Operation Solo: The FBI's Man in the Kremlin. - book reviews

National Review, March 11, 1996 by William A. Rusher

WITH the end of the Cold War, some fascinating stories have begun to come to light. In this bombshell of a book, John Barron, author of the best-seller The KGB, reveals one of the most astonishing of them all -- a story so gripping that it will capture the public imagination and permanently alter the balance of opinion on a number of major subjects.

Morris Childs, born Moishe Chilovsky near Kiev in 1902, emigrated to America with his mother in 1911, and in 1921 joined the United Communist Party of America. Working in its ranks, he caught the attention of Communist leader Earl Browder, who arranged for him to attend the Lenin School in Moscow from 1929 - 32. There Morris developed close friendships with two of his instructors: Yuri Andropov and Mikhail Suslov, later respectively the longtime head of the KGB and the Politburo's chief ideologist.

The significance of these contacts became apparent just a few years later, when Moscow ordered the American Party to put Morris in charge of Chicago and on the Party's governing Central Committee. In 1945 he became editor of the Daily Worker -- only to be fired two years later by Browder's enemies, who had captured control of the Party.

Disillusioned with Communism and weakened by a serious heart condition, Morris was sidelined for several years. It was during those years, through his brother Jack (who was also in the Party, and also disgusted with it), that the FBI recruited both men. Both, it was agreed, would remain in the Party -- as 'assets' of the Bureau.

The Party's elders knew how highly Moscow thought of Morris, and in 1957 Eugene Dennis, then leader of the CPUSA, appointed Morris as his deputy and put him in charge of all dealings with foreign Communist parties, including the Russians and the Chinese. In April 1958 the Soviets invited him to Moscow.

Thus began Operation Solo, one of the longest and most successful operations ever conducted by the FBI. Over the next 23 years, Morris Childs made 52 separate trips to the Soviet Union and other Communist countries, including China and Cuba. Together with his wife, Eva, and Jack, he smuggled a grand total of $28 million in U.S. currency from Moscow to the waiting leaders of its wholly owned subsidiary, the CPUSA -- after the serial numbers on every bill had been carefully noted, en route, by the FBI.

Gus Hall, who succeeded Dennis as head of the CPUSA in 1959, called Morris 'my secretary of state,' and insisted that he precede or accompany him whenever Hall himself went to Moscow. As for the Soviets, they lionized Morris. A comfortable apartment was set aside for him in Moscow. On almost every visit he spent hours with Andropov and Suslov, who sought his opinion on U.S. politics and similar matters, and confided to him the hopes and fears of the Politburo regarding China, Cuba, and the United States. Boris Ponomarev, head of the International Department of the Central Committee (formerly the Comintern), became another close confidant. In time Morris also came to know Khrushchev (who hailed him as 'the last of the true Bolsheviks'), and later Brezhnev (who, at a dinner in his honor in the Kremlin, pinned the Order of Lenin on his chest). There were also immensely valuable conversations with Mao, Chou En-lai, and Castro, among many others.

Operation Solo was undoubtedly the FBI's most successful penetration effort, and very probably its longest-running. High American officials who saw, but were not allowed to keep, memos reporting the substance of Morris's talks with major Communist leaders (e.g., confirming the rupture between the Soviet Union and Red China, which many experts dismissed as a hoax) became obsessed with their importance, and insisted that the operation continue at all costs. But not even Presidents were told the identity of the 'assets' until attacks on the FBI in the mid 1970s caused it to fear that domestic pressures might lead to disclosure. Thereupon President Ford and Secretary of State Kissinger were informed.

In 1981, when Morris was 79, the decision was made that the danger of discovery by Moscow was reaching a critical point, and Operation Solo was reluctantly closed down. Jack had already died, and one fine day in the summer of 1981 Morris and Eva disappeared from their usual haunts, under the Bureau's famous Witness Protection Program. The CPUSA and Moscow searched for them frantically but unsuccessfully, and were left to wonder when they had been 'turned' and how many of Communism's deepest secrets they had revealed. Neither the Party, nor anyone else outside a small circle, ever learned that in 1987 President Reagan conferred on Morris Childs, and posthumously on Jack, the Medal of Freedom -- the highest civilian award an American President can bestow.

Morris survived to give John Barron numerous interviews detailing Operation Solo, and to witness the fall of the Berlin Wall, which foretold the end of Soviet Communism. He died in June 1991, and the FBI managed to conceal that final fact from his enemies. Eva lived on, rightly proud of all that she and her husband were able to accomplish for the nation they loved.