A Covert Affair (50 page)

For a late starter, Julia went on to become a phenomenal success. The first volume of
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
has sold more than thirty million copies to date, and she went on to coauthor a hefty sequel, as well as eight more cookbooks. Her
French Chef
television series ran on PBS for ten years and turned Julia into a household name—and the quintessential television chef. What made Julia so appealing, apart from the fact that she was a natural ham, was that she was something entirely new and unexpected: with her commanding physical presence, intelligence, and operatic voice, she was a whisk-wielding, apron-clad marvel. She credited her incredible ad-libbing skills to the years she spent attending embassy cocktail parties with Paul, where she learned to disarm the stuffiest foreign diplomats with her down-to-earth American humor and entertaining anecdotes. She never developed an ounce of smugness about her enormous popularity. Nor did she ever consider moving to commercial television or cashing in on her name by accepting any kind of product sponsorship.
“We have no desire for mink coats, yachts, or Cadillacs,”
she once explained.
“We're perfectly happy just the way we are.”
They did allow themselves one big splurge: in 1965, flush from the royalties of her first book, Julia and Paul built their dream house in Provence, in the small town of Plascassier above the hills of Cannes. For the next two decades, they spent six months of every year at “La Peetch,” short for La Pitchoune (The Little One), as they called their French hideaway.

Julia inspired legions of television chefs, a classic
Saturday Night Live
parody—which she loved and kept a copy of by her television set—and the musical
Bon Appétit!
starring Jean Stapleton. An absolute original, Julia did not take kindly to imitators. One fan she reportedly did
not approve of was the blogger Julie Powell, with her mission to cook every recipe in
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
—a stunt on which Powell based a best-selling book,
Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen
, which in turn inspired a movie. The Nora Ephron film, which also drew on Julia's memoir,
My Life in France
, written with her nephew Alex Prud'homme, charmingly evokes the Childs' marriage, with Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci as Julia and Paul.

Julia was continually grateful that she had found true love, and that it in turn had led her to a second love affair with cooking and to such a joyous career. Paul was content in his supporting role, making himself quietly indispensable. Every morning, he and Julia would sit at their kitchen table and discuss the workday ahead, discussing plans for her new show and downing oceans of lapsang souchong. Despite their disparate personalities, what they had in common was their slow, careful approach to work and their dedication to perfection. After hours of laboring over scripts and shooting scenes for
The French Chef
at WGBH, they would often slip away to Joyce Chen, their favorite Chinese restaurant in Cambridge. Julia rarely cooked anything Asian style, believing that a lifetime was barely long enough to learn the French cuisine, but she confessed she could happily “live on Chinese food.” It reminded her and Paul of the old days, and all the wonderful meals they shared in Chungking when they were courting.

They remained devoted to each other. Even during the most hectic years of book promotion, they were rarely apart. When Paul, who was ten years her senior, began to fade with age, Julia faithfully took him on the road with her, and always made sure he had a front-row seat at her cooking demonstrations. He would watch the clock, advise her to speak louder, and lead the applause. After a series of strokes in 1989, he entered a nursing home in Fairlawn, Massachusetts. Their forty-eight-year partnership ended with his death in 1994 at the age of ninety-two. Julia lived another decade, returning to her native California in her last years, and died on August 13, 2004, two days before her ninety-second birthday.

There is no evidence that on their many trips to Paris Julia and Paul ever saw Jane again. Nevertheless, in the hundreds of interviews
she gave over the course of her career, Julia never said a word against her former OSS colleague. As the former head of the Registry, she was much too disciplined at keeping secrets to let anything slip. As a friend, she was far too loyal to speak out of turn or sit in judgment. Not until 1991, in a lengthy oral history interview for the Association of Diplomatic Studies and Training, did Julia open up about her relationship with that
“fascinating and amusing girl, Jane Foster,”
reminiscing about her fondly for a few minutes before adding matter-of-factly, “who turned out to be a Russian agent.”

