Among the more promising illegal agents discovered as a result of leads from Western Communist Parties were a French couple, LIMB and his wife DANA, who were recruited in 1973. LIMB was recommended by the PCF as a man “devoted to Communist ideals” but not to be used against French targets. After two years’ training, however, LIMB’s first recorded success was talent-spotting a French recruit. MARCEL, LIMB’s recruitment lead, worked in the mairie of a Paris suburb and was recruited as a KGB agent in 1975, probably to provide documentation for KGB illegals. In December 1975 LIMB (then aged thirty-six) and DANA were deployed to Belgium, where they set up a small business printing invitation and visiting cards near the headquarters of SACEUR (Supreme Allied Commander Europe). But their attempts over the next year to cultivate NATO personnel met with little or no success. By the end of 1976 they had returned to France, settled in the Bordeaux region and abandoned their brief careers as KGB illegal agents.59
Thirty or forty years before, the recruiting drive for illegal agents would doubtless have met with much greater success. Its apparent failure in the 1970s reflected the inability of the Soviet Union under Brezhnev’s geriatric leadership to recapture the idealism of an earlier generation of ideological agents inspired by the utopian vision of the world’s first worker—peasant state. By the mid-1970s most of the leading Western Communist Parties were tainted by what Moscow considered the “Eurocommunist” heresy, which advocated a parliamentary road to socialism within a multi-party system rather than slavish imitation of the Soviet model.60 Within the new generation of young Western Marxists, unconditional pro-Soviet loyalists were a dwindling breed—if not yet an endangered species.
JUST AS THE Centre expected fraternal assistance from the leaders of Western Communist parties, so the parties themselves depended in varying degrees on subsidies from Moscow secretly delivered by the KGB. The subsidies, like involvement in intelligence operations, were closely guarded secrets within each Party leadership. When stories of “Moscow gold” occasionally leaked out during the Cold War, they were dismissed as McCarthyite disinformation. The Centre, however, was well aware that some details of its secret subsidies were known to Western intelligence agencies. During the late 1970s, for example, the Soviet ambassador in Ottawa, Aleksandr Nikolayevich Yakovlev (later one of Gorbachev’s leading advisers), protested to Andropov, Gromyko and Boris Ponomarev, head of the Central Committee’s International Department, against the practice of Canadian Communist Party representatives—in particular the Party leader, William Kashtan—of calling at the embassy to collect funds (codenamed “US wheat”) from the resident, Vladimir Ivanovich Mechulayev. The residency had already warned Kashtan that he was taking a considerable risk. By 1980 the Centre was convinced that the Canadian authorities were aware that subsidies to the CPC were being funded by the Soviet-owned Ukrainskaya Kniga [Ukrainian Book] Company, based in Toronto. The FCD informed Ponomarev on October 20:
The Canadian Special [intelligence] Services are carrying out a study of the financial situation of the Communist Party of Canada which it is proposed to complete within 15-18 months. A preliminary report prepared by the federal government quotes data based on the results of an analysis of the channels and size of the financial receipts in the CPC treasury in 1970. The Special Services have only fragmentary information about subsequent years, but these give grounds to suppose that the methods of financing the activities of the CPC remain as before. According to the data of the Special Services, the CPC budget in 1970 amounted to 158,850 dollars (according to unconfirmed reports, in 1979 it was more than 200,000 dollars). This sum is made up of Party membership dues from CPC members (13,500 dollars or 8.5 percent), receipts from legacies from “deceased loyal members of the Party” (the amount cannot be estimated), voluntary payments and also direct transfers of cash by Soviet representatives and contributions to CPC funds from the income of the Ukrainskaya Kniga Company. It is noted that the first three sources of income provide approximately 30-35 percent of the Party’s total budget. The remaining part [65-70 percent] comes from the USSR and from Ukrainskaya Kniga. The Special Services report concentrates on an analysis of the mechanism for supplying funds along the last two channels. [Canadian] Counter-intelligence concludes that the USSR finances the CPC by means of “physical transfer of cash” by officials of the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, to be put at the disposal of Party functionaries under pretext of covering the expenses of Party activists on the occasion of their journeys to Socialist countries.61
The seizure by Boris Yeltsin’s government of the archives of the Soviet Communist Party (CPSU) after the failed coup of August 1991 led to the publication for the first time of documentary evidence showing that during the 1980s alone, at a time when the Soviet Union was chronically short of hard currency, the CPSU had distributed over 200 million dollars to fraternal parties outside the Soviet Bloc. The Central Committee’s International Department had tried to destroy the records of the payments shortly before the confiscation of its archive, but the metal paper clips which held the documents together jammed the shredding machines and saved some of them from destruction.62
THOUGH THE LARGEST Subsidies for most of the Cold War seem to have gone to the French PCF and Italian PCI, the two leading Western Parties, the biggest per capita donations probably went to the Communist Party of the United States. The disproportionate share of Soviet funds channelled to the CPUSA reflected Moscow’s desire to encourage the revival of Communism on the territory of the Main Adversary after the near disintegration of the Party in the mid-1950s. The CPUSA repaid Soviet generosity with an impeccable ideological orthodoxy which became particularly valued in Moscow when the heresy of Eurocommunism later took hold of the major west European Communist Parties.
