Operation SOLO
Barron, John
BOOKS IN REVIEW - "Operation SOLO" were not merely elegant precursors to the media-savvy politicians of today. (The author's concluding comparison of Habsburgs and Kennedys, doubtless well intentioned, is sorely inapt.) Philip II...
...70 March 1996 The American Spectator now have the story of the most successful American agent of the Cold War a man pretending to be a high-ranking American Communist who utterly bamboozled the leaders of the Soviet Union for more than thirty years, making fifty-two trips to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and provided American policy makers with detailed and valuable information on Soviet affairs...
...Their clothes do not mark them as royal...
...His illness coincided with the onset of a concerted government attack on Communism...
...They seemed to have posed without much forethought, three daughters rather squeezed together at one end of the row while their sister stands slightly apart at the other...
...Church steered his committee away from the issue...
...Childs's Moscow trips ended in 1978...
...And the Communist Party of the United States, whose leaders had been played for fools for thirty years, issued a statement indignantly denouncing the slurs being cast on their sterling Communists...
...he did not have the benefit of hindsight...
...Beautiful oversized picture books on the American West, wildlife, art, photography...
...Oddly enough, Barron does not tell the story of how the public finally learned about the spying brothers...
...Comrade Heroes Operation SOLO: The FBI's Man in the Kremlin John Barron Regnery / 319 pages / $24.95 REVIEWED BY Harvey Klehr ldrich Ames is only the latest of a long string of Soviet spies and moles who did extraordinary damage to their county with astonishing ease...
...Philip II spent the riches he gained from the New World in a vain attempt to enforce Catholicism on the Dutch, and the Emperor Ferdinand II (1578-1637) heard the voice of God telling him to bum heretics...
...American espionage against the Soviet Union has received far less attention...
...He provided information on the Chinese desire to provoke an American-Soviet confrontation over Vietnam...
...His classmates included future party leaders such as Walter Ulbricht of Germany, Josip Tito of Yugoslavia, and Sam Carr of Canada...
...On one of his last trips to Moscow, in May 1977, at the age of 75, he was escorted to a dinner at the Kremlin by Yuri Andropov, then head of the KGB...
...Thousands of titles, hundreds of new arrivals each month...
...Thanks to John Barron, formerly a senior editor at Reader's Digest and author of several previous books on the KGB, we HARVEY KLEHR is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Politics at Emory University and co-author of The Secret World of American Communism (Yale University Press...
...Over 60 subject areas: Politics, Biography, History Fiction, Science, Cooking, Gardening, more...
...Wheatcroft is not quite an apologist for the Habsburgs, but he does correct or qualify a number of common accusations against them...
...based on his personal conversations with Soviet leaders, he reported that the KGB had sworn to the Politburo that Oswald was not one of their agents...
...The enlightened despot Joseph II (1741-179o) pursued his program of "rational" reform as zealously as his forefathers had struggled to impose religious orthodoxy...
...When Morris reported Soviet fears that the new Nixon administration was seriously considering a nuclear first strike, his warnings helped shape foreign policy...
...More seriously, the congressional investigations of American intelligence in the 1970's, sparked by revelations of illegal activities, threatened to expose Solo...
...Soviet defectors told the CIA tales of subterranean funding of the CPUSA that led to suspicions about the brothers in some sectors of the American intelligence community...
...His severe illness was a perfect alibi for his recent inactivity...
...When Levinson turned up as one of King's closest advisers, the FBI and, later, the Kennedy Administration, worried that King was being manipulated by Communistsor that Soviet money was funding the civil rights movement...
...His first important assignment, in 1954, was to renew ties with the Russians to obtain badly needed money for the CPUSA...
...Morris and his wife, who had worked closely with him, were placed under federal protection...
...More leaks had convinced the FBI that he might be exposed...
...The FBI was visiting Party members, seeking potential witnesses or defectors, and one day showed up at the home of Jack Childs, Morris's younger brother...
...The world of the European Union is not that world of blood, honor, and faith that Otto's forebears conquered through bravery and guile...
...Such a perspective has implications of both transcendence and decadence...
...The Childs brothers, their wives, and the FBI agents who ran the operation pulled off one of the great intelligence coups of the century...
...More powerfully than any other in the book, this scene suggests how a preoccupation with the symbols of power, and with the sheer longevity of its line, could lead a family to the point at which "the present, and objective reality have a transitory quality...
...Back in New York, he was also soon out of a job, dumped as editor as a result of an internal power play in the CPUSA...
...the other boy, Paul George, is raised in his mother's arms...
...Morris was in the Soviet Union when President Kennedy was assassinated...
...Wheatcroft offers nothing more than a terse caption for the book's final illustration: "Dr...
