Julia was continually grateful that she had found true love, and that it in turn had led her to a second love affair with cooking and to such a joyous career. Paul was content in his supporting role, making himself quietly indispensable. Every morning, he and Julia would sit at their kitchen table and discuss the workday ahead, discussing plans for her new show and downing oceans of lapsang souchong. Despite their disparate personalities, what they had in common was their slow, careful approach to work and their dedication to perfection. After hours of laboring over scripts and shooting scenes for The French Chef at WGBH, they would often slip away to Joyce Chen, their favorite Chinese restaurant in Cambridge. Julia rarely cooked anything Asian style, believing that a lifetime was barely long enough to learn the French cuisine, but she confessed she could happily “live on Chinese food.” It reminded her and Paul of the old days, and all the wonderful meals they shared in Chungking when they were courting.
They remained devoted to each other. Even during the most hectic years of book promotion, they were rarely apart. When Paul, who was ten years her senior, began to fade with age, Julia faithfully took him on the road with her, and always made sure he had a front-row seat at her cooking demonstrations. He would watch the clock, advise her to speak louder, and lead the applause. After a series of strokes in 1989, he entered a nursing home in Fairlawn, Massachusetts. Their forty-eight-year partnership ended with his death in 1994 at the age of ninety-two. Julia lived another decade, returning to her native California in her last years, and died on August 13, 2004, two days before her ninety-second birthday.
There is no evidence that on their many trips to Paris Julia and Paul ever saw Jane again. Nevertheless, in the hundreds of interviews she gave over the course of her career, Julia never said a word against her former OSS colleague. As the former head of the Registry, she was much too disciplined at keeping secrets to let anything slip. As a friend, she was far too loyal to speak out of turn or sit in judgment. Not until 1991, in a lengthy oral history interview for the Association of Diplomatic Studies and Training, did Julia open up about her relationship with that “fascinating and amusing girl, Jane Foster,” reminiscing about her fondly for a few minutes before adding matter-of-factly, “who turned out to be a Russian agent.”
BETTY MACDONALD became a widow quite without warning in May 1959 when her husband, Richard Heppner, died of a heart attack at age forty-nine. Betty, who worked in a variety of government jobs after the war, joined the CIA as an operations officer and continued to work for the agency until her retirement in 1973. By then, she had married Frederick B. McIntosh, a veteran World War II fighter pilot, and settled in Leesburg, Virginia. In addition to her wartime memoir, Undercover Girl, she wrote the highly praised Sisterhood of Spies: The Women of the OSS, published by the Naval Institute Press in 1998. She has also penned two children’s books, Inky and Palace Under the Sea. For many years she served as editor of The OSS Society Newsletter. In the early 1980s, while in Paris on business, Betty decided to look up Jane. She discovered she was too late and instead had a brief, awkward visit with George. He was perfectly polite but struck her again as “a strange man” and not particularly to her liking. She soon made her apologies and left to pay her respects at Jane’s grave. To this day, Betty remains unshaken in her conviction that her friend and former OSS colleague was never a spy.
MARTHA DODD STERN and her husband, ALFRED, remained in exile for the rest of their lives. Fleeing to Prague, they reportedly requested permission to live in Moscow but after a brief sojourn in Russia and Eastern Europe returned to the Czech capital. By all accounts, they enjoyed a privileged life in Prague, where they lived in a sprawling three-story villa and were treated as local celebrities. A KGB document indicates that from 1963 to 1970 they made their home in Havana, after Martha fell in love with the romance of the Cuban revolution. The Sterns eventually became disappointed with the Cuban political scene and disillusioned with life in such a desperately poor country and returned to Czechoslovakia. In November 1972, they walked into the American Embassy in Prague and applied for passports. They retained Leonard Boudin, petitioned to return to the United States, and began protracted negotiations to avoid prosecution and imprisonment on their return. The Sterns, according to their lawyer, were getting on in age and were no longer happy with life behind the Iron Curtain. The Justice Department took the position that if the Sterns wanted to return to the United States, then they needed to cooperate as witnesses: they would have to agree to meet in a neutral country and tell the FBI all they knew about Soviet espionage operations in America during the 1940s and 1950s. The FBI field office in New York emphasized to Washington that the accused spies could furnish worthwhile information and “every effort should be made to obtain the Sterns’ story prior to their entrance in the United States.”
