A Covert Affair (47 page)

The twenty-ninth charge, which received the greatest share of titillating press coverage, alleged that in December 1949 she and George had gone to Salzburg to report on “the sexual and drinking habits” of the American personnel in Austria. By that time, both she and George were civilians, and all they did was relax for a few days, visit old friends, and attend midnight Mass in the church of Sankt Wolfgang. “As for ‘sexual and drinking habits,' if the Russians were interested, all they had to do was ask any Austrian bartender or chambermaid.”

By far the best “gem” of prosecutorial invention, in her view, was the line in count 4 of the indictment: “Mrs. Zlatovski fled from justice in or about the month of April 1947 and departed from the United
States.” It was hard to see how boarding the U.S. passenger lines on a legal passport to join her husband, who was working for U.S. military intelligence “in the American-occupied zone of Austria” amounted to fleeing. And what was she supposed to be “fleeing from in 1947”? No charges were ever filed against her until a decade later.

For all that she would rail against the indictment as a “scurrilous document” and quibble endlessly about specific dates and details, several of which were demonstrably wrong, Jane could not deny the damning chain of association outlined in the charges: that she knew the Sterns very well, had once considered them close friends, and that it was at their apartment in the Majestic that she had met both the Sobles and Boris Morros. Nor could she dispute that she had socialized with the Sobles and Morros later in Paris, lent them money for business ventures, and traveled with them or to meet them on more than one occasion, spending time with them in Salzburg, Vienna, and Zürich. It strained credulity to the breaking point to believe she had never had so much as an inkling of anything unusual, let alone illegal. But then, if anyone ever lived in a bubble, it was Jane. Wittingly or unwittingly, she had surrounded herself with companions who were not only Communists but were actively involved in Soviet espionage and determined to lead her and her husband down that same path. Considering what little regard she had for this unsavory crew, her willingness to become so intimately involved with them reveals a record of bad judgment and indiscretion on a colossal scale. To the charge of stupidity, Jane observed ruefully in her memoir, she had no defense:

Gertrude Stein
wrote in her
Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
, “Every time a genius entered the room, a bell went off in my head.” With me, it's always been the opposite. Every time an evil or disaster-boding person entered the room, a bell would go off in my head. Unfortunately, I never paid attention to it. I was still trying to be all sweetness and light, and thought there was something wrong with me and that I was being irrational. The minute I laid eyes on Boris Morros, the bell started clanging loudly.

The best argument in Jane's favor was her apparent lack of guile or premeditation. If she was the Sterns' protégée, as Boris Morros contended, and from early 1941 was being carefully groomed to become an undercover agent, why would she have listed Martha Dodd Stern, a leader of the Soviet spy ring, as a character reference on her 1943 employment application for the OSS? For that matter, why would the Soviets have picked someone as unabashedly antiestablishment as Jane to be a mole? She was so unguarded about her radical activities that the Civil Service Commission, which investigated all prospective government employees, had insisted on a special hearing in September 1943 to address all the “derogatory information” that had been discovered. During the hearing, Jane had again cited her friendship with Martha, mentioning their common interest in music and painting and that they saw each other “
socially at concerts
and parties.” If Jane knew Martha was at the red-hot center of a secret Soviet intelligence conspiracy, it would seem like very poor tradecraft to flaunt their relationship and invite the investigators to talk to her. (Martha begged off, claiming to be too ill to be interviewed in person, told the investigators by phone that Jane was a “very sweet person.”) At the time, Jane also candidly listed as “social acquaintances” Charles Flato, her boss at the Board of Economic Warfare, and Dr. Susan B. Anthony and her husband, Henry Hill Collins Jr.—all Communist sympathizers she seems to have had no qualms about advertising as friends. Surely she could have come up with a more conservative list of pals if she wanted to be considered for a sensitive government job? Or at least have done a better job of covering her tracks? Instead, she left a trail of Communist ties that the FBI followed like bread crumbs and later used to bolster its case against her.

Jane's FBI file reveals that she turned up on the bureau's radar again in the spring of 1948 because of her connection to Jack Soble. A “known Soviet agent,” Soble was the focus of the “Mocase” investigation and the FBI was listening in on his calls, reading his mail, and checking out anyone who crossed his path. J. Edgar Hoover immediately ordered a
“complete and exhaustive investigation to determine the present contacts and activities of the Zlatovskis,”
bringing all the investigative techniques of the bureau to bear, including “technical and microfilm surveillance, physical surveillance,
and mail and trash recovery.” The investigation turned up the usual Communist Party sympathies and friends until July 1949, when a “Confidential Informant” (Boris Morros) suddenly identified Jane and George as “active in Soviet intelligence.”

The FBI files reveal that Morros was immediately fascinated by Jane, and saw her as ripe for the picking. In the course of vetting her, he reported reams of gossip about Jane picked up at the Sterns's parties, detailing her upper-crust background, reactionary father, youthful sojourn to Russia, marital infidelities, and sexual attractiveness. George's pro-Russian sympathies, lack of money, and drinking habits were duly noted but of less interest. He was apparently never viewed as having much potential, and Soble wrote him off as a “parasite.” Morros reported to the FBI that Soble praised Jane as one of their “best agents” and supported this claim by explaining she had gathered information on Americans in Austria but “destroyed the notes” when her Soviet contact failed to show, although she managed to pass along a report on “the Marshall Plan in Paris.”

In the hundreds of reports in her FBI file,
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and in all the hours of testimony, there was never any definitive evidence that Jane knowingly crossed over from ordinary Communist Party work to outright espionage—becoming a significant source, serving as a courier, or passing valuable military secrets to Soviet intelligence—other than the word of Morros and Soble. There was also never any explanation as to how, as an employee of the Austrian radio service and later as an unemployed painter, Jane gained access to important classified information. An FBI memo reveals that after four weeks of investigation in Austria, the bureau was unable to discover any derogatory information and reported Jane had an excellent reputation among her colleagues in Salzburg.

Jack Soble was repeatedly interviewed in prison, and what emerges from his vague, rambling, and often jumbled recollections is that he
and his wife were far from brilliant intelligence masterminds. They were very ordinary people, originally forced into spying to help their family members still trapped in the Soviet Union—they managed to get eighteen relatives out, along with a baby boy they adopted—and were threatened and tormented by the NKVD (and later the NKGB) at every turn. In their desperate efforts to keep their masters happy, they fed them a steady diet of scuttlebutt, secondhand information, and whatever low-level reports their various informants, mainly relatives, could lay their hands on. At one point, Soble admits that while he obtained various kinds of information from Jane and George, he could not recall what and “must have” told the Soviets it was “military information” even though it was nothing of the kind.

Even Myra Soble's sworn statement proved too vague to corroborate their allegations against Jane and George. For example, she stated she
“did not know if Jane ever prepared any reports on [words deleted] or any other United States personnel at Salzburg.”
While she believed Jane was providing reports to her husband, Myra “never saw any of these reports” and did “not know what was in them.” She testified to the same ignorance in reference to George's work. The reason she believed they were both “furnishing reports” to the Russians was that otherwise they would not have been paid $150 a month. She later added, however, that Jane and George stated that Morros had cheated them out of a $4,000 “investment in a theater enterprise” and that Morros had paid them back $150 a month for a while and then stopped. The Zlatovskis blamed her husband for “the swindle,” and she never saw them again after the spring of 1951. The apparent contradictions in her testimony were never addressed.

There was no love lost between the Sobles and the Zlatovskis, and Myra volunteered all kinds of seamy details about Jane's personal life—mentioning her affair with “a black man,” multiple abortions, and her drunkenness—in an attempt to cast her in the worst possible light. Neither of the Sobles was able to present any physical evidence or any document to substantiate their allegations. The one classified document Jane was specifically accused of handing over to Jack Soble was the OSS report on Indonesia that she had previously disseminated to the press, discussed in a series of interviews and one public lecture, and summarized
in a
New York Times
letter to the editor. According to Morros, Soble claimed the OSS report was useful to Moscow in the
“UN debate on Indonesia,”
but this seems highly unlikely as the report was old news by then and the political situation in Indonesia had changed considerably. Given the extent to which Boris Morros might have been tempted to embellish these nuggets for his bureau employers, and Jack and Myra's desire to dress up their statements to impress their Soviet handlers and later in their bid for leniency, it was impossible to gauge the verisimilitude of any of their accounts.

