A Covert Affair (45 page)

The Sterns' lawyer, Paul O'Dwyer, who made an unsuccessful effort to have the subpoena quashed, admitted years later that he could not blame his clients for being too scared to appear in court.
“The Justice Department, at that time, was finding the most underhanded ways
of getting indictments,” he explained. “They were very apprehensive. They believed that Morros would say one thing and they would say another, and that would be an indictable offense. [To hand down an indictment, a grand jury does not have to be convinced of guilt beyond reasonable doubt, only persuaded there is sufficient evidence to warrant a trial.] All the rules about the defendant being innocent until proven otherwise—all those rules went out the window because of the atmosphere in which these trials took place.” O'Dwyer never doubted for a minute that their lives were at stake. “I am firmly of the belief that knowing how Boris Morros was acting, that if the government had taken the Rosenbergs and electrocuted them, they would have electrocuted Martha and Alfred.”

On September 6, the Sterns held a press conference in Prague to denounce the “fascist” practices of the United States. Martha, as brash and beautiful as ever, opened her remarks by making a preemptive strike against Morros, saying that her husband had been subjected to a “campaign of character assassination” and felt compelled to reply. Morros's accusations were the “fantastic inventions of a Hollywood imposter” employed by the United States government to “destroy or silence those people who dare dissent.” The allegations, she continued, were motivated by revenge for the failure of his music company, when in fact the fault lay with his own “incompetence.” She added that her and her husband's long progressive record was well known, and they were “proud” to be in the United States' tradition of protest. The government was persecuting them because the ruling elite was “deathly afraid of … peaceful economic and political competition with the socialist countries.”

Three days later, on September 9, the Sterns were indicted for espionage in absentia. Morros, the principal witness against them, testified before the grand jury that he was told by his Russian superiors to set up the Boris Morros Music Company in December 1943, and that the Sterns would be investing $130,000. He was supposed to look after the  legitimate end of the music-publishing business in Hollywood, while the Sterns took over the New York office as a front for their espionage activities. Morros became irritated with Alfred Stern as a partner,
explaining that he was extravagant, once billing the company $5,000 for a payoff to another Russian agent. They also argued over the song “Chattanooga Choo-Choo.” Apparently Mr. Stern did not like the title, though, as Morros was quick to point out, it was a hit anyway. Still, Alfred and Martha Stern served a useful purpose, as the Soviets needed independently wealthy Americans who could travel without raising questions and could easily pass information over the border.

Morros testified that Martha Stern's role was to sound out prospective agents and arrange for their introduction into active espionage cells. She was charismatic and persuasive, and knew how to play on people's weaknesses and desires, occasionally resorting to blackmail when necessary. She had roped her own husband and brother into working for the Soviets before moving on to friends and colleagues. It was Martha Stern, Morros stated, who introduced him to Jane, whom she claimed to have mentored, and personally
“guaranteed”
the latter's devotion to Russia.

That fall, in a series of articles in
The Philadelphia Inquirer
, Morros told his tales of derring-do to Rep. Francis E. Walter, who wrote it up as the “First Official Story of the Man Who Fooled the Kremlin.” The pudgy counterspy was characterized as
“a sensitive, dynamic, extremely intelligent man with a fantastic memory.”
A Russian agent, Morros confided, never did anything by accident. Everything was by design; even the most innocuous acts had a hidden meaning—
“a hand to shake, a kiss, a match to light a cigaret …”
That was how it was with Martha and with Jane, casual encounters that led him to a ring “up to their eyeballs in red espionage.” The pulpy prose was accompanied by macabre cartoons depicting Morros fending off shadowy spies and foiling the advances of mysterious beauties. And so it went on and on, with the flamboyant, self-mythologizing Boris Morros beaming in the spotlight, granting exclusive interviews, and clearly loving being back in show business.

While they were being vilified in the American press, Jane and George were besieged in Paris. The bottom had dropped out of their world six months earlier. Like Julia and Paul, they had awoken one morning to
devastating news. It was January 26, 1957, just days after Jane got out of the hospital, when they read in the
Herald Tribune
that Jack and Myra Soble had been arrested in New York as “Soviet spies.” They had known the Sobles for years. Jane and George quickly made the connection between the newspaper article and the recent reappearance of CIA agents outside their home. There had also been the terse phone call the previous day requesting their presence at the American Embassy
“at eleven o'clock tomorrow morning.”
Panic stricken, they had immediately phoned their lawyer. They took a taxi straight to his office in the Seventh Arrondissement and observed that they were followed the entire way by two cars, four men in each. They attempted to explain their predicament to their French lawyer, the
“tragic-comedy of errors,”
as Jane later put it, laying out how their friendship with this couple would inevitably link them to some sort of “crime” in America. He listened, concluded there was little he could for them at present, but managed to make them feel somewhat calmer.

As soon as Jane and George stepped into the street, they were surrounded. It was the same eight men they had seen in the cars earlier that morning. Terrified that they were about to be abducted by the CIA, Jane began yelling for help. Their lawyer, roused by her terrified screams, came rushing downstairs, coatless and still in his slippers. He reassured her that the officers were French police, attached to the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST), or counterintelligence unit, and that she and George were obliged to go with them. By law, they could be detained for twenty-four hours and questioned. At the end of that period, they had to be released or formally charged. She was put in one of the cars, George in the other, and they were driven to the DST headquarters near the élysée Palace. They were led across the huge courtyard of a nineteenth-century building and deposited in separate waiting rooms. Jane was taken to a small room occupied by two men, each seated at a desk before an identical typewriter. A short, round officer, who looked like
“a hairless teddy bear,”
took charge of her interrogation.

At the outset, his questions ranged widely, from when she had joined the Communist Party to whether she knew the famous Soviet
spy Richard Sorge (she had no idea who he was) to her familiarity with a long list of Russian names. The only person she had ever heard of was Lavrenti Beria (“Who hadn't?”), the notorious head of Stalin's secret police who was executed for his crimes against the state in 1953. As the interrogation progressed, the questions cut to the heart of the matter—her relationship to the Sobles, the Sterns, and, to a lesser degree, Boris Morros, whom the short French policeman referred to as “Maurice Borrós.” Jane began by being defiant and obstructionist, convinced that they were going to try to pressure her into listing American Communists and “demand names.” She was not being brave, she noted in her memoir, as she was “in no sense a Communist sympathizer by 1957” and had “no ideology” to sustain her. She simply had a deep-seated “hatred and contempt for snitches” going back to her days at the convent school.

When it became clear that the officers were not interested in her Communist ties, only in her connection to the espionage ring, she
“put her head on the desk and bawled.”
When they presented her with copies of every letter she had ever written to Soble, including a receipt for the repayment of a $1,800 loan to him, she sobbed harder. Faced with this feminine display of hysterics, the French officers became “extremely solicitous.” They asked whether she would like some champagne, whiskey, beer, or fruit juice. Understanding the root of her distress, they also brought her a copy of the French civil code and pointed out the relevant passage barring extradition for political offenses, adding that “espionage was an eminently political offense.” The short, round policeman then prodded her to talk, saying, “You might as well tell the truth. Soble is talking in America.”

Jane gave him a withering look. All she felt in that moment was frustrated rage. She did not have to be told Soble was talking. She already knew he would say anything he had to in order to avoid the same fate as the Rosenbergs. She also knew of his “mental deterioration” over the last few years, and of his wife, Myra's, “stupidity.” She could only imagine how easily they could both be manipulated to “say anything the Americans wanted.”

The real problem was not Soble but Boris Morros, a lying, self-aggrandizing
clown of a Hollywood mogul, who, she only now realized, much too late, had been playing a far more complicated game than she had ever imagined. Morros was in the business of peddling hearsay and innuendo, and he had handed her and George over in a neat package tied up with string. Jane could not help wondering if it had been Morros, pulling strings behind the scenes, who had been responsible for getting her passport restored.
“Morros, who did not want to lose his highly profitable meal ticket. He had been eating high on the hog, off the FBI/CIA, and was undoubtedly telling them … George and I could lead them directly to the top echelons of the KGB.”

It was by then one or two in the morning, and she was exhausted. She must have looked wrung out because the policeman took her into another room, furnished with a Napoléon III sofa upholstered in “hideous green rep,” and brought her an inedible sandwich. He placed a hand on her arm and said,
“Écoutez-moi bien, madame. La France vous a donné l'abri et le refuge. Et vous refusez maintenant d'aider la France?”
(Listen to me well, madam. France has given you shelter and refuge. And do you now refuse to help France?)

It was a masterstroke of interrogation. She had been on the verge of breaking. By invoking her beloved France, he unlocked her tongue. If she had any allegiance left it was to the country she now called home and desperately wanted to go on calling home for the rest of her days. France had a long history of welcoming political refugees, and it was her last, best hope. In that moment, she roused herself to make one more attempt to clear her name. Never one to
“do things by halves,”
once she started to talk she could not stop.

She told the DST “everything”—about her “reasons for joining the Communist Party and those for leaving it”; about the early days, before the war, when she was an “open member” of the Party and picketed the White House, signed petitions, and sold the
Daily Worker
on street corners. Her interrogator appeared surprised by the last and returned to it repeatedly, as if this menial task did not fit with his information about her as a high-level Soviet operative. She thought that she could see the dawning realization that she and George “were either the victims of the Americans, or of the Russians, or of both, or, at the most,
‘lampistes'
—a term meaning literally railroad employees who swing lanterns when a train pulls out and, by extension, the lowest of the low, who are made to pay for the mistakes or misdeeds of their superiors.”

She told of meeting the Sobles through Martha Stern in New York and how, after Jack Soble expressed interest in the Indonesian conflict, she had given him a copy of her OSS report to read. She described her gradual alienation from the Sterns, whom she had not seen since leaving New York ten years earlier. She outlined her relations with Jack Soble, the money she had lent him for his business back in 1947, and her efforts to collect it some years later when she learned he was in Paris. She talked about his odd demeanor, dramatic mood swings, and strange insistence that she meet his successful Hollywood producer friend Boris Morros, all the while going on about
“what a fabulous man he was.”
When Morros had offered her husband a job managing his art-house theater on rue du Faubourg Montmartre, they could not resist taking him up on it. George, “the eternal student,” had been unable to find steady work in the pinched French postwar economy, and this seemed like the answer to all their problems.

“Boris Morros was an outstanding confidence man,”
Jane recalled, explaining how he had taken them to the theater and introduced them to the “principal” owner, a White Russian émigré and son-in-law of Rachmaninoff. “Had we the brains of a gnat between us, we would have realized that all Boris Morros had proved was that the theater really existed and nothing more.” When Morros proposed selling them a 10 percent interest in the business for $4,000 (approximately $30,000 today), Jane, against her “better judgment,” allowed herself to be persuaded. She asked her father to advance the sum and wrote Morros a check on her Swiss bank account. He had at once paid out a month's salary in advance, and George, “in the euphoria of the moment,” had proposed that they all go on holiday, inviting the Sobles and Morroses to join them at the Salzburg Festival. Jane's doubts about Morros faded in light of his obvious celebrity in music circles, especially when he called his “good friend” Yehudi Menuhin, the famed violinist and conductor, and got them tickets to the sold-out performance of
Don Giovanni.
When they returned to Paris a week later, however, Morros promptly vanished
into obscurity, and they discovered that the art-house theater really belonged to the White Russian. There never was any partnership or job. It was a
“pure swindle on the part of Boris Morros.”