservative papers like the
Washington Post and Times-Herald
and
Chicago Daily Tribune
were merciless and gave every fact a sinister twist. The stories explained that Jane had been a target of the FBI as far back as the early 1940s,
when she had worked for the Board of Economic Warfare, which had been revealed in many congressional investigations as
“a haven”
for Communists. She then
“shifted her base of operations”
to the OSS, “also exposed in later years as Communist-ridden.” Jane reportedly delivered her OSS report on Indonesia to her “Red spymasters” in 1949, and then she and her husband began shuttling back and forth between Vienna and Zürich, “providing a flow of secret information to the Russians on American personnel in Western Europe.”

As the summer weeks passed, Jane and George remained front-page news. Adding to the sensational nature of the stories was the fact that the Sobles had been interviewed about their connection to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who had been found guilty of being KGB spies and were the first civilians ever executed for espionage in the United States. Jack and Myra Soble both denied knowing the Rosenbergs as well as many of the Russian members of the ring. The prosecutors theorized that the Sobles and the Zlatovskis were probably part of a small cell that did not interact with the others. The newspapers also seized on the connection to another infamous case of espionage: that of the admitted Russian spy Elizabeth Bentley, who had turned against her Moscow superiors and in July 1948 enthralled congressional investigators by spilling the secrets of her work as a courier for spy rings in New York and Washington. Her testimony had helped to convict Alger Hiss and expose Jack Soble. Jane promised to be another “blond spy queen,” and every new development in the case was played out like the latest steamy chapter in a long-running summer fiction serial.

The country was again in the grips of spy fever, and the papers worried breathlessly about whether or not Jane and George would be extradited to the United States to stand trial for their crimes against their country. Before their fate was decided, the United States would have to formally request extradition for the pair in accordance with French administrative and legal procedures. Typically, the French Ministry of Justice would order the couple's arrest. The case would then be submitted to the Chambre des Mises en Accusation, the French equivalent of a grand jury, which would hear all the facts and have three to four weeks to reach a decision. The prospects did not look good, however, as the
Franco-American extradition treaty of 1911 did not cover the crime of espionage and specifically barred extradition on political charges. French officials had further raised doubts by explaining that the United States would have to prove that the Zlatovskis had engaged in “criminal activity” before France would agree to send them back to stand trial. Assistant U.S. Attorney General William F. Tompkins, in charge of internal security, was flying to Paris to press for their return. He insisted that his staff was exploring every possible loophole and cited a promising lead concerning a 1927 extradition statute. The French authorities were conducting their own investigation to determine whether or not they should prosecute the couple. Some papers speculated that the extradition could become an international incident, with the U.S. government having to bring North Atlantic Treaty Organization pressure to bear to pry the accused pair loose.

Inevitably, the House Un-American Activities Committee got in on the act, expressing outrage that a spy had been allowed to slip through the FBI's fingers. Representative Francis E. Walter of Pennsylvania, the chairman of HUAC, told a throng of reporters in Washington that the courts had put Dulles in
“an untenable position,”
and said the situation pointed to the “loose passport practices which are spearheaded by court decisions.” He called on the House to “pass remedial legislation.” Other right-wing senators weighed in, with Roman Hruska, Republican of Nebraska, insisting that Jane's escape to France illustrated the dangers of the liberals' campaign against security safeguards in government.
“A Communist suspect who has been indicted for espionage was able to move about Europe for two additional years on an American passport and is now outside the jurisdiction of the United States,”
Hruska said. “I hope that the French government will extradite the Zlatovskis and that there will be an early trial so that the details of current Soviet espionage can be made known to the American people.”

Meanwhile, Boris Morros was basking in all the publicity, apparently relishing his role as the daring double agent. Morros, who made his first public bow at a news conference in Washington on August 12, turned out to be a balding, roly-poly former musician, whose ostensible claim to fame was having composed “The Parade of the Wooden
Soldiers.”
*
A suave Slavic charmer, Morros liked to brag about his days as a child prodigy in Russia and claimed to have arrived in the United States at age sixteen, when he was already conducting the Russian Imperial Symphony. He boasted of having scored the music for over four hundred films and claimed that, as musical director for Paramount Pictures, he persuaded the great Leopold Stokowski to make his first motion picture. He then turned producer, making the 1939 Laurel and Hardy comedy
The Flying Deuces
, the 1942 romantic comedy
Tales of Manhattan
with Rita Hayworth and Henry Fonda, and the 1947 musical bomb
Carnegie Hall.

According to Morros, the Russians pressured him into becoming a spy in 1945, and so he disappeared from Hollywood and spent twelve years posing as a millionaire Russian spy and recruiting important, well-to-do Americans to steal secrets for the Kremlin. What the Russians did not know, however, was that he was actually serving as a U.S. counterspy and feeding them only secret documents
“approved”
by the FBI. He claimed he had done so at great risk to his own life and at great expense to his career. Fooling everyone—including his wife, family members, and friends—for all those years
“didn't come easy,”
Morros boasted in a lengthy prepared statement that was released to the press. “I hated everything they stood for and when I had to express myself to high Russian officials and the American spies employed by them in terms of supporting their vicious ideology I really had to do a more realistic acting job than any of the players whom I ever directed in Hollywood.”

Morros supplied the newspapers with a wealth of colorful anecdotes about his thrilling escapades and close shaves. (Bureau agents, apparently bemused by his braggadocio, referred to him as their
“special special agent.”
) He claimed to have gotten to know Jane extremely well and said she had always accepted him at face value, except one night in Paris, when she had been drinking heavily and leaned across
the restaurant table and said,
“Boris, somehow I don't believe you're a Communist.”
Another Russian agent,
“a prominent American woman,”
also became suspicious of him and confided her doubts to the second secretary of the Russian Embassy in Washington. Subsequently, while in Munich, the FBI sent Morros a one-word coded wire—CINERAMA—alerting him that he had been compromised and his life was in danger. Morros managed to charm the Russians into believing that the American woman who had squealed on him was merely jealous. He had a narrow escape, hastening to take a plane to New York, where his grand jury testimony indicting the Sobles effectively ended his run as a counterespionage agent. The government paid for his services, but Morros did not disclose the sum. He stated that with his undercover work now over, he was hoping to resume his movie career.

In the days that followed, the case took another bizarre twist. Outraged members of HUAC clamored to hear more from Morros about the
“missing link”
in the Sobles' domestic espionage ring. After a three-hour closed-door session with the Morros, HUAC's chairman, Francis Walter, announced that the “prominent American woman” who tried to tip off the Russians was none other than the ex-ambassador's daughter, Martha Dodd Stern. He added that Morros's statement established that Martha and her husband, Alfred Stern, were
“part of the Soviet apparatus.”
Earlier that spring, the Sterns, who had been living in Mexico, had failed to appear after being subpoenaed by the grand jury investigating the Sobles and been cited for contempt and fined $50,000. On July 21, just days after the Zlatovski indictment, Martha and Alfred Stern, accompanied by their eleven-year-old son, Robert, suddenly upped and fled to Prague. Traveling on black-market Paraguayan passports, they boarded a 1 a.m. flight to Amsterdam via Montreal and then flew on to the Czech capital. The wealthy couple apparently astonished prosecutors by ducking behind the Iron Curtain and managed to take much of their substantial fortune with them.