Operation Solo (31 page)

“For a while, things should be quiet. Jack should miss a few meetings, ostensibly for security reasons. You must realize that their security on meetings is going to be tougher and tougher. They cannot afford to have this operation compromised. They must be scared to death that at any moment the FBI will jump on them.”

After missing a meeting, Jack should signal through the “rubber duck” or micro transmitter that he was all right, that something made him think the rendezvous was unsafe, and that he would meet at the fallback date and place. When he met Chuchukin he should appear worried, but not paranoid. He should say that all of his concerns were perhaps irrational; nevertheless, he wanted to report them. Then he should recite a series of fictitious and unverifiable incidents: a van that did not belong to anybody in the neighborhood loitered around his house; a young man and woman parked near his house and kissed and caressed, but his street was not a lovers' lane; his telephone sometimes failed, and the
telephone company said it was having problems with squirrels gnawing at its lines—all right, the squirrels were pests, but up until recently they hadn't cut his telephone service.

If the KGB interviewed Morris in Moscow, as it normally did during his year-end visits, he should express concern about security, ask if there had been any more defectors, and demand reassurance that knowledge of MORAT was being tightly held. However, a fine balance had to be struck between convincing the KGB that Morris and Jack were acutely concerned with security and frightening the KGB into believing that the operation had been compromised. Jack should make clear that he was willing to go on, but that everyone had to be very careful. Morris should not bring up security matters with his Politburo buddies; they didn't give a damn about such petty matters, but if they asked about them, he should defer to the KGB. In talking to the KGB, Morris should point out that he had not voiced his apprehensions to the Politburo; in operational matters, he put his trust in the KGB.

Moscow was as cold and laden with snow as when Morris first rode through its streets on a horse-drawn sleigh in 1929, and he and Eva welcomed the warmth and sanctuary of their apartment. By decorating the apartment with small Russian antiques and paintings, Eva had tried to make it into a second home, like the apartment in New York. They kept there extensive toiletries and clothing, including a plaid woolen robe, fleece-lined slippers, and flannel pajamas Eva had given Morris. Morris put them on while Eva gathered supper from the refrigerator, which as always was amply stocked with delicacies. Doctors told Morris that a couple of glasses of red wine a day would do him no harm, might do him some good, and were preferable to sleeping pills, so they uncorked a really fine bottle of Burgundy and before supper looked out on the falling snow that made the city appear pristine. Eva remembered because Morris, who would be seventy-two in May, suddenly and tenderly embraced her and said, “You are the greatest thing that ever happened to me. What a comrade you are.” Hastily, Morris corrected himself. “I meant partner.” They laughed and proceeded to enjoy the delicious
borscht Yekaterina had prepared along with good, chewy Russian bread. Morris thought,
Bread is the one good thing communism has given the people. No, that's not right. In my childhood we had good bread, and we exported wheat instead of begging for it from the United States and Canada
. Before they fell asleep, Morris said, “Don't forget to make Irina [Eva's escort] get the postcards tomorrow.”

Before an extended mission, Morris, with the help of Boyle, loaded big suitcases with all sorts of odds and ends as well as with the customary gifts. When Boyle asked why he was packing some peculiar items, Morris habitually replied, “Just in case.” The FBI rented a post office box to which Morris would send cryptically worded picture postcards from Moscow addressed to Mr. Justin Case, as in “Just in case.”

It took time for the cards to wend their way to Chicago, and Morris could write relatively few words on them. So the cards were not the ideal means of saying something to the FBI while in the Soviet Union; but they were the only means. By asking the escort to buy cards and the housekeeper to mail them, Morris could proclaim to the KGB his innocence.

Morris in the morning told Ponomarev that the American party needed $3.6 million for 1974; the Soviets, as Morris knew they would, agreed to $1.8 million. Ponomarev and Kazakov, not very delicately, instructed Morris to make Hall understand that “detente with the United States is now the cornerstone of Soviet foreign policy.” They did not say it outright but they clearly conveyed a message for Hall: This is the party line and you had better follow it, whether or not you like it.

There was something else Hall must understand. The Soviets recognized that the United States, because of its relatively influential Jewish population, had a special interest in Israel and the Middle East. The Soviet Union also had strategic interests in the Middle East, which was “much closer to us than it is to them.” Soviet and American interests in the Middle East conflicted and so the area was a “flash point,” which Morris interpreted to mean an area where events could get out of hand and lead to war. The Soviets were prepared to accept American interests if the United States
would accept theirs. In return for American concessions and acknowledgment of its right to have a say about what went on in the Middle East, the Soviet Union was ready to declare to the Arab world that Israel had a right to exist as a sovereign state and to establish formal diplomatic relations with it. Thus far, Nixon and Kissinger had been frank and honest in negotiations. True, they had not spoken about their “billing and cooing” with the Chinese (“billing and cooing” were the words used by an erudite and diplomatic Soviet interpreter; the Russian words were different and vulgar). But the (obscenity) Chinese had not been the subject of discussions; so they did not lie about that. Nixon and Kissinger also had honored their word about keeping negotiations and communications secret. But if the negotiations succeeded, everything, or most of it, would come out, and Hall should be ready for the results and ready to applaud them.

The Soviets, who liked Eva and Morris, exhausted them with hospitality. Almost every night there was a dinner with a member of the Politburo or Central Committee; at each Morris tried anew to explain Watergate. But to men who had colluded in the extermination of millions of their fellow citizens, including longtime comrades, Watergate still made little sense.

They landed in New York on December 12, 1973. The heartening sight of Boyle at the airport; the general gaiety of New York preparing for Christmas; the relief from fear that hourly they are being watched and listened to; the comfort of being in an apartment that really was their own, of being able to walk a block or two to markets, delicatessens, carryouts where at almost any hour you could satisfy any reasonable hunger; the family evenings with Jack, Roz, and Langtry at the storybook home of Al and Ann Burlinson; and, compared to Moscow, the overall merriment and jocularity of the people they saw on the streets—all combined to make the first days back home happy.

They stayed the first days in New York because the demands from headquarters were so voracious there was no time to go to Chicago. The first mission reports, once they were circulated, elicited a succession of questions; far from perturbing Morris, they gladdened him because they proved that the intelligence was being
seriously analyzed by intelligent people. Like Boyle, he awakened early and was at work at least by 8 A.M.

But on December 17, without consulting anyone except Eva, Morris made a pronouncement to the FBI: Tomorrow he and his wife were setting off on a vacation that would last until January 3. During it, he did not want to be disturbed.

Morris lived to work, and the belief that his work was vital to the United States probably kept him alive, against heavy medical odds. As a child he worked after Jewish school, helping in the cobbler shop of his father; at party headquarters in Chicago, to help after making his rounds as the “Red Milkman,” he got up at night to stuff stupid communist leaflets into the mailboxes of Americans who would have skinned him if they caught him. Carl Freyman started the custom by which the FBI weekly assembled a package of Soviet publications for Morris to analyze. Sometimes Morris called as early as 7 A.M. on Sunday to excitedly explain the significance of something he had culled from publications delivered on Saturday. Doubtless, he would enjoy a few free days to visit relatives during the holidays. But that was not the real reason he declared a vacation. He intended to go nowhere, only to hibernate at home. But by making himself officially unavailable, he liberated Boyle to be with his wife and six children before, during, and after Christmas.

After the tranquil holidays, on the night of January 18, 1974, Morris received a telephone call, and when he put the phone down his hand shook. The FBI had just deciphered a message from the KGB to Jack for MORAT: “Suspend all contact until further notice.”

Headquarters demanded to know what had happened. In the first hours, Burlinson, Boyle, and Langtry had no answers. Then agents uninvolved in SOLO reported that, on the afternoon of the eighteenth, Chuchukin, Jack's KGB handler, without bothering to pack, bolted from New York for Montreal. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police advised that he flew from Montreal on a ticket that listed his final destination as Moscow. Why? The next day Burlinson or Langtry found the answer.

The morning of the eighteenth a large bookstore on Fifth Avenue
displayed in its front window copies of a new book about the KGB.
¹⁴
The book contained a photograph of Chuchukin captioned, “Vladimir Aleksandrovich Chuchukin, a KGB officer assigned to work against Western journalists under the cover of a United Nations appointment.” An art or photo editor had placed his picture on a page with photographs, surreptitiously snapped and therefore unflattering, of three other prominent KGB officers who looked like snarling thugs. On the adjoining page appeared photographs diagramming a sinister KGB espionage device. The net effect portrayed Chuchukin as a candidate for the FBI's “Ten Most Wanted” list.

It is hard to say who was more dismayed—people in the Politburo, Central Committee, and KGB headquarters in Moscow, or people at FBI headquarters and the Chicago and New York offices. Something they all prized, for different reasons, seemed imperiled.

During the crisis, communications from headquarters to New York and Chicago were calm, reasoned, and encouraging, in part because of the changes in Washington. Plagued by scandal, the Nixon administration undertook to select as a new director of the FBI a man of unimpeachable rectitude, and it chose the police chief of Kansas City, Clarence Kelley, a former FBI agent. Kelley set out to surround himself with the strongest men he could find, and he appointed Raymond Wannall to be assistant director in charge of intelligence.

Wannall had worked in intelligence or counterintelligence for more than twenty years. In all those years, he never heard even an elliptical hint of the existence of SOLO. When he became assistant director, he was fully informed and he in turn briefed Kelley, who was amazed, and said, “Ray, you have the most interesting job in the FBI.”

Kelley granted Wannall broad authority to make policy decisions governing SOLO and told him that the management and protection of the operation would be one of his principal duties during the remainder of his FBI career.

Wannall began by trying to pick up the pieces and put them back together again.

fourteen

THE TRIAL

GUS HALL CONSTRUED THE ABRUPT, unexplained suspension of MORAT (SOLO) as a personal affront and a threat. Morris and Jack provided his main communications link with the Kremlin; they formed the conduit through which the indispensable Soviet cash flowed; and Morris, because of his standing and influence with the Soviets, enhanced Hall's status in Moscow. As weeks passed without any word whatsoever from the Soviets, Hall's apprehensions multiplied and, despite the order to cease all contact, he demanded that Morris by whatever means contact the Soviets to find out what had happened and why.

Still having heard nothing from the Kremlin or KGB, Morris on February 18, 1974, departed New York for Prague. Upon landing he asked to see the chief security officer at the airport and handed him a typed statement previously provided by the Czech Party commanding anyone who read it to help the bearer in all matters. Morris then gave the security officer a telephone number, and representatives of the Czech Party soon arrived and contacted the Soviets, who arranged for him to go on to Moscow.

When Morris entered Ponomarev's office, he was surprised to see Chuchukin grimly sitting there, like a prisoner in the dock, his eyes pleading for help. Defying protocol, Morris strode straight to Chuchukin and greeted him as if he had recovered a lost son. He was overjoyed to see Vladimir safe and well. “Jack has been worried sick about you. Why did you run away without even saying goodbye?”

Before Chuchukin could respond, Ponomarev curtly spoke in a tone communicating that the meeting had not been convened for purposes of good fellowship. “We have a grave and complicated situation.”

There ensued what Morris likened to a kind of trial. He was the expert witness, Chuchukin the defendant, Ponomarev the prosecutor or interlocutor. Seated next to Ponomarev was a big man who welcomed Morris with formal politeness but did not identify himself; periodically, he whispered to Ponomarev, probably telling him what to ask next. Morris guessed he was a KGB general acting as judge, jury, and counsel to the prosecution.

Ponomarev, referring to the book
KGB
, began by saying, “We believe you and Jack are in great danger and could be arrested at any time. If you are arrested, the cause of détente will be set back, maybe for many years. We believe this book is part of a plot by reactionary U.S. circles to sabotage détente.” He added that they were assessing its consequences and investigating to determine whether mistakes by the “special comrades” (his euphemism for the KGB) brought about this sorry state of affairs. Giving Chuchukin a hangman's stare, he asked whether Morris, Jack, or Comrade Hall found any fault in actions by the “special comrades.”