The Sterns refused to talk. But their passport application placed the government in something of a quandary: with the main witnesses against them deceased and with no way to sustain a prosecution for espionage conspiracy, the State Department had no real grounds for denying them passports. In an effort to strengthen its case against the Sterns, the FBI considered approaching Jane and George Zlatovski to see if they would agree to be interviewed. If they were amenable, the bureau could send a special agent acquainted with their case to Paris to question them “concerning their knowledge of the Sterns and Soviet espionage operations in the U.S.” Jane and George would be offered immunity in return for their testimony. In the end this strategy was vetoed and the matter dragged on for years without resolution.
In 1979, the twenty-two-year-old indictment against the Sterns was finally dropped, in part due to the couple’s advanced age and the absence of witnesses against them. Their lawyer, Victor Rabinowitz, Boudin’s longtime partner, described the indictment as “a very grave injustice of the McCarthy era,” and the dismissal, the result of almost ten years of talks with the FBI and the Justice Department, as “a belated effort to set things straight.” The Sterns never exercised their right to return. Their statements to the FBI indicated their dread of any publicity that might revive interest in their infamous case. They were “too old,” Martha wrote a friend, “to pull up roots.”
When the Sterns learned that Jane had written a memoir, they considered suing to stop its publication until their lawyers convinced them there was little they could do. They were very unhappy with Jane’s portrayal of them but took consolation in the book’s poor sales and inability to find a publisher outside England. Alfred Stern died of cancer in Prague in 1986. Martha Dodd Stern remained in exile and died in 1990. Their son, Bobby, whose childhood was blighted by their life in exile, developed a “nervous condition” that was later diagnosed as schizophrenia. Dr. Judd Marmor, an eminent Los Angeles psychiatrist who saw Bobby at the Sterns’ request, later wrote them that despite his biochemical vulnerability, their son “must be considered one of the unfortunate victimized innocent bystanders of the whole miserable McCarthy era.”
BORIS MORROS chronicled his adventures in a melodramatic book, My Ten Years as a Counterspy, published by Viking Press in 1959. He immediately began negotiating to sell the film rights, and it was made into a pseudodocumentary-style, anti-Communist propaganda film, Man on a String, starring Ernest Borgnine as “Boris Mitrov,” an even more fictionalized version of the FBI’s “special special agent.” The book also helped spawn a television series, The Spy Next Door. Morros’s life did not have the happy ending he had scripted: a few months after he was unmasked as a counterspy, his wife, Catherine, filed for legal separation. In October 1957, she alleged cruelty against him in her Superior Court suit for separate maintenance and charged that Morros had even failed in recent years to provide support for his ninety-eight-year-old father, the same man he had theoretically become a Soviet agent to protect. Morros died of cancer on January 8, 1963. The New York Times reported his age as seventy-three, while other newspapers gave it as sixty-eight. As Jane observed in her memoir, “it is absolutely typical of his whole lyi
ng life that no one, probably not even the FBI/CIA, ever knew the true facts about him. Undoubtedly he himself no longer knew truth from fiction.” One thing is certain: Morros knew how to market himself as a spy—whether it was to Moscow, Washington, or Holly-wood—and he played his part to the hilt.
JACK and MYRA SOBLE: After their arrest in January 1957 as Russian spies, Jack and Myra Soble were questioned scores of times by the FBI, and were persuaded to testify against friends and family members in their espionage ring in return for drastically reduced sentences. Nearly four years later, on November 30, 1960, their statements led to the indictment of Jack’s brother, Dr. Robert A. Soblen (he reportedly added an n to his name to differentiate himself from his physician-wife), on espionage charges. Soblen, a fifty-nine-year-old psychiatrist, pleaded not guilty to conspiring to obtain material relating to national defense for the Soviet Union, both during World War II and thereafter. Jack Soble, one of the government’s main sources of allegations against Jane, would be the prosecution’s star witness, which meant that for the first time his testimony would be exposed to the rules of evidence in a court of law. (As the Sobles had both made deals, and both the Sterns and the Zlatovskis had declined to return to the United States to stand trial, the government had never had to show any proof of their crimes.) That, during his years in jail, Jack Soble had suffered a mental breakdown, twice attempted suicide, and received twenty shock treatments before being found “mentally competent” to testify against his brother apparently did nothing to diminish the government’s faith in his credibility.
