Show Biz to Spy Biz

MY TEN YEARS AS A COUNTERSPY (248 pp.)--Boris Morros, as told to Charles Samuels--Viking ($3.95).

By now the spy story has become as stylized an art form as the western. According to the rules, good spies, like cowboys, always win: Boris Morros is one of those who lived to tell how he beat the paper rustlers of the NKVD.

At first blink, Boris Morros seemed unlikely for the part. With his late-Picasso haberdashery, borsht-and-bagel accent, and a personality as outgoing as a trombone, he had small chance of being inconspicuous among the grey and shadowy cadres of Soviet espionage. Also, as music director for Paramount theaters and Paramount Studios, later as an independent movie producer, he was a conspicuously successful man in a business that has no passion for anonymity.

Yet Boris Morros had an advantage in Soviet eyes: his family was still in Russia. Morros would have liked to spring his father from the "frozen prison" of the Soviet Union, but as it was, he could not even get food packages through to him. All this changed one day in 1936 when a seedy character who called himself Edward Herbert sidled backstage at Paramount and said he could fix things so that Morros Sr. would get his hampers. After the wheedling and finagling came the bullying, and Morros found himself being hectored by "Herbert," now a foul-mouthed drunken oaf called Zubilin, who said he was boss of the NKVD in the U.S.

Bewildered and miserable, Morros finally decided that, with his kin as hostage, he had no choice but to dance for the paid pipers of the Kremlin.

Underground Snobbery. As show biz turned to spy biz, the impresario discovered that the dedicated Communists of the Soviet spy apparatus were snobs about money, names and culture. They were not impressed so much by the fact that Musician Morros had been Piatigorsky's first cello teacher as that he had once paid Ginger Rogers $75 a week, and that Bing Crosby and Bob Hope had jostled backstage for a job at Paramount. Also, incredible as it may seem, the Russians were grateful because he had turned down a flesh peddler's offer of Leon Trotsky as a Paramount stage attraction.

For more than a decade Morros went through the motions of espionage. He could tell the Russians little they could not read in the papers: his main role was to provide jobs and a front for others. Under orders from "Herbert," who was succeeded by "Peter;" he founded a $136,000 record-publishing company with Millionaire Leftist Alfred K. Stern as partner. Stern did not know a bar of music, but he was married to Martha Dodd, daughter of F.D.R.'s Ambassador to Germany, and, on Morros' showing, one of the more poisonous women to appear in U.S. history. Morros' other contacts were also personality problems of a spectacular kind. One, "Slava," was a psychiatric case. They had one thing in common: they were kept as jumpy as drug addicts by money worries (pay was never regular) and nagging fears of falling out of favor with "home," i.e., the Kremlin.

Also, they were harried by capricious or impossible orders. Once Morros was ordered to have someone infiltrate Cardinal Spellman's office. His Eminence was almost certainly working for the FBI, reasoned the masterminds.

Sexological Institute. By this time, it was Morros himself who was working for the FBI. One day in 1947 his sense of having been betrayed into betrayal became intolerable, and he took his story to the Los Angeles branch of the FBI. Morros volunteered for the dangerous role of double agent, played it until 1957 with finesse and fast footwork.

Morros found that the business of treachery is mostly drudgery, but there were some episodes of pure comedy. The NKVD ran a "sexological" institute, where likely girls were groomed in bedlore. It was hoped that these prostitutes of progress would hornswoggle secrets from the hospitable beds of Allied intelligence officers. One such girl graduate undulated into Morros' hotel bedroom when he was in Prague. Morros bundled her into the corridor; he knew a B movie when he saw one, and wanted no part in it.

Tormented Creatures. Despite the shattering experience of being cut in Chasen's and Romanoff's as a dangerous Red, Morros emerged from his tour of double duty with unshaken morale. His evidence in court was enough to break one spy ring, send the Sterns scuttling behind the Iron Curtain and land "Peter" in prison for seven years under his right name, Jack Soble.

As told to Veteran Ghostwriter Charles Samuels, the Morros story reads like a bad novel. But it makes clear the Machiavellian method behind the apparent madness of Russian espionage. Its creatures are tormented by every caprice and fear, denied the commonest family loyalties, so that they lose any hope of identity with the ordinary world of men. For those still inclined to shrug, Boris Morros is there to prove that while it may not be true that anyone can be a spy, it is painfully certain that a spy can be anyone.

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