Operation Solo (7 page)

“I'm a communist,” he said. “I'm a skunk. No one wants to have anything to do with me.”

She smiled. “I do. Will you favor me with a dance?”

“I've never danced. I don't know how.”

“Well, you should learn. Just follow me.”

The sight of the ambassador's wife dancing with the leper attracted attention, and many watched as she afterward led Morris to her husband. “Bedell, this is Mr. Childs,” she said. “His colleagues are ostracizing him because he's a communist.”

An erect, imposing man, General Smith had been a wartime deputy to General Eisenhower; soon he would be director of the new Central Intelligence Agency. “Mr. Childs, as a citizen of the United States you are welcome at the embassy at any time,” he said. “As a citizen, you are entitled to your political opinions and you may surmise that yours differ from mine. But when Americans leave their country, they leave their political differences behind and stick together.”

“You should tell that to the other journalists,” Mrs. Smith interjected. “Have a word with them, Beedle.”

“I will.”

Morris never knew what General Smith said to the correspondents. He obviously said something because the next day they began talking to him and exchanging notes and opinions, and some even became friendly.

Over breakfast Morris mentioned that someday he would like to visit his brother's grave in France, and Howard K. Smith suggested that he do so en route back to New York. Morris confided that
though he was returning by way of Paris he did not have enough money for a side trip. At breakfast the day Morris departed Moscow, Smith handed him a sealed envelope and requested that he not open it until he boarded his plane. Airborne, Morris found inside the envelope a terse note: “We thought you should make that side trip so we took up a collection. Your fellow Americans.” The envelope also contained three hundred U.S. dollars.

Above the grave in an immaculately maintained Normandy cemetery stood a white cross inscribed with the Star of David and the words: “Phillip Childs—First Lieutenant, United States Army—1918–1944.” Morris knelt and offered an earnest prayer.

Flying homeward, he contrasted the spontaneous kindness of General and Mrs. Smith and the correspondents with the Stalinist terrors whose occurrence he no longer doubted, and he asked himself, have I perverted my whole life?

In New York, Morris returned to face more feuding and bickering. A clique headed by Foster caviled at Dennis and his followers, and Foster ridiculed Morris and his direction of the paper, accusing him of “Browderism.” Dennis surprised Morris by not rising to his defense.

Unable to will away worsening chest pains, Morris consulted a physician who insisted that he temporarily stop working. Morris then asked Dennis for a short leave of absence from the paper. At a meeting of the National Committee in June 1947 Morris blanched in disbelief as Dennis formally proposed that Morris be granted an indefinite leave of absence and that John Gates replace him as editor of the
Daily Worker
. Foster seconded the motion, and it passed unanimously, every comrade in effect voting to fire him and purge him from the party leadership.

Earlier, Morris' wife had left him and taken away their son because she felt he neglected her for the party. Now the party, his deity, had forsaken him, as had everyone else except his brothers. He had no job, no income, no savings, no future, and no faith. Nor did he have recourse to protectors in Moscow because the party could tell them that he was incapacitated. Soon that was true. He rented a room in a Greenwich Village boarding house, and there a massive heart attack left him near death.

Jack, who had established a business selling electrical and painting supplies, took care of Morris as best he could and paid his medical bills. Ben also sent money. Still, except for visits by Jack, he was utterly alone until Sonny Schlossberg, a former party member in Chicago, heard of his plight. She had always admired and looked up to him, and she brought him from New York to her home in Chicago and acted as his nurse.

Had it not been for his ouster and illness, Morris doubtless would have been arrested. Congress in 1940 passed a law, the so-called Smith Act, which made it a crime to advocate violent overthrow of the United States government. After the Cold War began, the Truman administration applied the law to communists and the FBI arrested the top twelve active leaders of the party: Dennis, Foster, Gates, Gus Hall, Ben Davis, John Williams, Robert Thompson, Jack Satchel, Irving Potash, Gil Green, Henry Winston, and Carl Winter.

The government considered arresting Morris; the FBI subjected him to “spot” or periodic surveillance, and the watching agents saw that he was almost completely enfeebled. After walking only fifty steps or so he had to sit down on the street curb and rest for several minutes to regain strength enough to stand up again. Given his condition and the fact that he no longer was active in the party, the Justice Department decided not to bring charges against him.

The prosecution of Foster was delayed because he too had become very ill, but the other eleven leaders were convicted. The Supreme Court, by a 6-to-2 vote in June 1951, upheld the constitutionality of the Smith Act and the convictions. Hall, Gates, Thompson, and Green jumped bail and fled; the rest were imprisoned. Granted Supreme Court authorization and goaded by wartime passions, the FBI rounded up more than one hundred lesser communist functionaries around the country and virtually all were convicted. The remaining party officials, besieged and largely leaderless, then went underground.

In hope of catching the fugitive leaders and breaking into the underground, the FBI instituted a program titled “TOPLEV” and formed Underground Squads in New York and Chicago. The
squads began the hunt by analyzing investigative and intelligence files to ascertain with whom Hall, Gates, Thompson, and Green most frequently associated. Then they undertook to identify former or inactive party members who had links to them. This search led to the file of Jack Childs, which indicated that he had not been active in the party since 1947 and hence might be disaffected.

On the night of September 4, 1951, Agents Edward Buckley and Herbert Larson stopped Jack as he walked near his home in Queens. Other party members they approached had profanely rebuffed them, and when Jack smiled sardonically they expected another rebuff. Instead, he said, “Where in the hell have you guys been all these years? I could have sired and raised a son during all the time you've been screwing around.” He agreed to talk to them the next evening in a room at the Tudor Hotel. During that first interview, Jack withheld information about some aspects of his past and dissembled about others. But he honestly answered the most critical question put to him: Yes, he wanted to help the FBI.

The real debriefings took place in a spacious country home perched on a hillside in Westchester County. It belonged to Alexander C. Burlinson, a slender FBI agent with a granite face and searching gray eyes. A graduate of Fordham Preparatory School, Fordham College, and Fordham Law School, Burlinson was an accomplished writer, pianist, and linguist. He composed poetry in Latin and sometimes exasperated superiors by expressing his own exasperations in Latin. The front of his expensive shirts, which he changed daily, was usually soiled at the end of the day because he so often rubbed his stomach to assuage an ulcer. The ulcer and admonitions of his doctor notwithstanding, he smoked two packs of cigarettes a day and drank copious quantities of Scotch whisky in milk.

Some FBI agents prefer the excitement of street work and the gratification of arresting somebody who threatens everybody. Burlinson liked intellectual detective work, the quest for clues from old archives or new sources. He also enjoyed playing deception games with the communists and impudent games with bureaucrats. Traveling to Washington to attend a conference of assistant directors, he once told an apprehensive subordinate,
“Don't worry. They only know what we tell them.” Although he had little personal ambition, his talents were such that colleagues thought he inevitably would wind up in an executive position at headquarters. As a result of events that began in 1951, he stayed in New York and for the next twenty-four years concentrated his career and life on one case.

The personalities of Burlinson and Jack Childs were quite dissimilar, yet the two were a good match. Burlinson was a great listener and Jack was a great talker, and they soon became friends and partners.

At the outset, Jack declared he “never really believed any of that communist bullshit.” He joined and worked for the party for the sake of his brother. He now loathed the communists because they callously threw away his brother and when Morris was in terrible need they sent him not one dollar, not even a postcard. He was grateful to be an American. Until a few years ago, he had not perceived the Soviet Union as a dangerous enemy of the United States; now that he did, there was no question on whose side he stood. For these reasons, he would work for the FBI.

There was another reason at which he later hinted. “Look, I'm basically a con man. If I had a choice between entering a house by walking through the front door or crawling through a back window, I'd go through the window because that's more exciting.” While his business was prospering, selling paint and light fixtures was not exciting. The prospect of taking on the Communist Party was.

In the next weeks, Jack recounted his training in Moscow, his two trips to Berlin, and the frolic there with the beautiful wife. He admitted supplying the party with birth and death certificates and illegally obtained passports. He also detailed party finances, named donors, and told of the secret Reserve Fund. Sure, he knew Sam Carr and many other communists about whom Burlinson asked, and he was willing to try to renew relations with them.

Burlinson did not expressly state that in addition to arresting the fugitives, the FBI needed to penetrate the leadership of the underground. Once Jack sensed this objective, he blurted out, “Look, Morris is your ticket to the top.”

Jack was an apparatus man, never a party leader. Morris was a prominent leader. Jack knew a lot of people, and some liked him. Morris knew everybody who counted, and except for Foster and a few other snakes, everybody loved him, including the Soviets. Jack could seek people out; people would gravitate to Morris.

Would Morris cooperate? “He may if he's well enough,” Jack answered. “But you can't deal with him like you did with me. He and I are different. When I screwed that Kraut knockout in Berlin, I at least took off my money belt. Morris, he wouldn't have taken off his money belt because he'd be afraid of losing commie money. Hell, Morris wouldn't even have screwed her. He's too straitlaced, too proper. You can't just walk up and proposition him cold. You've got to bring him along gently. You've got to send someone proper, a gentleman and someone who really understands all that communist crap.”

They agreed that Jack would visit Morris and try to persuade him at least to listen to the FBI. Before seeing Morris, Jack conferred with Carl Freyman in a Chicago hotel room. Had he not known otherwise, Jack might have taken Freyman for a soft-spoken, pipe-smoking professor of communism. The knowledge he evinced of the party and Morris at first amazed, then reassured him. Freyman happened to be exactly the man he had described to Burlinson.

Strict Catholic elementary and high schools in Iowa afforded him a superb education as did an Evangelical Church college that required daily Bible study. After graduation from the University of Iowa Law School, he started his own law practice in his hometown of LeMars near Sioux City. He was doing well for a young attorney when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. The next day he drove to Omaha to enlist in the navy only to be rejected because of deficient eyesight. The day after that he applied in Des Moines to the FBI, and in January 1942 it accepted him. At the end of his training in Quantico, Virginia, a supervisor said, “You're a farm boy, so we're going to send you to the big city and polish you up.”

In New York, Freyman learned about counterintelligence, agent handling, and deception after the FBI arrested a German spy and converted him into a double agent. British intelligence had asked
for American help in reinforcing Hitler's obsessive conviction that the Allies intended to invade Europe through Norway. One day Freyman took the German to a Brooklyn dock, and they watched as troops purposely clad in heavy arctic clothing filed aboard a transport. In a radio transmission to Berlin, the double agent detailed the embarkation and advised that the clothing obviously meant the troops were going “someplace very cold.” When the Allies invaded Normandy, sixteen Wehrmacht divisions remained in Scandinavia guarding against an attack in Norway. The little play staged by the FBI was only part of an overall deception scheme implemented mostly by the British but it dramatized to Freyman the importance of recruiting double agents.

Transferred to Chicago in 1946, Freyman proved to be one of the FBI's best recruiters. He liked people, and his religious beliefs made him considerate and tolerant of others—some said too much so. Though he rarely discussed religion, he was at heart something of an evangelist. The FBI at the time had difficulty recruiting black agents. Freyman in short order recruited three, including two sons-in-law of Olympic track star Jesse Owens.

Because of his counterintelligence experience in New York, the FBI assigned him to direct investigations of the party and its fronts in Chicago. He tried to qualify himself by reading Marx, Lenin, Soviet history, party publications, the writings of former communists, and voluminous FBI files. All the while, he taught himself how to think like a communist and how to talk to a man like Morris Childs.

Jack, coaching Freyman about how best to approach Morris, suggested that he not press for a prompt decision. He likened his brother to a chess player who deliberates before each move, thinking far ahead. Once Jack spoke with him, he would start thinking about the ramifications of collaboration; still, he would want more time.