Operation Solo (5 page)

Such was his worth that, even before Morris finished school, patrons in Moscow interceded to save his life. While he engaged
in “practical” work in Stalingrad, a typhoid epidemic ravaged the city and thousands perished. One night as icy winds howled across the steppes, he collapsed in the snow outside his apartment. His housekeeper discovered him, notified the local party office, and got him to a hospital. When he regained consciousness, he lay on the filthy floor of a hospital corridor surrounded by dying men, women, and children; all beds were occupied and, besides, physicians gave him slight chance of living. During the next days, he drifted in and out of delirium until suddenly he felt himself being lifted from the floor and placed in a bed. Henceforth, a physician or nurse attended him almost continuously and administered medicine shipped from Moscow. After about a month, he walked out of the hospital, one of the few afflicted Americans to survive. He returned to Moscow regally in a private railway coach, staffed by a doctor, nurse, cook, and maid, all provided by the Comintern solely for him.

Clearly, by the time Morris departed for the United States in 1932 the Comintern regarded him as an important man—Moscow's man or, as the Russians would have put it, “nahsh,” “ours.”

While Morris was in the Soviet Union, his brother Jack at age twenty-four moved to New York to be with a paramour, and Browder, now ensconced in the new party headquarters, appointed Jack business manager of the Young Communist League. His primary job was to squeeze dues from members, and he performed well, probably because he received a percentage of all he collected. In 1932 Browder proposed that Jack go to Moscow for training in communications and underground tradecraft. The Comintern until recently had relied upon the German party to supply couriers and radiomen for communications within the international movement. As Nazis hounded German communists, it shifted responsibility to the U.S. party, believing that Americans were technically proficient and that the bearer of a U.S. passport could travel anywhere.

Morris had looked upon his journey to Moscow as a pilgrimage. Jack envisioned an adventure, a lark, a yearlong tryst with his lover paid for by somebody else. He consented to go provided that the Soviets allow him to bring his girlfriend and live with her.

Browder instructed him to procure a false passport because a valid one would show that he had been born in the Soviet Union and that might cause problems during passage through Germany.

“How do I do that?” he asked.

“You figure it out,” Browder commanded.

Jack relished the challenge of fraud. Adopting the name John William Fox, he signed an affidavit averring that he was born in Gallaway, West Virginia, and mailed it to the town clerk there along with a request for a copy of his birth certificate. Unable to locate it, the clerk assumed that someone in the little town had misplaced the original and obligingly issued a new one. The State Department efficiently processed his application, and soon he had a passport in the name of John William Fox.

The Comintern put Jack and his girlfriend in a new hotel by the Moscow River, a short walk from the three-story stone mansion where field operatives, or “street men,” trained. He studied theory and operation of radio, how to build a shortwave receiver, Morse code, invisible writing, disguises, the use of drops or hiding places for the exchange of messages, countersurveillance, security procedures, and methods by which Lenin eluded authorities before the revolution.

Unlike Morris, Jack was not an outstanding pupil but he did well enough for the Soviets to entrust him with a real mission. A Comintern official explained that the communist underground in Germany acutely needed money and that an American would have the best chance of delivering it. Would Jack be willing to try?

Jack somberly replied that hazardous as the job might be, he was willing to fulfill his party duty; actually he was eager for an escapade in Germany.

Wearing a money belt packed with U.S. dollars in large denominations, he traveled first class by train through Warsaw and Danzig to Berlin. In cafés and cabarets, galleries and museums, he acted as a young American tourist bent upon nothing except a good time. He lazily reconnoitered the rendezvous site, and the next evening during an encounter at a subway station passed the money to a German comrade who quickly disappeared into the night. To act out his cover, he lingered two more days enjoying German cuisine, wine, and old Berlin.

The Comintern congratulated him enthusiastically, and toward the end of his studies asked him to repeat the mission.

Jack registered at a middle-class Berlin hotel as John William Fox, 845 West 180th Street, New York, New York, U.S.A., and again stated that the purpose of his sojourn was pleasure. Again, he undertook to be the typical tourist with a little too much money. Dining in a restaurant off
Unter den Linden
, Jack kept stealing glances at a spectacularly configured blond seated at a nearby table with an older man. As he started to pay his bill, the man came to his table and politely introduced himself in English. He had overheard Jack speaking English to the waiter and guessed that he was an American. After Jack nodded, the German claimed to have relatives in St. Louis, professed admiration for the United States, and said that he and his wife liked to practice their English. Would Jack kindly join them for brandy and coffee.

The last time in Berlin Jack concluded that Germans tended to be formal and reserved with strangers. His new acquaintances seemed to be genuinely friendly and interested in him and the United States. The conversation turned out to be so convivial that they drank several brandies and agreed to meet for dinner two nights hence at a café near his hotel.

To Jack's delight, the wife undulated into the café alone and apologized that because unexpected difficulties had delayed her husband's return from a business trip, he would not be back until tomorrow. During dinner, she smiled often and impishly; her large, hazel eyes gazed at his frankly; and twice her leg brushed against his. Afterward he suggested they have champagne in his room, where they happily shared amorous hours.

