That simplicity is inseparable from a gentleness of character, though life and history may wrench and pervert it almost past recognition. In the Hisses, it found one expression in an absorption in nature, especially in the life of birds. When I first knew them, the Hisses used to rise at dawn on Sunday and take long rambles out along the Potomac River, around Glen Echo and Great Falls. I remember vividly how Alger came in one morning and announced with an excitement that he almost never showed that for the first time he had seen a prothonotary warbler.
They gave up bird walking in 1934. But even in the days of his greatest underground activity, Alger Hiss talked constantly about birds with an enthusiasm that he showed for little else. It was an enthusiasm that I shared with the Hisses, though I had passed the point where identifying birds interested me very much.
No account of our friendship would be complete without mention of the continual kindnesses of the Hisses to us, their untiring solicitude for my wife and child, the inconvenience that they voluntarily put themselves to to help us. In late years, I have sometimes wondered how much of Hiss’s solicitude was for ourselves (as we then supposed) and how much was for Carl as the representative of the Communist Party. No doubt, he would prefer to believe that it was the latter. But I remember the simple pleasure that all of us took simply in being together, and I prefer to believe still that it was the former.
The outstanding fact about Alger Hiss was an unvarying mildness, a deep considerateness and gracious patience that seemed proof against any of the ordinary exasperations of work and fatigue or the annoyances of family or personal relations. Only very rarely did a streak of wholly incongruous cruelty crop out. From the first, my wife and I had been charmed by Baltimore and sometimes said so. “Baltimore,” Alger once answered, “is the only city in the country so backward that it still lights its streets by gas. It’s a city of dying old men and women.” He was so unnecessarily savage that, by way of easing matters, I said: “They seem to be pleasant and harmless old people.” “Yes,” he said, “the horrible old women of Baltimore!” It was the tone with which the words were uttered and the dry laugh that followed them that made me feel that I had touched depths which I had not suspected. The same strange savagery cropped out in a conversation about Franklin Roosevelt. Hiss’s contempt for Franklin Roosevelt as a dabbler in revolution who understood neither revolution nor history was profound. It was the common view of Roosevelt among Communists, which I shared with the rest. But Alger expressed it not only in political terms. He startled me, and deeply shocked my wife, by the obvious pleasure he took in the most simple and brutal references to the President’s physical condition as a symbol of the middle-class breakdown.
Only once, did that deeply hidden streak ever touch me. It came out in connection with the poor condition of my teeth. Several times Alger had urged me tactfully to visit a dentist. Then one night, during the last year that I knew him, he evidently decided to be firm with me. He gave me a little lecture, the burden of which was that my teeth were not a personal matter, but, as identifying marks, concerned everybody’s safety. My missing incisor must be replaced. He was oddly waspish, mincing no words. It was completely unlike him. I saw that I had touched something very important—his fastidiousness. The tone surprised, but the action did not offend me. For, toward the Hisses, we felt a tenderness, spontaneous and unquestioning, that is felt for one another by members of an unusually happy family. Nothing in their manner led us to suppose that they did not share the same feeling about us.
X
The English project slowly lost its urgency. Such ups and downs are a regular part of underground projects. In time, most people learn to accept the pattern without seeking to know the cause. When I grasped the meaning of Bill’s tapering interest in the English apparatus, conveyed in the grimaces and eloquent little noises that made up half his speech, I said, “So the English business is dead.” Bill insisted that the English apparatus was not dead but hinted that there were factors that I did not understand. Meanwhile, the Washington operation drifted. I was then too inexperienced to know that Moscow wanted the Washington group to drift.
One day, Bill met me, bringing with him an old acquaintance-Don—John Sherman. Sherman had been on the West Coast, he presently told me, setting up a Soviet apparatus in Los Angeles. He had driven east with his wife and child and his assistant in the California apparatus, a young Communist to whom he had given the pseudonym of “Pete.” The West Coast apparatus, for reasons that belonged to the order of things that I did not understand, and do not now understand, had been partially disbanded.
Don was being sent to head another apparatus, elsewhere. In that connection he had a problem for me to solve. Bill’s orders to me were to do everything possible to help Don. For some time, that was my chief concern and I was still working on the debris of Don’s problem, washed in by the underground tides, after Bill had gone out of my life and John Sherman had broken with the Soviet apparatus.
Don’s problem was simple and formidable. His instructions from Moscow were to organize a Soviet espionage apparatus in Japan. He was to travel there as the representative of an American business firm. He needed the usual legitimizing luggage: papers for a fraudulent passport, a business “cover.” Don did not ask me to set up a courier system on the Nippon Yusen Kaisha, though I know that he was considering that problem. But he asked me for something just as difficult. He asked me to secure for him an assistant to work with him in Japan.
The specifications were somewhat staggering. The assistant must be a Japanese who was an American citizen. He must be a Communist Party member. He must have connections in the top governing circles in Japan. Don also had two other chores for me. He wanted legitimate credentials that would enable him to travel without arousing suspicion in Manchukuo. He wanted a direct contact with the Chinese Communist forces, which were still restricted to the Soviet area of Kiangsi province, although about the very time that Don and I were discussing that point, Mao Tse-tung was in Moscow where he had been called so that Stalin in person could give the great “agrarian liberal” the order to move the entire Communist population of Kiangsi several thousand miles to Yenan.
As usual, the birth certificate was the simplest part of the problem. J. Peters quickly provided one in the name of Charles F. Chase. On this paper Don procured a passport.
Business “cover” for an American going to Japan was more difficult to provide, and had to be even more flawless than a “cover” for an American going to England. For a time we got nowhere. Then Bill suggested that, since the English project was merely rocking along at the moment, and in any case my problem in England was much easier to solve than Don’s in Japan, perhaps I should relinquish Lieber to Don as a “cover.”
For that purpose, I introduced Don and Paul. Lieber pointed out the obvious fact that his literary relations with Japan were practically non-existent and that for him to open an office in Tokyo would be, to say the least of it, odd. Lieber was much upset at the idea of losing his London office. Don was able to solve his problem and satisfy Lieber at one stroke. He proposed that we organize a news syndicate under Lieber’s auspices. It would be financed by the underground. The correspondents would be Soviet agents, though for purposes of verisimilitude and confusion there should be some who were not Communists and did not, in fact, know what it was all about. The correspondents, instead of concentrating on spot news, would file feature stories from various of the world’s trouble centers, reporting the background of the news. Lieber would be the head of the syndicate and handle the New York marketing and other business. His office would be the New York headquarters. Once the syndicate was a going concern there was no reason why I should not represent Lieber in London. Paul was assuaged.
In New York City, Lieber, Sherman (under the name of Charles F. Chase) and I (under the name of Lloyd Cantwell) formally filed papers establishing the American Feature Writers Syndicate. These papers are a matter of record. After I had testified to this and related matters befo
re the Grand Jury, the record was checked and my testimony confirmed.
Lieber then hurried over to the New York Evening Post and sold its publisher, David Stern, the idea of part-financing a series of articles on Japan by the Syndicate’s Tokyo correspondent, Charles F. Chase. One or two of these articles subsequently appeared in the Post. Meanwhile, the name of the Syndicate had been neatly lettered on Lieber’s door and its stationery filled his desk. Several thousand dollars of apparatus money filled his safety-deposit box, to be fed piecemeal into the Syndicate’s account, or for emergency expenses. The American Feature Writers Syndicate, one of the Tokyo branches of the Soviet Military Intelligence, was ready to operate.
Credentials for Manchukuo proved a simple matter. Among Lieber’s friends was an editor of the American Mercury (not Eugene Lyons, who was still a U.P. correspondent in Moscow). He gladly furnished a letter telling all whom it might concern that Charles F. Chase was a news gatherer for the Mercury.
