Witness

by Whittaker Chambers

  Gay Street is a little street in Greenwich Village. It is about a block long, curving and very quiet. I scarcely ever saw anyone on it. Maria unlocked a door in a brownstone house and let us into a small dark hall. Then she led the way up one or two flights of dark, narrow, creaking, carpeted stairs, and unlocked another door.

  We entered a small room. There was no rug on the floor. The only furniture was three or four wicker porch chairs and a low couch with a soiled cover that stood against one wall. In the wall opposite the door was a fireplace with a black marble mantel. At the front of the room were two or three windows, overlooking Gay Street. Next the windows, was a door that led into a smaller room. In it were a big locked trunk and a sturdy deal table. At the back of the room was a door that led into a bathroom. It was scarcely more than a big closet and had no window or other outlet so that it was an ideal darkroom. One side of the room was filled with a short tub, over which a shelf had been built to hold a photographic enlarger. Against the opposite wall were crowded a basin and a toilet bowl. The apartment on Gay Street was one terminal of an international communications system whose other terminal was presumably Moscow, and which had way stations in Hamburg and probably other European cities.

  Gay Street was a workshop of that system. The bathroom was the laboratory in which microfilmed messages were enlarged. In the basin other messages in invisible ink were developed. On the table in the little front room, messages from New York to Moscow were photographed. In the fireplace, messages that had been read and noted were burned. The cold ashes were collected in a paper bag and dumped somewhere far off in the city.

  A human chain of couriers and contacts stretched across the ocean and the continent of Europe, speeding communications back and forth between Moscow and New York. The last link which tied that chain to the Gay Street workshop was an underground worker known as “Charlie.”

  XIII

  I know now that Charlie’s real name is Leon Minster.12 For one day I unexpectedly came across his picture in a group of F.B.I. photographs of Soviet agents in the Far East. My identification of him has been confirmed, independently, by someone else who also knew him as Charlie.

  Charlie was born in Russia but had grown up in the United States, and was an American citizen. He was the brother-in-law of Vyacheslaw Molotov. He spoke a fluent Russian curiously roughened by overtones of New Yorkese. He had been, intermittently, a cab driver.

  As a man, Charlie knew that everybody Was against him. And, in the end, that almost proved to be true, because sooner or later his sullen and distrustful manner alienated most of his co-workers. But as a proletarian, Charlie knew that he belonged to the aristocracy of the new age, and that made him contemptuous and sometimes overbearing. Ulrich once summed up Charlie’s attitude in a German line: “Von unsrem Gott besegnet ist das Proletariat”—which, to preserve its laughing overtone, may perhaps best be translated: “By our God geblessed is the proletariat.”

  Charlie was a Techniker, a technical worker. In the underground, technical workers occupy the lowest, or proletarian, rank, not because any disrespect attaches to technical work, but because a technical worker who can do anything else seldom remains a technical worker. Charlie had always been a technical worker, and that further embittered his life. As a result, he was extremely jealous of his special skills, imparted them slowly and grudgingly and was especially conscious of his prerogative as custodian of the key to the big trunk.

  In the trunk, Charlie kept a Leica camera and a collapsible copying stand, the basic tools of espionage work, and other photographic and chemical supplies.

  Charlie, Maria explained after she had introduced me to him, would soon begin to teach me something. The nature of “something” was not explained. But I was presently ordered to appear at the Gay Street apartment one morning about eleven o’clock. Charlie was also the custodian of the door keys and had given me a duplicate key to the house and to the apartment. I was ordered to go to Gay Street only when told to, and never to go there at any other time.

  Maria was in the apartment when I arrived. Soon Charlie came in. He took from his jacket a small pocket mirror and an unaddressed envelope. Maria opened the envelope and took out a typed letter occupying less than one sheet of paper. The letter was written in German. Then she took a nail file and pried up the soft metal edges of the mirror so that the glass came out. Between the glass and the metal covering was a very small tissue paper package. Within it, piled one on another, were five or six frames of developed microfilm which had been cut apart and trimmed. On the film, typed in Russian characters, were the messages from Russia, or some intermediate Russian underground post, for the underground in New York.

  Charlie told me to fill the basin in the bathroom with warm water. From the trunk he brought a bottle of potassium permanganate crystals and spilled a few into the water which turned violet. Then he showed me how to move the typed letter slowly back and forth in the permanganate bath. Soon marks appeared between the typed lines. Then a small sharp Russian handwriting rose out of the blank paper to form a rusty brown script. It was the first time that I had ever seen invisible ink. The letter, like all the others I later developed, was signed: “Akyt.” I never knew who Akyt was. But I supposed that the word was probably the pseudonym of an underground worker and was perhaps a Russian or German form of the English word, acute. Communists are often given to such overemphatic names: viz., Stalin, the man of steel, and Molotov, the hammer.

  While Maria read the secret letter, Charlie brought from the trunk a box of enlarging paper. He replaced the electric bulb in the bathroom with a red bulb. In two enamel cake pans, he prepared a bath of hydroquinone and a bath of fixative. Into a glass slide in the enlarger he placed one by one the little frames of developed microfilm. Each was focused until the Russian typing stood out crisply. Then a sheet of enlarging paper was placed under the enlarger, the exposure was made and the sensitive paper developed in the hydroquinone and fixed in the other bath. One sheet of enlarging paper was used for each frame. When the job was completed, there was a developed message in Russian five or six pages long. Though I can read Russian type, I was seldom able to understand any of the words in the messages except the salutation. Each letter always began: Dorogoi droog—Dear Friend.

  The wet sheets of enlarging paper were laid to dry on the marble mantel or on the wicker chairs. Later Ulrich arrived. He read the secret letter and the photographed messages carefully, and made a few notes in his memo book. Afterwards, the letter, the photographs and the microfilm were burned in the fireplace.

  Charlie had indeed taught me something. When I left the Gay Street house after that first lesson, I walked over to Washington Square and sat down on a bench. I now had little doubt that I was in a Communist espionage group. As a Communist, I knew that the revolution is made by any and all means. Of necessity it is in part a military operation, and espionage is inevitably a military function. If the revolution is justified, espionage for its sake is justified. But it is one thing to know that in theory, or even to read or hear about such an experience as I had just been through. It is quite different to participate in it. I sat on the park bench for a long while.

  XIV

  I guessed, of course, that the mirrors were brought by couriers. I did not understand how the system worked. But I picked up one or two clues. I noticed that shortly before a mirror arrived, Ulrich would sometimes buy a newspaper and turn at once to the shipping news which he studied carefully. I noticed that, when Charlie brought a letter to Gay Street, he once or twice wore on his lapel a cheap brass pin in the form of a scorpion or lizard. Sometimes Maria made shopping trips to the dime stores where she bought a dozen mirrors and a few of the scorpion pins. With a cryptic smile she once told me where she got them, for dime stores are a 20th century bazaar that never ceased to amaze and delight Russians.

  Then, one day, I met Max Bedacht. The staid little man was elated. “You people,” he said, “really do very stupid things sometimes. Somebody should hear about
this.” He told me that “one of the sailors” had come ashore. “Your man” did not show up for the appointment. The sailor went to the meeting place several times, but nobody came. His ship was about to sail. He was desperate. But he was “a smart workingman” so he went to Mink13 and turned “the stuff” over to him. I guessed that “the stuff” would be a mirror and letter and asked Bedacht where it was now. He had it in his pocket and turned it over to me. “You fellows,” he said again with evident pleasure, “are not as smart as you think you are.”

  As a result of this incident, Ulrich told me something about the system in which I was presently to become a link. The underground couriers were sailors and stewards on the Hamburg-American and North German Lloyd steamships. I assume that they were Communists or trusted sympathizers. In Germany, they were given the mirrors and letters. In New York, they turned “the stuff” over to an underground worker who later turned it over to Charlie. Sometimes, for reasons not known to me, Charlie met the courier himself. Apparently, his meetings were always with new couriers because Charlie wore the scorpion pin on his lapel as an identifying mark. The courier also wore a similar pin, which must previously have been sent to Germany for that purpose. At one time Charlie’s meetings with the couriers took place in front of the Cameo movie theater on 42nd Street in New York City.

  The return mail from New York to Europe followed the same route. The letters were first brought to Gay Street. They had been typed in Russian somewhere else. Charlie photographed them with the Leica camera. The film was placed in a mirror and passed along the courier chain. So far as I know, there was no letter in invisible ink sent from New York to Europe.

  XV

  Ulrich presently decided to separate Charlie and the contact with the German sailors. I do not know exactly why that was done, but I seem to remember dimly that there was some comment about Charlie’s being too friendly with the contact. In general, the underground does not encourage close friendships between its members. There is a danger of their sharing information, the principle of separation of the members is impaired, and personal loyalties may take precedence over loyalty to the apparatus, at least in small ways.

  It was decided to place me between Charlie and the contact, who turned out to be a young German Communist known as Henry. He was a gnomelike man with a flip-up nose who looked and spoke as if he might have come out of a Berlin slum district or Hamburg’s Reeperbahn. He was a perpetually worried man. He had reason to be, for in dealing with the couriers, he was constantly exposed to a number of strange and miscellaneous people. In addition, he was probably in the United States illegally.

  When I first began to work with Henry, he used to meet his seagoing contacts in the 42nd Street area of Manhattan. Later, he would meet me in the same section. Once I found him trembling. “I was followed,” he said. He passed me his mirror and we separated at once. He had had to make a difficult decision: whether to risk being picked up with the mirror on him, or whether to get rid of the mirror but risk exposing me. I told him that I thought he had made the right decision.

  I reported to Ulrich that Henry thought that he had been shadowed. Both of us believed that Henry’s “shadow” was merely a city detective who had noticed Henry loitering in midtown Manhattan and decided to keep an eye on him. But I pointed out that 42nd Street and Broadway was full of plainclothesmen and was one of the worst possible meeting places in the city. The situation was even worse than I realized, for I did not then know that the office of Dr. Philip Rosenbliett, where underground people were constantly coming and going, was at Broadway and 40th Street.

  Thereafter, I met Henry in more tranquil neighborhoods. But he seemed to feel at home only in the white-light district, and he never approved of the meeting places I chose.

  Henry once found himself in a different kind of tight spot. One night, pale and making a visible effort not to tremble or babble, he came into the restaurant where I was waiting for him. The German courier in an ugly mood had met him earlier and without his transmission. “Those stupid fools,” said Henry, with a string of German curses, had given him three mirrors and two letters (an instance of the slackness in all branches of the Communist movement in Germany just before Hitler came to power). The courier had refused to endanger himself by bringing the mirrors off the ship.

  Henry had made another quick decision. He went aboard the ship with the courier and brought off the mirrors and the letters himself. The guards, supposing that he was a member of the crew, had let him pass.

  Not all the stupidities were committed at the German end of the network. One of the periodical rituals at Gay Street was known as “filling the box.” Every so often, Charlie would bring to the apartment a big empty box. In the apartment, Charlie, Maria and I would fill it with hundreds of thin leaflets in white paper covers. These were patents which anybody could then buy for a small fee from the United States Patent Office. They were collected in the bottom of the trunk until there were enough to make a shipment.

  Other perfectly legal documents also went into the box—the Infantry Journal, the Cavalry Journal, Iron Age. When packed, the box was heavy. Charlie and I would lug it downstairs and rope it to the bumper of Charlie’s car. What Charlie did with the box I do not know. I suppose that it eventually reached the Soviet Union.

  One day, Charlie and Maria took special care to leave a space in the middle of the packed patents. Charlie then brought from the truck several wide-mouthed Basks, filled with what looked to me like bits of uncooked yellowish-gray or brownish-yellow macaroni. I was curious enough to ask what they were. After a moment’s pause, Maria decided to tell me. “Flashless powder,” she said.

  Some weeks later, we heard about this shipment in the German letter which I was in the habit of reading while I was developing the invisible ink. As a rule, the letters always said the same things. One line kept recurring: “We live here as on a hot griddle” (the Nazis were about to take power). But the flashless powder shipment caused an explosive change in style. “Your present,” said Akyt with Bolshevik sarcasm, “arrived safely, but it was so stupidly packed that it was only due to the goodness of God that it did not go skyhigh.”

  XVI

  At Gay Street an effort was made to teach me photography. We used an old German Leica camera; the tables of calibration and instructions were also in German. Charlie was surly and did not want to teach me. He evidently supposed (mistakenly, as it turned out) that Ulrich meant to replace him with me. I was a poor pupil. I have never had the slightest interest in photography. I spoiled a great deal of film and the results I obtained were never really creditable. I was extremely grateful when Ulrich suddenly decided to abandon the Gay Street apartment and my photographic studies were interrupted. I never met Charlie again.

  The abandonment of the Gay Street apartment probably had something to do with the collapse of the courier system. The Nazis had taken over the Third Reich. “Do you suppose that the couriers will be safe?” I asked Ulrich. He smiled grimly. “We would know how to find them out and destroy them,” he said, “and so will the Nazis.” Two weeks after Hitler came to power, there was no more courier system.

  I learned many things at Gay Street. But nothing made a more lasting impression on me than an incident which in itself was completely unimportant. One day, when we were “filling the box,” Charlie and Maria were talking together in Russian. I became aware of some hitch in the conversation, which, of course, I could not follow. Maria turned to me and said: “Isn’t it stupid—it comes from being away from home (Russia) so long—but neither Charlie nor I can remember the Russian word for shovel.” Without thinking, I asked, “Can it be lopata?” Charlie, bending over the box, froze in that position. Maria sat rigid with her hand on a heap of patents. Both fixed me in silence with expressions that were blank and deadly. I thought: “They are wondering whether to kill me now or later.” “How do you know that word?” Maria asked in a slow, guttural voice. I said: “It is a Rumanian gypsy word. I once knew some Rumanian gypsies. There ar
e a good many Russian words in their language.” It was one of the most implausible of the many implausible truths I was to utter in my life. But Maria and Charlie very slowly relaxed and the murderous look faded from their eyes. “It is very strange,” said Maria in the same throaty voice, “that you don’t know Russian, but you know the Russian word for a shovel. You might know the word for a man or a woman, but not a shovel. Are you sure you don’t know Russian?” I told them just how much Russian I knew.

  I saw that I had given them a bad fright. Their thought, of course, was that if I were concealing the fact that I knew Russian, I must have a purpose in concealing it. If I were concealing that, what else was I concealing? Who was I, anyway? A police spy? The son of a Russian refugee? For Maria was one of the Russians who always insisted that I was simply a Russian peasant. It was a good many days before the distrust completely left Maria’s eyes and we resumed our friendly relations.

  How great a commotion my little slip had caused I realized when I presently met Dr. Philip Rosenbliett. “Well, Bob,” he said during our first conversation, “I hear that you are the American who knows what a shovel is in Russian.”

  The tension and suspicion that that one word invoked, though deeply hidden, are scarcely even for a moment absent among people in Communist underground work.

  XVI

  Dr. Philip Rosenbliett, the quiet, crafty, sorrowful man, was sometimes called “Phil” in the underground, but was usually called “The Doctor.” His office was high up in a building at Broadway and 40th Street. He was a dentist. But dentistry was not his chief business.