Operation Solo Read Free

the United States and its leaders. Often they solicited his opinions and advice, and often they heeded it. The Soviets so trusted and esteemed him that on his seventy-fifth birthday, Brezhnev hosted a banquet at the Kremlin in his honor. The Soviet dictator eloquently thanked Morris for more than half a century of service to the Soviet Union and international communism, then awarded him a medal, the Order of the Red Banner.
    In the United States, Morris secretly served as the principal deputy to the head of the American Communist Party, Gus Hall. In effect, an FBI spy was the second-ranking figure in American communism. The Soviets smuggled money to the U.S. party through Morris and his brother, Jack Childs, and over the years they received from Moscow more than $28 million, which the FBI counted down to the penny.
    The voluminous secrets Morris stole from the Kremlin for more than two decades enabled the United States to read the minds of the men who ran the Soviet Union, to anticipate their actions, and to exploit their problems, most spectacularly their problems with
China. It was like playing poker, knowing which cards everyone else at the table held.
    By elaborate ruses, the FBI concealed the identity of Morris and the nature of the operation from everybody—the State Department, the CIA, the Defense Department, and the National Security Council. FBI agents personally took the most sensitive reports from Morris to the offices of these and other agencies. There a few people were allowed to read the reports in the presence of the delivering agent, but they had to hand them back. Not until 1975 did the FBI finally inform the president and secretary of state of the source of the intelligence for which they and other policymakers clamored.
    Even now, at the funeral, Fox could disclose few of these facts. But he resolved to hint at the truth by telling as much of it as he could.
    In the foyer outside the chapel of a funeral home in northwest Chicago, Fox bent down to embrace a tiny, elegantly coiffed woman who in her late eighties remained unbowed, trim, and lovely. Officially, she was CG-6653S*; Fox called her Eva because he revered her. How many elderly women would hide with their husband underneath bed covers in Moscow copying secret Soviet documents, one holding a flashlight while the other wrote? How many would smuggle out copies encased in plastic wrapped around their bodies? How many would carry hundreds of thousands of dollars in shopping bags through the streets of New York and Chicago? How many so late in life would give up their life to espionage?
    Two old friends, Carl Freyman and Walter Boyle, joined them. Freyman, in his late seventies and limping slightly, reminded Fox of a courtly grandfather; Boyle looked as lean, tough, and darkly handsome as he did forty years before when the commanding general of the first Marine Division decorated him on a Korean battlefield.
    The four of them—Eva, Fox, Freyman, and Boyle—belonged to the small American team that challenged the Soviet empire on its own territory and terms; they were teammates. Morris always credited Freyman with saving his life. In 1952, while Morris lay near death, Freyman persuaded him to be a partner of the FBI, put him in the Mayo Clinic, and restored his will to live. Freyman was the first to perceive that Morris someday might penetrate the highest
Soviet sanctums, and he recast the operation accordingly. And Freyman rescued Boyle’s career and brought him into the operation at a time when nobody else in the FBI wanted anything to do with him.
    For eighteen years Boyle embarked Morris and Eva on their every mission, and wherever they alighted back in the United States, he was there, waiting to lead them past customs and to a hideaway to draft the first flash report to Washington. He saw or talked to them every day that they were in the United States, and he was at their call night and day. Always he carried a weapon, and they knew he