Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

At the beginning of the Carter administration in 1977, the CPUSA leadership made exaggerated claims of its influence over King’s former executive secretary, Andrew Young (codenamed LUTHER), newly appointed as US representative at the United Nations. According to Hall, “Young himself did not know that several of his close friends in Atlanta were covert Communists, and he listened to them. The Party, while observing the required clandestinity, would cautiously exert an influence on Young in the necessary areas.” 82Lesiovsky’s cover as assistant to U Thant gave him a number of opportunities for discussions with Young. Though he claimed to have obtained “important information” from the discussions, he reported—less optimistically than Hall—that, while Young hoped for better US-Soviet relations, his attitude to the Soviet Union was fundamentally “negative.” 83

Though Hall tended to overstate the influence of undeclared members of the CPUSA within the Democratic Party, there was at least one to whom the Centre attached real importance during the 1970s: a Democratic activist in California recruited as a KGB agent during a visit to Russia. The agent, who is not identified by name in the reports noted by Mitrokhin, had a wide circle of influential contacts in the Democratic Party: among them Governor Jerry Brown of California, Senator Alan Cranston, Senator Eugene McCarthy, Senator Edward Kennedy, Senator Abraham Ribicoff, Senator J. William Fulbright and Congressman John Conyers, Jr. During the 1976 presidential election the agent was able to provide inside information from within the Carter camp and a profile of Carter himself, which were particularly highly valued by the Centre since it had so few high-level American sources. On one occasion he spent three hours discussing the progress of the campaign at a meeting with Carter, Brown and Cranston in Carter’s room at the Pacific Hotel. His report was forwarded to the Politburo. During the final stages of the campaign the agent had what the KGB claimed were “direct and prolonged conversations” with Carter, Governor Brown and Senators Cranston, Kennedy, Ribicoff and Jacob Javits. Andropov attached such importance to the report on these conversations that he forwarded it under his signature to the Politburo immediately after Carter’s election. 84

IN NOVEMBER 1977 the Centre sent a memorandum to the Central Committee complaining that, despite several requests to Hall to replace the Childs brothers, they were still running the American end of the “covert channel of communication with the US Communist Party.” During Jack’s illness in August and September, Morris had replaced him as the CPUSA’s representative at a meeting with a KGB officer in New York:

His use in the special channel operation is very risky, since [Morris] Childs is known to the intelligence service—as is evidenced by the US Senate Judiciary Committee’s report for 1967, where he is referred to as a person who uses several names and has contact with the KGB. Because of this, one cannot exclude the possibility that the FBI has him under covert surveillance.

On November 10 Kazakov and Ivanov raised the question of replacing the Childs brothers at another meeting with Hall in Moscow. Hall said that he had three candidates in mind as a replacement for Jack Childs—John Vogo and the Applekhoums [? Appleholmes] brothers. 85He would make his final choice in the near future and announce his decision by a coded telegram to Moscow reporting the completion of a draft article on colonialism. The number of the draft indicated in the telegram (first, second or third) would indicate which candidate he had selected. Jack Child’s successor would then apply for a visa at the Soviet consulate in Vienna so that he could receive one and a half to two months of “special training” in Moscow. Hall also suggested that the KGB use the wife of his personal chauffeur and bodyguard as an additional channel of communication in New York. The residency could telephone her at work, identifying itself by using the parole, “This is Mr. Budnik calling about the old furniture. My friend from Hoboken suggested contacting you.” 86

Once again, however, Hall delayed taking action. The Childs brothers continued to take part in the “special channel operation” for the remainder of the decade. One of the files noted by Mitrokhin records that during the eight months up to April 1978 Jack Childs conducted nineteen operations: three VALDAY money transfers, two meetings with KGB officers, five dead drops, six brush contacts and three operations to signal contacts. 87By the spring of 1980, however, the FBI had concluded that the Childs were in imminent danger of being compromised. On May 28, as a pretext for withdrawing from the “special channel,” Morris Childs told Hall that unidentified men had been calling on his neighbors making enquiries about him and he feared he might have to go into hiding to avoid arrest. He handed Hall 225,437 dollars in cash, which, he claimed, was all the money from Moscow in his possession. Jack Childs, who had been in failing health for some time, died in a New York hospital on August 12. Morris and Eva Childs retired to a luxurious condominium north of Miami with spectacular views over the Atlantic. In 1987, at a special ceremony at FBI headquarters, Morris was presented by President Reagan with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He and his brother Jack, who was awarded the same medal posthumously, thus became the only spies ever to be decorated by both the Soviet Union and the United States. 88

Throughout the decades when the Childs brothers operated the secret channel to Moscow, the CPUSA had been wholly marginal to American politics. In four presidential elections between 1972 and 1984 Gus Hall never received more than 59,000 votes; after falling to 35,000 in 1984, he decided to support the Democrats in 1988. After dropping well below 10,000 members in the mid-1970s, the Party staged a modest revival but in the later 1980s was only about 15,000 strong. 89Hall, however, continued to inhabit a fantasy world in which the CPUSA had a major influence on American politics. He wrote to Boris Ponomarev, the head of the International Department, in the autumn of 1981:

More than at any moment in recent history, I am convinced that our Party can be an important factor in slowing down, stopping and reversing the present reactionary policies of the Reagan administration. Tens of millions have become disillusioned. They are moving towards mass actions, and millions are in ideological flux. Our Party can be an important and even a decisive factor in influencing and moving these masses.

As on this occasion, Hall’s fantasy assessments of the CPUSA’s growing influence were accompanied by appeals for Soviet subsidies, which for most of the 1980s ran at 2 million dollars a year. In 1987 Hall asked for a large increase:

I can only argue that because our party works in the decaying heart of imperialism whatever we do in influencing events in the United States has an impact on world developments. And, because of the crisis of the Reagan presidency, which is deep and chronic now, our Party’s work has had and continues to have a growing impact on the politics of our country.

Therefore, in the context of the struggle against US imperialism and the policies of the Reagan administration, our party must be seen as an important, and even indispensable, factor.

The CPUSA’s subsidy for the following year was put up to three million dollars. 90

Morris Childs believed that the remarkable generosity of Soviet donations to the CPUSA (200 dollars a member in 1987) was due partly to the fact that the Kremlin took Gus Hall’s claims at least semi-seriously and “ludicrously overestimated the influence of the American party.” 91The generosity was also due, however, to the ideological servility of Hall and the CPUSA leadership. According to Dorothy Ray Healey, a prominent party militant for forty-five years: