Witness
Page 6
Your Father
1
FLIGHT
I
In 1937, I began, like Lazarus, the impossible return. I began to break away from Communism and to climb from deep within its underground, where for six years I had been buried, back into the world of free men. “When we dead awaken....” I used sometimes to say in those days to my wife, who, though never a Communist, had shared my revolutionary hopes and was now to share my ordeals: “When we dead awaken....” For this title of an Ibsen play I have never read somehow caught and summed up for me feelings that I could not find any other words to express—fears, uncertainties, self-doubts, cowardices, flinchings of the will—natural to any man who undertakes to reverse in mid-course the journey of his life. At the same time, I felt a surging release and a sense of freedom, like a man who bursts at last gasp out of a drowning sea.
This elation was not caused by any comparison of the world I was leaving and the world I was returning to. By any hard-headed estimate, the world I was leaving looked like the world of life and of the future. The world I was returning to seemed, by contrast, a graveyard. It was, in fact, the same world I had abandoned as hopeless when I joined the Communist Party in 1925. Only, now, its crisis, which a few men could diagnose thirteen years before, had reached the visible brink of catastrophe. And still that stricken world did not know the nature of the catastrophe. It still did not know, or even want to know, two facts that it must know to survive: the meaning of Communism, the meaning of that new breed of man, the Communist.
I wanted my wife to realize clearly one long-term penalty, for herself and for the children, of the step I was taking. I said: “You know, we are leaving the winning world for the losing world.” I meant that, in the revolutionary conflict of the 20th century, I knowingly chose the side of probable defeat. Almost nothing that I have observed, or that has happened to me since, has made me think that I was wrong about that forecast. But nothing has changed my determination to act as if I were wrong—if only because, in the last instance, men must act on what they believe right, not on what they believe probable.
Then in 1938, with the clearest understanding of the consequences, we freely made the choice which history is slowly bringing all men to see is the only possible choice—the decision to die, if necessary, rather than to live under Communism. Nothing has made us regret that decision.
I I
There is a difference between the act of breaking with Communism, which is personal, intellectual, religious, and the act of breaking with the Communist Party, which is organizational. I began to break with Communism in 1937. I deserted from the Communist Party about the middle of April, 1938.
At that time, I was living with my family in one of the somber old double brick houses that stand above Mount Royal Terrace, in Baltimore, and are reached from the street level by flights of dark stone steps. It was then a somewhat faded street, but we loved it for its spaciousness and its overarching elms. When I deserted from the Communist Party, I took into hiding with me my wife, my five-year-old daughter and my son, who was about two years old.
I use the word “deserted” deliberately. The members of the Communist Party are bound by a semimilitary discipline which each man and woman agrees to submit to when he joins the party. It is a mistake to suppose that this discipline is an arbitrary strait jacket. This discipline is a Communist’s pride. It means that each of his acts is a contribution to the total action of an army. It means that a small group of disciplined men and women, acting as one, can accomplish feats impossible to undisciplined groups many times their numerical strength. Every Communist shares this organic sense of functional solidarity and effectiveness, which is the emotional root of the slogan: “There is no fortress that the Bolsheviks cannot take.” It is misleading, too, to call this discipline the action of a flock of sheep following a leader. The discipline is effective because, in the first instance, it is self-imposed.
I also use the term “deserted” in its simple military sense. At the time I broke with the Communist Party, I was the contact man between a powerful Soviet espionage apparatus in Washington and my superior in New York City. Each of us was a link of unequal size in the invisible chain of Communist command that laces the world.
My superior was Colonel Boris Bykov, a Russian officer of the Fourth Section (military intelligence) of the Red Army. At that time, and for some time after I broke, I did not know whether I was working in the Fourth Section or the Foreign Section of the C.P.U.1 (the Soviet secret police). During the six years that I worked underground, nobody ever told me what service I had been recruited into, and, as a disciplined Communist, I never asked. From the work, I assumed that I must be in one or the other of the two secret services I have mentioned. When it was necessary to refer directly to the underground apparatus, it was simply called “the apparatus” or sometimes “this institution.” Its personnel were called apparatchiks, a Russian word meaning just what it sounds like: apparatus workers. Sometimes the apparatchiks were called “Illegale” (illegals) and their work “illegale Arbeit” (illegal work). These terms were used from habit or nostalgia, chiefly by older foreign Communists whose memories and activities went back to times before the Russian Revolution. They were proud terms, uttered proudly by the men and women who used them and who held that the Communist Party could call its members to few higher (because few more hazardous) activities.
I did not know the identity of the apparatus I was working in. Nor, during all the time that I worked with him, did I know Colonel Bykov by that name. I first learned it from General Walter Krivitsky, the former head of the Fourth Section in Western Europe, when we later met in New York as fugitives from the Communist Party, from which each of us had deserted independently. Krivitsky had worked underground with Bykov in Italy.