The next day, after having handed over a package of dollars in another fleeting encounter in a subway station, Jack leaned back in a richly upholstered compartment of the train to Danzig. He was congratulating himself on his success and conquest when the door to the compartment slid open. There stood the cuckolded husband; his executioner, Jack thought.

The cheerfulness of the husband's greetings, however, kindled a little hope; maybe he didn't know after all. He did not mention his wife; instead he orated about the menace the bloody Bolshevik
barbarians posed to civilization. In the end, he revealed himself to be a German intelligence officer who wanted to recruit Jack because his American passport would admit him to Russia.

Jack assured the officer that the offer flattered him. The Bolsheviks indeed were bastards. But as he had said the other night, he was about to begin a new job in New York crucial to his career and at least for a couple of years it would debar him from traveling abroad. Could he have a card or telephone number in case his circumstances changed? And by the way, “Thanks for the other night, and give my regards to your beautiful wife.”

These exploits endowed Jack with a reputation of his own in the Comintern. Not only had he accomplished two hazardous missions into Nazi territory; he had parried the overtures of a professional intelligence officer while seducing his wife. Here was a young man with balls and a future; a man who could be counted upon and trusted; a worthy brother of Morris. When Jack got back to New York, Browder hired him at headquarters as his personal factotum, chauffeur, and bodyguard.

Morris meanwhile had married a party member from a Ukrainian family and became the chief organizer in Wisconsin. At the Moscow school an instructor quoted Lenin as saying, “A good communist must have the ideas of a Bolshevik and the energy of an American.” In Milwaukee, Morris displayed both by recruiting union members and intellectuals, addressing political rallies, leading street demonstrations, and running for mayor. The campaign netted him relatively few votes and several beatings, and he lamented, “Sometimes, I think it's not easy being an agitator.”

He accepted the beatings, however, as a natural adjunct of his job. It never occurred to him that the popular hostility they manifested sprang from any deficiency in his political philosophy. He simply needed to master better means of delivering the liberating message to the masses. So he studied Coca-Cola advertising in quest of techniques that might be adapted to selling communism. He stood on street corners trying to analyze how Salvation Army missionaries effectively appealed to the downtrodden and derelict. He himself was so affected by their good intentions that sometimes he dropped a coin or two into their kettles. He really could
not afford to give away any money. The party paid him twelve dollars a week, and though his wife earned a few more as a seamstress, they lived on the brink of destitution.

Visiting Milwaukee, Browder went home with Morris just as an ambulance drove from the house, and neighbors told Morris that his wife had given birth to a son. Browder asked, “How much money do you have?”

“I don't even have enough for a phone call.”

“Well, I can give you enough for a call.” From his watch pocket, Browder withdrew a tightly folded $50 bill and pressed it into Morris' hand.

By the mid-1930s, the Soviets concluded that Morris' talents were not being sufficiently utilized in Milwaukee. To them, Chicago was the most important city in America, the “heart of the beast,” the “greatest concentration area”—that is, the largest center of heavy industry whose exploited workers in theory could most easily be mobilized for revolution. Through Comintern agent Gerhardt Eisler, they ordered the American party to put Morris in charge of Chicago and on the governing Central Committee. The appointments, added to his bond with Browder, made him one of the most influential American communists, exactly what the Kremlin intended.

Chicago also was the hub of an underground communist railway stretching from Wall Street to Hollywood, and Morris lodged many comrades on the run in safe houses. In a cryptic call from Canada, Sam Carr said that “a good friend” would be visiting Chicago and he hoped Morris would help him “rest.” The fugitive who arrived was Tim Buck, a Comintern agent and head of the Canadian party. Morris subsequently gave him refuge several more times, and the two became intimate friends. Upon their friendship the FBI operation later turned.

Despite his party status, Morris still lived humbly, and when summoned to New York he had to hitchhike. Hobos introduced him to their own kind of communism by teaching him how to loiter in small towns and get himself jailed for vagrancy. Jails provided supper, a warm bed, and breakfast before release in the morning. Most of his clothes were castoffs donated by more
affluent comrades who took turns treating him and his wife to Sunday dinner. The party finally did buy an old Model-T Ford for his official use but he had to pay for gas and maintenance.

Within the party, Morris was known as a “straitlaced, out-and-out Bolshevik.” In public appearances, writings, and conversation with noncommunists, he seemed to many to be an urbane and reasonable idealist. He reviled the isolationist
Chicago Tribune
, yet he could argue amicably with journalists from that and other newspapers because he listened respectfully and never disparaged anyone personally. With perhaps more sincerity than he realized, he represented himself as a patriotic American actuated by the ideals of Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt, whose names he frequently invoked. He tried to depict communism as a democratic, mainstream political movement and the Soviet Union as a redoubtable foe of fascism. Typically, in recruiting three hundred men to fight alongside communists in the Spanish Civil War, he appealed for volunteers to fight against fascism rather than for communism. Still, in the underlying import of all he said, he never deviated from the prevailing Soviet position on any substantive issue.

The Comintern duly noted his fidelity and abilities in a dossier kept in Moscow. An example of its contents has been provided by Emory University Professor Harvey Klehr, an eminent authority on American communism. Allowed by the new Russian government to examine old Comintern files, Professor Klehr found and generously made available to the author the following report: