The safe house was located on the third floor of a brick-and-stone apartment building on Meshchanskaya Street, in one of Moscow’s recently redeveloped neighborhoods. At the door, the junior MGB officer escorting Boris enacted an elaborate signal. He rang the doorbell, rang it again, and then knocked — once, twice, three times. Only after the third knock did a woman’s voice answer from inside.
“Who?” the voice asked.
“Owls,” the officer answered.
The door swung open to reveal a housekeeper, who smiled at them with her gold tooth. Inside, the apartment was furnished in what Boris judged was the height of Russian respectability but in New York, would pass for lower-middle-class. There was a record player, a large knockoff Zenith radio, and, fittingly, a television set.
But not his dinner companion. Prior to his ultimate showdown with Fedotov, Boris was scheduled to meet another intelligence officer, Colonel Aleksandr Mikhailovich Korotkov. As head of the MGB’s shadowy Illegals Section, Korotkov was responsible for all the agency’s deep-cover operatives. At his command were hundreds of MGB officers working under non-official cover, as well as the thousands of foreign agents they recruited through ideological persuasion, blackmail, or cold, hard cash.
The MGB colonel was running late — a classic Hollywood power move Boris knew well. It gave him time to reflect on his predicament. He was certain that his room at the Metropol, a remnant of pre-revolutionary Russia in all its faded glory, was bugged. And when he left the confines of his hotel, the hairs on the back of his neck told him he was being followed. Part of him still reveled in these shadowy thrills. But another part was downright terrified about where this all-too-real spy-thriller was headed.
Finally, two hours later, there were two rings and three knocks at the door, and in stepped Korotkov. With his movie-star good looks — square jaw, thick blond hair — he appeared young for someone who occupied such a high station, barely 40 years old. Then again, Stalin’s purges had not spared the security services’ upper ranks.
As a young man, Korotkov got his start as an elevator operator in the secret police’s Lubyanka headquarters, but the bosses there soon realized his talents were wasted pulling levers and pushing buttons. He quickly mastered the German language and, under non-official cover, infiltrated the Third Reich, where he uncovered evidence that Hitler was preparing to break his non-aggression pact with Stalin. Once war did break out, Korotkov donned a tattered Wehrmacht uniform and embedded himself within the Red Army’s POW camps, prying even more secrets from captured German officers.
Now, as this legend of the spy world settled in across the dining table from his Hollywood secret agent, Boris would have to keep his secrets more secure. The housekeeper brought out caviar and vodka. Despite the refreshments, the conversation got off to a bad start.
Korotkov brought up Boris’ intelligence reports on Thomas Dewey and Earl Warren, the Republican Party’s 1948 ticket. Boris had thought it amusing to scribble those reports on the back of a golf scorecard. It didn’t seem so funny anymore.
The MGB colonel glared at him through steel-rimmed glasses. The reports, he snarled, “could have been written for the New York Times.”
Boris’ heart sank. His actual source for those reports was the FBI, and of course those two by-the-book special agents hadn’t given him any compromising information.
“In fact,” Korotkov continued, “I suspect that is the newspaper you copied them from.” The colonel had a habit of talking through his teeth and biting off his words, which made him seem angry about everything. “It may be a surprise to you, but we also subscribe to the New York Times.”
Desperate to change the subject, Boris poured some vodka and offered a toast to Korotkov’s health.
No, Korotkov corrected him, let’s drink to Mrs. Morros.
Catherine had nothing to do with this — so why was Korotkov invoking her? She had spent much of her time in Moscow shopping with her strong American dollars. Surely that was no crime, even in Russia. Or had a microphone caught her denouncing those cursed Reds yet again?
He offered an olive branch. “I am sure that we all wish from the bottom of our hearts,” Boris said, raising his glass, “for peace between the United States and Russia.”
He gulped down the vodka and felt that familiar burning sensation in his throat. Only as it subsided did Boris, self-satisfied, glance at his drinking partner. The spymaster was still holding a full glass.
