When the interrogation resumed, the questions focused on her relations with Bill Browder, brother of Earl Browder, the former leader of the American Communist Party. Jane admitting knowing Bill Browder and explained that she had been introduced to him by Martha Stern before the war and they had met on several occasions for drinks at various Greenwich Village bars. She recalled that he had told her she would be more helpful to the Party if she was “more discreet, and that Martha reiterated this more than once.” She explained that she did not “understand his reasoning” but welcomed the suggestion as a way to get out of selling papers and other Party tasks that were not her idea of fun. When she went to Washington in 1942, he had introduced her to a young woman who would help her “keep in touch with the Party.” Jane never recalled the woman’s ever asking anything about her work or anything important but remembered that she had once brought a message from Browder telling her not to accept an overseas assignment from the OSS. Presumably, Browder was directing her into underground operations, much as he had done with Whittaker Chambers twelve years earlier, but she was not as receptive. As usual, Jane said, she “rebelled and refused to comply.”
The French police seemed very interested in this “shadowy woman” from fifteen years before and asked Jane if she could pick her out in any of the photographs they supplied. She could not. A little while later, the short, round policeman gathered all the typed pages of her statement into a neat stack and asked her to initial them. The interrogation had lasted precisely twenty-four hours, “the legal limit.” She and George were free to go, although they would be called back for additional questioning. It was then explained to them that the fact that they were not being arrested meant that their case would not be remanded to a grand jury for a hearing.
The DST interrogations continued sporadically for several more weeks. The short, round policeman was joined by a half-dozen others with varied expertise, who proceeded to comb through their documents and compare and analyze their answers to see if their stories matched. In order to satisfy the French authorities, Jane and George agreed to tell everything they knew about Soviet espionage in France and anyone they knew who was involved in Communist causes and fronts. In the end, Jane admitted to passing on some material but claimed she had never been more than a dupe and had been unaware at the time of the Sterns’ collusion with Soviet intelligence. According to FBI records, the French service advised that Jane felt Martha had “led her to become involved in espionage on the belief that she was working for international Communism on an ideological basis.” Once Jane was caught in the Stern-Soble web, she found it difficult to extricate herself. She could not go to the authorities at that point because all of her friends were Communists and she could not bring herself to inform on them. Angry at having been made a tool of the NKVD (Soviet secret police under Stalin) and the mess it had made of her life, Jane gave the French police chapter and verse on the clandestine activities of her former comrades. Ironically, after years of standing on principle, she was naming names. She told herself it was not the same thing, but in the end she did it for the same reason as all the others—to save her own neck.
In her memoir, Jane is circumspect about the extent of her disclosures to the DST. She never acknowledged taking part in any espionage, and even attempted to insinuate that the French authorities did not think she was particularly guilty, suggesting that the reason she and George were allowed to go free was that neither of them impressed the DST as nearly slick enough to have pulled off the sophisticated covert operation outlined in the indictment:
It seemed highly unlikely to the DST that the Russians would recruit open Communists like George and myself and, knowing that Boris Morros was a double or triple agent and an agent provocateur, the DST began to consider the possibility that the so-called Stern-Soble-Zlatovski “spy network” was, in reality, a simple réseau bidon, i.e. false network, immobilizing a large part of the CIA while the Russians did their dirty work through agents who really were agents.
Like most rationalizations, this argument had an element of truth to it. The Stern-Soble network was a fairly sorry, minor-league operation, and Jane and George among the most underemployed and unreliable of recruits. While Jane understandably preferred to trivialize their contribution, implying that the French had let them walk because of their utter incompetence and unimportance, the fact remains that they were released because they cooperated and provided valuable information about illegal Soviet activity within France. They purchased their liberty the same way Elizabeth Bentley had bought hers a decade earlier—by betraying those who had betrayed them.*
In March 1957, Jane had another breakdown. The weeks of relentless questioning and demeaning admissions were too much for her. She entered a maison de santé—a French euphemism for “not exactly nuthouses but rest homes for people with nervous depressions.” She underwent what was fashionably known in those days as a cure de sommeil, a treatment that involved being pumped so full of tranquilizers she was “in a constant state of somnolence.” Her worried parents, who had flown to Paris to provide moral support, made the arrangements and footed the bill.
Jane had been in the hospital about two weeks when she was informed that two high-ranking American officials, Assistant Attorney General William Tompkins and Special Assistant Attorney General Thomas B. Gilchrist, were waiting at the DST headquarters to question her about the Sobles. Despite being woozy on whatever drug cocktail she had been given that morning, she got dressed and went to meet them. When she walked into the room, the first words out of Tompkins’s mouth were “Mrs. Zlatovski, we would like you to come back to America for a few days to testify in the Soble case.” She refused. Much to the Americans’ irritation, she persisted in speaking French, drafting one of the DST officers as interpreter. They explained that they had brought a U.S. Air Force plane specially to take her to New York, and she would travel round-trip in comfort. She insisted on having their remarks translated. Then she refused again, in French, and waited for her meaning to be conveyed. She would not say a word in English. It was a small act of rebellion, the only one she could manage under the circumstances. At the end of their tense exchange, she asked to be driven back to the maison de santé. Jane talked the driver into stopping off at a bistro along the way, and they both had an aperitif. It was “very human and very French.”
When she got back to the hospital, she climbed into bed and slit her wrists. As political protests go, it was remarkably effective. When she woke up, both arms were bandaged up to her elbows and the special attorneys had been sent home. She had lost a lot of blood, but she had made her point. She would rather die by her own hand in France than return to the United States to die in the electric chair. From then on, a special nurse was assigned to stand guard in her room, but she had no more visits from the police.
A confidential memorandum from the American Embassy in Paris to the director of the FBI, dated May 28, 1957, reveals the diplomatic stalemate she had achieved: “In view of Jane Zlatovski’s attempted suicide and her mental attitude, the Zlatovskis have not been reinterviewed.” Shortly after the attorney general issued the indictment, and while the American papers were having a field day running the most dramatic parts of Morros’s testimony, Tompkins flew back to Paris to again formally request their extradition. Another memo from the American Embassy to the FBI, dated July 24, reflects that Tompkins again returned home empty-handed. The embassy official reiterated the view that no useful purpose would be served in trying to question the Zlatovskis “because of their knowledge of the United States’ trying to obtain their return, and because Jane might attempt suicide again.”
In the meantime, the French authorities had reached their decision. A high official in the Quai d’Orsay, the French foreign office, summoned the Zlatovskis for a meeting. As Jane was still too ill to go, George met with monsieur le ministre, who gave him his assurance that the French government would never allow them to be extradited. The French authorities’ official recalcitrance made the head
lines in the following day’s Herald Tribune: “PARIS REFUSES TO GIVE U.S. TWO ALLEGED SPIES.”
By the time Jane returned from the hospital a few weeks later, a mob of hostile reporters was permanently camped outside their building on rue Mazarine. They swarmed the sidewalk, staircase, and landing and “acted like a pack of jackals,” she recalled, incessantly ringing the doorbell, banging on the door, and shouting insults. Even the “respectable” papers were venomous, offering large bribes to the housekeeper and printing rumors and ill-informed scuttlebutt. Jane became a virtual prisoner in the apartment. Not that it mattered terribly. The drugs in the hospital had left her in such a weakened state that she was in for a long recovery. She stayed inside and out of sight. Apart from George’s initial comments to the press, they decided to grant no interviews. They kept silent and waited for the furor to die down.
While she was recuperating, her New York lawyer, Leonard Boudin, sent her a copy of the indictment. She read through the five counts and all thirty-eight charges, spelled out “in barbarous, presumably legal language” over twenty pages. “It was THE BIG LIE,” she wrote in her memoir. “For all its gobbledegook, lies, errors, imprecisions, contradictions and sheer nonsense, it was devastating. How does an individual fight THE BIG LIE? We were utterly helpless against the judiciary of a powerful government, which wanted another Rosenberg case.”
She also learned that in exchange for turning state’s evidence—and presumably their promise “to reveal a vast Soviet spy network”—the Sobles had gotten off relatively lightly: Jack was sentenced to seven years and Myra to five and a half, though in return for all her assistance her sentence was reduced again and she served only four years. According to press reports, while awaiting trial Jack Soble was kept in the psychiatric ward at Bellevue Hospital. Directly after being transferred to the Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary after sentencing, he swallowed a handful of nuts and bolts stolen from the machine shop. He was then transferred to a medical facility for federal prisoners and later received shock treatments. Jane thought the prosecutor must have been “greatly relieved” to have Jack Soble’s guilty plea, as he would have been a pathetic sight on the witness stand.
To her family and friends, Jane would angrily hold forth about the “glaring inaccuracies and discrepancies” contained in the thirty-eight charges and how most of them were based on innuendo and “sheer ignorance.” To begin with, she argued, counts 1 through 8 did not even mention either her or George by name and had to do with other members of the ring. Counts 9 and 10 alleged she had met Soble in December 1945, when she was still aboard the “USS Unspeakable” on her way home from the war, as could easily be corroborated by the ship’s manifest. She actually met Soble six months later, in April or May 1946. Counts 14 through 18 had her traveling to Paris “five times” between May 1948 and February 1949 to meet with unnamed Soviet agents, when she was there only twice, and the second time was to meet her parents—“those two well-known spies, Dr. and Mrs. Harry Emerson Foster”—with whom she traveled through Europe for the next few months until returning to Paris in March 1949, at which point Paris became her permanent home.
The twenty-ninth charge, which received the greatest share of titillating press coverage, alleged that in December 1949 she and George had gone to Salzburg to report on “the sexual and drinking habits” of the American personnel in Austria. By that time, both she and George were civilians, and all they did was relax for a few days, visit old friends, and attend midnight Mass in the church of Sankt Wolfgang. “As for ‘sexual and drinking habits,’ if the Russians were interested, all they had to do was ask any Austrian bartender or chambermaid.”
By far the best “gem” of prosecutorial invention, in her view, was the line in count 4 of the indictment: “Mrs. Zlatovski fled from justice in or about the month of April 1947 and departed from the United States.” It was hard to see how boarding the U.S. passenger lines on a legal passport to join her husband, who was working for U.S. military intelligence “in the American-occupied zone of Austria” amounted to fleeing. And what was she supposed to be “fleeing from in 1947”? No charges were ever filed against her until a decade later.
For all that she would rail against the indictment as a “scurrilous document” and quibble endlessly about specific dates and details, several of which were demonstrably wrong, Jane could not deny the damning chain of association outlined in the charges: that she knew the Sterns very well, had once considered them close friends, and that it was at their apartment in the Majestic that she had met both the Sobles and Boris Morros. Nor could she dispute that she had socialized with the Sobles and Morros later in Paris, lent them money for business ventures, and traveled with them or to meet them on more than one occasion, spending time with them in Salzburg, Vienna, and Zürich. It strained credulity to the breaking point to believe she had never had so much as an inkling of anything unusual, let alone illegal. But then, if anyone ever lived in a bubble, it was Jane. Wittingly or unwittingly, she had surrounded herself with companions who were not only Communists but were actively involved in Soviet espionage and determined to lead her and her husband down that same path. Considering what little regard she had for this unsavory crew, her willingness to become so intimately involved with them reveals a record of bad judgment and indiscretion on a colossal scale. To the charge of stupidity, Jane observed ruefully in her memoir, she had no defense:
Gertrude Stein wrote in her Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, “Every time a genius entered the room, a bell went off in my head.” With me, it’s always been the opposite. Every time an evil or disaster-boding person entered the room, a bell would go off in my head. Unfortunately, I never paid attention to it. I was still trying to be all sweetness and light, and thought there was something wrong with me and that I was being irrational. The minute I laid eyes on Boris Morros, the bell started clanging loudly.
