Ever-Widening Ring

Even hard-bitten Justice Department lawyers skipped a heartbeat last spring when accused Soviet Spies Jack and Myra Soble of Manhattan pleaded guilty to "receiving and obtaining" U.S. defense secrets (TIME, April 22). The plea got them out of a tougher charge of conspiring to transmit defense secrets to Soviet agents, and in return it seemed certain that the Sobles had agreed to tell their story. Last week, as a direct outgrowth of secret Soble testimony, a federal grand jury in Manhattan indicted two more Americans as members of the ever-widening Soble ring. The two: onetime U.S. Army Intelligence Officer George Zlatovski, 47, and his wife Jane, 45, a wartime employee of the secret Office of Strategic Services.

Russian-born George Zlatovski arrived in the U.S. with his parents in 1922 at the age of twelve, settled in Duluth, Minn., earned the nickname "Trotsky" in high school because of his spouting off in defense of Red Russia. He studied civil engineering at the University of Minnesota, where he was a big pro-Communist on the campus, and he fought with the Red-sponsored Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish civil war. In 1943 he joined the U.S. Army, rose from private to lieutenant, in 1945-47 was assigned to U.S. intelligence work in Austria.

His wife, Californian Jane Foster, the daughter of the retired medical director of the Cutter Laboratories, was a graduate of Mills College ('35), became an abstract painter of sorts, joined the Communist Party in 1938, married a Dutch foreign service officer and lived in the Dutch East Indies. Where or how Jane Foster lost her first husband is a mystery, but she met and married Zlatovski in Washington, D.C. in 1943, then unaccountably remarried him three years later.

Slang & Rector. The Zlatovskis became part of the Soble network in January 1940, the indictment charged. At times they dealt directly with Soble, an importer of bristles and animal hair who acted as a sometime boss of Russian espionage in the U.S. on the direct orders of the late Russian Secret Service boss, Lavrenty Beria. On other occasions they worked with Russian-born Musician and Hollywood Producer Boris (Carnegie Hall Morros, 62, an unwilling courier who was trying to protect members of his family behind the Iron Curtain, was put in touch with Soble by Elizabeth Zubilin, wife of a functionary in the Soviet embassy during World War II. In 1947 Morros went to the FBI and became a U.S. counterspy. Jane and George Zlatovski were helpful spies for the Soble-Morros combine. In Hitchcock-trimmed meetings both in the U.S. and a dozen European cities--including Moscow--the Zlatovskis turned over a file-load of valuable information that eventually dropped into Russian hands, said the indictment. Using OSS information, Jane (code name: "Slang") wrote an incisive report on Indonesia as well as dossiers on U.S. intelligence agents.

George (code name: "Rector") was not so active as his wife, mostly gathered information on refugees. As a team, they collected information on the "sexual and drinking habits" of U.S. personnel stationed in Austria so that the Russians could use it to blackmail Americans.

Tired & Glum. The grand jury's indictment charged the Zlatovskis with five counts of spying. But, for the time being at least, they were safely out of reach of federal hands, living in a walk-up flat in Paris' Latin Quarter. Since the basic U.S.French extradition treaty does not mention espionage as an extraditable crime (but specifically bars extradition on political charges), the U.S. will have to find a way of convincing the French that the espionage charge bears heavily on the success of NATO, and thus on the security of France.

Meanwhile, George and Jane Zlatovski glumly chained their apartment door against newsmen, opened it a crack only once, handed out a feeble statement. Said Zlatovski: "The charges are false--and, in addition, quite ridiculous."

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