Tensions boiled over in March 1945 when Alfred Stern accompanied Jack Soble to Los Angeles and found Boris occupying a lavishly furnished office at the American Recording Artists’ West Hollywood headquarters. Stern worked himself into a rage seeing how Boris was enjoying such splendor while their label released bombs like “Brazen Little Raisin.” He pounded Boris’ desk. “It’s trash! I won’t let you spend my money on such tripe.” Boris lost his customary cool and let loose a few choice expletives. Stern was, he declared, “a musical ignoramus on all levels.”
A tour of the company’s factory on Robertson Boulevard only deepened the divide. The visitors found it “a tiny, rented place,” Soble wrote, “something I found completely surprising in view of the large outlay of money for the operation.” Moreover, they were astonished to discover that Boris had registered the plate plant in his own name, not the company’s. “This is strange and difficult to understand,” Soble concluded in a memo to Moscow, “because Boris considers himself a comrade, deeply loyal to our cause.”
Even as his business partnership was falling apart, other worries occupied Boris’ mind. Since the Soviets made their first approach, Boris had kept his stridently pro-American wife in the dark about his secret career. Catherine would never have understood, forever haunted as she was by the memory of her brothers’ deaths in the Russian Civil War. Now Boris struggled to explain why his social circle had come to include so many card-carrying communists. He fretted over what she might blurt out in their presence. On one occasion, Soble’s mischievous wife goaded Catherine into a counter-revolutionary tirade. “Bolsheviki!” Catherine cried. “Swine! They did not even blindfold my brothers before shooting them down like dogs!”
Adding to his anxiety, Boris was sure he was being followed. Mysterious cars tailed his Cadillac around Los Angeles. Strange men watched the front door of his Beverly Hills estate and tracked him into New York apartment buildings when he paid associates visits, asking doormen about “the little fat fellow.”
Meanwhile, despite early hits, ARA was burning through its cash, and Boris announced that the company needed another infusion of $150,000. Of the Sterns’ initial contribution, only $6,500 was left in the bank. His communist business partners were certain Boris was mismanaging their investment, or worse, pilfering it for his own vain ambitions.
Martha shared her mistrust with Alfred, who dashed off a report to Moscow. “The business is in an extremely critical state,” it read. “One of the reasons for the crisis is that my partner doesn’t want to listen to business advice.” Soble reported his own concerns to Moscow. “With his enthusiasm for music,” he wrote, “Boris has almost forgotten the main idea. Music is only a means to realizing our central goal — to infiltrate a number of countries bordering the USA.”
By this point, the spymasters had heard enough. A one-word order arrived from Moscow: “Dissolve.” That decision satisfied no one, least of all Alfred Stern, who would see his entire $130,000 investment wiped out. He threatened to sue Boris “until he’s blue in the face” — an outcome the NKGB wanted to avoid.
To keep Operation CHORD’s secrets out of a courtroom, Moscow ordered Boris to repay the Sterns $100,000. His new handler knew how to twist an arm. “I’d hate to feel responsible for the extermination of your relatives in Russia,” Soble said. “Wouldn’t you?”
Boris scrambled to scare up some cash, selling off his share in a lucrative film project. The partnership was dissolved.
Not long after, while Boris was visiting New York on business, Martha came to say farewell. As she strutted into his room at the Sherry-Netherland, she struck a conciliatory tone, but there was something bitter beneath her sugar-coated words.
Martha mistrusted Boris more than ever. Far from being a “tried and true communist,” he seemed motivated by something other than loyalty to the cause. He had tried to fleece her husband, and if Boris wasn’t already working for the FBI, Martha was convinced, he soon would be.
Considering it her duty to set the record straight, Martha put her concerns into writing. She filed a damning memo with the Soviet embassy in Washington, well aware it likely meant the untimely end of Agent FROST.
Unaware of her denunciation, Boris thrust himself into work on a feature film, Carnegie Hall, a project refreshingly free of international intrigue. Even so, the unwanted attention he first noticed in that Perino’s booth only grew more palpable. Every day he saw the same suspicious car parked across the street from his house. Every evening he felt eyes watch him leave his studio office. Once, when he hosted a press party, his friends reported seeing an “unidentified, uninvited male guest” mingling with the crowd, and he was certain someone had gotten hold of his bank records. Boris wasn’t sure if it was the Soviets or the Americans — or both — but he sensed a net tightening around him, fast.
“You boys were following me, weren’t you?”
Boris was seated across from two FBI special agents inside the Bureau’s Los Angeles field office. He’d arrived that day in 1947 in what he later described as a “state of mental chaos,” unsure if he’d ever know freedom again, or only the inside of a federal prison cell.
One of the agents laughed. “We’ll ask the questions, Boris, if you don’t mind.”
In fact the FBI had been following Boris for nearly four years, since an anonymous letter singling him out as a Soviet intelligence asset landed on Director J. Edgar Hoover’s desk. The eccentric Hollywood figure seemed an unlikely spy, but the Bureau dutifully opened a case file and placed him under surveillance, logging his movements and noting visitors to his Beverly Drive home — even eavesdropping on his lunchtime conversations at Perino’s.
Now, the agents urged Boris to confess.
“Just tell us what happened.”
It was a relief to spill the secrets he’d held inside for so long. In fact, Boris told the special agents so much that his confession ran into a second session, and then a third.
He identified Martha and Alfred as Soviet agents. He told them all about American Recording Artists. He recounted his decade-plus relationship with Soviet intelligence — one he had gladly exploited for his own gain time and again. He wrapped up his confession, resigned that this was the end of the line.
But that’s not what the FBI agents wanted. When Boris was finished, the two agents stunned him with a scheme of their own: He would continue spying on behalf of the Soviet Union, only now he’d do it on the FBI’s terms. He would cook up new Soviet intelligence operations, even more outlandish and ambitious than before, and report everything back to his FBI handlers. They wanted him to act as a double-agent, or, to use Boris’ own formulation, a “counterspy.”
“We can give you your instructions now — unless you’d like to think the whole thing over for a day or two.”
“I don’t have to think anything over.”
The agents urged caution. “If you think your life was difficult and complicated before, that is nothing compared to how complicated it will be once you begin working with us. Because you will have to pretend to be playing ball with them all the time. You will have to remember a thousand details that you will not dare to write down, that you will be able to pass on to us only verbally.”
Boris shrugged. He had been walking a tightrope for years. Why not learn to juggle while he did it?
The agents went on. He would log every telephone call he received, every conversation with Soviet spies. He would conceal nothing from the FBI. Most importantly, Boris could tell no one that he was working for the Bureau — not his colleagues, not his friends, not even his wife, Catherine — even as the favors he supposedly performed for the Soviets became more brazen and overt, casting his loyalty to America in doubt.
“And it is only fair to tell you that it is dangerous. Very dangerous.”
Spies were routinely jailed and executed without fanfare or judicial process in the international game of state secrets. Double agents were treated especially roughly.
Boris felt uncharacteristically brave at that moment. Perhaps the threat of federal prison helped him summon the courage. But he also knew a thing or two about how to construct a good movie. And if he was living in a spy thriller of his own making, now was the time to introduce a wild complication that ratcheted up the suspense.
“What are my instructions?”
A Russian boy was running up and down the aisle of the Pullman coach with a toy gun.
Outside, darkness still shrouded the Polish countryside as Boris Morros’ train rattled on toward Moscow. Before the sun dawned, his train would cross the Bug River, and the Hollywood producer would be on Soviet soil.
Catherine was accompanying Boris, against his better judgement. His wife’s tendency to denounce the Bolsheviks and declare that she “didn’t care to breathe the same air as those swine” could only complicate matters. But he had no choice. She wanted to visit her troubled homeland.
Boris knew that for too many travelers, especially travelers like him, Moscow was a point of no return. But he was willing to risk it all for his latest caper — an FBI counterintelligence sting, Soviet cover operation, and show business venture all rolled into one.
Even before he turned double agent, Boris had foreseen the power of an emerging technology to disrupt and transform Hollywood. And so, when the Bureau offered to pay his startup costs, Agent FROST dashed off a written proposal to the spymasters in Moscow.
“A new popular form of entertainment has appeared,” his proposal read, “a combination of film and radio under one name — ‘radiovision,’ or, as it has become commonly known in ordinary and commercial language, ‘television.’ Television has found wide acceptance throughout the country, and there are already more than two million television sets in private homes, bars, and restaurants.” By 1948, those sets were tuned to a handful of pioneer networks. DuMont Laboratories, a maker of household electronics, launched the first in 1946, followed soon after by the three-letter giants of radio: NBC, CBS and ABC.
Boris’ network would distinguish itself by its programming. Whereas the others aired a variety of programs — news and sports, situational comedies and anthology dramas — Boris’ would specialize in music. A series about Mozart, for example, would be shot entirely in the composer’s hometown of Salzburg, and live performances from the great concert halls of the world would be broadcast straight into American living rooms.
And it would be different in one other important respect: it would operate as a front for the MGB, the newest call sign for the Soviet intelligence service that, at other points in its history, was also known as the NKVD and KGB. Like American Recording Artists, the new network would open international branch offices wherever the Soviets had intelligence-gathering needs, all under the guise of seeking out new musical talent for the airwaves.
