Witness

by Whittaker Chambers

  There are men and women who break from the Communist Party and then have just one need: peace. Escape was all they had strength for; they have none left over to fight with. They are like shipwrecked men who can only slump down on the saving beach to which they have brought nothing from their experience but exhaustion. Let those who have never struggled with the sea blame them. If they ask only to be left alone, I should never disturb them. If they expressly refuse to help in the fight against the common enemy, I must respect their decision though it cause me hardship. During the Hiss Case, I learned that a former Communist had met Alger Hiss, in the 30’s, at a Washington party to which only Communists or their close sympathizers were invited. He remembered his introduction to Alger Hiss clearly because, when he heard that name, he thought: “What ridiculous phony names our party people sometimes take.” But the ex-Communist begged that he be spared from giving this information. He had suffered all that he could take, he said; he could not stand any more. His information had some value at that time. I never mentioned it, or his name, of course, to anyone.

  In my own case, it would not have occurred to me that, if I survived the ordeal of deserting, I would then settle down with my family, wash my hands of the past and live entirely for myself. It is practically impossible for a man who knows there is a murderer at large, quietly to cultivate his garden while ignoring the screams of the victims in the next yard. It is practically impossible for a man who joins the Communist Party for the purpose of correcting an evil condition of the world not to turn against the party the force of the same purpose when experience convinces him that Communism is a greater evil. And there was something else that I shall come to presently.

  By fighting the Communist Party, I do not mean that, day and night, I had no other thought. I do not much enjoy fighting. And my mind has a dozen active interests the least of which is more pleasant, fruitful, and engrossing than fighting Communism, which, by its very nature, is, of all the activities I know, the most sterilely wasteful of mind and spirit. But this fight happens to be a necessity of the 20th century, and I, by an accident of individuality and history, and hence by my special experience, happened to be one man who could make it

  There are many ways of fighting and I had hoped to use means and weapons best suited to my temperament and abilities. History soon proved to me that the enemy, and the conditions of the struggle, not I, would choose the weapons. Therefore, I carried on the fight against the Communist Party on more than one level. I carried it on for ten years before the world at large ever noted the name of Alger Hiss. I carried it on, in Marx’s phrase, by “now open, now hidden means.” For most of those ten years, the files of Time magazine reflect my fight week by week. The secret files of more than one security agent would reflect it more explicitly.

  I began my active fight a few months after I broke from the Communist Party, some time in the fall of 1938, amidst the minor distresses of our life on St. Paul Street.

  XIII

  To a friend who, in 1938, was urging me, with some eloquence, to break with the Communist Party, I said at last: “You know that the day I walk out of the Communist Party, I walk into a police station.” I meant, as he well knew, for he was an ex-Communist himself, that the question which first faces every man and woman who breaks with the Communist Party is: “Shall I become an informer against it?” My answer stopped that conversation, for to my friend, as to me, “informer” is a word so hateful that when, years later, in testifying before a grand jury, I came to that word and my decision to become an informer, I could not at once go on.

  In the months after my break, I faced this word daily. For I faced daily the question: “What must I do about the underground apparatus in Washington?” I did not mean simply to let it go on operating. I was determined to immobilize it, and, if possible, to smash it. But I was not then prepared to do this by informing. Informing involves individual human beings, and neither then, nor at any subsequent time, were my actions directed against individual Communists, even when, perforce, I had to strike at the Communist Party through them. My actions were directed against the Communist Party as a political organization. I therefore decided to try first of all to smash the secret apparatus by myself.

  The Communist Party, despite occasional pious statements to the contrary, is a terrorist organization. Its disclaimers are for the record. But its record of kidnappings, assassinations, and murders makes the actions of the old Terror Brigade of the Socialist Revolutionary Party2 look merely romantic. No argument can reach the Communist Party unless it sees in it some self-serving advantage. It respects only force. Only terror terrifies it. I knew that if I merely returned to Washington and got in touch with the members of the underground, my reappearance would send a tremor through the apparatuses that would paralyze, if it did not stop, their work. I knew, too, that regardless of the party’s reaction, if I returned to Washington and threatened the individual underground Communists, the party would be all but powerless to keep them active, and must, at the very least, declare a holiday. I knew that if I merely tried to argue the underground Communists out of their activity, most of them would laugh in my face and then demand that the party take steps to get rid of me.

  It was a dangerous task to attempt. The party could not have overlooked the possibility that I might turn up again. Past friendship and loneliness both made it likely. I had no way of knowing whether my former underground comrades had been alerted against me or what measures had been taken to trap me if I should reappear. For safety I could count only on surprise and the fact that the conspirators were kept apart from one another by the form of the organization, and thus probably could not warn one another. I did not know whether, assuming that the party had not already sounded an alarm, it would act swiftly to warn all of them after my attack on the first ones, or whether it would try to avoid a panic by keeping the news from the rest and taking other special precautions. It might, for example, set a guard in the house of Alger Hiss, where I might be expected sooner or later to show up. My margin of safety lay in one chance: the party did not know whether I was working alone or together with an American security agency. If the latter, the guard might itself be endangered, and I did not think that the party would take that risk.

