Firebird_A Spy Story of the 1960's

by Noel Hynd

  He wasn’t far off. Nixon and Humphrey were increasingly alarmed. Wallace was locking up hundreds of thousands of blue-collar votes in the North while he sabotaged Nixon’s efforts in the south. A little chipmunk-faced man with over-cropping black eyebrows was preparing the put a knife in the two major American political parties.

  He played his standard stump speech like an angry concerto. He blasted activists, community organizers, leftists and beards. He promised to “plow them under the courthouse” after he was elected. The press had heard the same lines so often that they sometimes mouthed them aloud as Wallace delivered them.

  Wallace identified his enemies, “the bureaucrats, the long hairs, the intellectuals, the communists….and some of these newspaper editors that look down their nose at every workingman because we want to defend American institutions.”

  As he spoke, the crowds rocked. Wallace was articulating what they believed and what other people disparaged them for thinking. There was not a raw working-class nerve that Wallace missed. And while his speeches focused on coded messages such as safe streets and respect for the flag, his television commercials—for which he had plenty of financing—played the race cards with bravado.

  One ad showed a single white woman walking down a dark street where a streetlamp had been smashed. The voice over invited the viewer to “take a walk through your street or park tonight.” Then the viewer heard the distinct voice of George Wallace stating, “As President, I shall help make it possible for you and your families to walk the streets in safety.”

  Another ad showed a school bus rolling down a gentle country road as the narrator spoke. “Why are more and more millions of Americans turning to George Wallace? Follow while your children are bused across town.” The screen then exploded into various acts of domestic violence and rioting, after which Wallace was seen and heard saying, “As President, I shall return the control of the school systems to their respective states.”

  An off-camera ovation was thunderous.

  “If you’re an angry working American, this is wonderfully appealing stuff,” wrote Martin Friedkin for the Eagle after a rally in Akron. “Wallace’s message to working people is short, crisp and clear: your government has sold you out. It doesn’t care about you. Hundreds of thousands of working people across this country are listening to George Wallace because no one else speaks their language of social and economic frustration.”

  Friedkin’s words were on page two of the Eagle two days after the Rudawski obituary.

  Chapter 20

  Among Monday morning's necrologies, there was a violinmaker, a woman in her nineties, there was a former state police lieutenant, and a Greenwich Village poet. The main obit on Cooper's page, however, would be given to a man who had been a particularly acerbic Broadway critic in the Forties and Fifties. The critic merited a full column. Cooper didn’t bother finding someone with something gracious to say him. Instead, he printed some of the nastier things said by the critic. “I have seen her sing, I have heard her dance,” the man had once written of a musical comedy star who was well-loved by everyone else. Even his family disliked him. Cooper talked to the man’s third ex-wife. “When it came right down to it, deep down,” she said, “he was a loathsome human being.” Cooper used the quote.

  Three times Cooper’s phone rang while he was writing the obit. All three times there had been no caller on the other end. Malfunctions in the new phone system? Or someone keeping track of Cooper's whereabouts? Shades of the old days, he told himself.

  A voice came from his doorway. “Cooper!” Cooper jumped and looked up. “Whoa! Jumpy today, huh, mate?” Marty Friedkin said.

  “I’m jumpy every day, Marty. What’s up? I thought you were out in the sticks following Adolf Junior.”

  “I fly out to Chicago to rejoin the Wallace campaign tomorrow. Meanwhile, I’m meeting Bill Bradford for lunch. Right now. Join us? We’ll be talking Wallace.”

  “Sure,” Cooper said. Cooper and Friedkin took a bouncy taxi downtown to The White Horse Tavern on Hudson Street. The White Horse was as renowned as a classic Greenwich Village writers’ hangout, along with the Lion's Head, a place where writers and musicians congregated to talk, inspire, get into fights and initiate sexual activity with their admirers.

  It had first found fame beyond its neighborhood in the 1950s as the place where the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas drank heavily. After one such boundless spree, he returned to the Chelsea Hotel, became ill, and died a few days later of unrelated causes. Now, on any given visit to The White Horse, it was not usual to see Bob Dylan, Norman Mailer, Jim Morrison, Hunter Thompson or Mary Travers.

