by John Barron
The Soviets did regard the May 26 agreements as merely a “first step.” What they really wanted was a treaty whereby the United States and the Soviet Union each pledged never to launch nuclear weapons against the territory of the other. Morris marveled at Soviet chutzpah. Such a treaty obviously was unenforceable. But it would proclaim to Western Europe, Japan, and China that the United States was unwilling to risk its cities to protect theirs and thereby expose all American allies to Soviet bullying.
Ponomarev remarked that the Americans seemed to be stalling and asked if Morris thought they might come around. Modestly noting his lack of military expertise, Morris asked, “If you were in their position, would you agree to such a treaty?” Ponomarev laughed and shrugged, as if to say No harm in trying.
Despite Soviet explanations, Hall remained unplacated, and in October 1972 he dispatched Morris to tell the Soviets that they were making too many concessions to the United States and undermining socialism everywhere. Morris again tried to represent these judgments as Hall’s observations rather than opinions, but they nonetheless exasperated and angered the Soviets. They did not understand Comrade Hall’s attitude, and, to be blunt, he did not know what he was talking about. Although the Americans had rejected a treaty banning nuclear strikes by the United States and the Soviet Union against each other, the Soviets were convinced that to date Nixon had dealt “honestly and fairly” with them; that Nixon and Kissinger tried to understand their concerns and candidly stated those of the United States. Soviet military and technical experts advised that the American concerns, from the American perspective, were in the main comprehensible and reasonable. In sum, the United States appeared to be negotiating in good faith, and no major foreign communist party, except the American and Chinese, opposed the ongoing negotiations, and the Chinese were hopeless in all matters. So what was the matter with Comrade Hall? Morris, who was well-versed in Sovietese, understood: Comrade Hall damn well better get in line.
Suslov and Ponomarev in many other discussions with Morris talked a lot about Nixon. They very much wanted him to win the presidential election only two or three weeks away but the Soviets had to be discreet in their support of him because if Democratic candidate George McGovern found out, he might get angry. Although they preferred to deal with Nixon and Kissinger above all others, Nixon still confused them. His feats in simultaneously “hijacking China,” improving American–Soviet relations, and escalating an unpopular war in Vietnam awed them. How did he do it? Morris thought, Maybe one reason is that he always knows what you’re thinking and what you plan to do, insofar as you know yourselves.
The Soviets theorized that Nixon’s legerdemain was possible because his reputation as an inveterate anticommunist immunized him to charges of selling out to them. But what political tricks or acrobatics would he try next? If Nixon was reelected, the Central Committee wanted the American party to submit a “full analysis and evaluation” of his administration and its likely policies.
Morris and Eva returned to Chicago in time to vote for Nixon, who won the 1972 election by the largest majority ever, winning all of the fifty states except Massachusetts.
After the election, Morris pointed out more examples of Soviet detachment from reality. By October 1972, almost all rational, informed people in the United States knew that McGovern had no chance whatsoever of winning, yet the Soviets still thought he might win. Nixon had escalated the war in Vietnam; McGovern favored ending it on virtually any terms the communists dictated. Yet the Soviets preferred to deal with Nixon, the hawk, instead of McGovern, the dove.
The Soviets wanted the American party to tell them what Nixon was going to do. How on earth would the ragtag party know? Did they think that the party was more astute and knowledgeable than their Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the KGB?
Morris was seventy, and in the past thirteen months he had traveled to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe six times. He looked forward to a surcease from danger, to rest, and to enjoying the holidays with Eva. But Hall had to go to Moscow in December to attend ceremonies celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Soviet Union, and he demanded that Morris be there with him.
A few days before he left, Jim Fox and his wife invited Morris and Eva to dinner. Fox was proud of his family, his career, and home, and after Eva came to know him and his background she realized that he had cause to be proud. Fox’s father drove a bus for the Chicago municipal transit system, and his mother worked at whatever jobs a woman without a college education could find in those days. The family on Sunday morning attended a Baptist church, no matter how inclement the weather or how late his father had driven the night before, and when he was thirteen Fox went to a summer camp sponsored by the church. One of the counselors was an FBI agent, and by the campfire he enthralled the boys with accounts of how the FBI chased gangsters, spies, and Ku Klux Klansmen. Fox came home from camp resolutely sure of what he wanted to do in life.
The counselor told him that the FBI accepted maybe one out of every one hundred applicants and that his chances would be better if he had a law degree. So after making good grades as an undergraduate at the University of Illinois, Fox entered law school. At the end of his first year he was admitted to the law school at Georgetown University in Washington, where he could work as an FBI clerk at nights and on weekends. An assistant dean, however, tried to dissuade him from “throwing your life away” in the FBI and, having failed, refused to transfer to Georgetown the Illinois credits. The university upheld his appeal. After his graduation from Georgetown the FBI accepted him; during training at Quantico, veteran instructors accurately put him down as a future star.
He became one of the youngest supervisors in the FBI (Boyle before his fall from favor had also been one of the youngest), and the Bureau in 1971 chose him to be Boyle’s immediate supervisor and therefore a principal participant in its most important operation. By now, the White House, State and Defense Departments, and the CIA beseeched the FBI for SOLO data. Anyone intimately associated with SOLO could gild his or her career with gold. But Fox, in reports to the Chicago SAC and conversations at headquarters, made it a point of honor to stress that the accomplishments of SOLO were the accomplishments of Burlinson, Freyman, Jack, Morris, Eva, Boyle, and Langtry; he just happened along. Boyle says, “Jim always ran interference for us. If anything went wrong, he took the blame. When things went right, and they usually did, he gave the credit to others.”
Fox and his family lived in a pleasant suburban house where Morris played with the children, his delight so evident and spontaneous that it was contagious. Eva said, “The family scenes there could have been painted by Norman Rockwell.” She remembered the evening just before Morris’ departure for Moscow on December 11, 1972.
Before dinner Fox usually said a simple, three-sentence prayer—Eva guessed he had learned it in Sunday School. That night he recited part of a hymn that began “Blest be the ties that bind our hearts in Christian love” and ended ”When we are called to part, it gives us inward pain; but our hearts are joined in hope that we shall meet again.” When Fox raised his head, Eva sensed he suddenly was embarrassed at having said “Christian love.” Eva said, “Jim, that was a beautiful prayer. Amen.” She noticed that Morris’ head still was bowed.
EVA HAD BEEN IN Moscow, Prague, and Warsaw throughout October, and Morris had no intention of dragging her away from home and relatives in December. In an uncharacteristic lapse, he complained before Hall about having to leave her at Christmastide. Characteristically, Hall asked, “What the hell do you care about Christmas?”
Morris cared a lot. He did not observe Christmas in any religious sense, and as a supposedly devout communist and atheist, he couldn’t afford to enter a synagogue or church, even if he wanted to. But he could enjoy the festivities of Christmas—the lights and decorations along Michigan Avenue and Fifth Avenue; shopping for Eva, her nieces and nephews, the children of Boyle and Fox; listening to the Salvation Army bands. In Chicago and New York, the Christ
mas season for Morris, culturally and spiritually, was a happy time. In Moscow, Christmas 1972 was for him a dreary time.
He had to sit through long, soporific speeches larded with communist clichés he had been hearing for fifty years and had to trail along with Hall to ritualistic and boring meetings. After Hall returned to New York, Morris did receive an enlightening briefing from Yevgeny Kuzkov, an assistant to Ponomarev.
Kuzkov began with a harangue about U.S. actions in Vietnam. “The same point is on our agenda all over the world: stop the bombing and end the war in Vietnam.” Meanwhile, the Soviets intended to do all they could to strengthen the North Vietnamese with more weaponry and supplies.