In 1937 and 1938, I knew Colonel Bykov as “Peter”—Peter, nothing more. Wherever possible, underground Communists are known to each other by such simple first-name pseudonyms. This practice, which puzzled many Americans when the Hiss Case first highlighted it, has been a commonplace of Europe’s revolutionary movement for almost a hundred years. The purpose is security. Usually, the underground worker has several pseudonyms. In higher underground circles, I was called “Bob.” In Washington, I was called “Carl.” Men and women may work together in the underground for years, may become close friends, without ever knowing (or asking) one anothers real names.
By 1938, the Soviet espionage apparatus in Washington had penetrated the State Department, the Treasury Department, the Bureau of Standards and the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. In the State Department, it had two active sources and two contacts that had not yet become active sources. In the Treasury Department, it had one active source and a contact who was used for a short time to watch and report on the active source. This contact later became a member of one of the underground apparatuses headed by Elizabeth Bentley. In the Bureau of Standards, the apparatus had one active source and one inactive contact. In the Aberdeen Proving Ground, it had one active source.
By active source, I mean a man who supplied the Soviet espionage apparatus with secret or confidential information, usually in the form of official United States Government documents for microfilming. By an inactive contact, I mean a man who had been recruited into the Soviet apparatus for espionage purposes, but who, for one reason or another, was not transmitting information.
Seven of these Soviet apparatus workers were members of the American Communist Party. Two were fellow travelers. These two were so deeply engaged in Communist espionage that the organizational differences between them and their Communist co-workers were largely metaphysical. One of them was so indistinguishable that I always supposed him to be a Communist, and did not learn that he was not until he testified to that effect during the Hiss Case.
All these men knew that the chief purpose of the apparatus they served was espionage. The seven Communists were members of the apparatus in obedience to the discipline of the Communist Party. Five accepte
d this discipline eagerly. One obeyed it reluctantly, not from a scruple about espionage (I know because I discussed his transfer with him at the time), but because he was active in an underground cell of the American Communist Party and preferred to continue its activities for which he was strategically placed in the Government.
Thus, the number of productive sources in the Soviet apparatus was small. But their activities were supported by a larger number of apparatus people—photographers, couriers, contact men and people who gave the use of their homes for secret photographic workshops. The sources did not know that most of these people existed and very few of the non-sources knew the identity of the sources. None of the active sources knew of one another’s identity. I was the only man in the Washington apparatus who knew all of them and met them regularly or irregularly as the work required. Colonel Bykov knew the identity of all of them and had met all but two of the sources.
But the productive sources, though few in number, occupied unusually high (or strategic) positions in the Government. The No. 1 source in the State Department was Alger Hiss, who was then an assistant to the Assistant Secretary of State, Francis Sayre, the son-in-law of Woodrow Wilson. The No. 2 source in the same Department was Henry Julian Wadleigh, an expert in the Trade Agreements Division, to which he had managed to have himself transferred from the Agriculture Department. He had done so at the request of the Communist Party (Wadleigh was one of the fellow travelers) for the purpose of espionage. The source in the Treasury Department was the late Harry Dexter White. White was then an assistant to the Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau. Later White became an assistant secretary of the Treasury, at which time he was known to Elizabeth Bentley. The source in the Aberdeen Proving Ground was Vincent Reno, an able mathematician who was living at the Proving Ground while he worked on a top-secret bombsight. Under the name Lance Clark, Reno had been a Communist organizer in Montana shortly before he went to work on the bombsight. The active source in the Bureau of Standards I shall call Abel Gross.
Thus, the group of active sources included: one assistant to the Assistant Secretary of State; one assistant to the Secretary of the Treasury; a mathematician working on one of the top-secret military projects of that time; an expert in the Trade Agreements Division of the State Department; an employe in the Bureau of Standards. The contacts included: two employes in the State Department and a second man in the Bureau of Standards.
In addition, the apparatus claimed the services of the Research Director of the Railroad Retirement Board, Mr. Abraham George Silverman, whose chief business, and a very exacting and unthankful one too, was to keep Harry Dexter White in a buoyant and co-operative frame of mind. Silverman also passed on as “economic adviser and chief of analysis and plans, assistant chief of air staff, material and services, air forces,” into Miss Bentley’s apparatuses. I did not recruit any of these men into the Communist Party or its work. With one possible exception (the mathematician), all of them had been engaged in underground Communist activity before I went to Washington or met any of them.
The espionage production of these men was so great that two (and, at one time, three) apparatus photographers operated in Washington and Baltimore to microfilm the confidential Government documents, summaries of documents or original memoranda, that they turned over. Two permanent photographic workshops were set up, one in Washington and one in Baltimore. Furthermore, the apparatus was constantly seeking to expand its operation. One of the Communists in the State Department and Vincent Reno, the man in the Aberdeen Proving Ground, were late recruits to the apparatus. Most of the sources were career men. In Government they could expect to go as far as their abilities would take them, and their abilities were considerable.
