FROM THE PUBLISHER: Operation Solo is America's greatest spy story. For 17 years, Morris Childs, code named "Agent 58," provided the United States with the Kremlin's innermost secrets. Repeatedly risking his life, "Agent 58" made 51 clandestine missions into the Soviet Union, China, Eastern Europe, and Cuba. Because Morris was in effect the second-ranking man in the U.S. Communist Party, he was treated like royalty by communist leaders worldwide. They never knew he was working for the FBI. Operation Solo ventures into the recesses of the Kremlin and the FBI. "Agent 58" was present at the 20th Party Congress in Moscow when Khrushchev became the first Soviet leader to document and condemn the mass murders engineered by Josef Stalin. The secret speech was such a damning indictment of Soviet communism that it was intended only for the ears of the party oligarchy, but Morris Childs was able to obtain a copy for the FBI. Communism never fully recovered from the effects of the speech's publication by the U.S. State Department. This operation - which the FBI officially considers the greatest in its history - forewarned the United States of Soviet intentions in Berlin, of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, of the details, from the inception, of the Sino-Soviet split, of Soviet subversion in Africa and Latin America, and much more. Through first-hand accounts, Operation Solo tells the story of the conflicts within the FBI and American intelligence about the operation and how the FBI, through extraordinary measures, managed to keep that operation hidden from everyone, including the CIA. FROM THE CRITICS Publishers Weekly Although Morris Childs (1902-1991) was treated as a friend by Soviet rulers Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Andropov, this Chicago communist and onetime editor of the Daily Worker, the U.S. Communist Party newspaper, was an American spy working for the FBI. Barron (FBI Today) interviewed his wife, Eva Lieb Childs, and numerous FBI operatives to produce this remarkable true-life espionage story, which often reads like a spy thriller. According to Barron, Operation Solo (as the Childses' group was called) yielded intelligence that enabled Washington to exploit the Soviet Union's widening rift with China in the 1960s; their spying also helped Nixon and Kissinger forge ahead with diplomatic ties to Beijing. Born Moishe Chilovsky, near Kiev (he emigrated to America when he was nine), Childs also befriended Castro, Mao Tse-tung, East Germany's Walter Ulbricht and other Communist leaders. In 1987, Reagan awarded him a presidential medal. Photos. (Mar.) Library Journal Traditionally, it is the Central Intelligence Agency that carries out foreign espionage for the United States, but attention to the American Communist Party gave the FBI an opportunity to infiltrate communism's highest international levels. It is amazing that the FBI apparently managed to keep it a secret all these years. Morris Childs (1902-91) trained in Moscow as a Comintern agent and became a labor agitator in the Midwest during the Depression. He became the editor of the Communist Daily Worker in 1946 but fell out of favor with the American party next year. Suffering a heart attack, he became disillusioned at what communism had become and thus was willling, along with his brother, to cooperate with the FBI when approached in the mid-1950s. Childs was rehabilitated to become the American party's foreign minister and the main funnel for funds from abroad. He advised the Soviets on America and reported to Washington what the Communists were thinking. Childs received the Order of Lenin from the grateful Russians, and Leonid Brezh Regnery Publishing, Inc., An Eagle Publishing Company 0895264862 / 9780895264862
Hardcover As New Washington, D.C. 

Price: 21.29 USD