  Current on the persona non grata list was Jack Kerouac, who had been thrown out more than half a dozen times for substandard behavior, which was quite an accomplishment. About the same time, the White Horse was a gathering-place for labor members and organizers and socialists, as well. The Village Voice offices were around the corner and much of the editorial work was done at The White Horse by editors fleeing the telephones of the office.

  Friedkin and Cooper entered. They spotted Bradford at the bar, an amiable but intense man with white hair and a tough but friendly face. He had a drink in front of him and his shoulders were slightly stooped. Cooper noted that Bradford must have been watching the door via the mirror behind the bar, as he turned toward them and smiled as soon as they entered, recognizing Friedkin. “Hey! Marty! How you doing, you lousy Red?” Bradford said.

  “Hello, Bill,” Friedkin answered, extending a hand in greeting. “This is my friend Frank Cooper,” said Friedkin. “Investigative stuff as well as the Irish comics at the Eagle.”

  “Ha!” said Bradford. “Sometimes the distinction is vague, right?”

  “A pleasure to meet you, sir.”

  The inflections of Alabama clung like kudzu to Bradford’s speech. “Call me ‘Bill,” he said. Bill. Bradford’s enemies, and there were many, had called him much worse than that.

  Cooper admired Bradford. Meeting him now, Cooper recalled why. Bradford had cut his teeth as a very young reporter in Los Angeles, doing investigative reports for the Los Angeles Times on the career of Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel. He had served in the big war, and having survived combat in Asia, he didn’t seem to care what enemies he made. He just went after injustice.

  His most famous book, a 1954 Best Seller, concerned an American WWII deserter who was the only American to be executed for desertion since the Civil War. More recently, he wrote the story of a wealthy married black woman in Florida who had shot and killed her physician and white paramour, who was a state senator-elect, claiming he had forced her to have sex and bear a child. The popular married doctor had been being groomed to run for Governor of Florida. The explosive book on the case was banned in Florida but became a national bestseller.

  Bradford had also reported on the murder of an African-American Chicago teenager in Mississippi. After an all-white jury found the suspects not guilty, he paid the men four thousand dollars to describe how and why they committed the murders. Since they could not be tried again, the killers complied.

  “I’ve admired your work,” Cooper said. “I think of read most of it.”

  “Not everyone is so thrilled. The Klan burned a cross on my front lawn last year. Someone must have read my stuff to them; those ignorant rednecks can’t read.”

  Cooper liked the blend around the bar. It was his sort of place. There mingled the scents of beer and whiskey with a sweet undercurrent of marijuana intermixed with the more traditional tobacco smoke. Bradford was heating up to his topic and could have used a toke to settle down.

  “Wallace started out as a racial moderate in Alabama terms,” Bradford said. “He was a state legislator for ten years and a county judge. Modeled himself after his mentor, Big Jim Folsom. Folsom was six feet eight, and his slogan was he was ‘the little man’s big friend.’ Wallace ran for governor himself in 1958, tried to be a moderate, and got blindsided by a bastard named John Patterson who was a race-baiter. Afte
rwards, Wallace claimed that Patterson ‘outniggered’ him and it would never happen again. Cooper, you ask any white Alabaman what they think of George Wallace and they’ll say George is a good man. Ask a Negro the same question and watch him loose the power of speech and stare at his shoes.”

  Bradford wet his lips with a noontime whiskey and continued.

  “Wallace ran again in 1962. Got elected. Wallace made his ‘Segregation Forever!’ speech on the exact spot where Jefferson Davis took the oath of office as the President of the Confederate States of America. Wallace claims he has no use for the Ku Klux Klan, but down back home, the Klansmen raise money for him.”

  “How tight are they?” Cooper asked. “Wallace and the Klan?”

  “Tight as a bull’s ass. In his first week in office, Wallace pardoned a group of Klansmen who had been convicted of castrating a black man. Wallace’s ‘Segregation Forever!’ speech was written by a hateful son of a bitch named Asa Carter. Carter was a right-wing radio announcer. He founded his Ku Klux Klan branch. He has a long history of personal violence. In one eighteen-month period, his followers stoned Autherine Lucy, the first black student at the University of Alabama, assaulted Nat King Cole on a Birmingham stage, attacked civil rights activist Fred Shuttlesworth with chains and brass knuckles and stabbed the man’s wife. This was all in the name of Christian Anglo-Saxon people of Alabama. These are the people that Wallace empowers, and this is the type of bastard whom he hires as a speechwriter.”

  Bradford was animated now. “Yet the same dumb white working people who claim they love Wallace got screwed by the accounting tricks of his administration. He finances public works with debt and bonds and the stupid yokels don’t even understand what he’s done. It’s the same political equation served up by Adolf Hitler thirty years ago. Populism, my sweet fucking ass!” Bradford concluded sharply. “Wallace is an American fascist. On type of that, he’s a lying piece of shit.”

  An hour later, Cooper was back at his desk at the Eagle Building. Marty Friedkin was in a taxi on his way to La Guardia Airport, aiming to resume coverage his beloved Alabaman. Sam Rothman poked his head in the door in passing. He had been at Toots Shor’s for lunch and had run into a semi-retired Walter Winchell. Winchell had sent his regards to Cooper.

  Cooper looked up from the clippings and photographs on his desk. “Is that right?” he asked. “What did Walter have to say?”

  “He wished you a happy birthday. Is it your birthday?”

  “Nope,” Cooper answered.

  Sam shook his head. “Not only is Walter an old fascist, but he’s a failing old fascist.”

  “Lay off him, Sam,” Cooper said, resuming what he was doing. “W.W. is a pal.”

  Then, late in the day, Brett Molloy at the CIA returned Cooper's phone call. Molloy—the intelligence agent alluded to by Margot's father toward the end of his long account of Paris, 1965—was still in the employ of the same well-known company based in Langley, Virginia. Given the personal reference, Molloy said he would be agreeable to meet in person.

  Cooper arranged a meeting in Washington for the following Friday at two p.m., his next day off. An assistant editor from the Eagle's city desk would cover the obituary beat for him. Sam would oversee everything. Topher Wilson would write one brief obit each day on his lunch hour. Molloy agreed to a conversation on any reasonable non-classified topic. Cooper sensed that he had a story, and better yet, now he might now have a contact.

  Chapter 21

  Cooper returned home late in the evening. Seeing that it was only 10:30 p.m., he finally opened the printout from the Eagle’s computer archives, carefully seated at a table beyond half-drawn shades.

  Cautiously, he began to prowl through a toxic past.

  As he examined his print-outs, the first reference to Popov occurred in the year 1953, the year Stalin died and the year the Soviet Union exploded its first hydrogen bomb. It was Eisenhower's first year as President, John F. Kennedy's first year as a United States senator and the year when Khrushchev executed Lavrentii Beria. Not to be outdone, the United States executed Ethel and Julius Rosenberg.

  Cooper was barely out of the U.S. Army. Austria remained occupied by the victorious allied armies of World War II, but already Vienna, Berlin, Zagreb were focal points of intrigue. Colonel Pyotr Popov of Soviet military intelligence, the GRU, was stationed in Vienna. For reasons never entirely clear, Colonel Popov offered his services to the West by leaving a note on the car of an American diplomat. Colonel Popov soon became the first postwar penetration agent by the CIA within Soviet military intelligence. The colonel was paid $100 per month, the money held for him in a West German bank. In return, Popov delivered a witch's brew of intriguing secrets. Among them he had a list of cryptonyms for nearly four hundred Soviet agents who had infiltrated the West. One of these was a hair stylist named Irena.

  In Vienna, Popov prepared the woman with a suitcase filled with American clothing and cosmetics. Behind a vanity mirror in the suitcase he hid several thousand dollars in various currencies. Irena was a shapely but plain woman in her mid-thirties. “Nothing much to look at until she took off her clothes,” a frisky CIA case officer had noted in one of the sidebar files. Her mission was to travel to Manhattan and assume the identity of the wife of a Soviet agent in place. She was equipped with a cover story and a United States passport. The latter had once belonged to an American woman of Polish birth, stolen from her hotel room on a visit to Eastern Europe. Now the passport had been forged and reissued with Irena's photograph.

  The CIA's first reaction to the Irena affair, as they learned of it from Colonel Popov, was to wish that they had never known of it. Because she was a foreign agent on U.S. soil, the Federal Bureau of Investigation had to be notified. The CIA agents in the field drafted a memo to CIA Chief Allen Dulles. They urged that the director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, keep his agents away from Irena.

  Hoover's office responded with its usual delicacy: twelve different agents met her flight from Paris when it arrived at New York's Idlewild Airport. They stood a few feet from her as she changed francs for dollars. Two agents followed her onto the airport bus that took her to the East Side of Manhattan. Another team followed her from the bus terminal to the Hotel Hewitt in Brooklyn. The next day, impatient FBI agents broke into Irena's hotel room and searched it. The bureau's notes on the case maintained that the entry was done “with utmost care.” Irena recognized the break-in immediately.

  On her third day in America, she took a subway into Manhattan and spent six hours riding escalators and elevators in Macy's, Bloomingdale's, and Saks Fifth Avenue, attempting to discard her shadows. Irena knew she was blown and the FBI knew she knew. Still, federal agents sat three rows behind her when she rendezvoused with her Soviet “husband” at a Broadway movie house showing Moulin Rouge. When she moved into his apartment, the FBI immediately tapped their phone. Another FBI squad conducted a crude illegal break-in to place electronic bugs in the walls. They left sawdust on the floors beneath the electronic placements.

  This went on for several weeks. Then Irena walked out of the apartment one day and disappeared. The FBI didn't know she was gone until she turned up in East Berlin with a GRU inspector reassigned from Moscow. East Berlin was where Colonel Popov was now stationed, and she accused Colonel Popov of being the source of her betrayal.

  Popov protested his innocence. He insisted that Irena must have been stricken with cowardice in the United States. The GRU interrogator was inclined to believe a man who was a senior officer over a woman who was in the field. The KGB, however, was not so readily convinced. Popov was escorted to Moscow for “additional interrogation.”

  Eventually, on October 16, 1959, Popov was arrested. A few days later, Popov’s “confession” to treason appeared in Pravda. An article in lzvestia “quoted” the GRU officer. “There are crimes after which it is impossible to live,” the colonel said. “At the end of a contemptible life, a bullet is a fitting punishment, as well as an act of mercy.”

 
The “act of mercy” was a one-time-only appearance before a firing squad at Lubyanka Prison, around the corner from the Kremlin, before the end of the year. The colonel's body was then stuffed into the incinerator out back maintained especially for such purposes.

  Cooper, at a few minutes past one in the morning, fumed as he digested this. Then he froze. There were voices very close to him. He sat still. His thoughts leaped from Piotr Popov and J. Edgar Hoover through to the present. Voices: a man and a woman. He broke a hot sweat.

  Then he relaxed. It was the couple on the other side of the common wall. They had returned home and were having a noisy hot-blooded frolic in their bedroom.

  Cooper rose and walked away from his table. In his kitchen, he reheated some coffee. Then he returned to his desk. The Shields couple was quieter, apparently having sated their lust. Cooper flipped to the next page of his long printout. A new name appeared. The initial identification was SOURCE: SNIPER.

  Sniper. He glanced to his window and was reassured when he saw only dark sky and very, very distant buildings.

  Sniper. The file grabbed Cooper’s full attention.

  Back in December 1959, as the Central Intelligence Agency had been cursing Hoover, another penetration agent emerged. The new agent had first made contact in March 1959 with a letter in German, mailed from Zurich to Henry J. Taylor, the U.S. ambassador to Switzerland. The correspondence offered “valuable information on Communist spy operations in the West.” It was signed, “Sniper.” Ambassador Taylor turned over the letter to the CIA station chief in Bern.

  The station chief studied the letter. Some of the initial content dealt authoritatively with Soviet operations in Poland. An analysis of Sniper's typewriter and stationery revealed little.