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Volume 66, No. 1 (March 2022)

The Challenges of Espionage and Counterespionage Operations: Running SOLO: FBI’s Case of Morris and Jack Childs, 1952–77

By Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes

In the early 1950s, the FBI instituted a program dubbed TOPLEV in which FBI agents discreetly approached members of the Communist Party of the USA  in the hopes of recruiting informants. Frequently the agents met with rude and obscene reactions. Not so with the brothers Jack and Morris Childs. In relatively short order the brothers became the most fruitful informants the FBI ever recruited.

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