Free Operation Solo by John Barron Page B

travel, and he was not sure when the doctors would allow him to travel. If need be, could he use Jack?
    Bart thought that an excellent idea.
    Freyman, who had stayed at the office, heard from Morris about 2:30 A.M. “I had a very successful meeting. As soon as security permits, I’ll tell you about it.”
    Once headquarters learned that a meeting had taken place, it teletyped an order to Freyman: “Get out there and interview him.” Again, Freyman refused. If Morris judged it safe to meet immediately he would not have said “as soon as security permits.”
    When the two did confer, Morris said, “It was Phil Bart.” Freyman smiled broadly. After Morris reconstructed the conversation, he smiled even more broadly, suddenly envisioning new and grand possibilities. The leader of the underground had invited Morris and Jack into the underground. If Morris could deliver Soviet funds, he would make himself indispensable and securely reposition himself in the highest councils of American communism. He probably would be the principal intermediary to the Soviets, who liked and trusted him. Should he establish clandestine relations
with them, he could conceivably insinuate himself into their councils. An operation that began with relatively limited and modest objectives, it now held out the promise of vastly more.
    The FBI initially code named the operation SASH. It gave Morris the code designation CG-5824S*; Jack was NY-694S*. Among themselves, FBI agents referred to Morris as “58” or “George”; they referred to Jack as “69.” An asterisk at the end of a source designation denoted that the source could never testify in court or be otherwise identified. Usually that meant that the source was a telephone tap, a bug, or a burglary. Uninitiated analysts poring over reports from 58 and 69 for years thought that the FBI was running one hell of an eavesdropping operation.
    At FBI headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue, some supervisor, whose name cannot be retrieved from available records, bravely acted upon an intelligent insight. Freyman, during his FBI career, received seven formal letters of censure from J. Edgar Hoover (along with nineteen commendations). Unbeknownst to Hoover, however, Freyman refused to obey a direct order twice in twenty-four hours. Either refusal surely would have provoked Hoover to censure him or do worse. But Hoover never knew because the unknown supervisor reinforced an earlier headquarter decision: Burlinson and Freyman have brought the case along. Thus far, they’ve done everything right. They’re on the spot; they know what they’re doing. Why pester them? Let Chicago and New York run the case and work with each other directly.
    That is pretty much what happened for many, many years.

four
    THE FIRST LIMITS
    MORRIS CONCEIVED AN OPERATIONAL plan that Jack put into effect by calling upon Betty Gannett and suggesting that he ask Tim Buck in Canada to reopen lines of communication between Moscow and the underground American party. On March 25, 1954, Gannett, probably having consulted Bart, emphatically instructed Jack to go to Toronto as soon as possible.
    Although Jack knew Buck, at this meeting he represented himself as an emissary of Morris acting under the authority of Gannett, who presided over a skeletal staff at party headquarters in New York. Buck was more than willing to help. He cautioned, however, that in the aftermath of Stalin’s death the year before, chaos still reigned in the Soviet party and that the Canadians themselves were having difficulty communicating. They agreed that Jack should return to Canada periodically and that in an emergency Buck would send his friend Elizabeth Mascola to New York as a messenger.
    The first results were discouraging. Throughout 1954 and 1955 no word came from Moscow. Morris and Jack did succeed,
however, in reestablishing themselves among the comrades. They demonstrated that the Soviets