by John Barron
Morris realized that the FBI first would want any information that might benefit Kissinger and the United States in the next secret negotiations with the Chinese, and that he had no right or reason to dispute this priority. But he did scribble a reminder on the back of the envelope containing his plane tickets, “TWA-DD.” To him, the notation meant after we’ve answered all the questions, after I’m finished with the technocrats, tell Walt about dangerous delusions.
MORRIS AND BOYLE WERE still filing reports and answering queries from Washington when Kissinger returned to Peking in October 1971, ostensibly to arrange for Nixon’s forthcoming visit. Actually, he and Chou engaged in cordial, candid, and wide-ranging dialogue about major world issues. At the same time, they established an enduring and friendly personal relationship.
Back in Moscow in December for the regular year-end review, Morris found the Soviets again drifting away from reality. The impending accords between China and the United States in a few weeks would dramatically alter the balance of power against the Soviet Union. Yet the Soviets had convinced themselves that the “crisis of capitalism is deepening and that imperialism is in retreat.” A relatively minor economic recession in the United States persuaded them that the West was verging on collapse.
What the Soviets long had feared and forecast came to pass in February 1972 when Nixon, Mao, Kissinger, and Chou achieved understandings that, from the perspective of the Soviets, were worse than their gloomiest predictions. In a joint declaration issued at the end of their talks—the so-called Shanghai Communiqu é—China and the United States pledged jointly to oppose “the hegemonic aims of others [i.e., the Soviet Union] in Asia.” As Kissinger wrote, “In plain language, the United States and China agreed on the need for parallel policies toward the world balance of power.” In plainer language, the two nations publicly and formally entered into an anti-Soviet alliance.
That was bad enough, but much more went on in private. The Chinese made it clear that they did not want China and the United States just to be “former enemies,” but real friends and partners. Domestically, each nation should abide by its own political, economic, and social principles. Internationally, they should act jointly despite their ideological differences. Kissinger wrote, “Mao took the proposition a somewhat cynical step further by indicating that we would strengthen domestic support for our cooperation if we took occasional potshots at each other—so long as we did not take our own pronouncements too seriously.” The Chinese exhorted the Americans to maintain the strongest possible armed forces and weaponry, to stay close to Western Europe and NATO, to forge an anti-Soviet alliance stretching from Pakistan through Iran and Turkey into the Middle East, and, above all, despite domestic pressures steamed up by an unpopular war in Vietnam, to assume and maintain a preeminent role in world affairs. In sum, they did everything within their power to encourage the United States, short of singing “The Star Spangled Banner.”
At the same time, the Chinese wished to be a worthy and constructive partner. Insofar as their resources permitted, they would covertly abet Sino–American policies around the globe. Delicately, they hinted they would assist in solving mutual problems in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. And they noted that the United States and China were natural trading partners who had much to offer each other commercially.
Morris at the time knew nothing of these historic negotiations because in February 1972 he and Eva were in Poland and Moscow, dispatched there by Gus Hall on an important mission—laying the groundwork for acquisition of Arabian horses to be sold by the American Communist Party (or Hall himself). But in Moscow Morris gathered some truly important intelligence showing that the Soviets really had gone ’round the bend. Three disparate and relatively trivial events persuaded them that the United States had set out “to worsen relations” on the eve of disarmament negotiations: (1) A U.S. Coast Guard cutter had hauled in a Soviet fishing vessel flagrantly poaching in American territorial waters; (2) the FBI had caught and arrested KGB officer Valery Markelov as he tried to steal designs for the new Navy F- 14 fighter plane; and (3) the State Department had denied visas to Soviets seeking to attend a convention of the American Communist Party.
Awareness of the Soviet delusions enabled the United States to dispel them by communicating with the Soviets through different channels. Privately and repeatedly, the United States had requested the Soviet Union to keep its trawlers and “factory ships” out of U.S. waters. A Coast Guard officer, acting on his own in compliance with standing orders, simply did his duty in corralling the intruding Soviet trawler. The FBI by law was charged with catching spies, and when it caught a spy, it arrested him without consulting anybody. Markelov was guilty as hell, and if the Soviets had any doubts they could consult the KGB. Nixon was being upbraided by many of his supporters for consorting with Chinese communists who were contributing to the deaths of American soldiers in Vietnam. Why should he invite more outcries by helping the Communist Party stage its convention?
The “TWA-DD,” “tell Walt about dangerous delusions,” again worked.
THOSE WHO KNEW MORRIS and what he really did knew him to be an extraordinarily brave man, all the more brave because he fully understood the risks he took and the consequences of being found out in the Soviet Union. At the Lenin School in 1930 when his teachers included bomb-throwing, bank-robbing, old-time Bolsheviks, he heard a lecture by a professional Cheka/OGPU torturer. He thought the torturer evil incarnate until he realized that the man, who spoke calmly and smiled frequently, was an insane pervert, a classic candidate for a mental institution. But the torturer obviously was good at his trade. He explained that the trick in torture is not to kill or render a victim senseless until you have extracted what you want. No one can resist skilled, prolonged torture, and you don’t have to have sophisticated equipment—a set of chains, a pair of pliers, and a box of matches would do just fine. “Give me a night with a man and I don’t care how brave or strong he is, by morning he won’t have any teeth or fingernails and he’ll wish he didn’t have any scrotum, and I’ll have him confessing he’s the king of England,” he had said.
Morris also knew that under his friend Yuri Andropov, the KGB had perfected techniques of destroying minds and wracking bodies with deranging drugs. The FBI promised that, were he arrested, it would try to ransom him by releasing jailed Soviet agents. But Morris believed that Soviet rulers would never agree to an exchange that would show how completely they had been duped. Rather, he was certain that should he be caught in the Soviet Union, his death was guaranteed—and it wouldn’t be painless. Yet he kept going back.
For all his courage and audacity, he gave to those who did not know him well the impression of being a reticent, even shy man. It derived in part from his habit of listening to others rather than talking himself. When he did talk, he spoke sparsely and rarely delivered speeches, although he was an experienced and able public speaker.
Morris made an exception on an evening in early March 1972 while he, Eva, and other team members were guests of Al and Ann Burlinson at their lovely old house in Scarsdale, New York. Morris was among his best friends, his mood was expansive, and he spoke as a coach might in addressing a team that had just won the championship.
Everyone could be proud of what they together had accomplished over the years and especially proud of their accomplishments regarding China. He said anyone could speculate about “what might have been.” He proposed to talk only about what he was sure “had been.” Recounting his first visit to Peking in 1958, he reviewed the history of SOLO reports about China and Sino–Soviet relations. From 1958 to now, they gave the United States the benefit of the highest and best Soviet intelligence and estimates pertaining to China while revealing the thoughts and intentions of Soviet rulers toward China. The reporting accurately charted the degeneration of the Sino–Soviet partnership into implacable enmity while tracking the evolution of Chinese attitudes toward the United States. Ultimately and collectively, the SOLO reports showed that, if the United States
wanted the Chinese as allies against the Soviet Union in international affairs, it need only ask. And it could be confident of China’s answer.
Morris pointed out something else that few others were in a position to appreciate. In personal dealings, the Chinese had for years treated the Soviets rudely or scornfully. As Kosygin complained after another futile negotiating session in Peking, they displayed “none of the characteristic Oriental civility and politeness.” Instead, they barely masked their raw contempt. Even the cultured Chou remained frostily aloof and refrained from any gesture suggesting the least goodwill. But from what Morris had been told, he concluded that the Chinese from Mao and Chou on down received Nixon and Kissinger warmly and graciously, speaking to them as if they were old colleagues. Chou and Nixon were well on their way to becoming personal friends. To Morris, that meant the Chinese were trying to tell the Americans, We really mean it.
