A Covert Affair (51 page)

After nearly four weeks of trial, during which the defendant's condition worsened to the point that he was too weak to take the stand, the defense rested without calling a single witness and asserted that the government had failed to present a prima facie case. In just a little over an hour, the jury brought in its guilty verdict. On August 7, the day of sentencing, two former OSS men—H. Stuart Hughes, a Harvard professor of history, and Herbert Marcuse, a Brandeis professor of philosophy—came forward and raised serious doubts about some of the key testimony in the trial concerning information about the atom bomb project, which Soblen was accused of passing on to the Soviet Union. They argued that it could not have come from the two low-level German refugees then employed in the Biographical Records section of the OSS. Both professors offered to testify at a new trial. Judge William B. Herlands asserted that Soblen could request a new trial after sentencing and then proceeded to hand down a life sentence, stating firmly,
“A spy is a spy no matter what his health may be.”

On August 31, 1962, Jack Soble was paroled for “good behavior” after serving five and a half years. A week later, his brother, who had jumped bail and fled the United States for England, and was in Brixton prison awaiting extradition, committed suicide by taking an overdose of drugs. Robert Soblen had made a dramatic entry into England on July 1 after an earlier attempt to seek asylum in Israel failed and he
was forced by Israeli authorities to leave. As his chartered El Al flight returning him to New York neared London, Soblen cut his wrists and stabbed himself in the stomach; he later stated that this was not a suicide attempt but a carefully designed ploy to enter Britain, where he had hoped to prove his innocence. Jack Soble had five years to think about what he had done to his brother before he died in 1967.

Myra Soble served only four years. Afterward, she took an assumed name and made a new life for herself in New York City, where she was employed at an accounting firm. On July 5, 1991, she received a full pardon from President George H. W. Bush. Myra Soble died in 1992.

THEODORE H. WHITE was officially cleared of all charges of subversion two days before Christmas 1954, just three weeks after Senator McCarthy's methods were condemned by the full Senate. Although he was granted a spotless new passport,
“with all the dirty restrictions of the old wiped out,”
he did not immediately recover his self-confidence and former zeal. He was sufficiently traumatized by the loyalty-security hearing that he did not write anther word about China between 1954 and 1972 and wrote only four articles about Vietnam. For years, he also deliberately avoided reporting about foreign policy and defense—loaded topics during the Cold War. In his memoir,
In Search of History
, he castigated himself for ignoring those subjects because
“too much danger lurked there; and for that shirking I am now ashamed.”

White returned from his “wilderness” years in France and threw himself into analyzing domestic American politics, becoming one of the country's foremost historians with
The Making of the President, 1960
and the series of books that followed. He died of a heart attack in New York in 1986. Looking back on the ultimate impact of McCarthyism, White observed that its
“warping effect”
not only affected his own life but affected the country for decades to come:

McCarthy's most lasting effect on American history may well have been on its foreign policy—for a direct line runs between McCarthy's terrorizing of the Foreign Service of the United States State Department and the ultimate tragedy of America's war in Vietnam …

The wrong done by the McCarthy lancers, under McCarthy leadership, was to poke out the eyes and ears of the State Department on Asian Affairs, to blind American foreign policy. And thus flying blind into the murk of Asian politics, American diplomacy carried American honor, resources, and lives into the triple-canopied jungles and green-carpeted hills of Vietnam, where all crashed.

In the summer of 1995, the CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA) released the first group of “Venona” decrypts, translations of coded Soviet intelligence messages dealing with espionage operations in America between 1940 and 1948. “Venona” was the fanciful code word assigned to the highly classified government project, which began in 1943 and was formally closed in 1980, in order to limit access to the cryptanalytic breakthrough that finally made it possible to crack the Russian secret code. Approximately 2,900 Soviet diplomatic telegrams, intercepted by the U.S. Army's Signal Intelligence Service (a precursor to the NSA), have now been painstakingly decoded and deciphered, allowing experts to read portions of the secret cables. The majority of the KGB communications were translated and made available to the U.S. government by 1945, which meant that intelligence officials were in possession of evidence about a wide variety of Soviet espionage operations—everything from the Rosenbergs' atomic spying to the Soble ring—that was not made public at the time of their controversial cases. The release of so much new evidence has inevitably led to a certain amount of revisionism in terms of the guilt of many of the accused Soviet spies from that era, and analyzing and interpreting the full meaning of the Venona haul will doubtless keep historians, journalists, and authors busy for years to come.

The deciphered Venona cables pertinent to Jane Foster's case suggest
she lied in her memoir about the purely social and happenstance nature of her contacts with Martha Dodd Stern, Jack Soble, and Boris Morros. A telegram from Vasily Zarubin, a KGB general operating in the United States under the alias Zubilin, informed Moscow in June 1942 of a possible new source:
[UNRECOVERED CODE GROUP] LIZA [MARTHA DODD STERN], WE ARE CULTIVATING THE AMERICAN JANE FOSTER WITH A VIEW TO SIGNING HER ON. SHE IS ABOUT 30 YEARS OLD AND WORKS IN WASHINGTON IN THE DUTCH [TWO UNRECOVERED CODE GROUPS] TRANSLATOR OF MALAY LANGUAGES…. SHE IS A FELLOWCOUNTRYWOMAN [COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE SOVIET UNION, OR CPSU, MEMBER]. SHE IS DESCRIBED BY THE FELLOWCOUNTRYMEN [CPSU] AS A [UNRECOVERED CODE GROUP], DEDICATED PERSON.
In subsequent Venona messages from 1943 and 1944, Jane, identified by her code name “Slang,” is described as providing information, but these memos are incomplete and extremely vague. It is impossible to tell if Jane was simply being indiscreet and talking about information gleaned from her job that the author of the memo felt would be of interest to Moscow or actually “reporting” the information to her Soviet handler.