Over dinner the previous November at the Pomme d’Amour in Paris, Boris told his two FBI handlers that he’d been summoned to Moscow to discuss the proposal.
“Now, fellows, what do you think I should do?”
The special agents looked at each other. Considering that it was essentially an FBI counterintelligence sting, he expected them to urge him on to Moscow to close the deal. After all, Boris had set up two companies, Worldwide Television, Inc., and the Boris Morros Music Corporation, and rented a lavish fourteenth-floor suite in midtown Manhattan, all with Bureau funds, a welcome substitute for his former business partners.
After a pregnant pause, one of the agents finally spoke. “Of course we want you to go, but under no circumstances will we give you orders or instructions to go. You have to make up your own mind.”
Boris suggested they cable the special-agent-in-charge in New York, or even headquarters in Washington, for guidance. But the agents refused.
“We know this is very dangerous. We can’t protect you there. We can’t go along. Our office wouldn’t sanction it.”
Boris had become one of the Bureau’s most closely guarded secrets. Should something go wrong, there would be nowhere to run for sanctuary.
“Nobody in the American Embassy in Moscow knows you,” the agents warned.
The FBI men had only one emergency protocol at their disposal. If they learned he was in immediate danger, they would find a way to send him a single codeword — the latest Hollywood innovation, a three-projector, widescreen process — CINERAMA.
“What would you want me to find out there?”
“You used to be a musician, Boris. You’ll have to play this one by ear.”
The agents suspected that the television deal was only a pretext for his invitation. Moscow’s spymasters likely wanted to size him up in person — a general meeting, in the parlance of Hollywood. If the spymasters approved, Boris would be fully accepted as an MGB operative, which would make him an even more valuable American asset. If they disapproved — well, the FBI men wisely kept silent about that possibility.
Boris had heard the horror stories. Others who braved a return to their native Russia had been arrested by the secret police, declared traitors to the homeland, and shot — or tortured until they wished they were shot. It made no difference that he now carried an American passport. Once a Soviet citizen, always a Soviet citizen.
The fate of his youngest brother, Aleksandr, haunted him. Once a rising Party apparatchik, Aleksandr was one of three Morros brothers swept up in the so-called Great Terror of the 1930s that sent more than a million Soviet citizens to the Gulag and another 681,692 to their deaths. When Boris learned of his brothers’ arrests, he begged his friends in Soviet intelligence to intervene. They obliged. Soon they secured the release of Savely and Yuliy Morros. Sadly, when they finally tracked down Boris’s third brother, there was nothing they could do for him. Aleksandr Morros had already paid Vysshaya Mera Nakazaniya — “the highest measure of punishment.”
The Gulag could even swallow up non-Russians, with little concern for the diplomatic consequences. Only a year had passed since Alexander Dolgun, a file clerk at the US embassy in Moscow, born in the Bronx to Polish immigrants, stepped out for lunch. As he was walking down the sidewalk, a man called out after him. Dolgun stopped, and the man wrapped his arms around him in a bear hug. “Old buddy! How wonderful to see you. It’s been such a long time.” Dolgun had never seen the man before in his life, but before he knew it he was in the back seat of a Pobeda, speeding toward the Lubyanka prison. He was not heard from again for seven years.
If Boris wanted the money for his television company, he would have to come face to face with the men who orchestrated such terror. Ultimately, he would have to persuade Stalin’s foreign intelligence chief, an MGB lieutenant general named Pyotr Fedotov.
In an organization of maniacal ideologues and sadistic killers, Fedotov set himself apart with his reputation for calm, dispassionate analysis and his charming manners. He was often characterized as “professorial,” an effect attributable as much to demeanor as to his gray hair and eyeglasses. But looks can deceive, and Fedotov could be ruthless in his pursuit of traitors. He was believed to be the trigger man in several political killings during the Great Terror, including the 1938 execution of the Soviet ambassador to Hungary. And few had more experience at ferreting out foreign agents. During the Second World War, Fedotov directed military counterintelligence within SMERSH — a Soviet agency whose name meant “death to spies.”
Unbeknownst to Boris, he would also have to overcome the denunciations of his former business partner, herself a valued Soviet intelligence asset with a track record of success. Martha Dodd Stern’s secret memo — set aside at the time by the MGB bureaucracy — still moldered somewhere inside the agency’s Lubyanka headquarters, dormant but deadly, like unexploded ordnance.
Now, as Boris’ train hurtled through the darkness toward Moscow, the boy was still playing with his toy gun. Boris stopped him to ask if he was shooting Indians.
“Not Indians,” the young Russian answered. “Americans.”
HTML layout and style by Stephen Thomas, University of Adelaide.
Modified by Skip for ESL Bits English Language Learning.