The major underlying problem with the government's case was that Morros, the FBI's counterspy, was himself a very questionable character, whose self-serving version of his own activities the authorities knew from the outset to be exaggerated and extremely unreliable. From the very first statement he made to the press when he came in from the cold—that patriotic sentiment had inspired him to call the FBI on July 14, 1947, and offer his services—Morros was prevaricating, blurring the line between fact and convenient fiction. FBI documents reveal unequivocally that it was the FBI's Los Angeles field office that first contacted Morros in 1947—not the other way around—and that he was interviewed on July 14, 16, and 18 about his connections to the Soviet intelligence official Vasily Zarubin. It was only
after
Morros realized the FBI knew of his involvement with Soviet espionage operations that he decided to cooperate fully to avoid prosecution. FBI records indicate he may also have angered his bosses at the NKVD and was running scared, providing additional impetus to ingratiate himself with the American intelligence service. His business setbacks—he had filed for bankruptcy twice—may also have motivated him to seek a new career as a counterspy.

Internal memos between D. M. Ladd, assistant director of domestic intelligence, and Hoover further reveal that the FBI had grave concerns about Morros's personal and financial integrity, and agents were ordered to maintain close tabs on him to be sure he would not end up double-crossing the bureau. In the end, however, the FBI was so eager to develop Morros as an informant that it overlooked the dubious incidents in his past, leaving open the question of what lies he might have told and misdeeds he might have committed in the name of his new
employer, to say nothing of the damage caused by his overblown allegations of Soviet espionage.

Morros's veracity became a critical issue for the Justice Department in January 1957, when the U.S. attorney Thomas Gilchrist was about to impanel the grand jury and bring Boris Morros in to testify. Before calling on the double agent, Gilchrist's office had queried the bureau about
“available information concerning Boris Morros that would reflect on his credibility,”
including the extent of his “compensation or expense money.” Gilchrist did not get the answers he had hoped for, however, and had to delay the proceedings while he dealt with what the FBI's director disclosed about their star witness.

Hoover's memo revealed that the FBI knew of at least three instances when Morros had been less than truthful. First, Morros had had not made full disclosure about his initial contact with the FBI in 1947. Second, he had reported to his FBI handlers in 1955 that he had met with Jane Foster in Paris in November 1954. The FBI, aware that she was in the United States at that time, “repeatedly interrogated” Morros about the meeting in Paris, but he insisted that it took place. The agents were not too concerned, as they believed it was possible Morros was confusing the meeting with one that took place months earlier. Still, it raised doubts about his memory, if not his honesty. Third, and far more incriminating, Morros had forged business contracts showing that he had the rights to the score of the opera
War and Peace
, which he had attempted to exploit in the United States for financial gain. In the summer of 1955, the Leeds Music Company of New York, which had obtained the rightful title from the noted Russian composer Sergey Prokofiev, filed a complaint with the FBI. Under pressure, Morros had reluctantly agreed to make restitution and paid the company the sum of $40,000.

As far as the FBI was concerned, the matter was closed. The more troubling implications of Morros's veniality were ignored. (There were also allegations concerning Morros's relations with the USIS in Vienna, as well as with a firm called Metal Import Trust of Zürich, which the FBI chose not to pursue.) The three incidents were judged insufficient to call into question Morros's ten-year relationship with the bureau or impeach the vast bulk of his testimony, which had been corroborated
by agents and other sources over the course of countless separate investigations. To assuage Gilchrist's concerns, Hoover sent the U.S. attorney a second memo detailing all the evidence substantiating Morros's claims.
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