The infernal Chinese still were at it, vilely defaming the Soviet Union and conniving to splinter socialism. They had moved troops from coastal areas opposite Taiwan and from the Vietnamese border to the Soviet frontier and were trying to provoke new clashes. Maps being distributed in Chinese schools represented large swaths of the Soviet Union as Chinese territory, and the populace was being drilled and indoctrinated for war with the Soviet Union. Chou En Lai had rejected “friendship” overtures from Brezhnev and told the Japanese that the existing Sino–Soviet friendship treaty was a worthless “scrap of paper.”
In the Middle East, the Egyptians had become both a joke and a pain for the Soviets. The Soviets had invested immense resources in Egypt, and what had they gotten in return? After Gamal Abdul Nasser died, his successor, Anwar Sadat, unceremoniously booted the Soviets out of the country “without prior consultations.” Then, after unsuccessfully flirting with the West, they had the gall to ask the Soviets for “offensive” weapons. “We said to them: ‘The same weapons you have work effectively in Vietnam. You even have some better weapons than the Vietnamese have. What you need as much as weapons, if not more, is morale and spirit. You cannot sit in coffee houses sipping cognac and expect the weapons to work by themselves.’” Kuzkov added that the Egyptians had proposed that Sadat and Brezhnev meet, and that the Soviets said no.
The Soviets were also wary or mistrustful of the North Koreans and the unpredictable dictator Kim Il Sung. The North Koreans’ attitude toward the Soviet Union was “give, give, give,” and they offered nothing in return. Kuzkov said, “For now, their line is for peaceful reunification of Korea. If they succeed, that is fine, but from what we can see up until now, only God can help. We support their line but from a practical standpoint, how can you unite bourgeois [South] Korea and socialist Korea? Maybe Kim has the answers; we don’t.”
From Kuzkov’s statements, Morris made these deductions, which the FBI subsequently shared with the White House and State Department:
The United States could expect no help from the Soviets in extracting itself from Vietnam. Despite all the Soviets said about peaceful co-existence, improved relations, and reaching agreements, they were determined to inflict upon the United States the most humiliating geopolitical defeat they could.
The actions of the Chinese toward the Soviet Union matched their venomous words. They were consistent with what the Chinese said to the United States and consistent with SOLO reports about Sino–Soviet relations. If anything, the Chinese were growing more belligerent and the Soviets more worried about the Chinese.
The Soviets held the Egyptians in contempt and were unwilling to invest more in Egypt. The Egyptians might be willing to listen to the United States privately.
The Soviets feared the unpredictable, and they considered North Korea unpredictable. Relations between the Soviets and North Koreans were not as close as they appeared; the Soviets would not support reunification of Korea by force; and they cared little about Korea except as a danger point.
Morris owed his one pleasant evening around Christmas to Nikolai, the KGB officer who came by for “general intelligence” and bourbon. Nikolai spoke English with an American accent, asked insightful questions about the United States, never talked party cant, affected to believe in nothing except his wife and children, and dared to ridicule the ridiculous: “They say we’re about to catch up with America. If that’s true, America must be running backward very fast.”
However, Morris and Boyle figured Nikolai was important in the KGB; Morris was a very important man in Moscow and the KGB would not allow just anybody regularly to talk to him. So why not utilize him? SOLO constituted one grand deception; Morris and Jack regularly told the Soviets tactical or operational lies. Morris never purveyed substantive disinformation to mislead Soviet rulers because his influence depended in part upon the accuracy of the information and the assessments he gave them. He might mislead them once but not repeatedly.
He did misrepresent to Nikolai the sources of much of the “general intelligence” he volunteered. Supposedly, it came from a corporate executive or scientist by whom he sat on an airplane, or from his stockbroker or a business associate, or from something Jack had picked up. Almost all facts he reported were gleaned from open sources such as Aviation Week, the Congressional Record, the Wall Street Journal, and the Economist of London. But they were interesting and made for commendable reports.
Morris also consulted Boyle about what he should say. Sometimes Boyle asked for advice from headquarters. But FBI agents were not about to saunter through the corridors of the White House, State Department, Pentagon, or CIA saying, “Hey, our man is talking to Brezhnev next week. Anything you guys want to tell him?” And the FBI was not formulating U.S. foreign policy. So whatever Morris said in Moscow, was, in the end, “58’s call.”