It is hard to believe that a more highly placed, devoted and dangerous espionage group existed anywhere. Yet they had rivals even in the Soviet service. While trying to expand the secret apparatus, Alger Hiss, quite by chance, ran across the trail of another Soviet espionage apparatus. This was the group headed (in Washington) by Hede Massing, the former wife of Gerhardt Eisler, the Communist International’s representative to the Communist Party, U.S.A. In this second apparatus was Noel Field, a highly placed employe of the West European Division of the State Department. Field, his wife, brother and adopted daughter all disappeared into Russian-controlled Europe during the Hiss Case, in which he was involved. Among the Massing apparatus’ contacts was Noel Field’s close friend, the late Laurence Duggan, who later became chief of the Latin-American Division of the State Department.
Moreover, the Washington apparatus to which I was assigned was only one wing of a larger apparatus. Another wing, also headed by Colonel Bykov, operated out of New York City, and was concerned chiefly with technical intelligence. It numbered among its active sources: the head of the experimental laboratory of a big steel company; a man strategically connected with a well-known arms company; and a former ballistics expert in the War Department. Presumably there were others. I learned the identities of these sources from an underground Communist known by the pseudonyms of “Keith” and “Pete.” Keith had been Colonel Bykov’s contact man with them. Later he became one of the photographers for the Washington apparatus. Incidentally, he has on all material points corroborated my testimony about him, about our joint activities, and the technical sources.
There were no doubt other apparatuses of the G.P.U. and the Fourth Section in Washington, of which I knew nothing. Behind this multiplying of organizations is what Communists call “the principle of parallel apparatuses.” This is a swollen way of saying that a variety of self-contained underground apparatuses, ignorant of one another’s existence, operate side by side for more or less the same purpose. For the Russians are great believers in bulk. They are not highly selective, and they mass their apparatuses in about the same way that they mass their artillery.
The Washington apparatus to which I was attached led its own secret existence. But through me, and through others, it maintained direct and helpful connections with two underground apparatuses of the American Communist Party in Washington. One of these was the so-called “Ware group,” which takes its name from Harold Ware, the American Communist who was active in organizing it. In addition to the four members of this group (including himself) whom Lee Pressman has named under oath, there must have been some sixty or seventy others, though Pressman did not necessarily know them all; neither did I. All were dues-paying members of the Communist Party. Nearly all were employed in the United States Government, some in rather high positions, notably in the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Justice, the Department of the Interior, the National Labor Relations Board, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, the Railroad Retirement Board, the National Research Project—and others.
A number of these men I knew personally as Communists. The treasurer of the Ware apparatus, Henry H. Collins Jr., Princeton and Harvard, and a scion of a Philadelphia manufacturing family, was my personal friend. He also served, voluntarily and, in fact, irrepressibly, as a recruiting agent for the Soviet apparatus among members of the State Department. It was he who recruited one of the Bykov apparatus’ State Department sources, a man of much more glittery social background than Alger Hiss.
I knew much less about the other underground apparatus of the American Communist Party. Apparently, it included somewhat less exalted Government employes. I met only two of its members personally. One of these was a Government employe. The other, the head of the apparatus, was Eleanor Nelson, who later became a national official of the C.I.O.’s union of federal employes. At that time, she was a close friend of my immediate assistant in Washington (David Carpenter, now a staff member of the Daily Worker). She was then divorcing her husband, a former Socialist and a former well-known Government official.
At the very end of my activity in Washington, as a result of preparations I was secretly making to break with the Communist Party, I came across what appeared to be a third underground apparatus of the American Communist Party. It
s members, too, were Government employes (I knew three of them), chiefly in the W.P.A.
There may also have been another type of apparatus which I then learned of with surprise, and which in this country’s present crisis assumes a special importance. This is the so-called “sleeper apparatus.” Very shortly before I broke, Colonel Bykov told me one day that I was being considered for a job of “the greatest importance.” I was to organize and head an entirely new apparatus within the American Government. It was to be made up of men as highly placed as I could recruit. But it was to be wholly a reserve apparatus. Its members were not to engage in active espionage. They were to become active only in event of war (Bykov did not say war between the Soviet Union and the United States), when the other apparatuses might be disabled or destroyed.
The Soviet espionage apparatus in Washington also maintained constant contact with the national underground of the American Communist Party in the person of its chief. He was a Hungarian Communist who had been a minor official in the Hungarian Soviet Government of Bela Kun. He was in the United States illegally and was known variously as J. Peters, Alexander Stevens, Isidore Boorstein, Mr. Silver, etc. His real name was Alexander Goldberger and he had studied law at the university of Debrecen in Hungary. In addition, I had myself, during my entire six years in the Soviet underground, been the official secret contact man between a succession of Soviet apparatuses and the Communist Party, U.S.A. Both the open and the underground sections of the party were under orders to carry out, so far as they were able, any instructions I might give them in the name of the Soviet apparatuses.