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Framing William Albertson the FBI’S “Solo” Operation and the Cold War

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Framing William Albertson the FBI’S “Solo” Operation and the Cold War Framing William Albertson The FBI’s “Solo” Operation and the Cold War ✣ John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr In 1964 the executive secretary of the New York Communist Party, William Albertson, who was also a member of the National Executive Committee (NEC) of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), was falsely rumored to be an informant of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The FBI itself was behind the framing of Albertson as part of its Counterintelligence Pro- gram (COINTELPRO) designed to disrupt groups the FBI saw as subversive. Most of the literature on COINTELPRO has focused on efforts to disrupt the civil rights movement and the New Left, with only scattershot references to operations against the CPUSA. Only one secondary account of the Albertson case has ever appeared: Frank Donner’s indignant 1976 article, which accu- rately describes how the FBI set up Albertson but suggests this was simply part of a generalized effort to sow discord among CPUSA officials. Only in recent years have new FBI records released under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) allowed for a full understanding of why the FBI undertook the operation and how much damage it did to the CPUSA.1 In the spring of 1964 the FBI realized that information on one of its most successful intelligence operations was being leaked. Victor Riesel was 1. On the effort against the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, see Nelson Blackstock, COINTELPRO: The FBI’s Secret War on Political Freedom (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1988). On activities directed against the Maoists, see Aaron Leonard and Conor Gallagher, Heavy Radicals: The FBI’s Secret War on America’s Maoists (Washington, DC: Zero Books, 2014); and Frank J. Donner, “Let Him Wear a Wolf’s Head: What the FBI Did to William Albertson,” Civil Liberties Review, Vol. 3, No. 1 (1976), pp. 12– 22. COINTELPRO became public via a bizarre route. In 1971 leftist activists calling themselves the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI burglarized a small FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, and stole over 1,000 classified documents that they subsequently sent to various journalists. Some of the documents dealt with COINTELPRO. This prompted many journalists to file Freedom of Information Act requests for more documents. In response, in 1975 the FBI released a large batch of documents on various aspects of COINTELPRO, including the Albertson matter. See “The Complete Collection of Political Documents Ripped-Off from the F.B.I. Office Media, PA. March 8, 1971,” Win [magazine of the War Resisters League], March 1972; Betty Medsger, The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI (New York: Knopf, 2014); and Mark Mazzetti, “Burglars Who Took on F.B.I. Abandon Shadows,” The New York Times, 7 January 2014, p. A1, A7. Journal of Cold War Studies Vol. 22, No. 3, Summer 2020, pp. 63–85, https://doi.org/10.1162/jcws_a_00951 © 2020 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 63 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws_a_00951 by guest on 01 October 2021 Haynes and Klehr a New York investigative labor journalist whose columns were widely syndi- cated across the United States. He gained considerable notoriety and credibil- ity when in 1956 he was blinded by an acid attack arranged by the Genovese crime family in retaliation for his stories on mob-linked corruption in the In- ternational Union of Operating Engineers. Riesel, a fierce anti-Communist, also often wrote on the CPUSA. A Riesel column of 14 April 1964 discussed the deliberations at a meeting of the CPUSA’s NEC on plans for the 1964 U.S. presidential election. The appearance of this column prompted a highly placed informant inside the CPUSA, designated as “NY 694-S*” in FBI records, to let the FBI know that the CPUSA General Secretary, Gus Hall, had concluded that the details in Riesel’s column were known to only fourteen or fifteen senior Communist officials. Hall was convinced there was a leak in the senior leadership, and he would “leave no stone unturned” to hunt down the leaker.2 NY 694-S* was himself extremely upset by the Riesel column because he had conveyed to his FBI liaison the same details Riesel discussed in his col- umn. The informant hoped that Riesel had learned of the NEC deliberations from some other source, but he feared that the leak had come from within the FBI. If that were the case, NY 694-S* felt he might be in danger and his role as a long-time FBI informant might be exposed. The FBI agreed. One senior FBI official added a handwritten annotation to the report bluntly stat- ing, “This is a highly dangerous situation.” By this, the annotator likely meant that it was dangerous not only for NY 694-S* but for the entire intelligence operation NY 694-S* was part of, Operation “Solo.”3 The FBI was also aware of an earlier leak that potentially threatened Solo. A former FBI agent, Jack Levine, had made some public statements alluding to the operation. The FBI interviewed Riesel, and he claimed that the night clerk at the hotel where the CPUSA meeting had taken place had for years been a paid informant and had given him the information.4 Operation Solo was an astoundingly successful FBI intelligence opera- tion that began in the 1950s and did not end until 1977. The operation was 2. New York FBI Field Office to Director FBI, 16 April 1964, FBI 100-428091 (hereinafter referred to as the “Solo File”), pt. 61, p. 13. The “Solo File” is available at the FBI FOIA vault: https://vault. fbi.gov/solo; and at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/FBI-Operation-Solo. Hall served as CPUSA general secretary from 1959 until his death in 2000. 3. Ibid.; emphasis in original. 4. Mr. DeLoach to Mr. Mohr, 19 June 1964, in “Solo File,” pt. 66, pp. 30–31. Riesel claimed that the source for his 14 May column was, in part, FBI testimony before Congress about Soviet financing of the CPUSA, as well as his own informed speculation. He implied that he had a source within the CPUSA but refused to name the person. 64 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws_a_00951 by guest on 01 October 2021 Framing William Albertson exposed in 1981 by Martin Luther King biographer David Garrow in The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr.: From “Solo” to Memphis. Garrow had amassed a large body of FOIA FBI records on King. Putting together clues in the FBI records, Garrow realized that two high-level informants in the Communist Party had reported to the FBI that in the 1950s Stanley Levison had been a major figure in the CPUSA’s secret financial support operation, to which the informants, Morris Childs and Jack Childs, were also connected. Although Levison remained a sympathizer and financial supporter, he sought in the late 1950s to distance himself from a direct role in CPUSA activities and became an adviser to King and a major source of financial support for the rising civil rights leader. Garrow was able to identify the code name for the Childs broth- ers’ operation, “Solo,” and put together an outline of their decades-long role as FBI informants at the highest ranks of the Communist Party. (Although the FBI’s interest in King originated with this possible Communist connection via Levison, the bureau quickly turned its attention to the civil rights leader’s sex life.)5 At the heart of Solo were Morris Childs and his younger brother, Jack (NY 694-S*). In 1921, at age nineteen, Morris joined the United Communist Party, as the CPUSA was then known. By the mid-1920s he was a protégé of Earl Browder, a rising figure in the Communist Party. With Browder’s help, Morris in 1929 received an appointment from the Communist International Comintern) to attend the International Lenin School in Moscow. He did well there, graduating with high evaluations. When Morris was at the school, he was recruited by the Soviet state security agency, then known as the OGPU (a predecessor to the NKVD and KGB), to be an informant on the ideological orthodoxy of his fellow students. His time at the Lenin School also revived his childhood Russian, which he learned after being born in Kyiv (then part of the Russian Empire) in 1902 and did not come to the United States until 1911. Morris’s Russian-language skills served him well later on in Operation Solo. He returned to the United States in 1932 and served in increasingly im- portant CPUSA positions in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Illinois. By this point his mentor, Browder, had become the party’s General Secretary. In Illinois, 5. David J. Garrow, The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr.: From “Solo” to Memphis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981). Garrow updated his account in David J. Garrow, “The FBI and Martin Luther King,” Atlantic Monthly, July/August 2002, pp. 80–88. Although journalistic rather than scholarly, John Bar- ron’s Operation SOLO: The FBI’s Man in the Kremlin (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 1995) provides a detailed account prepared with considerable FBI cooperation, as well as the cooperation of Morris Childs and his family. John Barron’s papers and research files, as well as Morris Childs’s papers, are located in the Hoover Institution Archives. The summary of Operation Solo presented herein is largely drawn from Barron with corrections from Garrow and the “Solo File.” 65 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws_a_00951 by guest on 01 October 2021 Haynes and Klehr then the second-most important region of the Communist Party (after New York), Morris was state secretary.6 In 1945 he suffered a mild heart attack and was consequently out of active party work for some months.
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