“The new relationship between China and us is a crossroad in history,” Morris declared. “We are looking at a historic change. I hope we can say we helped a little to bring it about. I think we can.”
twelve
CRITICAL INTRIGUES
THE INTERNATIONAL DEPARTMENT in March 1972 again summoned Morris to Moscow, supposedly to arrange for Gus Hall to travel to Hanoi and Havana via the Soviet Union. Actually, it wanted him available before, during, and after the secret talks between Kissinger and Brezhnev that were to take place in April.
After shepherding Hall around during his Moscow stopover, Morris received a briefing from Ponomarev about current Chinese machinations. The Chinese were just as virulently anti-Soviet as ever, but now they were scheming more cleverly. Instead of reviling the parties of both Eastern and Western Europe as Soviet stooges, they were courting them, enticing them to enter into an anti-Soviet alliance.
“They found a few Italians on L’Unita [the Italian party newspaper] whom they bought for five cents, as we would say. One of them spent a month in China and wrote ten pro-Chinese articles for L’Unita. They were very well done and very clever in justifying Maoism. The Chinese took the writer to a concentration camp where he saw a professor. This professor said that during the Cultural Revolution he was beaten, forced to clean toilets, etc. But now the professor agrees this was the correct thing to do.” The Italian party had brushed off Soviet protests about the articles. The Chinese also were making inroads into the Spanish and Rumanian parties.
Ponomarev declared that Mao had converted China into an armed camp seething with anti-Soviet animosity and that he was murdering anyone who disagreed with him. “Lin Piao was Mao’s designated heir but he spoke out against Mao’s position. We do not know all the details but Lin Piao was against their anti-Soviet line. So Mao eliminated him like he did Liu Shao-Chi. Liu’s flight didn’t reach its destination; he was shot down by a Chinese fighter plane.”
In passing, Ponomarev confided, “We have good relations with the Cambodian resistance movement” (the Khmer Rouge, who were about to annihilate between I million and 2 million men, women, and children, primarily by driving the entire urban population of Cambodia into the jungles).
Kissinger came in April to discuss disarmament agreements that the Soviets hoped Nixon would sign during a summit conference with Brezhnev in May. Brezhnev reviewed the discussions with Morris and asked for advice about how to deal with Nixon. He reported that, because of U.S. actions in Vietnam, parties around the world were screaming at the Soviet Union to cancel the summit conference, but the Soviets intended to proceed unless some cataclysmic event in the next couple of weeks made the conference politically impossible. Brezhnev also said that he had “great respect” for Kissinger, whom he characterized as a “vigorous and smart negotiator not to be underestimated.”
From the conversations with Brezhnev and Ponomarev, Morris made three primary conclusions:
(1) The Chinese were keeping their part of the bargain with the United States by doing exactly what they said they would do and urged the United States to do.
(2) The Soviets craved agreements with the United States so much that they would proceed with the summit conference no matter what other communists said.
(3) Whatever Kissinger said to Brezhnev, he said the right things.
Morris arrived in New York on April 30, and the intelligence and analyses he brought were delivered by hand to the White House and put to good use forthwith.
Without consulting or informing the Soviets, the North Vietnamese initiated a massive offensive against South Vietnam. Nixon had to decide between the military necessity of countering the offensive and the perceived political desirability of the summit conference. SOLO told him the Soviets would meet, almost no matter what he did, and on the eve of the summit conference he ordered North Vietnamese harbors mined and blockaded and the aerial bombardment of North Vietnam intensified. Foreign communist parties, privately and publicly, shouted at the Soviets to cancel the summit conference. The Soviets, just as Morris predicted, sent word to Kissinger that the meeting still was on.
On May 26, 1972, in Moscow, Brezhnev and Nixon signed an agreement (SALT I) that restricted the number of strategic ballistic missiles the United States and Soviet Union could maintain during the next five years and an agreement that limited the development of antiballistic missile (ABM) defenses. These modest agreements, which did little to reduce existing arsenals, enraged Gus Hall, who wrote a vituperative letter accusing the Soviets of conniving with the imperialists and selling out North Vietnam, and he ordered Morris to hand the letter personally to Brezhnev.