The relative success of the North Vietnamese in using Soviet weapons intoxicated the Soviets, and they boasted to Morris that their weapons were just as good or better than American weapons. Boyle explained to Morris—whose only military expertise came from the Lenin School, where he learned how to blow up trains and stick pins into police horses—that the American difficulties in Vietnam resulted from idiotic strategy and idiotic Pentagon procurement policies of the 1960s, not from technological inferiority, and he introduced him to Aviation Week. Morris thought it dangerous for the Soviets to exaggerate to themselves their military prowess. So Morris recounted to Nikolai a fictional conversation he had with a Grumman Corporation executive while flying first class from New York to Los Angeles and drinking a lot of champagne. According to the tipsy executive, whose name Morris unfortunately did not retain, the United States was developing a new generation of fighter aircraft that, the executive claimed, would “rule the skies for decades.” But there was something more devilish about these new planes. They not only were fighters; they were bombers. Each could carry miniaturized nuclear weapons many times more powerful than those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Grumman man claimed that the coming planes had “special systems” (Morris here concealed his newfound knowledge of avionics, terrain-following radar, and electronic jamming) that would enable them to penetrate any air-defense system in the world. The executive bragged that one fleet of these planes flying from U.S. navy aircraft carriers alone could blow up every city in the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, Morris again could not remember everything; only that the planes were designated by an F followed by two numerals. (Morris well knew he was talking about the F-14, the F-15, and the F-16.) Of course, this was just gossip; the executive was tired and had too much champagne; and if he would give away such secrets to a stranger, how reliable a person was he? Still, to Morris all this seemed like something worth looking into.
Surely, the GRU or KGB knew about the diagrammed capabilities of the F-14, the F-15, and the F-16 (which in flight turned out to be equal to or better than the projections of the designers hovering over computers in New York, Texas, Missouri, and California). At the next Politburo meeting Andropov could announce important, verified intelligence gained from MORAT, which the Politburo itself had instigated and for which it deserved congratulations. Boyle says, “We [the FBI and Morris] played them like a harp.”
After they finished the supper laid out by the housekeeper, they drank bourbon and Nikolai asked questions about A
merica. “How much of a factor was religion in the United States?” Morris, a student of the Talmud, Bible, and Koran, lied and said he really didn’t pay much attention to religion. But he had read surveys which showed that a large majority of Americans said they believed in God and that a majority said they went to church. Morris then asked how much of a factor was religion in the Soviet Union.
“It’s like weeds in a garden,” Nikolai said. “You can stomp them out in one place and they keep sprouting in some place else.” The party controlled the hierarchy of what was left of the Russian Orthodox Church, but it could not control the feelings of the people. Even many party members wanted their daughters to be secretly married by a priest and themselves wanted to be buried by a priest. Then there were the “sects,” the most pernicious being the Baptists because they practiced what they preached. They were sober, diligent workers who showed up on time, did their job honestly, and then went home to their religion. Consequently, managers coveted them as workers and tolerated, even tacitly encouraged, their proselytizing at work—the more good workers the better. “Maybe someday we’ll be the Soviet Union of Baptist and Muslim Republics.”
Morris thought, I’ll tell Jim that the Baptists are making as much of a nuisance of themselves in the Soviet Union as they are in America. He also thought, Blest be the ties that bind.
One of the verbal agreements of the May 1972 conference between Nixon and Brezhnev stipulated that Brezhnev would visit the United States in June 1973. Brezhnev was both excited and apprehensive about the journey, and in April of 1973 the Soviets called Morris and Hall to Moscow to help him and them prepare for it. Hall in turn asked Morris to help prepare him for the talks at the Kremlin. Morris advised him to explain to Brezhnev that the growing Watergate scandal conceivably could result in the impeachment of Nixon or compel him to resign from office.