There are only a handful of Venona decrypts referring directly to Jane, and while incriminating they are not conclusive evidence that she was a Soviet spy. To begin with, the translations are woefully incomplete: the cryptanalysts were able to decipher only portions of the coded telegrams, leaving gaps that could alter the meaning of the messages. In addition, all of the messages are secondhand accounts by Zarubin or another Soviet handler reporting to the KGB about what various American sources—Martha Dodd Stern or Jack Soble or Morros—said or claimed to have done. As a result, inaccuracies abound. For example, Morros's report in one cable that Jane told him she was recruited by Martha Dodd Stern in 1938, when she was actually still in Batavia, was wrong and demonstrates the danger of hearsay. Morros was either mistaken or misinformed. Adding to the confusion, they all were assigned code names, and these code names changed over time and are often
only half deciphered, so the cryptanalysts made educated guesses as to their identities.

The decrypts are also ambiguous and open to interpretation. The Zarubin telegram from 1942 is speculative in nature, merely outlining their plan to recruit Jane in the future. While Zarubin was later convinced Jane was working as an agent and passing them information, the reports are still all secondhand, and Jane's state of mind—whether she was under the impression she was helping the Sterns and the Communist cause or was fully cognizant that she was serving Soviet intelligence—is unclear. Finally, given all the testimony on record from the Sobles and other Soviet recruits to the effect that they were under enormous pressure to keep Moscow supplied with information, and Jack Soble's admission under oath in the Soblen trial that he told Morros “lies” just to keep him happy, there is no way to be certain of the accuracy or verisimilitude of these messages. They all had an obvious interest in exaggerating their progress to their Soviet handlers, and their inflated claims about new recruits and espionage coups may have been closer to empty boasts than actual achievements.

Apart from the Venona decrypts, a wealth of new material about Soviet espionage has also come to light in recent years from the notebooks of a former KGB officer, Alexander Vassiliev, who was permitted unprecedented access to Stalin-era intelligence archives in 1993. Sorting through Vassiliev's extensive notebooks of transcribed KGB material, two historians, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, have provided a thorough and carefully constructed account of Soviet intelligence operations in the United States during the 1930s and 1940s. These official communications include much new material about the Soble ring and the activities of the double agent Boris Morros. There are KGB memos referring to Jane and George, confirming the Venona cables and again implicating the pair as members of the Soble network. In one KGB memo, Zarubin listed “‘Slang,' Jane … of the Far Eastern Department of the ‘cabin' [OSS]” as one of the sources recruited under his watch. In a later retrospective memo dated 1957, he wrote, “On a lead from ‘Liza' the agent ‘Slang' was recruited, followed by ‘Slang's' husband, the agent ‘Rector,' who once worked for American counterintelligence in
Austria.” The authors go on to observe that the notebooks reveal that the KGB developed “more than a dozen sources in the OSS,” eleven of whom were “secret Communists” who came to the KGB via the American Communist Party, which is the same route Jane followed.

The Vassiliev notebooks, like the Venona transcripts, provide a fascinating glimpse into the inner workings of Soviet espionage, but it is impossible to simply accept the claims of the KGB authors or their American sources as fact. They were all too adept at spinning their successes and failures to have any of their accounts taken at face value. Once again, Vassiliev's access was partial and restricted, and, as Haynes and Klehr are careful to note, “even contemporaneous documents can sometimes mislead because their author didn't correctly understand the events he was reporting for some reason, harbored prejudices and assumptions that distorted what was reported, or for self-promotion or self-protection distorted what actually happened.”

In spite of all these caveats, the existence of multiple documentary sources describing Jane Foster and George Zlatovski as Soviet assets establishes that they were deeply enmeshed in the Soble espionage ring. How they became caught up in the Soviet network, and whether or not there were mitigating circumstances, is another matter. The fact remains that in her book Jane never acknowledged even being aware of any Soviet espionage, let alone becoming a participant, and lied about the true nature of her complicated relationship with the Sterns, the Sobles, and Boris Morros. Even at the end of her life, she was too accustomed to half truths and evasions to permit herself to be completely candid. By writing a memoir about her wartime service and postwar travails, Jane hoped to have the last word about her fascinating life. Unfortunately, her flawed and incomplete account raises more questions than it answers.

For those who are interested in reading more about Soviet espionage against America during this era, I recommend the following:

Benson, Robert Louis, and Michael Warner, eds.
Venona: Soviet Espionage and the American Response, 1939–1957.
Washington, D.C.: National Security Agency / Central Intelligence Agency, 1996.

Haynes, John Earl.
Red Scare or Red Menace?: American Communism and Anticommunism in the Cold War Era.
Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996.