When Morris read the letter, he realized it had to be rewritten. Only two months before, Ponomarev declared that the Soviets were fed up with “deviationism” in foreign parties, and Hall’s angry words could only brand him as a “deviationist.” In rewriting the draft, Morris transformed Hall into a loyal acolyte anxiously requesting guidance, yet the revision satisfied Hall because it still conveyed all of his original points. Now, though, Hall himself was not accusing the Soviets of making squalid deals with Nixon and betraying North Vietnam. Such charges were being spread as part of anti-Soviet propaganda, and they had begun to worry members of the American party.
As Morris prepared to leave for Moscow, a seemingly minor incident occurred at the Washington, D.C., Watergate apartment complex in Foggy Bottom between Georgetown and the State Department. A security guard apprehended men trying to break into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee. At first, the attempted burglary generally was regarded more as a sophomoric stunt than as anything sinister. Republican Senator Robert Dole commented, “I don’t know why anyone would want to break into the headquarters of the Democratic Party. All they would find is a bunch of unpaid bills.”
The Soviets took Hall’s letter seriously, and Brezhnev instructed Ponomarev to give Morris a verbal reply pending a formal response. He said that the Central Committee understood Hall’s concerns and wished to explain some facts. The summit conference long had been scheduled, and the North Vietnamese did not forewarn the Soviets of their offensive that provoked the American mining and blockade of Vietnamese harbors. At the time, nine Soviet ships were in Haiphong Harbor, and they barely escaped before it was mined. “When the blockade started, many Soviet ships were on the way to Haiphong. We asked the Chinese to allow these ships to unload at Von Pong [a Chinese port]. The Chinese refused and said they should go to Haiphong. The Chinese wanted a Soviet–U.S. confrontation and wanted us to war with the United States.”
Considering all factors, the Politburo decided it was in the interest of Vietnam and worldwide communism to proceed with the summit conference, and the Vietnamese did not object. Far from abandoning the North Vietnamese, the Soviets were increasing aid to them. “Night and day, trains are going to Vietnam… We exerted tremendous pressure on Nixon. Comrade Brezhnev told him it is a barbaric, horrible war in which innocent people are being murdered, and so on. We told him categorically that our people are indignant, that world opinion is opposed to the dirty war in Vietnam, th
at there is world indignation. We demanded an end to U.S. aggression. This discussion went on for three to four hours, and there was danger that Nixon would leave the room. But he stayed and listened. He tried to justify the U.S. actions but failed. After Nixon went home, we gave hell to U.S. imperialism on our radio and television.”
Lies concocted by the “bourgeois press,” Brezhnev continued, had grossly distorted the results of the summit conference, and the Soviets needed to give Comrade Hall “more facts and arguments to counter the enemy.” But he need not worry. “We have no illusions about U.S. imperialism or about Nixon or about Kissinger or any others. There is no difference between a Nixon and a Johnson—which devil is better? But as Lenin taught us, we can see the difference between aggressive and reasonable people… The Nixon speeches are chiefly demagoguery. But some parts of his speeches can be used.”
Ponomarev also had some words about the agreements: “Of course, there is a difference between a document and deeds. But peaceful co-existence means that some documents need to be signed and implemented. We are aware that agreement on partial reduction of armaments and ABMs does not mean disarmament. We know that the number can be reduced but the quality can be improved. This is only a step in the direction of disarmament.”
That was the Soviet message to Hall. Over lunch, Ponomarev spoke informally to Morris “as friend to friend,” that is, for Morris’ ears only. Hall had to be humored, but frankly the Soviets respected and even grudgingly liked Nixon and Kissinger because they were intelligent, they stood up for their beliefs—however wrong those beliefs were—and they gave the appearance of being honest. Of course, there was no such thing as an honest American politician but, so far as the Soviets knew, Nixon and Kissinger had not lied to them.