BETTY MACDONALD became a widow quite without warning in May 1959 when her husband, Richard Heppner, died of a heart attack at age forty-nine. Betty, who worked in a variety of government jobs after the war, joined the CIA as an operations officer and continued to work for the agency until her retirement in 1973. By then, she had married Frederick B. McIntosh, a veteran World War II fighter pilot, and settled in Leesburg, Virginia. In addition to her wartime memoir,
Undercover Girl
, she wrote the highly praised
Sisterhood of Spies: The Women of the OSS
, published by the Naval Institute Press in 1998. She has also penned two children's books,
Inky
and
Palace Under the Sea.
For many years she served as editor of
The OSS Society Newsletter.
In the early 1980s, while in Paris on business, Betty decided to look up Jane. She discovered she was too late and instead had a brief, awkward visit with George. He was perfectly polite but struck her again as
“a strange man”
and not particularly to her liking. She soon made her apologies and left to pay her respects at Jane's grave. To this day, Betty remains unshaken in her conviction that her friend and former OSS colleague was never a spy.

MARTHA DODD STERN and her husband, ALFRED, remained in exile for the rest of their lives. Fleeing to Prague, they reportedly requested permission to live in Moscow but after a brief sojourn in Russia and Eastern Europe returned to the Czech capital. By all accounts, they enjoyed a privileged life in Prague, where they lived in a sprawling three-story villa and were treated as local celebrities. A KGB document
indicates that from 1963 to 1970 they made their home in Havana, after Martha fell in love with the romance of the Cuban revolution. The Sterns eventually became disappointed with the Cuban political scene and disillusioned with life in such a desperately poor country and returned to Czechoslovakia. In November 1972, they walked into the American Embassy in Prague and applied for passports. They retained Leonard Boudin, petitioned to return to the United States, and began protracted negotiations to avoid prosecution and imprisonment on their return. The Sterns, according to their lawyer, were getting on in age and were no longer happy with life behind the Iron Curtain. The Justice Department took the position that if the Sterns wanted to return to the United States, then they needed to cooperate as witnesses: they would have to agree to meet in a neutral country and tell the FBI all they knew about Soviet espionage operations in America during the 1940s and 1950s. The FBI field office in New York emphasized to Washington that the accused spies could furnish worthwhile information and
“every effort should be made to obtain the Sterns' story prior to their entrance in the United States.”

The Sterns refused to talk. But their passport application placed the government in something of a quandary: with the main witnesses against them deceased and with no way to sustain a prosecution for espionage conspiracy, the State Department had no real grounds for denying them passports. In an effort to strengthen its case against the Sterns, the FBI considered approaching Jane and George Zlatovski to see if they would agree to be interviewed. If they were amenable, the bureau could send a special agent acquainted with their case to Paris to question them
“concerning their knowledge of the Sterns and Soviet espionage operations in the U.S.”
Jane and George would be offered immunity in return for their testimony. In the end this strategy was vetoed and the matter dragged on for years without resolution.

In 1979, the twenty-two-year-old indictment against the Sterns was finally dropped, in part due to the couple's advanced age and the absence of witnesses against them. Their lawyer, Victor Rabinowitz, Boudin's longtime partner, described the indictment as
“a very grave injustice of the McCarthy era,”
and the dismissal, the result of almost
ten years of talks with the FBI and the Justice Department, as “a belated effort to set things straight.” The Sterns never exercised their right to return. Their statements to the FBI indicated their dread of any publicity that might revive interest in their infamous case. They were “too old,” Martha wrote a friend, “to pull up roots.”

When the Sterns learned that Jane had written a memoir, they considered suing to stop its publication until their lawyers convinced them there was little they could do. They were very unhappy with Jane's portrayal of them but took consolation in the book's poor sales and inability to find a publisher outside England. Alfred Stern died of cancer in Prague in 1986. Martha Dodd Stern remained in exile and died in 1990. Their son, Bobby, whose childhood was blighted by their life in exile, developed a “nervous condition” that was later diagnosed as schizophrenia. Dr. Judd Marmor, an eminent Los Angeles psychiatrist who saw Bobby at the Sterns' request, later wrote them that despite his biochemical vulnerability, their son “must be considered one of the unfortunate victimized innocent bystanders of the whole miserable McCarthy era.”

