Operation Solo (24 page)

Headquarters had instructed the SOLO team to accompany reports with their own explanation of the significance of the contents; no one had empowered them to recommend, much less make political policy. Their interpretations thus had to show policymakers what ought to be done and the likely consequences of inaction without presuming to tell anyone what to do. At the same time, nothing in the analyses could hint that they were made by someone with rare understanding of Soviet mentality derived from lifelong immersion in communism and someone Soviet rulers trusted with their innermost thoughts.

In essence, the analysis Morris and Boyle submitted that December said: The Soviets are proceeding from the irrational premise that upon assuming office President Nixon may order a nuclear attack upon them. Unless they are disabused of this irrational assumption, they are likely to act irrationally.

Morris and Boyle hoped that the Nixon administration would conclude that, by all available diplomatic means, the Soviets must be reassured that the United States had no intention of attacking them.

Evidently it did, for by the time Morris returned to Moscow in March 1969 Soviet attitudes had undergone a striking change that could not have occurred without some American initiatives. All talk about impending war had ceased, and the tanks and troops so conspicuous the preceding November had disappeared. Suslov and Ponomarev said that achievements of understandings with the United States had become a primary objective of Soviet foreign policy. They hoped that Nixon would “see the light of reality” and
agree to arms limitations, and they intended to be patient in negotiating with the Americans.

For the first time, however, they explicitly expressed fears that the United States and China would unite against the Soviet Union. Morris could not ascertain whether their concern arose from concrete intelligence collected either in Washington or Peking or whether it was based solely upon analysis of the drift of world events. Regardless, the political intelligence or analysis that the Soviets only a few months before had pronounced abysmal in this instance was excellent.

As for the Chinese, the Soviets seemed on the verge of losing all patience. Never before in all their many conversations with Morris about China, spanning nearly a decade, had the Soviets alluded to the possibility of war. Now they did, declaring they were prepared to employ military force against the Chinese if that proved to be the only way to deal with them. They did not want war and they planned one last appeal to the Chinese, but they were ready for war.
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The Soviets elaborated upon these positions while Morris attended an international conference of parties in Moscow during May and June. They were still afraid that Nixon might revert to policies of “Cold War and containment”; they worried increasingly about an accommodation between the Chinese and Americans, yet they remained committed to improving relations with the United States and reaching some arms agreements. Developments in China appalled them. Ponomarev told Morris that Maoists had murdered the former president of China, Liu Saho-Chi, and his wife, and thereby virtually destroyed the Communist Party.

Morris heard more from Brezhnev in September. He had to fly to Moscow to arrange for Hall to go to the funeral of Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi, and when Hall came back to Moscow, Brezhnev briefed him and Morris about secret discussions between Kosygin and Chou En Lai conducted just a few days before on September 13, 1969. The Soviets judged it futile for the time being to try further to settle their ideological differences with the Chinese. So Kosygin proposed some relatively small, practical actions to rebuild civil relations—increased trade, sharing information about world affairs, exchange of newspaper correspondents, mediation of border disputes, and resumption of contacts between friendship societies. Chou listened sullenly and agreed to nothing, and Brezhnev predicted the Chinese would continue to agree to nothing.

In December 1969, during the annual review of the next American party budget, Ponomarev confirmed that the negotiations in Peking had come to naught. The Chinese had resumed their nasty calumny and bellicose propaganda against the Soviets, and Ponomarev despaired, “China is our most important international problem.”

He was more optimistic or at least hopeful about relations with the United States. Both Soviet and American negotiators engaged in the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) were “playing their cards close to the chest,” but the possibility of some agreements existed and the Soviets were willing to make concessions if the Americans reciprocated.

Enabled by SOLO to read the thoughts of Soviet rulers, Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and confidants within a year had transformed the
attitudes of Soviet rulers. In November 1968, this little band of oligarchs viewed Nixon as the devil personified, threatening them with extinction. By November 1969, these same men sufficiently trusted Nixon to make dealing with him the foundation of their foreign policy. They did not like him—they still regarded him and the United States as enemies—but they respected him.

By nature and nurture, Kissinger was a scholar not prone to adulatory or extravagant statements. Years would pass before the FBI revealed to him (or to the president) who Agent 58 was and just why he could do what he did. Kissinger had no ties to the FBI, nothing to hide from the FBI, and nothing personally to gain from the FBI. But on his own he went to the FBI and said, “What you are doing is fabulous. You have opened a window not only into the Kremlin but into the minds of the men in the Kremlin. This is unprecedented in modern history.”

Through Missions 35, 36, and 37 to Moscow, Morris kept the window open during 1970 and précis of reports by him and Boyle show how wide the view given the United States was:

While Morris was in Moscow, the FBI received a communication from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), a service it regarded and treated as a brother. A well-placed member of the Canadian Communist Party, revolted by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, brooded and concluded that he long had been on the wrong side. In the words of Milovan Djilas, the Yugoslav political philosopher who once ranked just below Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao as a communist ideologue, he “thought his way out of communism,” just as Morris had. Conscience impelled him to go to the RCMP and detail what he knew about communist subversion. The Canadians naturally were most interested in what the communists were doing in Canada, but toward the end of his confessional the convert told a story that caused his RCMP listener /interrogator to ask, “Are you willing to tell that face to face to the FBI?”

The Detroit field office, being nearest to Toronto, took the testimony and filed a report, which roughly said: