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The Shadow Dossier — The Mole Inside the American Communist Party · The Shadow Dossier

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  the shadow dossier act i two brothers one secret
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  in 1952 two brothers morris and jack childs both
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  longtime senior officials within the communist
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  party usa approached the fbi and quietly agreed
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  to become informants What followed was one of
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  the longest running and most successful counterintelligence
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  operations in FBI history, codenamed Operation
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  Solo, which continued for more than a quarter
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  century without ever being discovered by either
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  the party or Soviet intelligence. Morris Childs,
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  in particular, held a position of genuine trust
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  within international communist circles. Because
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  of his standing, he became the Communist Party
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  USA's principal liaison to the Soviet Communist
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  Party, traveling regularly to Moscow and meeting
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  personally with senior Soviet leadership, including,
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  over the following decades, essentially every
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  general secretary from Khrushchev through Brezhnev,
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  Andropov, and Chernenko. a courier for both sides.
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  Morris Child's role gave Operation Solo an extraordinary
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  window into Soviet strategic thinking. He personally
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  carried substantial sums of covert Soviet cash,
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  funneled to the American Party to fund its operations.
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  Funds that the FBI... Remarkably, allowed to
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  flow largely undisturbed, since seizing the money
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  would have exposed the operation and ended its
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  usefulness. Instead, the Bureau used Solow's
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  access for something far more valuable than disrupting
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  one relatively small American political party.
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  Real -time insight into internal Kremlin debates
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  and Soviet foreign policy thinking, delivered
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  by a source the Soviets themselves considered
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  completely trustworthy. Child's reporting reached
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  the highest levels of the American government.
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  Several presidents briefed on Operation Solo's
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  product without necessarily knowing every detail
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  of its source, used insights it provided during
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  major Cold War moments, including tensions surrounding
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  Soviet relations with China and internal Kremlin
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  succession struggles. Maintaining the operation
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  for so long required extraordinary discipline.
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  Both brothers lived for decades with the constant
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  risk that a single mistake, a slip in front of
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  the wrong person, an inconsistency in their travel
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  could expose them to Soviet or American Communist
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  Party counterintelligence, either of which could
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  have meant serious consequences. Morris Childs
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  continued traveling and reporting well into his
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  70s. suffering health problems that he and his
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  FBI handlers had to carefully manage without
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  raising suspicion about his frequent trips and
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  long absences. The operation was so tightly compartmentalized
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  within the FBI itself that only a small number
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  of officials ever knew its full scope, a secrecy
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  that helped it survive decades of American Communist
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  Party leadership changes and Soviet counterintelligence
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  efforts without detection. Act 4, a secret kept
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  until the end. Operation Solo finally wound down
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  in the early 1980s as the Childs brothers aged
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  out of active service. Morris Childs died in
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  1991, Jack Childs some years earlier, both largely
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  unknown to the public they had quietly served
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  for decades. Morris Childs was posthumously awarded
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  the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1987 by
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  President Reagan in a ceremony that because the
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  operation's details remained classified gave
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  the public no real sense of what the honor was
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  actually for operation solos full scope only
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  became widely known after later declassification
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  and it stands as one of the clearest illustrations
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  of cold war counterintelligence success measured
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  not in dramatic arrests but in decades of quiet
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  disciplined unglamorous access that most spy
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  fiction never bothers to imagine. This concludes
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  declassified file number 061 of the Shadow Dossier,
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  the mole inside the American Communist Party.
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  What dangerous secrets await in our next file?
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  Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, RSS .com,
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  and YouTube so you never miss an official declassification.
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  This is the Shadow Dossier. Thank you for listening.