Witness

by Whittaker Chambers

  I can no longer distinguish one of those early meetings with Sherman from another, tell just where in New York they took place or what was said at each. But on one or more of them, Sherman began to instruct me in underground organizational techniques, the only real instruction of the kind that I ever had. There was no particular order in the instruction. Sherman simply took up points as they occurred to him. I had begun to call Sherman by his underground name, Don, and shall call him that henceforth.

  Point one, at least in importance, was discipline. Absolute obedience was the rule in the underground. Whatever I was told to do was a military order, and I must obey it as such. I was not to question anything; I could be questioned about anything.

  I was never to write anything about my work (my New Masses writing worried the members of that apparatus to the very end). I might keep a little memo book, with the date, hour and place of my appointments suitably disguised in any way I liked. It had been found that attempts to memorize future appointments led to confusion. Don preferred a system in which the entry in the memo was two hours later, or two hours earlier than the time set for the meeting. All meetings were by prearrangement. For example, when I met Don, we would agree before we parted where and when we would next meet. Telephones were always assumed to be tapped. They were to be used only in exceptional cases or in emergencies. For unscheduled or emergency meetings, there was a “reserve meeting place.” In Don’s case, this was an apartment, which I shall soon describe, and which was referred to over the telephone simply as “The Gallery.” If Don telephoned me and said: “How would you like to meet me at The Gallery at seven o’clock?” he meant: Meet me at the apartment on West 51st Street.

  Separation. For one reason or another, members sometimes lost contact with their apparatus. Don had once lost touch in that way for several months. Later on, I knew of other cases. If I should ever be “lost,” I was never under any circumstances to try to reconnect myself with the apparatus. There might be good reasons why the apparatus wanted “to lose” me. No matter how long it took, I was simply to sit at home and wait until someone contacted me.

  Technique of meetings. There was a traditional technique of meetings. It was simple, but decades of underground work had proved that it was successful. Before any meeting, at least half an hour, and preferably one or two hours, should be spent wandering around town, changing conveyances and direction to make sure that there was no surveillance. Undue nervousness about surveillance, always possible when a man was tired or strained, must be carefully avoided. But if there were definite signs of surveillance, if an apparatus worker found himself persistently followed by some one, or by a series of observers who seemed to be relieving one another, he must not keep his appointment. He must lead the men watching him as far away from the place of appointment as possible, and then try to give them the slip. For that purpose, buildings with more than one entrance, crowds of all kinds and especially crowded subway trains were useful. If the apparatus man eluded his followers, he would then go home and wait. The apparatus would contact him.

  Punctuality was the absolute rule of all meetings. Failure in this respect was considered a cardinal sin in the underground, and even a cause for serious suspicion. Thus, in Washington, several years later, I refused to have any further dealings with an underground Communist because he came an hour late to an important appointment. The man who reached the meeting place first would wait fifteen minutes, and no more than fifteen minutes, for the second man. Sometimes there was an agreement that if one meeting failed, a second meeting would be held the next day at the same time and place, or at another prearranged time and place. In New York meetings were usually held in restaurants or movie houses. Sometimes the initial contact was made at a movie, followed by a long ramble around the city, winding up at a restaurant. Variations on that pattern were used. In Baltimore and Washington, I later found that few of the New York techniques were suitable, and worked out new techniques for meeting which I shall describe in the proper place.

  In any one day, meetings should be widely separated in time and space. If a man were meeting three people in one day, he might meet one man in the Bronx. Several hours later, he might meet a second man in Brooklyn. Several hours after that, he might meet a third man in midtown Manhattan. Meetings on successive days should never be in the same area.

  Forgetting and not seeing. Every underground apparatus has certain fixed points, headquarters, workshops, hideaways, houses of contacts, where one or another member must go more or less regularly. Nearly always he is first taken to such places by another member or contact of the apparatus. Don impressed on me the necessity of learning the way to such places without observing the name of the street or the number of the house where they were situated. The underground worker, he pointed out, must make an effort to put out of his mind any features that will identify such addresses. I found that that effort at first resulted in the very opposite to what was intended. At first the mind found itself “peeking” and actually noted things more vividly than it would ordinarily do. But after a while a habit of not seeing was formed. I know my way to a number of places which I could not locate by street name or address. That is why, in my early public testimony, I sometimes used to say “the up and down street” or the “cross street.” I had forced myself not to learn their names.

  Non-recognition. Underground workers who chanced to meet in public or at any kind of gathering must never, under any circumstances, greet each other or give any sign of recognition. To greet another apparatus worker on the street was a first-rate breach of discipline and punishable as such.

  The Chain of Command. Decentralization was the principle of underground organization. Originally, Don told me, all the members of his apparatus had met together to discuss their work. Thus everybody in the apparatus knew everybody else. Later, a reorganization had taken place. Thereafter, few members of the apparatus met or knew one another’s identity.

  At the head of the apparatus was a chief. He might know all the members of the apparatus and from time to time, often at long intervals, meet them. Working directly under him, would be one, or perhaps several men, none of whom (at least in theory) knew one another, but all of whom dealt with the chief. Under each of those lieutenants, there might again be one or several men who also did not know one another or the existence of the other parallel chains of command within their own apparatus. This principle of separation continued down to the lowest link in each chain.

  The chief knew the identity of each of the men in the apparatus. In theory none of the others knew the identity of his co-workers. They knew one another only by underground pseudonyms —Bob, Don, Otto. Each man usually had more than one pseudonym. Don was also known as Mike. Otto was also known as Herbert and Carl. I was known as Bob, Carl, Eugene.

  The second man in each chain of command knew how to reach the last man on the chain; he knew his name, address and telephone number. But the last man in the chain did not know how to reach the second man, his immediate superior. A third man from the end of the chain knew how to reach the second man in the chain, but the second man did not know how to reach the third man—and so on up to the top. Thus, in theory, no subordinate knew how to reach his immediate superior at any point in the chain. If he were arrested, or deserted, he could only reveal the identity of the men under him. The upper reaches of the chain were hidden from his sight; he simply did not know them.

  As in most human relations, this system was not kept to rigorously. Sometimes circumstances made it necessary to breach the rules. Sometimes carelessness, short cuts, the development of personal friendships, the boredom of keeping to an arbitrary conspiratorial pattern which, in the United States, often seemed pointless, and was always a nuisance, caused some let-down in precaution. But, in general, the rules were observed.

  Arrest. If an underground worker were arrested, he must assert his innocence. He must deny all charges against him. He must divulge nothing. Decades of underground experience had shown that any suspec
t who admits to one fact, however trifling he may believe it to be, will end by telling all. This is a principle that all Communists are taught. I had known it even in the open party. It is in this light that the conduct of Hiss and others who denied my charges must be viewed.

  Money. Underground work made it necessary for apparatus people to live somewhat better than other Communists. This was not only essential to the work, said Don. It was proper, since underground activity was more hazardous than work in the open party, and the people engaged in it should not have to worry about ways and means. But no underground worker should receive more than the “party maximum” (the highest salary that the open party paid its top leaders; at that time, $45 a week, if I remember rightly). In the conditions of underground work, it was often impossible for an apparatus man to live on that salary. Therefore, each man was also permitted an expense account, which was roughly geared to the kind of work he was doing. The expense account covered such items as transportation, telephone, medical expenses, rent, etc. These were the party‘s, not the individual worker’s, expenses.

  Drinking. Underground workers were absolutely forbidden to drink. This did not mean that underground people never touched liquor. But in their meetings with contacts, at social gatherings or in restaurants, liquor was banned. Actually, few underground workers ever drank. In my experience, I knew only one drunkard (Valentine Markin). His drinking cost him his life.

  Penalties. It was Don’s way to suggest, rather than to describe, the penalties for the infraction of underground rules. He would say: “If you do something wrong, we will soon find out”—from which I gradually gathered that one section of the apparatus, or some other apparatus, was assigned to watch us. But only once was I able to spot this surveillance. Don also solemnly cited the case of a minor apparatus worker who in some way had displeased Herbert. Herbert shipped him off to Russia and sent a covering letter which said simply: “I hope I will never see this man again.” “You know,” said Don, “what that meant.”

  But an underground worker was not without rights in the apparatus. If he had grievances against his superior, he could write out a statement about them and forward it to Moscow. “But,” said Don with a wide smile, “the statement must be in the form of an unsealed letter. And it must be forwarded by the superior who is being attacked.”

  During my first days in the underground, Don explained to me that the party was always referred to as “the Bank.” My job was to be the contact between the underground and the Bank in the person of Max Bedacht. Such a liaison man was often referred to in the apparatus by the German term, Verbindungsmensch, for German, not Russian, was the international language of Communism in those days.

  In the past, Don had been the Verbindungsmensch. He met weekly with Bedacht, sometimes to ask specific favors of the Bank, sometimes to receive information from it. Sometimes there was no business at all. Then Don just chatted with Bedacht. Don met Bedacht by calling him at the Workers Center or the I.W.O. office and summoning him to some prearranged place. Bedacht had no way of reaching Don. Since Bedacht might have important unexpected news to give, the contact was indispensable and must be kept up regularly.

  “Bedacht,” Don added, “is used to thinking of you as a rank and file party member while he is a big shot. Now you are his boss. You must make him understand that.”

  “Is meeting Bedacht all I have to do?” I asked.

  “That’s all for now,” said Don. “In our work, the worst part is the waste of time. But that’s the kind of work it is. It was all thought out years ago. Don’t try to improve it.”

  I had no desire to improve it. I realized that I was not in an underground of the American Communist Party. I was either in a Soviet underground or in an underground of the Communist International. In practice, it made little difference which. Each is a different organizational form of the same political purpose. No Communist can be loyal to the Communist International, or any of its component parties, without being loyal to the Soviet Union. No Communist knows any higher loyalty or he could not be a Communist.

  I was in the Fourth Section of the Soviet Military Intelligence, though no one in the apparatus ever told me that fact and it would be years before I was sure of it.

  VI

  Don went with me to see Bedacht the first time. We met in an Automat. Bedacht was plaintive. My disappearance from the New Masses had caused a scandal. There had been charge and countercharge on the floor of the John Reed Club. One “non-party element” had demanded to know if the party had “liquidated Chambers.” A loyal Communist had shouted that Chambers had probably walked out of the New Masses as he had walked out of the Daily Worker.

  “Browder is furious,” said Bedacht. “He stamped his foot at me.” Browder and I had met just twice; we disliked each other at sight. “Browder,” said Comrade Bedacht, “says that Chambers must come back.” Don laughed. “Tell Browder,” he said in the tone of a pasha of four horses tails talking to a rug dealer, “that he is faced with an accomplished fact. There is nothing he can do about it.”

  “He threatens to take it higher up,” said Bedacht.

  “Are we mice or are we men?” asked Don—a question that he was fond of asking. In this case it meant that the action of the underground in my case was irreversible. “From now on,” he added, “this gentleman will be Bob to you. He will take my place. He will tell you what we need. Give him all the help you can.”

  VII

  Following Don’s instructions, I rented an apartment in New York. It was in Greenwich Village. I was able to rent it furnished (among other oddments, with a rather startling piece of African sculpture) from a staff member of a New York liberal weekly. From an underground viewpoint, this arrangement was ideal. The telephone was in my landlord’s name. I did not change it. I did not change his name on the mailbox (we did not receive mail). I had practically disappeared as a person.

  Rather sadly, my wife and I prepared to abandon our barn. We took a last look at our gardens, which the weeds would now smother, and a last walk to the rim of the valley. We decided to leave such furniture as we owned in the barn. All our other possessions filled two or three shopping bags.

  The only thing that worried me at all about our apartment was our landlord, and he soon convinced me that he was not a cause for concern. He was one of those valiantly and vaguely unhappy middle-aging intellectuals who had spent years not writing the book he had planned to write as a younger man. He was not a Communist, though his wife, who was in publishing, was sympathetic. But we had a number of friends in common and he knew that I was a Communist. He himself was making his first tremulous splashes in the great leftward intellectual undertow of the 30’s, borne up, more cheerfully than most, by a buoyant displacement of Scotch and soda.

  About four o’clock in the morning of our first night at the apartment, we were awakened by a persistent drumming on the door. I opened it to find my landlord, happily teetering back and forth, smiling shyly and a little vacantly. “I want to tell you something,” he said. “I must tell you something. I, too, believe in a proletariat revolution, although”—he added apologetically after a solemn interval—“ I am not myself a proletariat.”

  He repeated these tidings several times, and then, with the satisfaction of a man who has made clear his discriminating stand on a difficult question, groped his way downstairs. For several successive nights, I opened the door in the gray dawn to receive his revolutionary avowal, always in the same slightly scrambled terms, sometimes a little tearful. Then I stopped answering (somewhat guiltily, for after all it was his apartment), and he grew discouraged. I saw that the liberal intellectuals were indeed mounting the barricades. I felt reasonably sure that whatever suspicions my landlord might have about my activities, he would never report them where it mattered. Neither would a dozen other liberals who, in the great whispering gallery of New York City, soon knew that I was engaged in some kind of underground activity.

  VIII

  I cannot remember now whether
Don first introduced me to “The Gallery,” or whether he first introduced me to “Ulrich,” who then took me to The Gallery. Ulrich was my superior in the underground.

  The Gallery was a private apartment on the second or third floor of a brownstone building at 7 West 51st Street, just off Fifth Avenue. I have a somewhat blurred recollection of a vast living room furnished with rather massive furniture, of many long windows in the west wall and bookcases from floor to ceiling. There were always ten or twelve boxes of candy lying about, from which I concluded that the tenant of the apartment was a woman. Though I was in The Gallery a number of times, I never saw her.

  I presently learned (from Dr. Philip Rosenbliett ) that she was Paula Levine. When the French police rounded up a Soviet espionage ring in Paris, circa 1933, Paula Levine was the only American member of the group (the other Americans were Robert Gordon Switz and his wife) to escape. She had noticed the lurking figures of the French police surveillance, and without returning to her room, fled to Istanbul and thence to Russia. She has not been heard from since.

  The Gallery may once have been one of the headquarters of the underground. When I visited it, it was merely a convenient meeting place for several of the apparatus workers. Since I was taken there so early in my underground experience, I assume that a decision had already been made to abandon it.