Witness

by Whittaker Chambers

  Therefore, I must simply set down my impressions of that first day as best I can, in part as recollection, in part as reconstruction of what took place. There may be errors of detail, but the general outlines will be accurate. Anyone who tries to recollect by his unaided memory what happened to him in the course even of one eventful day seventeen years ago will realize how the years blur detail.

  I met Hal Ware shortly before noon. He drove me around downtown Washington, somewhat in the manner of a man showing his estate to a guest. Then we headed across the Potomac to Arlington National Cemetery, where we parked while Ware talked a little about the organization of the Ware Group, some of the people in it and others I would meet. Hal talked about them like a father who is tremendously proud of his sons, but who is also aware that they have not quite outgrown their political pinfeathers.

  Then I first learned that I would stay overnight at “the violin studio.” At first I thought that “the violin studio” might be a cover name, like The Gallery. A little later, I separated from Ware and, by a prearrangement made in New York, met J. Peters at the Union Station. Together we walked downtown, to kill time and to make sure that we were not followed. It was then that Peters made that exultant comment that I have quoted in the first part of this book: “Even in Germany under the Weimar Republic, the party did not have what we have here.” At the time, I thought that Peters was exaggerating. I was mistaken.

  Somewhere downtown Peters and I picked up Hal Ware as I had arranged with him to do. We drove in his car to a basement cafeteria on Wisconsin Avenue in Georgetown. There we sat talking. Ware and Peters worked out certain appointments for Peters which were meaningless to me. But there I again heard the name that was to be fateful for the world and for me—the name of Alger Hiss. I learned that he was an American, a lawyer, an exceptional Communist for whom Peters had an unusual regard, and that he was a member of the Ware Group. He was about to leave, or had just left, the A.A.A., where he had been assistant general counsel, for the Senate munitions investigating committee. This change made it important that he should be separated from the Ware Group at once. He would be the first man in the new apparatus which I was to organize. For that purpose, I would meet Alger Hiss that day.

  Peters, Ware, Hiss and I met at a downtown cafeteria, which, as nearly as I can remember, was located (rather fittingly) a few doors from the Washington Post, on Pennsylvania Avenue. It was a brief meeting, for the sake of introducing Hiss and me, and it broke up almost as soon as the introduction had been made. I believe that Peters and Hiss left separately and that, a little later, Ware and I left together. For my next recollection of that afternoon is driving with Hal to some point where we picked up an underground Communist whom I shall call Egmont Gaines. Probably we had an early supper together and probably at a co-operative cafeteria near the Y.M.C.A. Either before or after that, we were at the violin studio, which was not a cover name, but was in fact a studio on Connecticut Avenue, near Dupont Circle. There, during the day, Hal Ware’s sister, Helen Ware, taught music. But at night the studio served as an informal meeting place for certain of Ware’s underground connections.

  The studio was one flight above a florist’s shop. It was a big room as bare as a dance floor. Toward the Dupont Circle end, at the right-hand side, was a smaller room where there were one or two cots. There, Hal said, I could pass the night. I gathered from something else he said that transients from his farm undergrounds often spent the night there. Hal or Egmont gave me a key.18 What I particularly remember is Egmont Gaines sitting on one of the cots, chatting about the possibilities of underground organization and insisting that we must make contact with “Larry” Duggan, whom he called “very sympathetic.” Thus, on my first day in Washington, I first heard the name of the late Laurence Duggan, who was then in the State Department, and later became chief of its Latin-American Division. Fourteen years later, during the Hiss Case, Duggan would be killed by a fall from his New York office window several days after he had been questioned by F.B.I. agents.

  That night I returned alone to the violin studio and slept there. That was, in general, my first day and night in contact with the Washington underground.

  IV

  If I did not meet all the leaders of the Ware Group during my first day in Washington, I met them soon after.

  The headquarters of the Group was then the apartment of its treasurer, Henry H. Collins, Jr., at St. Matthews Court. There the leading committee of the Group held its weekly or fortnightly meetings. Collins’ St. Matthews Court apartment remained the Group’s headquarters until some time in 1936 or 1937, when Collins moved to a house just across the District Line in Maryland. After that, the Ware Group met at the house of John Abt—an ideal arrangement since, at that time, Abt was not only the head of the Group, but a special assistant to the Attorney General of the United States.

  St. Matthews Court was the only place in Washington with a touch of Greenwich Village. It was a mews that lay between M and N Streets, just off Connecticut Avenue. The court was flanked by two- or three-story brick houses with window boxes and gay shutters. The tenants seemed to desire and respect privacy. That was an advantage, but, in general, St. Matthews Court was a little too conspicuously picturesque for an ideal underground headquarters.

  Henry Collins’ apartment was on the second floor of a house whose first floor was occupied in part by a Negro family, in part by a garage or car-washing establishment. It was a big, sprawling, attractive apartment. The entrance, as nearly as I can remember, led into a small hall. To the left was a big living room. It was really two rooms, shaped roughly like a reverse L, but the upright stroke of the L was oblique. To the right of the vestibule was a dining room. Behind the dining room were one or two bedrooms.

  I have no recollection of the furniture in the apartment. But there were many books and its memorable feature was the Ethiopian tapestries and paintings that hung on its walls. For Henry Collins, before going to Washington, had made a trip to Ethiopia and was, he once told me, the only member of the Travellers’ Club who at that time had been there. Collins was also an ornithologist and a dendrologist—interests that were not merely hobbies with him, as they were with me, but in which he was learned. He also had a passion for figures and often plagued J. Peters to let him leave Government service and go to New York to manage the Communist Party’s finances. They might have proved a revelation to the Philadelphia manufacturer’s son and graduate of the Harvard School of Business.

  Henry Collins was all that Princeton and Harvard can do for a personable and intelligent young American of good family. To some, he seemed a little chilly and diffident. And there was in him a core, not so much of reserve as of incapacity for spontaneous feeling. But he was persistent, very tenacious and held at least his political convictions, with a fierce faith. I was constantly in touch with Collins almost until I broke with the Communist Party. During that time, he made several voluntary efforts to enter the State Department for the purpose of serving the Communist Party, and twice sought to recruit Laurence Duggan, a college friend, into that Soviet espionage apparatus. Incidentally, one of those recruiting attempts has been described in detail—not by me—and exists as a Government record. For, even more than keeping the party’s books, Collins longed to enter the Soviet underground—a dream that seemed about to be realized when, in 1937, I introduced him in New York City, to Colonel Boris Bykov.

  At St. Matthews Court, Collins lived alone. He was separated from his wife (he has since married Susan B. Anthony III). He had a son about ten years old whom I met once when he was visiting his father (on some holiday from school) and I was staying overnight at St. Matthews Court, as I sometimes did. To tidy up and cook occasional suppers, Henry had a colored maid. The leading committee of the Ware Group met after she had gone home.

  The Ware Group, in 1934 and 1935, when I knew it best, consisted of a leading committee of seven men. All were Communists and they met to discuss policy, organization, personnel and projects. Several of the leader
s of the Group also headed secret cells. Of one cell, I caught a glimpse when I once happened in unexpectedly at the apartment of Charles Kramer. I attended a meeting of another cell (headed by Henry Collins) at the house of a future employe of the State Department who has since left its service. Each meeting included some twelve or fifteen members. There must have been four (and possibly more) such cells. Assuming that each contained about the same number of members, there must have been seventy-five underground Communists in the Ware Group. That, it seems to me, is a conservative figure. The overwhelming number of these Communists were employes of the United States Government.

  The relationship of the leading committee to the secret cells was much like that of the Central Committee to the units of the open Communist Party. The Group was headed, when I first knew it, by Harold Ware himself. After Ware’s death in 1935, Nathan Witt became the leader of the Group. Later, John Abt, for reasons not known to me, became its leader.

  An effort has been made to describe the Ware Group as merely a “Marxist study group.” That is not true. The Ware Group was an integral (and highly important) unit of the underground section of the American Communist Party. Until his death, it was under the constant direction of Harold Ware. It was always under the personal supervision of J. Peters, whose visits to it were at least monthly, and sometimes more frequent. On trade-union questions, and much of its activity had to do with trade-union and other labor problems, at least one of its members sometimes consulted in New Yerk with Jack Stachel, one of the party’s top men in trade-union work.

  There was Marxist-Leninist political instruction and discussion in the Group. The Daily Worker was received in Washington at several drug stores19 where packages of it carefully wrapped were sent by express from New York. One of the functions of Alger Hiss’s 1929 Ford roadster, and especially what he was later to describe as “its sassy little trunk,” had been to pick up and distribute to the Ware Group those clandestine shipments of the Worker. The members of the Group were forbidden to keep more than one or two Communist pamphlets in their homes at any one time. But such party literature was studied by them. J. Peters occasionally lectured the leading Committee (and probably the cells) on the theory of Leninism, and on another subject which was very close to his heart, the problems of Communist organization (he had written the Communist Party’s official Manual of Organization).

  But one point should be made clear: all the members of the Ware Group were dues-paying members of the Communist Party and Peters considered the Group, together with his Hollywood underground, as one of his major sources of income. I am quite sure that I am right in remembering that members of the Ware Group regularly paid ten per cent of their salaries to the Communist Party, and were subject to special assessments, besides. It was a point with J. Peters, stressed by him to the Group, and frequently mentioned to me, that since its members were intellectuals without open party experience, it was extremely important to their feeling of Communist solidarity that they make exceptional money sacrifices for the Communist Party. Lenin himself had stressed the importance of dues as a test and a binder of party loyalty. Long after he was in the Soviet underground, Alger Hiss continued devoutly to pay exorbitant dues to the party.

  But while the Ware Group was not primarily a Marxist study group, neither was it an espionage group, as is sometimes supposed. To my personal knowledge, at least eight members of the Group were sooner or later involved with a Soviet espionage apparatus as members or helpers. (Later on, several members graduated into Elizabeth Bentley’s espionage apparatus.) It is also highly probable that some members of the Group transmitted to the Communist Party Government documents, not privileged, but not intended for the party. For it is axiomatic that any Communist anywhere will always steal for the party anything that can possibly be of interest or use to it. I know, too, that a kind of Communist Kiplinger letter was sent weekly to the Communist Party by a Communist once highly placed in the Treasury Department. Nevertheless, in the technical sense, the Ware Group was not primarily an espionage group.

  Its functions, if less sensational, were scarcely less important. They were on several levels. They involved the recruiting of new members into the underground and the staffing of Government agencies with Communist Party members (the overnight ease with which the Communist Party later on placed me in the Government, as I have described in Part I of this book, shows how it had streamlined that operation).

  Those were more or less routine functions. The real power of the Group lay at much higher levels. It was a power to influence, from the most strategic positions, the policies of the United States Government, especially in the labor and welfare fields. Moreover, since one member of the Group was secretary of the National Labor Relations Board, and another member of the Group was in the top council of the C.I.O., the Communist Party was in a position to exert a millstone effect, both in favor of policies and persons it supported, and against policies and persons it disliked.

  I can imagine no better way to convey the secret power of the Communist Party in the domestic policies of the United States Government from 1933 to 1943, and later, than to list the members of the leading committee of the Ware Group and the posts that mark their progress through the Federal Government. That excludes the contributing efforts of all other members of the Group whose names and activities, with three or four notable exceptions, are not known to me.

  The leading committee of the Ware Group included:

  Nathan Witt

  August, 1933, through February, 1934—attorney on the staff of the A.A.A.

  1934—One of the four members of the Legal Staff of the Labor Relations Board, established under the N.R.A.

  July, 1935—Transferred to the Legal Staff of the National Labor Relations Board.

  December, 1935, through November, 1937—Assistant General Counsel of the National Labor Relations Board.

  .November, 1937, through December, 1940—Secretary of the National Labor Relations Board.

  Lee Pressman

  1933—Assistant General Counsel of the A.A.A.

  1935—General Counsel of the Works Progress Administration and of the Resettlement Administration.

  1936 through 1948—General Counsel of the C.I.O.

  John J. Abt

  1933—Attorney for the A.A.A.

  1935—Assistant General Counsel of the Works Progress Administration.

  1936—Special counsel to the Securities and Exchange Commission (to prepare the case against the Electric Bond and Share Company).

  1936—Chief counsel to the Subcommittee on Civil Liberties Violations of the Senate Committee on Education and Labor (the LaFollette Civil Liberties Committee).

  1937—Department of Justice as a Special Assistant to the Attorney General of the United States in charge of the Trial Section.

  Charles Kramer

  1933—On the staff of the A.A.A.

  1935—On the staff of the National Youth Administration.

  1936 through 1937—On the staff of the LaFollette Subcommittee of the Senate on Civil Liberties.

  1938 through 1942—On the staff of the National Labor Relations Board.

  1942 through 1943—With the Office of Price Administration.

  In 1943—Joined the staff of the Senate Committee on War Mobilization.

  1945 through 1946—On the staff of the Senate Subcommittee on Wartime Health and Education.

  Henry H. Collins, Jr.

  1933—N.R.A.

  1935—Soil Conservation Service of the Department of Agriculture.

  1938—Wage and Hour Division, Department of Labor.

  Subsequently, the House Committee on the Interstate Migration of Destitute Citizens.

  1941—The Senate Committee on Small Business.

  1942—On the staff of the Kilgore Subcommittee of the Senate Military Affairs Committee.

  Subsequently, attended School of Military Government at Charlottesville, Virginia. From there was sent overseas and spent two years in military government in England, Fra
nce and Germany.

  Entered the Army with the rank of captain and was separated , with the rank of major.

  Now a major in the United States Army Reserves. After separation from the service, spent five months with the State Department in connection with the Displaced Persons Program. Thereafter, spent six months with the Inter-Governmental Committee on Refugees to South American Countries; then did free-lance writing.

  1948 Executive Director of the American Russian Institute in New York City, cited by the Attorney General as a Communist front organization.

  Victor Perlo

  1933 through 1935—N.R.A.

  1935 through 1937—Home Owners Loan Corporation.

  1937 through 1939—Brookings Institution.

  1940 through 1941—With the Commerce Department as a special agent and senior economic analyst. Thereafter, joined O.P.A. as Chief of the Statistical Analysis Branch of the Research Division.

  February, 1943—Joined War Production Board and handled problems relating to military aircraft production.

  December, 1945—Joined the Treasury Department, Monetary Branch, where he remained for 1½ years.

  Alger Hiss was also a member of the leading committee before his separation from the Ware Group.

  For a long time, the fact that I had ever been inside the Collins apartment rested only on my unsupported word. But at a late stage of the Hiss Case, perhaps in an unguarded moment, more probably with some idea of bolstering Hiss’s identification of me as “George Crosley,” Henry Collins one night admitted to special agents of the F.B.I. that he had known me (as George Crosley, which is not true), and that I had been at his apartment (which is tiue). In Collins’ version, I had been there only “for cocktails.”