Witness

by Whittaker Chambers

  I took the ferry to Staten Island. Then I tramped into the open country where I could find the earth that I felt I must be close to in that crisis.

  At nine o’clock, I called again from the ferry house at St. George. “The baby has been born,” a nurse said. “It is alive. It is a girl.” “And my wife?” I asked. “She is all right,” said the nurse. It seemed to me that she had hesitated. Again, I was seized with panic that my wife would die.

  She was scarcely out of the anaesthetic, and reeking of ether, when I sat beside her bed. As I looked at her white, hollowed face and the deep, leaden circles under her eyes, and felt her feverish fingers, I thought: “What have I done to her?” At that moment, I cared only for my wife and nothing at all for the child.

  My wife kept urging me feebly to go and look at it. She wanted me, of course, to approve and love what had so nearly cost her life (the birth had been terrible). I went into the hall. Through a glass panel, I peered into the antiseptic nursery where banks of babies lay in baskets. A nurse, with a wonderfully personal smile, considering the miscellaneous fathers to whom she pointed out their babies, pointed out mine. The child had been born long enough to have lost the puckered, red, natal look. Her face was pink, and peaceful. She was sleeping. Her long lashes lay against her cheeks. She was beautiful.

  I went back to my wife who was no longer only my wife but the mother of our child—the child we all yearn for, who, even before her birth, had begun, invisibly, to lead us out of that darkness, which we could not even realize, toward that light, which we could not even see.

  Whittaker Chambers testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

  A reporter points to a hollowed-out pumpkin in which microfilms of top-secret war documents were found on Chambers’ farm in December 1948.

  Whittaker Chambers after attending New York federal grand jury investigation into State Department documents found on his Maryland property.

  Chambers appears before reporters after telling the grand jury that microfilms of government documents were hidden in a pumpkin shell because he was afraid they would fall into the hands of Alger Hiss.

  Alger Hiss, after his indictment on giving false testimony. “My statement before the grand jury was entirely truthful.”

  Whittaker Chambers at his farm in July 1949, learning that the jury in the Hiss perjury trial had been dismissed after being deadlocked.

  7

  UNDERGROUND

  The Second Apparatus

  I

  No one who has, even once, lived close to the making of history can ever again suppose that it is made the way the history books tell it. With rare exceptions, such books are like photographs. They catch a surface image. Often as not, they distort it The secret forces working behind and below the historical surface they seldom catch.

  It is certain that, between the years 1930 and 1948, a group of almost unknown men and women, Communists or close fellow travelers, or their dupes, working in the United States Government, or in some singular unofficial relationship to it, or working in the press, affected the future of every American now alive, and indirectly the fate of every man now going into uniform. Their names, with half a dozen exceptions, still mean little or nothing to the mass of Americans. But their activities, if only in promoting the triumph of Communism in China, have decisively changed the history of Asia, of the United States, and therefore, of the world. If mankind is about to suffer one of its decisive transformations, if it is about to close its 2000-year-old experience of Christian civilization, and enter upon another wholly new and diametrically different, then that group may claim a part in history such as it is seldom given any men to play, particularly so few and such obscure men.

  One of them was Alger Hiss. Since 1948, the press and other opinion-shaping forces have fostered the impression that, in the past, Alger Hiss was a figure of national prominence. The fact is that until I began to testify about him, in August, 1948, you could have asked the first one thousand people you met in almost any American city: “Who is Alger Hiss?” and the chances are that most of them would have answered: “Never heard of him.” He had been active at Dumbarton Oaks, at Yalta, at the San Francisco conference which set up the United Nations. He was the president of the Carnegie Endowment for World Peace. There had been news stories about some of those activities. His name was familiar to the F.B.I., to the Office of Naval Intelligence and to the State Department, including its security division. It had troubled the thoughts of the former Secretary of State, James F. Byrnes, and a mental note had been made of it by a sharp-eyed layman.15 But on the American consciousness Alger Hiss had made no dent Nevertheless, he was a figure of power.

  Nobody starts from nowhere, and seldom alone. Beside Alger Hiss, from his earliest days in Washington, stood another man whose name, and other facts about him, were also presently on file at the F.B.I., the Office of Naval Intelligence and the security division of the State Department. He also would affect in incalculable ways the lives of millions of Americans and others who had never heard of him. For he had organized in the United States Government one of the most formidable little fifth columns in history, whose influence for evil, widening outward long after he was dead, would also be felt in the crash of China and the Carthaginian mangling of Europe. His name was Harold Ware, and his friends all called him Hal.

  It suited him exactly. He was as American as ham and eggs and as indistinguishable as everybody else. He stood about five feet nine, a trim, middle-aging man in 1934, with a plain face, masked by a quiet earnestness of expression wholly reassuring to people whom quickness of mind makes uncomfortable. Nevertheless, his mind was extremely quick. I suppose that he owned several suits and sometimes changed them, but in my memory of him, he is always wearing an off-color brown suit of some heavy fabric, carefully pressed, and a brown fedora hat, carefully brushed. From his rimless eyeglasses, a fine gold chain loops behind one ear.

  He might have been a progressive county agent or a professor of ecology at an agricultural college. And yet, there was something unprofessorially jaunty about the flip of his hat brim and his springy stride—as if he might have a racing form in his pocket, and be off for the day to the track at Pimlico or Laurel. It is true that he liked to drive his car at breakneck speed almost as well as to talk about soils, tenant farmers and underground organization.

  For one fact set off this reassuring man from the mass of Americans whom he so happily blended with. He was a birthright member of the Communist Party. His mother was Ella Reeve Bloor, who, after the expulsion of “Mother” Gitlow from the party, became the second of its official “mothers,” and even a kind of dowager fertility goddess. For at sixty, she was as frolicsome as a school-girl, and her vitality provided the party’s inner circles with unlimited droll stories.

  Hal Ware was one of a Communist dynasty. His half-brother, Carl Reeve, was at one time a district organizer of the Communist Party, and, during my time, was once briefly attached to the Daily Worker staff. Hal’s wife was Jessica Smith (now Mrs. John Abt and the sister-in-law of Marion Bachrach16). For many years, Comrade Smith has been editor of Soviet Russia Today (now called New World Review), a magazine of facts and figures (impartially taken from Soviet sources) and adding up to a paean of Soviet progress, beamed monthly toward the unthinkingly enlightened American middle class.

  Hal’s sister, Helen Ware, in 1934 operated a violin studio on Connecticut Avenue in Washington. It will play a brief obbligato later on in this narrative.

  Harold Ware was a frustrated farmer. The soil was in his pores. Unlike most American Communists, who managed to pass from one big city to another without seeing anything in the intervening spaces, Ware was absorbed in the land and its problems. He held that, with the deepening of the agrarian crisis, which had preceded the world financial and industrial crisis, and with the rapid mechanization of agriculture, the time had come for revolutionary organization among farmers. , But first he decided to do a little farming himself. In the early 1920’
s he set out with a group of American radicals for the Soviet Union to develop a collective farm, the so-called Kuzbas colony. Later, Hal Ware returned to the United States. He did not return empty-handed. The Communist International was also convinced that the time was ripe for organizing the American farmer. Harold Ware himself told me that, for that purpose, he brought back from Moscow $25,000 in American money secreted in a money belt—such a belt as I was soon to wear to San Francisco for another purpose.

  Around 1925, Ware hired himself to the Department of Agriculture as a dollar-a-year man. Later on, he set up in Washington a small fact-finding and information bureau called Farm Research. In that enterprise he associated with him two congenial young men. One was the brother of a man named by Elizabeth Bentley as one of her contacts, and a close friend of Harry Dexter White, then with the United States Treasury Department, and also one of Elizabeth Bentley’s contacts. The other, later an expert on labor relations at a United States consulate in Australia, was, until rather recently, an employe of the State Department.

  Seldom has $25,000 bought so much history. But Ware did not invest all (or perhaps even much of his nest egg) in Washington. To my knowledge, he maintained close ties with the Communist Party’s underground sharecroppers’ union at Camp Hill, Alabama, and no doubt with other undergrounds in the West and South.17

  It was not necessary to invest heavily in Washington. Once the New Deal was in full swing, Hal Ware was like a man who has bought a farm sight unseen only to discover that the crops are all in and ready to harvest. All that he had to do was to hustle them into the barn. The barn in this case was the Communist Party. In the A.A.A., Hal found a bumper crop of incipient or registered Communists. On its legal staff were Lee Pressman, Alger Hiss and John Abt (later named by Elizabeth Bentley as one of her contacts). There was Charles Krivitsky, a former physicist at New York University, then or shortly afterwards to be known as Charles Kramer (also, later on, one of Elizabeth Bentley’s contacts). Abraham George Silverman (another of Elizabeth Bentley’s future contacts) was sitting with a little cluster of Communists over at the Railroad Retirement Board. In the Agriculture Department (after a flier in the N.R.A.) there was Henry H. Collins, Jr., now the head of the American-Russian Institute, cited as subversive by the Attorney General. Collins was the son of a Philadelphia manufacturer, a schoolboy friend of Alger Hiss, and a college friend of the late Laurence Duggan (who was later to be one of Hede Massing’s underground contacts). There was Nathan Witt in the National Labor Relations Board. There was John Abt’s sister, Marion Bachrach. In the N.R.A., then or later, was Victor Perlo (also one of Elizabeth Bentley’s contacts). Widening vistas opened into the United States Government. Somewhat breathlessly, Harold Ware reported to J. Peters, the head of the underground section of the American Communist Party, with whom Hal was in close touch, that the possibilities for Communist organization in Washington went far beyond farming.

  I do not know how many of those young men and women were already Communists when Ware met them and how many joined the Communist Party because of him. His influence over them was personal and powerful. But about the time that Ulrich and Charlie were initiating me into The Gallery and invisible ink, Harold Ware and J. Peters were organizing the Washington prospects into the secret Communist group now known by Ware’s name—the Ware Group.