  Nevertheless, the undertaking was so formidable that I kept puttingit off. But one day, Without telling my family where I was going, I drove to Washington.

  I first called on Julian Wadleigh. In a series of syndicated articles which appeared during the Hiss Case, Wadleigh has described how I telephoned him at the State Department, how he met me somewhere outside, how I frightened him. From Wadleigh’s account, I gather that my first attempt, though effective, was somewhat bungling and embarrassed. I say “I gather” because, over the years, this meeting with Wadleigh has faded from my mind; I have no independent recollection of it. But I remember clearly my meetings with Harry Dexter White and George Silverman.

  I had intended simply to walk into Harry White’s office in the United States Treasury. I had never met any of the sources at their offices and I thought that my sudden appearance in White’s office would in itself be alarming. It would also be practically impossible for White to trap me in the swarming Treasury building.

  But there was a uniformed guard at the Treasury door. I thought that I would be asked my business and my name. My business I could scarcely disclose and any name I might give would be meaningless to White, who would probably refuse to see me, for he had known me only as “Carl.” So I called White from a drug or cigar store near the Treasury. White was not at all surprised that I should tell him over the telephone where to meet me, though I would never have done this in the old days. He said he would be right down. He was delighted to see me. “Back on a little trip to inspect the posts?” he asked cheerily. White, I concluded, had not been told about my break.

  We started walking. I set the course and he came along just as in the past. We went to a candy and soda shop, sat down at the back and ordered coffee. White, with whom m
y relations had never been particularly friendly, was never so communicative. He talked, as usual, about “the Secretary” (Henry Morgenthau), about George Silverman, but not about the apparatus. I did not ask him about it. But at some point, he asked me: “Are you coming back to Washington to work?” I answered to this effect though I no longer remember my exact words: “No, I am not coming back to Washington to work. I am not here ‘to inspect the posts.’ The fact is that I have broken with the Communist Party and I am here to break you away from the apparatus. If you do not break, I will denounce you.”

  Harry White was a nervous man. At first he merely bent over his coffee and said nothing. Then he tried the “you don’t really mean that” rejoinder. I left him in no doubt that I meant that. I do not remember the rest of the conversation. I doubt that we said much more. I remember only that we were both embarrassed and that that made me stiff and probably grim.

  As we left the shop in this mood, a street photographer pointed his camera at us. I spun White around and we walked in the opposite direction. Over his shoulder White glimpsed the camera. The action had been a reflex on my part, a hangover from the past. But White was abjectly grateful. I never saw him again. For some time, I thought that I had surely frightened White out of the underground. Certainly the flow of documents from the United States Treasury must have dried up temporarily. But, according to Elizabeth Bentley, White was active again in her apparatus a few years later.

  From my meeting with White, I went directly to the Railroad Retirement Board, where George Silverman was director of research, and walked unannounced into his office. He was much more surprised than White had been to see me, and, as I had expected, he was startled that I should come to his office. He hurried me down to the street and we walked along Florida Avenue, through the Negro section, where I could easily keep track of the white faces around me.

  Silverman also knew nothing about my break. He was in no way suspicious of me. He told me that the espionage operation was still in full swing, only there were new faces. George was frankly happy to see me again and in the warm glow of his welcome, I felt my purpose go soft. Nothing could have hardened it so quickly as his news about the apparatus. He told me, further, that in a day or two, he was meeting his new contact man, a Russian with a pseudonym that Silverman mentioned (one of the innumerable Tom, Dick or Harrys), but which I have forgotten. He was meeting the Russian in a drug store near Thomas Circle. I said: “Tell him without fail that you have seen me and say that Bob sends his greetings.”

  A week or so later, I again walked unannounced into George Silverman’s office at the Railroad Retirement Board. This time he looked terrified. Again he hurried me downstairs. “What has happened?” he asked in a frightened voice. “What has happened? When I gave (Tom, Dick or Harry) your message, he jumped up from the table and grabbed his hat. He said: ‘Don’t ever try to contact me again unless you hear from me first.’ Then he rushed out of the drug store.”

  Then I told George. I told him just as grimly as I had told Harry White. (Since, on my second visit, Silverman still knew nothing about my visit to White, I can only assume that under the new management of the apparatus, White and Silverman, who had formerly worked together, had been separated like the other workers.)

  Like White, Silverman was a slight, nervous little man. But he lacked a pushing quality that I disliked in White. He aroused a protective feeling. For, in fact, he was a child, and the effort that it cost him to be a man was apparent in the permanently worried expression of his eyes. You cannot strike a child whom life costs such an effort. I told Silverman that I would surely denounce him if he continued in the apparatus which, I assured him, I meant to wreck. But we talked quietly. We wandered in the back streets beyond Florida Avenue. He confessed that he sometimes had his own doubts about the Communist Party. We parted gently.

  And yet, when Elizabeth Bentley took over the Soviet espionage apparatuses in Washington, she found George Silverman still busily at work. He had gone ahead in the American Government service. He had become economic adviser and chief of analysis and plans to the Assistant Chief of the Air Staff (the unhappy General Bennett Meyers), in the Materiel and Services Division of the Air Force. Silverman had advanced in the Soviet service too. He no longer had to play underground nursemaid to Harry Dexter White. He had, according to Miss Bentley, become a full-fledged productive source himself.