...Afraid that the USSR might act irrationally, the administration convinced the Communists that a diplomatic relationship with America was possible...
...The Habsburgs have been called backward-looking for their devotion to tradition, but Wheatcroft stresses their knack for adjusting to the times, explaining that "because their collective past was their greatest, and sometimes only, asset, [they] give the impression of perpetual retrospection...
...Once that money started flowing, with Morris and Jack bringing hundreds of thousands of dollars into the United States annually (millions by the 1970's), or meeting KGB agents in secret rendezvous in New York to receive packets of bills, Morris Childs's stock in the CPUSA could not have been higher...
...echelons of the Kremlin...
...Publishers' overstocks, remainders, imports, reprints, starting at $3.95...
...Although they would not tell Garrow the names of Solo, they dropped enough facts about the two that Garrow, with my help, was able to identify the two brothers...
...Jack died in 1980...
...perhaps these masters of survival could teach their subjects how to keep up tradition while adapting to change...
...The FBI finally recruited Morris, even arranging for him to be treated for his heart ailment at the Mayo Clinic...
...Morris was in precarious health...
...The astonishing saga of Morris Childs is one of the great spy stories of this century and deserves to become a national legend...
...Their general appearance is at once reassuringgood looking on a human scale, well bred yet approachable and assertive...
...About Ferdinand II, thought to be a fanatic, the author writes: "Under the accepted doctrine (in Protestant as well as Catholic states) that the prince determined the religion of his people, he was within his rights...
...At great personal risk, Morris and Jack Childs served the United States with distinctionsolo, but certainly not alone...
...They are looking resolutely into the future...
...Jack had been active in the Party underground in the 1930's and 1940's, and was bitter at the way Party leaders had treated his brother...
...72 March /996 The American Spectator...
...In 1981 David Garrow, working on a biography of King, heard information about SOLO from a retired FBI agent...
...The family's last two generations have been prominent in the movement for European unity, which Wheatcroft calls "the continuation of the Habsburg mission...
...Either would have been devastating...
...Frank Church that delving into the King issue would expose the single most valuable penetration of the Soviet Union that the United States had...
...Barron also claims that the operation yielded detailed intelligence about the development and depth of the Sino-Soviet split, analysis of private policy meetings with such important figures as Mao Tse-tung, Chou Enlai, Fidel Castro, and Leonid Brezhnev, documents on Soviet-Cuban ties, Soviet views on arms control and American leaders, and much more...
...The men and women of the House saw themselves as destined to rule or to die trying...
...After returning to the United States in 1932, Morris rose quickly in the ranks, eventually becoming Party leader in Wisconsin and subsequently Chicago...
...The FBI took extraordinary measures to keep the identity of the source providing this spectacular intelligence top secret...
...Concerned that congressional inquiries would expose the Childs brothers, the FBI informed Sen...
...In 1879, at a private dinner in honorof the Imperial couple's silver wedding anniversary, the younger cousins entertained the rest of the party by staging tableaux from family history, their props the original robes, orbs, and scepters of the ancestors they portrayed...
...Born in the Ukraine as Moishe Chilovsky in 1902, Morris arrived in America in 1911...
...Please send me your Free Catalog of Bargain Books...
...By the early 1970's, however, the danger of exposure was mounting...
...And the dignity the Habsburgs' past affords them may finally prove the barrier to their success...
...Now that McDonald's and MTV have all but obliterated the Old World of kings and queens, it is tantalizing to imagine the dynasty's restoration...
...Top Party leaders were convicted of conspiring to overthrow the government and jailed...
...john Barron conducted a number of interviews with Childs while he was still alive and also enjoyed the cooperation of his widow and the retired FBI agents who ran the operation, which was known as Operation SOLOa joke about the two Childs brothers...
...Brezhnev, Suslov, Boris Ponomarov, and half of the Soviet Politburo sang him "Happy Birthday," and Brezhnev decorated him with the Order of Lenin...
...His book, The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr., generated a host of newspaper stories...
...Having caught the eye of senior Party leaders, Childs was dispatched to Moscow in 1929 to study revolutionary methods at the Lenin School...
...he was wined and dined regally by old friendsnow powerful government and Party leaders on his frequent trips to Moscow, where he had his own luxurious apartment...
...Although Morris understood Russian, the Soviet leaders did not know this...
...Their extraordinary story deserves to become at least as well-known to Americans as that of Julius Rosenberg or Alger Hiss, Americans who betrayed their country...
...Never in good health, Morris suffered a heart attack and dropped out of Party activity...
...Joseph's nephew and successor Francis (1768-1835), together with his Chancellor, Prince Metternich, responded to the Enlightenment and the ensuing Age of Revolution with a relentless campaign against radicalism and subversion...
...The CPUSA sent hundreds of its cadres into hiding and expelled thousands of members believed to be insufficiently loyal or resolute...
...There have been so many revelations of the successes enjoyed by Soviet agents in ferreting out American and British government secrets in the past half century that it is sometimes hard to believe that the West still won the Cold War...
...His latest book, co-authored with Ronald Radosh, is The Amerasia Spy Case: Prelude to McCarthyism (University of North Carolina Press...
...Historians usually portray the Habsburgs as genetically indecisive, but Wheatcroft rightly emphasizes the clan's stubbornness...
...Newly inaugurated President Ford and Henry Kissinger were the first outsiders to learn who the agent was...
...After his recovery, Morris re-established ties with the Party, which had been decimated by arrests and defections...
...This meant censorship and secret police, though the repression was "humanized by Austrian lack of enthusiasm and efficiency...
...The Kennedys pleaded with King to disassociate himself from Levinson without explaining their rationale...
...Francis II(I) so numbered after he converted the Holy Roman Empire into the Austrian Empire was no mere blinkered reactionary: "neither thoughtless nor unimaginative, as has been claimed...
...The greatest danger stemmed from information that the FBI had for years secretly wiretapped Dr...
...his tutors included later Soviet leaders like Otto Kuusinen, Yuri Andropov, and Mikhail Suslov...
...Although the full extent of the intelligence Morris provided to the FBI is still classified, Barron argues that among the fruits of SOLO was the first copy of Khrushchev's secret 1956 speech denouncing Stalin...
...That environment vanished along with the multicultural civilization that the family's Imperial authority had held together...
...The impetus for the taps had come from Morris and Jack Childs, who had reported that a New York lawyer named Stanley Levinson was involved in secretly laundering Communist Party funds...
...Otto von Habsburg with his family in 1966, on the balcony of their house at Pocking...
...Gus Hall, AS YOU EXPLORE THE INTERNET, visit AmericanSpedator and our new Web Site: HTTP://www.amspec.com/tas/home.html Send Letters to the Editor, Correspondence and Subscription queries to our E-Mail address: amspec@ix.netcom.com Books America's Biggest Selection at up to 80% savings...
...They refuse to rule out the chance that they may someday reign again, and are clearly ready in case the call shouldcome...
...Name Address City /State HAMILTON Box 15-8, Falls Village, CT 06031 who became Party leader in 1959, regarded him as his "foreign minister," and the Soviet leadership saw him as one of the last of the "old Bolsheviks...
...Operation SOLO was winding down, however...
...Childs, who died in 1991 at the age of 89, is due posthumous glorification...
...Not until 1973 did anyone outside the FBI know the identity of Solo, who was providing these glimpses into the highest44 The astonishing saga of Morris Childs is one of the great spy stories of this century and deserves to become a national legend...
...the exposure of one of Jack's KGB handlers (in one of Barron's previous books) provoked consternation...
...in his dark suit, the father could be a banker or an elegant professor or the international statesman that, in fact, he is...
...In Maximilian's last words before the firing squad: "Men of my class and race are created by God to be the happiness of nations or their martyrs...
...Kissinger called Solo's material "fabulous" and "unprecedented in modern history...
...Like many other poor, young, Jewish immigrants, he was attracted to radicalism, and he became a charter member of the Communist Party in the United States in 1919...
...Many agents wanted to end the operation, convinced that it had outlived its usefulness and that the public should know about this American hero...
...But some traditions may be incompatible with our time...
...He persuaded the FBI that while he would help, his brother was the real prize...
...Rare, unusual, fascinating books for every interest...
...The Russians were becoming increasingly curious about whether the FBI knew about the money transfers...
...they sometimes revealed interesting facts in asides to each other when he was present...
...Yet the grouping is not utterly casual: the first-born son, Karl, stands with the Archduke's hands on his shoulders...
...Wheatcroft quotes Robert Musil on the paradox of fin de siecle Viennaa desert of institutional mediocrity that bloomed with genius and concludes that "the Habsburg preoccupation with image and affect ...provided an ideal growth medium" in which Freud and Klimt could thrive...
...For the first time one sees members of the House of Austria broadly and unambiguously smiling, saying "cheese" as in any modern family snapshot...
...Martin Luther King, Jr...
...After World War II, Morris became editor of the Daily Worker...
...Sent to Moscow in 1947 to cover a high-level meeting of foreign ministers, he was shocked by the extent of the Stalinist purges, the corruption, and the persecution of Jews...
Vol. 29 • March 1996 • No. 3