BORIS MORROS chronicled his adventures in a melodramatic book,
My Ten Years as a Counterspy
, published by Viking Press in 1959. He immediately began negotiating to sell the film rights, and it was made into a pseudodocumentary-style, anti-Communist propaganda film,
Man on a String
, starring Ernest Borgnine as “Boris Mitrov,” an even more fictionalized version of the FBI's “special special agent.” The book also helped spawn a television series,
The Spy Next Door.
Morros's life did not have the happy ending he had scripted: a few months after he was unmasked as a counterspy, his wife, Catherine, filed for legal separation. In October 1957, she alleged cruelty against him in her Superior Court suit for separate maintenance and charged that Morros had even failed in recent years to provide support for his ninety-eight-year-old father, the same man he had theoretically become a Soviet agent to protect. Morros died of cancer on January 8, 1963.
The New York Times
reported his age as seventy-three, while other newspapers gave it as sixty-eight. As Jane observed in her memoir,
“it is absolutely typical of
his whole lying life that no one, probably not even the FBI/CIA, ever knew the true facts about him. Undoubtedly he himself no longer knew truth from fiction.” One thing is certain: Morros knew how to market himself as a spy—whether it was to Moscow, Washington, or Holly-wood—and he played his part to the hilt.

JACK and MYRA SOBLE: After their arrest in January 1957 as Russian spies, Jack and Myra Soble were questioned scores of times by the FBI, and were persuaded to testify against friends and family members in their espionage ring in return for drastically reduced sentences. Nearly four years later, on November 30, 1960, their statements led to the indictment of Jack's brother, Dr. Robert A. Soblen (he reportedly added an
n
to his name to differentiate himself from his physician-wife), on espionage charges. Soblen, a fifty-nine-year-old psychiatrist, pleaded not guilty to conspiring to obtain material relating to national defense for the Soviet Union, both during World War II and thereafter. Jack Soble, one of the government's main sources of allegations against Jane, would be the prosecution's star witness, which meant that for the first time his testimony would be exposed to the rules of evidence in a court of law. (As the Sobles had both made deals, and both the Sterns and the Zlatovskis had declined to return to the United States to stand trial, the government had never had to show any proof of their crimes.) That, during his years in jail, Jack Soble had suffered a mental breakdown, twice attempted suicide, and received twenty shock treatments before being found “mentally competent” to testify against his brother apparently did nothing to diminish the government's faith in his credibility.

On June 19, 1961, the case
United States v. Dr. Robert A. Soblen
opened to a packed federal courthouse at Foley Square in New York, featuring the first public appearance of a principal player in what one newspaper called
“the biggest spy ring smashed in this country since atom spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg went to the chair.”
It turned out that the defendant, Dr. Soblen, was in an advanced stage of lymphatic leukemia, and appeared frail and heavily medicated in his wheelchair. Jack Soble testified at length about their political activities in Lithuania in the 1920s and 1930s, and later in Germany, where they joined the
Communist Party and supported its “Trotskyite wing,” and sometime in 1940 begun gathering information for the Soviet Union, employing many family members in their ring. Under cross-examination by the defense counsel Joseph Brill, Jack Soble admitted to being a desperate man forced to take desperate measures. When asked, for example, if he had done the things reported in the sensational
Journal-American
articles detailing his exploits with Martha Dodd Stern and Jane Foster, he denied both their accuracy and their authorship, and explained he had agreed to their publication sight unseen because he needed the money. He also admitted to making up material for Boris Morros to feed to the Russians, fearing that Morros would make good on his threat to expose him to the FBI if he did not give him the reports, which Soble described as
“lies and wrong things about what I did in this country.”