  My last call on George Silverman ended my private offensive against the underground in Washington. One part of that offensive I did not go through with. There was a photographic workshop in Washington to which I had a key. Part of my plan had been to go there and wreck the equipment. This was the most dangerous venture possible. The workshop was one place where the G.P.U. could easily prepare a trap for me and even “commit a good natural death.” I found that I lacked the courage for this attempt.

  XIV

  I made one other visit to a former underground comrade. I made it, as nearly as I can reconstruct the pattern of that troubled time, between my visit to Julian Wadleigh and my visit to Harry Dexter White. It was my visit to Alger Hiss. It is the only one of the visits that I can date with certainty. It took place shortly before Christmas, 1938. I have taken it out of its chronological order because it differed in quality from the others.

  I had never liked Harry White. I had no particular feeling, one way or the other, about Wadleigh. Silverman was merely a curious co-worker. But Alger Hiss and his wife I had come to regard as friends as close as a man ever makes in life. By unnumbered little acts of kindness and affection, by the pleasure, freely expressed, which they took simply in being together with my wife and me, they had given us every reason to believe that their feeling for us was of the same kind as our feeling for them. Therefore, I had some grounds to suppose that my break must disturb Alger Hiss deeply. But because it is my habit to think in terms of people first, and their function in life only secondly, I failed to measure accurately how much Hiss’s regard for me had been regard for me as a Communist organizer. Perhaps he did not realize it himself. Thus my personal feeling for Hiss got in the way of my sober judgment, and, as Colonel Bykov had once fondly hoped against all probability that I had not deserted, but merely been killed, I, in my wish-fulness, nursed the unlikely hope that my break might have shaken Alger Hiss. Nothing could have been less realistic.

  But, with this hope at the bottom of my mind, I thought that simply by seeing Alger again, by talking quietly with him, I might pry him loose from the party. In any case, I could never have acted with him as I had with White and the others; our friendship made it unthinkable.

  It was early evening when I reached the Hisses’ house, probably between six and seven o’clock. They were then living on Volta Place in Georgetown, in a house whose narrow end faced the street. It was, in fact, flush with the sidewalk. I went in through the little gate, at the right side of the house. A colored maid, probably Claudia Catlett, who was a witness for Hiss at his trials, came to the door. She said that neither Mr. nor Mrs. Hiss was at home. I left. But as I stood for a moment in indecision on the sidewalk, Priscilla Hiss drove up. She headed in to the curb on a slant to park. The headlights swept the sidewalk and I stepped into the beam so that Priscilla could see me clearly and would not be frightened by a loitering figure.

  Her greeting was pleasant but not effusive, and I decided at once that Alger Hiss had been warned of my break. We went into the house together. Yet there was nothing in Priscilla’s manner, as we sat chatting in the living room, that enabled me to tell what Alger really did know. Then Timmie joined us. Timmie is Timothy Hobson, Priscilla Hiss’s son by her first marriage. Timmie was delighted to see me.

  I had to go to the bathroom. Priscilla followed me upstairs. The bathroom was at the front of the house, facing the street. Directly to the right of the bathroom door, there was a bedroom door. A telephone was on a little table near the door. As I went into the bathroom, Priscilla went into the bedroom. I closed the bathroom door and thought: “This situation i
s tight.” Before I washed my hands, I opened the bathroom door halfway. Priscilla was speaking in a very low voice into the telephone. I walked directly up to her. She hung up. We went downstairs in silence.

  At that nerve-tingling moment, Alger Hiss came home. We were in the living room and he saw me the moment he came into the house. He was surprised, of course, and his surprise showed in his eyes. But he smiled pleasantly, said: “How do you do,” and made me the little bow with his head and shoulders that he sometimes made when he was being restrained. It was both whimsical and grave.

  We went in almost at once to supper. The dining room was also at the front of the house. The light supper, which had been intended for three, and was stretched for four, was quickly over. With Timmie present and the maid serving, we again made the kind of random talk that Priscilla and I had had before Alger arrived. Again, I do not remember just what we talked about, but I seem to recall that Timmie, who had never taken much interest in athletics, was trying out for the wrestling team at his school, and wanted for Christmas, or had just bought, some wrestling shoes.

  Timmie left the table while we had our coffee and I said good night to him—in effect good-bye, for I have never seen him since. Once Timmie was gone some question was asked which I answered in the faintly foreign tone that I had always used in the underground. The reaction was electric: “You don’t have to put on any longer. We have been told who you are.” To understand what was meant, it is necessary for me to explain that Alger Hiss, like everybody else in the Washington underground, supposed that I was some kind of European. I do not want to interrupt the narrative to explain how this was possible. But during the Grand Jury hearings in 1948, one of the former underground people was brought into the witness waiting room so that he could hear me speak because, while I looked like the man he knew as Carl, I spoke like an American, and the man he knew as Carl spoke like a European.