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.

[2] 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.

[4] 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.

[6] 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.

[8] He remained a lifelong friend of Suslov,[11] later a top expert in relations with foreign Communist Parties under Soviet leaders Joseph 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.

[3] 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.

[14] 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.

[14] On Dennis's motion, Childs was given an indefinite leave of absence as Daily Worker editor, replaced by Spanish Civil War veteran Johnny Gates.

[15] In 1932 Browder tapped Jack Childs to attend the Lenin school to be trained as a communications expert, since the Comintern now sought those holding American passports because of their versatility.

[16] Upon his return to the United States Jack was put to work at the side of Earl Browder at party headquarters in New York City, acting as chauffeur, personal assistant, and bodyguard.

As a so-called "Browderite", Childs also lost his party job, instead making use of his former radio training to open a small electrical and painting supply store in New York City.

"[20] One day in April 1952,[3] Special Agent Carl Freyman of the Chicago office of the FBI made a successful appeal to Morris Childs to go to work as a secret government informant.

The oblique communications between the Communist Parties of the Soviet Union and the United States forced upon the Americans by the Smith Act proved inefficient and ineffectual and in 1956 the FBI learned that a move was planned to reestablish direct ties between Moscow and New York.

[3] This effort was rewarded in July 1957, when CP leader Eugene Dennis told Childs to begin making preparations to covertly travel to Moscow as the representative of the Secretariat of the CPUSA.

Barron, a former editor at Reader's Digest magazine, was the author of a book on Operation SOLO which was published in 1996 and accumulated copious materials on the post-World War II CPUSA during the course of his research.