In April 1958 a veteran member of the CPUSA leadership, Morris Childs (whose aliases included “Morris Summers,” “Ramsey Kemp Martin” and “D. Douglas Mozart”) was invited to Moscow to discuss financial help for his ailing party. Boris Ponomarev, the head of the Central Committee international department, offered 75,000 dollars for the current year and 200,000 dollars for 1959, initially channelled via the Canadian Communist Party.63 From 1961 to 1980 the conduits for Soviet subsidies were Childs (codenamed KHAB) and his brother Jack (alias “D. Brooks,” codenamed MARAT), an undeclared Communist who had worked for Comintern in the 1930s. Until the late 1970s Morris Childs usually visited Moscow at least once a year to submit the CPUSA budget and request for funds, receive instructions from the International Department and the KGB and take part in discussions on American affairs. Jack acted as the main point of contact for the handover of money in the United States. The normal procedure was for the Centre to send a coded message to a CPUSA radio operator in New York containing details of the next transmission of funds. The message would then be passed to Jack Childs, who would decode it and inform his brother, Gus Hall (leader of the CPUSA from 1959 and codenamed PALM), or Hall’s wife Elizabeth that the next delivery was imminent.64
From 1968 the CPUSA radio operator who passed messages from the Centre on to Jack Childs was another undeclared party member of Russian descent, Albert Friedman, codenamed FORD, who worked as a salesman in a Manhattan radio store on East 49th Street. Using the alias Weber, Friedman had worked between the wars at Comintern’s radio school in Moscow, training other underground radio operators. In January 1969 he travelled to Moscow for further training,65 but performed so well that his instructor told him, “You know more than I do” and invited him to lunch.66 Though Friedman paid Party dues, his membership of the CPUSA was known only to the KGB and a small group within the Party leadership.67 What neither the KGB nor CPUSA leaders knew, however, was that since the end of the Second World War Friedman had been an FBI agent in the Party, codenamed CLIP. He passed every word of the Centre’s communications on to the Bureau.68
By the late 1960s Soviet subsidies to the CPUSA amounted to well over a million dollars a year; a decade later they were more than two million. Jack Childs (MARAT) usually took deliv
ery of Soviet subsidies from KGB operations officers during “brush passes” at pre-arranged locations in New York, all at precisely 3:05 p.m. During 1974, for example, money-transfer operations (then codenamed VALDAY) took place at four locations in Lower Manhattan: 10 Pine Street, 10th floor (codenamed DINO); 11 Broadway, 9th floor (FRED); 120 Wall Street, 7th floor (POST); and 81 New Street, 2nd floor (ROLAND). All four addresses were chosen by the New York residency because they had several entrances and exits. MARAT and the KGB operations officer chosen to hand the money over to him entered and left the building selected for their brush contact through different doors. In order to lessen the increasing bulk of the packages of money handed over in brush contacts, the denomination of the bills contained in them was raised in 1974 from 20 dollars to 50 dollars and 100 dollars.69 On the grounds that it was too dangerous to pass the money to Hall, who was under close surveillance by the FBI, the New York police and the Internal Revenue Service, Jack Childs gave much of it to his brother Morris for safekeeping.70
As well as acting as a conduit for Soviet subsidies, Jack Childs also regularly exchanged written messages with the New York residency either through brush contacts or “dead drops.” Like brush contact sites, dead drops were all given codenames; those in use in 1974 were MANDI, LYUSI, OPEY, RIBA and OVERA. Messages were normally sent on undeveloped film from a Minox camera placed in a magnetic container. One of the files noted by Mitrokhin records that between July 1975 and August 1976 MARAT took part in five VALDAY operations and nine to exchange secret messages (five by brush contact, four by dead drop). In an emergency the residency could arrange an urgent meeting with MARAT by ringing a designated telephone number at precisely five minutes past noon and asking for Dr. Albert. On being told, “There is no Dr. Albert here” the residency officer would reply, “Sorry, must have the wrong number.” He would then meet MARAT at 3:05 p.m. the same day at a Brooklyn location codenamed ELLIOT, at the entrance to the Silver Road pharmacy on the corner of Avenue J and East 16th Street, next to the subway station. MARAT identified himself by carrying a copy of Time magazine and placing a Bandaid on his left hand. The operations officer asked him, “Do you have the time?” When MARAT replied, “It’s 3:05 sharp,” he produced a business card from one of MARAT’s former employers with a note by KHAB, his brother Morris, on the back.71