On June 19, 1961, the case United States v. Dr. Robert A. Soblen opened to a packed federal courthouse at Foley Square in New York, featuring the first public appearance of a principal player in what one newspaper called “the biggest spy ring smashed in this country since atom spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg went to the chair.” It turned out that the defendant, Dr. Soblen, was in an advanced stage of lymphatic leukemia, and appeared frail and heavily medicated in his wheelchair. Jack Soble testified at length about their political activities in Lithuania in the 1920s and 1930s, and later in Germany, where they joined the Communist Party and supported its “Trotskyite wing,” and sometime in 1940 begun gathering information for the Soviet Union, employing many family members in their ring. Under cross-examination by the defense counsel Joseph Brill, Jack Soble admitted to being a desperate man forced to take desperate measures. When asked, for example, if he had done the things reported in the sensational Journal-American articles detailing his exploits with Martha Dodd Stern and Jane Foster, he denied both their accuracy and their authorship, and explained he had agreed to their publication sight unseen because he needed the money. He also admitted to making up material for Boris Morros to feed to the Russians, fearing that Morros would make good on his threat to expose him to the FBI if he did not give him the reports, which Soble described as “lies and wrong things about what I did in this country.”
After nearly four weeks of trial, during which the defendant’s condition worsened to the point that he was too weak to take the stand, the defense rested without calling a single witness and asserted that the government had failed to present a prima facie case. In just a little over an hour, the jury brought in its guilty verdict. On August 7, the day of sentencing, two former OSS men—H. Stuart Hughes, a Harvard professor of history, and Herbert Marcuse, a Brandeis professor of philosophy—came forward and raised serious doubts about some of the key testimony in the trial concerning information about the atom bomb project, which Soblen was accused of passing on to the Soviet Union. They argued that it could not have come from the two low-level German refugees then employed in the Biographical Records section of the OSS. Both professors offered to testify at a new trial. Judge William B. Herlands asserted that Soblen could request a new trial after sentencing and then proceeded to hand down a life sentence, stating firmly, “A spy is a spy no matter what his health may be.”
On August 31, 1962, Jack Soble was paroled for “good behavior” after serving five and a half years. A week later, his brother, who had jumped bail and fled the United States for England, and was in Brixton prison awaiting extradition, committed suicide by taking an overdose of drugs. Robert Soblen had made a dramatic entry into England on July 1 after an earlier attempt to seek asylum in Israel failed and he was forced by Israeli authorities to leave. As his chartered El Al flight returning him to New York neared London, Soblen cut his wrists and stabbed himself in the stomach; he later stated that this was not a suicide attempt but a carefully designed ploy to enter Britain, where he had hoped to prove his innocence. Jack Soble had five years to think about what he had done to his brother before he died in 1967.
Myra Soble served only four years. Afterward, she took an assumed name and made a new life for herself in New York City, where she was employed at an accounting firm. On July 5, 1991, she received a full pardon from President George H. W. Bush. Myra Soble died in 1992.
THEODORE H. WHITE was officially cleared of all charges of subversion two days before Christmas 1954, just three weeks after Senator McCarthy’s methods were condemned by the full Senate. Although he was granted a spotless new passport, “with all the dirty restrictions of the old wiped out,” he did not immediately recover his self-confidence and former zeal. He was sufficiently traumatized by the loyalty-security hearing that he did not write anther word about China between 1954 and 1972 and wrote only four articles about Vietnam. For years, he also deliberately avoided reporting about foreign policy and defense—loaded topics during the Cold War. In his memoir, In Search of History, he castigated himself for ignoring those subjects because “too much danger lurked there; and for that shirking I am now ashamed.”