The best argument in Jane’s favor was her apparent lack of guile or premeditation. If she was the Sterns’ protégée, as Boris Morros contended, and from early 1941 was being carefully groomed to become an undercover agent, why would she have listed Martha Dodd Stern, a leader of the Soviet spy ring, as a character reference on her 1943 employment application for the OSS? For that matter, why would the Soviets have picked someone as unabashedly antiestablishment as Jane to be a mole? She was so unguarded about her radical activities that the Civil Service Commission, which investigated all prospective government employees, had insisted on a special hearing in September 1943 to address all the “derogatory information” that had been discovered. During the hearing, Jane had again cited her friendship with Martha, mentioning their common interest in music and painting and that they saw each other “socially at concerts and parties.” If Jane knew Martha was at the red-hot center of a secret Soviet intelligence conspiracy, it would seem like very poor tradecraft to flaunt their relationship and invite the investigators to talk to her. (Martha begged off, claiming to be too ill to be interviewed in person, told the investigators by phone that Jane was a “very sweet person.”) At the time, Jane also candidly listed as “social acquaintances” Charles Flato, her boss at the Board of Economic Warfare, and Dr. Susan B. Anthony and her husband, Henry Hill Collins Jr.—all Communist sympathizers she seems to have had no qualms about advertising as friends. Surely she could have come up with a more conservative list of pals if she wanted to be considered for a sensitive government job? Or at least have done a better job of covering her tracks? Instead, she left a trail of Communist ties that the FBI followed like bread crumbs and later used to bolster its case against her.
Jane’s FBI file reveals that she turned up on the bureau’s radar again in the spring of 1948 because of her connection to Jack Soble. A “known Soviet agent,” Soble was the focus of the “Mocase” investigation and the FBI was listening in on his calls, reading his mail, and checking out anyone who crossed his path. J. Edgar Hoover immediately ordered a “complete and exhaustive investigation to determine the present contacts and activit
ies of the Zlatovskis,” bringing all the investigative techniques of the bureau to bear, including “technical and microfilm surveillance, physical surveillance, and mail and trash recovery.” The investigation turned up the usual Communist Party sympathies and friends until July 1949, when a “Confidential Informant” (Boris Morros) suddenly identified Jane and George as “active in Soviet intelligence.”
The FBI files reveal that Morros was immediately fascinated by Jane, and saw her as ripe for the picking. In the course of vetting her, he reported reams of gossip about Jane picked up at the Sterns’s parties, detailing her upper-crust background, reactionary father, youthful sojourn to Russia, marital infidelities, and sexual attractiveness. George’s pro-Russian sympathies, lack of money, and drinking habits were duly noted but of less interest. He was apparently never viewed as having much potential, and Soble wrote him off as a “parasite.” Morros reported to the FBI that Soble praised Jane as one of their “best agents” and supported this claim by explaining she had gathered information on Americans in Austria but “destroyed the notes” when her Soviet contact failed to show, although she managed to pass along a report on “the Marshall Plan in Paris.”
In the hundreds of reports in her FBI file,* and in all the hours of testimony, there was never any definitive evidence that Jane knowingly crossed over from ordinary Communist Party work to outright espionage—becoming a significant source, serving as a courier, or passing valuable military secrets to Soviet intelligence—other than the word of Morros and Soble. There was also never any explanation as to how, as an employee of the Austrian radio service and later as an unemployed painter, Jane gained access to important classified information. An FBI memo reveals that after four weeks of investigation in Austria, the bureau was unable to discover any derogatory information and reported Jane had an excellent reputation among her colleagues in Salzburg.
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