Korotkov slammed his fist on the table. “How in hell can you have peace when you have that goddamned government?” The spy boss wasn’t just angry about the grand ideological struggle; some resentment about the recent world war still simmered. “Did we not win the war,” he demanded, “without any help from our so-called Allies in the West — until the real fighting was over?” He had a point — the German blitzkrieg claimed millions of Russian lives before a single American died at Pearl Harbor.
Boris couldn’t get a word in. Korotkov went on: “Isn’t our food better than theirs? Our cars? Our houses? Above all, our thinking?”
The colonel only cooled off when coffee was served. He squeezed some lemon into his cup and explained that he always took his coffee that way — it sobered him up.
Boris thought this might be the time to pitch his TV proposal, a necessary preamble to his big pitch to Fedotov, but Korotkov cut him off. How long, he asked, was Boris staying in Moscow? Another week, Boris answered.
No, Korotkov told him menacingly. It would be longer than that.
The meeting with Korotkov had not gone well. Boris tried to put it out of his mind. With hundreds of Hollywood pitch meetings under his belt, he knew that a bad showing with an underling could be erased if you knocked the socks off the big boss.
As the fateful evening approached, Boris’ stomach grew more unsettled at the prospect of dinner with Lieutenant General Pyotr Vasileevich Fedotov.
Several officers had spent the past weeks interrogating and indoctrinating Boris. Now even they were on edge as they all waited for “the big man” to arrive. “Don’t interrupt Fedotov,” he was warned. “Don’t use anyone’s last name. Don’t ever say ‘in our country,’ and under no circumstances offer comparison between Russia and the United States.”
Boris listened to that advice carefully. When he’d arrived in Moscow, he was hopeful he could leave with a half million dollars to launch his television network. Now, he would thank God, or even Josef Stalin Himself, if he could simply leave in one piece.
The room stewed with nervous energy as Korotkov and his men watched the clock. Fedotov had been expected at seven, but he was running late — of course. One hour passed, then another. The night sky darkened. Finally, at half past nine, they heard the elaborate signal at the safe house door.
Ring.
If any man could expose Boris as a traitor to his native Russia, it was Fedotov. In his previous post as wartime counterintelligence chief, Fedotov had rooted out Nazi spies and others who would betray the Motherland.
Ring.
Would such a high ranking official actually carry out the dirty work of rooting out and even terminating a traitor? It wasn’t beyond the pale. MGB generals were known to personally torture prisoners within the Lubyanka.
Knock.
As a Jew, Boris was especially vulnerable. The Soviet Union was in the grip of anti-Semitic paranoia, with Stalin publicly declaring that all Russian Jews were secret agents of the United States. Even Korotkov, despite his rank and unquestioned loyalty, had been forced to divorce his Jewish wife.
Knock.
Boris’ seventeen-year career as a Soviet intelligence asset had seemed like an elaborate fantasy. Now it felt very real. Why had it taken this reckless trip to Moscow to realize what a fool he’d been? As a double-agent, he was also a double-traitor.
Knock.
The door swung open.
Boris was expecting a smoldering volcano of a man. He braced himself and looked toward the door, only to find the plump, smiling face of Pyotr Fedotov lighting up the room. A glimmer of hope. Surely this cheerful man couldn’t be his executioner? With his glasses and his combed-back gray hair, the spymaster looked more like a university professor than a murderous thug.
Fedotov introduced himself by his full name, himself breaking the rule about no last names.
At that moment, Boris made a bold decision. To hell with all the warnings, and to hell with these pussyfooters. Boris hadn’t become a Hollywood player by kowtowing to men like Zukor and Mayer or slavishly following the instructions of their subordinates. His flamboyant persona, his loud shirts, his tall tales, all of it was constructed to help him bridge gulfs in social status. That also went for the personal history he invented for himself, one that downplayed his hardscrabble immigrant origins, the vulgar striving. What he couldn’t hide — his accent, his Russian otherness — he weaponized as part of his charm offensive.
And so, as Korotkov and the others sat down for dinner, Boris turned his charm on Fedotov. He would schmooze the MGB general as if this were a power lunch at Romanoff’s on Rodeo Drive, address him as an equal, as if he had nothing to hide and nothing to fear.