White returned from his “wilderness” years in France and threw himself into analyzing domestic American politics, becoming one of the country’s foremost historians with The Making of the President, 1960 and the series of books that followed. He died of a heart attack in New York in 1986. Looking back on the ultimate impact of McCarthyism, White observed that its “warping effect” not only affected his own life but affected the country for decades to come:
McCarthy’s most lasting effect on American history may well have been on its foreign policy—for a direct line runs between McCarthy’s terrorizing of the Foreign Service of the United States State Department and the ultimate tragedy of America’s war in Vietnam …
The wrong done by the McCarthy lancers, under McCarthy leadership, was to poke out the eyes and ears of the State Department on Asian Affairs, to blind American foreign policy. And thus flying blind into the murk of Asian politics, American diplomacy carried American honor, resources, and lives into the triple-canopied jungles and green-carpeted hills of Vietnam, where all crashed.
APPENDIX
In the summer of 1995, the CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA) released the first group of “Venona” decrypts, translations of coded Soviet intelligence messages dealing with espionage operations in America between 1940 and 1948. “Venona” was the fanciful code word assigned to the highly classified government project, which began in 1943 and was formally closed in 1980, in order to limit access to the cryptanalytic breakthrough that finally made it possible to crack the Russian secret code. Approximately 2,900 Soviet diplomatic telegrams, intercepted by the U.S. Army’s Signal Intelligence Service (a precursor to the NSA), have now been painstakingly decoded and deciphered, allowing experts to read portions of the secret cables. The majority of the KGB communications were translated and made available to the U.S. government by 1945, which meant that intelligence officials were in possession of evidence about a wide variety of Soviet espionage operations—everything from the Rosenbergs’ atomic spying to the Soble ring—that was not made public at the time of their controversial cases. The release of so much new evidence has inevitably led to a certain amount of revisionism in terms of the guilt of many of the accused Soviet spies from that era, and analyzing and interpreting the full meaning of the Venona haul will d
oubtless keep historians, journalists, and authors busy for years to come.
The deciphered Venona cables pertinent to Jane Foster’s case suggest she lied in her memoir about the purely social and happenstance nature of her contacts with Martha Dodd Stern, Jack Soble, and Boris Morros. A telegram from Vasily Zarubin, a KGB general operating in the United States under the alias Zubilin, informed Moscow in June 1942 of a possible new source: [UNRECOVERED CODE GROUP] LIZA [MARTHA DODD STERN], WE ARE CULTIVATING THE AMERICAN JANE FOSTER WITH A VIEW TO SIGNING HER ON. SHE IS ABOUT 30 YEARS OLD AND WORKS IN WASHINGTON IN THE DUTCH [TWO UNRECOVERED CODE GROUPS] TRANSLATOR OF MALAY LANGUAGES…. SHE IS A FELLOWCOUNTRYWOMAN [COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE SOVIET UNION, OR CPSU, MEMBER]. SHE IS DESCRIBED BY THE FELLOWCOUNTRYMEN [CPSU] AS A [UNRECOVERED CODE GROUP], DEDICATED PERSON. In subsequent Venona messages from 1943 and 1944, Jane, identified by her code name “Slang,” is described as providing information, but these memos are incomplete and extremely vague. It is impossible to tell if Jane was simply being indiscreet and talking about information gleaned from her job that the author of the memo felt would be of interest to Moscow or actually “reporting” the information to her Soviet handler.
There are only a handful of Venona decrypts referring directly to Jane, and while incriminating they are not conclusive evidence that she was a Soviet spy. To begin with, the translations are woefully incomplete: the cryptanalysts were able to decipher only portions of the coded telegrams, leaving gaps that could alter the meaning of the messages. In addition, all of the messages are secondhand accounts by Zarubin or another Soviet handler reporting to the KGB about what various American sources—Martha Dodd Stern or Jack Soble or Morros—said or claimed to have done. As a result, inaccuracies abound. For example, Morros’s report in one cable that Jane told him she was recruited by Martha Dodd Stern in 1938, when she was actually still in Batavia, was wrong and demonstrates the danger of hearsay. Morros was either mistaken or misinformed. Adding to the confusion, they all were assigned code names, and these code names changed over time and are often only half deciphered, so the cryptanalysts made educated guesses as to their identities.
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