Morris Childs

Morris H. Childs (born Moishe Chilovsky; June 10, 1902– June 5, 1991) was a Ukrainian-American political activist and American Communist Party functionary who became a Soviet espionage agent (1929) and then a double agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (1952) until leaving both services by 1982.

Morris H. Childs was born Moishe Chilovsky on June 10, 1902, in Kiev, Russian Empire, the son of an ethnic Jewish family.

The family spoke Russian in the home, not Ukrainian or Yiddish.

Morris's father, Josef Chilovsky, engaged in revolutionary activities against the Tsarist regime, for which he was imprisoned and subsequently exiled to Siberia.

Josef was able to flee Russia via the Black Sea and he emigrated to the United States, landing in Galveston, Texas, in March 1910.

Josef Chilovsky moved to Chicago, where he worked as a cobbler and bootmaker.

As soon as his living situation was established and a small sum of money raised, Josef sent for his wife, Nechame Chilovsky, and their boys, including Moishe and Jakob.

The family arrived at Ellis Island in December 1911.

The family name was Americanized from Chilovsky to "Childs" in Chicago.

Morris, as Moishe was now known, attended a demanding Jewish school in the city and worked in his father's shoemaking shop and as a messenger in the Chicago financial district.

Childs read extensively, favoring particularly works of literature and history, and took courses at the Art Institute of Chicago.

There he was exposed to radical ideas among his peers, echoing the dissent which his father felt towards the autocracy in imperial Russia.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 was a source of great inspiration to the entire Childs family, and news of its dramatic events were breathlessly followed over the next several years.

Towards the end of the decade Childs joined a trade union in order to get a job driving a milk delivery wagon, where he first made the acquaintance of members of the then-underground American Communist movement.

During the bitter factional war within the American communist movement throughout the decade of the 1920s, Childs was a consistent supporter of the Chicago-based faction led by William Z. Foster, head of the party's trade union operations.

From the middle-1920s onward Childs was a protégé and friend of the man who help bring the famous union organizer Foster into the Communist Party's orbit, Earl Browder.

The combination of his family's radical heritage, the exciting news from Russia, and the enthusiasm of his radical peers caused Morris Childs to become politically engaged, and he took the step of joining the United Communist Party of America in 1921.

When in 1928 the Communist International sent Browder on a dangerous mission to China as a representative of the Communist International's trade union organizing section, the Profintern, Browder left his prized library and papers with Childs, telling him before he left, "if I don't come back, they're yours."

In 1929 Childs was selected by the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) to attend the elite International Lenin School in Moscow, a training school for professional revolutionaries.

Early in 1930, Childs was approached by an agent of the Soviet secret police, the OGPU, who had noted in Childs' file that he had helped to successfully identify a police spy in the Communist organization of Chicago.

The man asked Childs to become an informer for the agency to help keep tabs on the ideological foibles of his Lenin School comrades.

Childs agreed with the request and thereafter provided periodic reports.

During his second year at the Lenin School, Childs made the personal acquaintance of a number of high-level Soviet officials who taught courses at the school, including exiled Finnish revolutionary leader Otto Kuusinen and a young ideology expert named Mikhail Suslov.

Childs remained at the Lenin School until 1932.

He remained a lifelong friend of Suslov, later a top expert in relations with foreign Communist Parties under Soviet leaders Iosif Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev, and Leonid Brezhnev.

When he returned to the United States in 1933, a young Moscow-trained functionary on the rise, Childs went to work for a Communist Party organization now headed by his old Chicago acquaintance, Earl Browder.

Childs was assigned the role of paid sub-district organizer in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Childs was subsequently moved to Illinois, where he served as State Secretary of the CPUSA for Illinois.

Childs was a candidate for public office for the Communist Party, running for US Congress in an Illinois at-large district in 1936.

Childs was also a member of the CPUSA's governing Central Committee.

Morris Childs remained a leading party worker in Illinois through 1945.

In December 1945, Childs was named editor of The Daily Worker, the official English-language newspaper of the Communist Party published in New York City and a member of the CPUSA's governing National Committee.

In 1947 Childs, who, having attended the Lenin School was a fluent speaker of Russian, traveled to Moscow on an unspecified mission for the Communist Party, stopping off in France during the return trip to have a conversation with Jacques Duclos, the French Communist Party leader who in 1945 had published criticism of the policies of American CPUSA leader Earl Browder which ultimately led to Browder's ouster.

Childs, a supporter of a majority faction headed by Eugene Dennis, was a target of a hardline minority group (which included William Z. Foster, Robert Thompson, and Benjamin Davis) which used Childs's absence from the Daily Worker to engineer his ouster as editor.

The Dennis group assented to this maneuver in an attempt to calm troubled waters with the minority.

Childs was surprised with the fait accompli at the June 27, 1947, plenary meeting of the National Committee, at which he was forced to resign the editorial post, ostensibly due to the heart ailment which plagued him.

Beginning in 1958, Childs acted as a secret courier on behalf of the American party, briefing Soviet officials on political affairs in the American party and carrying funds to support the American Communist movement from Moscow to New York City, reporting details all the while to his FBI handlers.

Over the course of two decades of activity in this role, Childs played a major part in the transfer of more than $28 million in Soviet subsidies to the American movement.

For his activity as a courier on behalf of the Soviet government, Childs was awarded the Order of the Red Banner in 1975.

His work as a spy for the American intelligence community was recognized in 1987 when Childs (together with his brother Jack) was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Ronald Reagan.