It would be the bluff of his life.
When Fedotov bragged that Russia had coaxed one European nation after another into the eastern bloc, Boris interrupted to inquire about the fate of a divided Germany. The others squirmed at his blunt question, but Fedotov simply answered that the Kremlin was waiting on America and expected a resolution within a year or so.
When Fedotov brought up the arts, Boris noted that filmmakers worked toward different goals in Russia and America. Again, the others were aghast, having explicitly forbidden just such a frank comparison of capitalism and communism. But Fedotov agreed with Boris, commenting that under the Russian system artists must enlighten the problems of the world.
The worry on the others’ faces begged him to stop, as did the butterflies in his own stomach. Ignoring the others and treating his stomach with vodka, Boris kept up his act. If this was where his script ended, he would at least make the final pages interesting. Besides, he felt that familiar electricity. He was on a roll.
And then, in the middle of dinner, Fedotov suddenly turned cold. “Boris Mihkailovich!” Fedotov said, “I have here a disturbing report. It concerns you! One of our best American agents has warned against you.”
At once Boris knew just who had filed the report.
The general continued: “She said she had reason to believe you weren’t really a loyal communist, but were in fact working against us, for our enemies, like the FBI.”
If Fedotov carried a bullet meant for Boris, how would he accept his fate? How had his brother Aleksandr accepted his Supreme Penalty? Surely with dignity, and not as a coward. But there still might be a way out.
Moscow would never forget that Martha Dodd had stolen secrets from her own father to advance the Cause, but these men, all men, might be swayed by an attack on her gender. Thinking quickly, he chanced an almost absurd suggestion: “She never forgives a man for rebuffing her.”
The comment floated over the silent table. Then, remarkably, it seemed to sink in, turning Russian scowls into smirks.
And as evening turned into early morning, Boris found reassurance in the spymaster’s demeanor. Far from angry, Fedotov seemed delighted to be having a genuine conversation for once. Few in Stalin’s Russia dared to speak so frankly to a man of Fedotov’s rank. Moreover, Boris seemed to be earning the general’s trust. That much seemed clear when he brought up an apparently ongoing operation with the world’s most famous actor as its target.
“What do you think of Charlie Chaplin?” Fedotov asked. “Do you think he is actually a communist?” Fedotov continued: “Maybe someday we will give you the word to contact him and ask him to come to Moscow. We would give him anything — a villa for life and so forth. Josef Stalin wants to see him.”
Chaplin was an old acquaintance. Boris could make an approach — but he would need to find the right angle so that he as well as Josef Stalin came out ahead.
By now Boris had forgotten about his stomach. He grew even more confident when Fedotov asked whether he could help establish a backchannel to the White House through an acquaintance of his: Margaret Truman, the president’s daughter. “We are very anxious to have Truman ask Stalin for a meeting,” Fedotov explained. “We want it, but we don’t want to lose face by asking for the conference ourselves.”
Fedotov then voiced his grudging respect for the folksy politician from Missouri. “Truman is a much better man than we all thought. He has guts,” Fedotov said. “Such a stupid guy makes a fine president.”
All this candor signaled two things. First, Boris was no longer in Hollywood, where true feelings were seldom shared. Second, and more importantly, he had earned the spymaster’s approval. He couldn’t be sure whether he’d won him over in the room or if Fedotov, briefed on the interrogations by his subordinates, had made up his mind beforehand. But Boris had seen studio bosses succumb to his charm in Hollywood restaurant booths, coaxing green-lights from them over several rounds of Martinis. Now, something similar was happening in this Moscow safehouse.
Boris brought up his proposal. It was met with enthusiasm.
The spymasters agreed to invest $350,000 in Boris’ television company. To conceal its investment, the MGB concocted an elaborate cover story. Publicly, Boris would broker the sale of 50 independent American films to the Soviet Ministry of Cinematography for distribution across the communist world. Privately, the ministry would pay inflated prices, at least twice what the distribution rights were worth. Boris agreed to turn around and invest the proceeds in his new television network, putting undercover Soviet operatives on the payroll.
When the conversation finally drew to a close at half-past five in the morning, the MGB officers who had writhed at Boris’ petulance were in for a final shock. With his private car waiting outside, Fedotov dismissed his chauffeur and announced that he would drive Boris back to the hotel himself.
Outside the Metropol, Fedotov got out of the car and kissed Boris on the cheek, three times. As Boris climbed into bed next to his blissfully ignorant wife, the words of the MGB general rang in his ears.
“If there is anyone you don’t like,” he said, “anyone who is annoying you and you don’t want around anymore, just let me know.”
Martha Dodd may have come to Boris’ mind. But the double agent had another way of getting back at Martha for what turned out to be her very correct suspicions.
As America’s only human intelligence source inside the MGB — not even the CIA had cracked that nut — Boris gave J. Edgar Hoover, who personally monitored his case from the director’s office, interagency bragging rights. More importantly, his detailed recollections of Moscow, catalogued in Headquarters file 100–202315, provided intelligence leaders with rare glimpses of their adversary’s inner workings.
Boris also helped stave off Soviet interference in an American election, and that intelligence coup came with a satisfying dose of revenge.
Immediately after he identified Martha Dodd and Alfred Stern as Soviet agents, the FBI placed them under 24-hour surveillance, tapping their phones, checking their mail, and searching their trash cans. What they learned was troubling. The Sterns had recently become close friends with former vice president Henry Wallace, who was challenging Truman in 1948 under the banner of the Progressive Party. In fact, Martha Dodd Stern had persuaded Wallace to run.
When Wallace asked Martha to work as his speechwriter, she went straight to the Soviet consulate and asked for talking points. When Moscow kept silent, she voiced her frustration to her handler. “Why aren’t there any instructions from there?” she demanded. “Do they really think nothing should be done or nothing can be done?”
Later in the race, when Wallace’s campaign was lagging, Alfred begged for some prominent Soviet figure to give a speech recalling the nations’ shared sacrifice in defeating Nazism. “We need this right now,” he pleaded, acknowledging that Wallace couldn’t win at this point, but reminding Moscow that more votes for Wallace could spoil Truman’s re-election.
“It’s possible to do a great deal through Wallace,” Martha reiterated to her handler, “but we need to receive direction.”
They never did. Moscow was aware that the Sterns were under surveillance and was reluctant to partner with them again, especially on such a sensitive operation. In the end, Wallace did not collude with Moscow, and America’s first election of the Cold War was not compromised.
Instead, a federal grand jury summoned Boris and listened with interest as he recounted the secret history of American Recording Artists. Sealed indictments followed. Rumors of a pending prosecution found their way to Martha and Alfred Stern, who fled first to Mexico City, before realizing Mexico wasn’t far enough. One pitch-black morning, the “Escamilla” family — a mother, father, and 11-year-old son carrying Paraguayan passports — boarded a KLM flight for Montreal, connected to Amsterdam, and then caught another flight to Zurich. By the time American authorities caught up to them, the “Escamillas” had ducked behind the Iron Curtain.
Justice of a sort had been done. But the Sterns were not Boris’ only quarry — far from it. As with so many Hollywood promises, the television money never materialized and Boris was denied his dream. But Moscow gave its man in Hollywood a new assignment, one the FBI would want to monitor with care. Boris was to recruit ten prominent Americans to defect and resettle in the Soviet Union.
Recalling his conversation with Fedotov, he proposed starting with Charlie Chaplin.
Nyet.
Moscow had someone else in mind for its first catch: America’s most controversial physicist, a target so coveted that Moscow had already assigned him the codename CHESTER. Boris Morros was ordered to recruit the architect of the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer, self-proclaimed “destroyer of worlds.”
“Do you think you could do it?” he was asked.
Boris had never met Oppenheimer. In fact, despite his impressive Rolodex, he had few friends in the halls of science. But his life as a movie producer, music mogul, spy, and double agent had taught him a thing or two about where a good bluff could lead you.
“Yes, it’s possible.”
Boris Morros from his Paramount days