  Under oath, before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Lee Pressman, in 1951, testified that he, Witt, Abt and Kramer had been Communists and members of this group. He also gave an account of its organization which may well bear a sketchy resemblance to its first formative stage. But, by 1934, the Ware Group had developed into a tightly organized underground, managed by a directory of seven men. In time it included a number of secret sub-cells whose total membership I can only estimate-probably about seventy-five Communists. Sometimes they were visited officially by J. Peters who lectured them on Communist organization and Leninist theory and advised them on general policy and specific problems. For several of them were so placed in the New Deal agencies (notably Alger Hiss, Nathan Witt, John Abt and Lee Pressman) that they were in a position to influence policy at several levels.

  They were so well-placed that the thought had occurred to Comrade Peters, and no doubt to others, that such human material could be used more effectively, and, moreover, that it was poor organization to leave so many promising Communists in one large group where everybody knew everybody else. Peters proposed to separate the most likely ones (an almost invariable underground practice) and place them in another distinct underground—a parallel apparatus—much more rigorously segregated and subdivided. When advisable, other Communists would be added to this special apparatus from other undergrounds in Washington. For the Ware Group was not the only Communist underground in the capital. This task Peters assigned to me.

  The immediate plan called for the moving of “career Communists” out of the New Deal agencies, which the party could penetrate almost at will, and their gradual infiltration of the old-line departments, with the State Department as the first objective. Actually, Peters was organizing what Herman had dreamed of, and, ultimately, for the same master—the Soviet Military Intelligence. It is possible, though he did not tell me about it, that he was well aware of that fact.

  In pursuance of this plan, in the early spring of 1934, J. Peters introduced me, in New York City, to Harold Ware. He introduced me as Carl, for I had decided to take a new pseudonym for my new work.

  Ware and I quickly discovered that we had the same unromantic approach to conspiracy, the same appreciation of the difficulties of organizing intellectuals, and a common interest in farm problems. Before we parted, we knew that we would work together easily. and we had arranged a time and place where I would meet Hal Ware in Washington, and begin looking over the underground landscape.

  Peters, too, presently decided that he would join us in Washington on the same day. His trip was made necessary by a fact that he did not tell me in New York. An underground Communist whose name I had not yet heard, a lawyer named Alger Hiss, had been offered the opportunity to move from the A.A.A. and to become counsel for the Senate Committee investigating the munitions industry, sometimes known as the Nye Committee after its chairman, Gerald P. Nye. For the penetration of the United States Government by the Communist Party coincided with a mood in the nation which light-heartedly baited the men who manufactured the armaments indispensable to its defense as “Merchants of Death.” It is not surprising that Alger Hiss should first have emerged to public view in the act of helping the Communist Party to abet that disastrous mood.

  II

  I had not been in Washington since I left it in the fall of 1919. Then I had been a day laborer. I came back to it, in 1934, as a secret agent of a revolutionary party which seemed consciously to embody in politics what, as a youth, I had unconsciously groped for in life. I felt the past and the present fuse.

  On my first day of laying rails in Washington, as I stood waiting for a streetcar to crawl over the partially dismantled tracks, a laughing man had leaned out an open window and casually and deliberately aimed at me a squirt of tobacco juice that missed my face but soaked my shirt. I had been a day laborer, that is to say, a target for any grossness from above. I had that jet of tobacco juice well in mind when I wrote for the New Masses a decade later:“What do you make

  Of our bare and lonely lives,

  Working together

  In the section gang, early and late,

  In the heat of the day, in the warm spring weather?

  You say: It is our fate that we must take.

  But we say: ”A grim fate

  That sets you free,

  And makes us slaves forever for your sake.

  And one we should be able to unmake.

  And will. Wait.”

  I had returned to Washington to assist in unmaking that fate, still with the proletariat, but with a proletariat that throughout the world was rising in the consciousness of its mass strength and the faith, that only
through its unflinching intelligence and will, could all of mankind emerge from the disaster of this age to a better (or even a bearable) life. I had no doubt at all, as I stepped out of the Union Station, thinking of those things, that whatever I might do on my return to Washington was inseparable from that purpose.

  I found Hal Ware waiting for me at exactly the time and place that we had agreed on in New York a week or so before. The place, as if predestined, was a Childs restaurant near the Union Station, a few doors from the Hotel Bellevue, where, six years later, General Walter Krivitsky would lie murdered by that same party which he and I had both devotedly served, but from which we had both broken.

  Harold Ware was delighted to see me, for there were not enough hours in the day and night for him to manage any longer without help his heavy load of conspiracy.

  III

  It is difficult to disentangle the events and their sequence on that day seventeen years ago. That is also true for much that happened during the next few months, when I was meeting many new people and trying to adjust myself in underground work to a new kind of Communist (the collegiate conspirator who had gone almost directly from the campus to the underground without any experience of the open Communist Party). At the same time, I was commuting between Washington and New York, where something was about to occur that would direct my main organizational interest away from Washington at the very moment I arrived there, and turn it first toward England, and then toward Japan.