The elaborate security employed by the KGB in contacts with both MARAT and KHAB suffered, however, from one fatal flaw. Since the early 1950s both had been FBI agents.72 By 1974 the Centre had become suspicious, particularly about KHAB (Morris Childs). He had not been imprisoned during the anti-Communist witch-hunts of the 1950s, nor had he been arrested for travelling abroad on false passports (a fact of which the FBI was believed to be aware). A 1967 report by the Senate Judiciary Committee had referred to him under the names Morris Chilovsky (his name at birth) and Morris Summers (one of his aliases) and mentioned his pre-war links with Soviet intelligence. The Centre also found suspicious KHAB’s determination to accompany Gus Hall on all his trips to Russia and his “nervousness” when Moscow bypassed him and his brother and communicated directly with Hall. In March 1974 Vladimir Mikhailovich Kazakov, head of the FCD First (North American) Department, reported to Andropov and the Central Committee:
Although [Morris] Childs enjoys the trust of Comrade Gus Hall, his direct involvement in the financial affairs of the US Communist Party constitutes a real threat to this special channel [for the transmission of Soviet funds]. In addition, certain doubtful and suspicious elements in M. Childs’s behavior lead one to believe that he is possibly being used by US intelligence.
Kazakov also urged that Hall be persuaded to find a substitute for MARAT (Jack Childs), whom he described as absent-minded and in poor health.
At a meeting with Hall in Moscow on May 8, another senior FCD officer, B. S. Ivanov, tried to persuade him that the time had come to retire both the Childs brothers, whose long involvement in secret work placed them under increasing danger of FBI surveillance. Ivanov suggested a number of alternative methods of transferring Soviet funds to the CPUSA, among them opening a Swiss bank account or using a cover business in the United States. But, though Hall said he had found a “reliable comrade” to replace Jack Childs, he took no action and the International Department, which evidently did not take Kazakov’s warning very seriously, did not insist.73
In 1975 Morris and Jack Childs were awarded the Order of the Red Banner; Morris received his in person from Brezhnev during a Moscow banquet. Back in the United States both brothers lived in some style, embezzling about 5 percent of the Soviet funds sent to the CPUSA as well as receiving a salary from the FBI. Morris posed as a wealthy businessman with a penthouse in Chicago, expensively furnished with antiques, paintings and oriental carpets, as well as apartments in Moscow and New York. Gus Hall, who naively believed both brothers to be independently wealthy, sometimes asked them to buy clothes for his family.74
Among the intelligence which the Childs brothers reported to the FBI for more than twenty years were the claims of the CPUSA leadership to influence on the black civil rights movement. In 1958 Jack Childs had reported a boast by James Jackson, Party secretary in charge of “Negro and Southern Affairs,” that “most secret and guarded people” were “guiding” the civil rights leader Martin Luther King.75 According to one KGB file, Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador, later asked Hall to stop bringing Jackson, whom he described as “poorly trained politically,” to meetings with him; he also requested the Soviet mission to the UN (by which he probably meant the KGB New York residency) to break off contact with Jackson.76
There was, however, some substance to the claim that the CPUSA had penetrated King’s entourage. The Childs brothers reported that one of King’s advisers, Stanley D. Levison, a New York lawyer and entrepreneur, was a secret Party member. 77 Levison drafted sections of King’s 1958 book, Stride Toward Freedom, and helped prepare his defense against trumped-up charges of perjury on his Alabama tax returns in 1960.78 Levison also introduced into King’s entourage a secret black member of the CPUSA, Hunter Pitts “Jack” O’Dell.79 The FBI, who put Levison under surveillance, reported that he was meeting Viktor Lesiovsky, a KGB officer working as special assistant to the UN Secretary-General, U Thant.80 It was Levison’s alleged influence on King which in 1963 led Attorney-General Robert Kennedy to authorize the bugging of King’s hotel rooms. Though the bugs produced recordings of a number of King’s sexual liaisons, in which President Lyndon B. Johnson took a prurient interest, they provided no evidence of Communist influence on him.81
At the beginning of the Carter administration in 1977, the CPUSA leadership made exaggerated claims of its influence over King’s former executive secretary, Andrew Young (codenamed LUTHER), newly appointed as US representative at the United Nations. According to Hall, “Young himself did not know that several of his close friends in Atlanta were covert Communists, and he listened to them. The Party, while observing the required clandestinity, would cautiously exert an influence on Young in the necessary areas.”82 Lesiovsky’s cover as assistant to U Thant gave him a number of opportunities for discussions with Young. Though he claimed to have obtained “important information” from the discussions, he reported—less optimistically than Hall—that, while Young hoped for better US-Soviet relations, his attitude to the Soviet Union was fundamentally “negative.”83
Though Hall tended to overstate the influence of undeclared members of the CPUSA within the Democratic Party, there was at least one to whom the Centre attached real importance during the 1970s: a Democratic activist in California recruited as a KGB agent during a visit to Russia. The agent, who is not identified by name in the reports noted by Mitrokhin, had a wide circle of influential contacts in the Democratic Party: among them Governor Jerry Brown of California, Senator Alan Cranston, Senator Eugene McCarthy, Senator Edward Kennedy, Senator Abraham Ribicoff, Senator J. William Fulbright and Congressman John Conyers, Jr. During the 1976 presidential election the agent was able to provide inside i
nformation from within the Carter camp and a profile of Carter himself, which were particularly highly valued by the Centre since it had so few high-level American sources. On one occasion he spent three hours discussing the progress of the campaign at a meeting with Carter, Brown and Cranston in Carter’s room at the Pacific Hotel. His report was forwarded to the Politburo. During the final stages of the campaign the agent had what the KGB claimed were “direct and prolonged conversations” with Carter, Governor Brown and Senators Cranston, Kennedy, Ribicoff and Jacob Javits. Andropov attached such importance to the report on these conversations that he forwarded it under his signature to the Politburo immediately after Carter’s election.84
IN NOVEMBER 1977 the Centre sent a memorandum to the Central Committee complaining that, despite several requests to Hall to replace the Childs brothers, they were still running the American end of the “covert channel of communication with the US Communist Party.” During Jack’s illness in August and September, Morris had replaced him as the CPUSA’s representative at a meeting with a KGB officer in New York:
His use in the special channel operation is very risky, since [Morris] Childs is known to the intelligence service—as is evidenced by the US Senate Judiciary Committee’s report for 1967, where he is referred to as a person who uses several names and has contact with the KGB. Because of this, one cannot exclude the possibility that the FBI has him under covert surveillance.
On November 10 Kazakov and Ivanov raised the question of replacing the Childs brothers at another meeting with Hall in Moscow. Hall said that he had three candidates in mind as a replacement for Jack Childs—John Vogo and the Applekhoums [? Appleholmes] brothers.85 He would make his final choice in the near future and announce his decision by a coded telegram to Moscow reporting the completion of a draft article on colonialism. The number of the draft indicated in the telegram (first, second or third) would indicate which candidate he had selected. Jack Child’s successor would then apply for a visa at the Soviet consulate in Vienna so that he could receive one and a half to two months of “special training” in Moscow. Hall also suggested that the KGB use the wife of his personal chauffeur and bodyguard as an additional channel of communication in New York. The residency could telephone her at work, identifying itself by using the parole, “This is Mr. Budnik calling about the old furniture. My friend from Hoboken suggested contacting you.”86
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