The contact with the Chinese Communists seemed on the point of splendid success. Just as we were seeking it, Agnes Smedley happened into New York on her way to Russia from the Kiangsi Communist area, Shanghai and other Chinese centers where she had been active as a member of the first Soviet espionage apparatus organized in the East by Richard Sorge. Sorge, a great friend, among others, of Hede Massing, was the Communist who used his post as press attaché of the German embassy in Tokyo to organize a remarkable Soviet espionage apparatus in Japan. He was arrested in Tokyo, confessed and was executed during World War II.
I knew of Miss Smedley as the author of Daughter of Earth, a novel about her western girlhood, and as a persistent spokesman for the Chinese Communists. I asked Peters to arrange a meeting for me with her so that I could introduce a friend (Don) to her. I said that it would be unnecessary for Peters to go along (I did not want him to see Don) since I would easily recognize Miss Smedley from her pictures. I met her in an Automat on 72nd Street in New York. Peters had not told her whom she was going to meet and she was extremely surprised and distrustful at meeting a stranger. She was equally distrustful of Don. We separated without agreeing to anything, and Don never got his contact with the Chinese Communists.
But I was able to solve what seemed the most insuperable problem—the Japanese-American Communist who was connected in the highest circles in Japan. Through a non-Communist friend, I met a young Japanese who had been born in the United States. He was a member of the American Communist Party. He was also a cousin or nephew of one of the Japanese premiers—Prince Konoye, if I remember rightly. He was a young painter of exceptional promise, and one of the favorite pupils of Diego Rivera, the celebrated mural painter, formerly secretary of the Mexican Communist Party. The young man’s name was Hideo Noda. He was extremely intelligent, alert, personable and likable. I introduced him to Don, and, at a conversation in my presence, Noda readily agreed to go to Japan to work as a Soviet underground agent. Don gave Noda the underground name, “Ned.” By the end of 1934, many of the pieces in the Japanese puzzle had been moved into place. Their assembling was a much more sporadic process and took a much longer time than I have indicated here.
Before Don left for Japan (from San Francisco), he spent a night with me at my apartment in Baltimore. I had told him about the underground apparatus in Washington, with which I was in contact all the while that the Japanese underground was being organized, and especially about Alger Hiss. Don was eager to meet him. It was not strictly according to underground rules. But since Don was leaving for the Far East, there seemed no real reason against it. Besides, I thought that it would do Alger Hiss good to meet someone other than me connected with the international apparatus.
Alger was eager, too. He spent an evening with Don and me at St. Paul Street. The meeting was not a success. Don is at his worst with strangers, with whom he almost invariably becomes wary, mysterious and arch. The evening was almost as bad as my first evening with Hiss.
It was to have a curious echo years later. I had introduced Don to Alger Hiss as “Adam” (the first man in my underground experience). Don has steadfastly refused to discuss his part in these affairs. To the F.B.I. he has refused to answer questions. To the House Committee on Un-American Activities, he pled self-incrimination. But he did venture to answer one question. Asked if he had ever known Alger Hiss, he said: No, and added: “I do not believe that Alger Hiss would know me from Adam.”
XI
Before he left for Japan, Don also introduced me to someone—his West Coast assistant, Pete. Later on, Pete was for a short time my assistant in Washington, where I renamed him “Keith.” To simplify matters, I shall call him Keith henceforth. Fourteen years later, Keith’s corroboration of those parts of my experience about which he had direct personal knowledge were to be important during the Hiss Case.
Keith was a tall, young, native American of good family, rather inexperienced, but a devoted Communist. I saw no reason to meet him in the first place, and less reason after I had met him. But Don had his own cryptic reasons, connected no doubt with his Japanese plans. For though I knew a good deal about the Japanese apparatus, there was also a good deal that I did not know, and did not want to know. One thing I never knew about was Don’s courier system with the United States—he must at least have attempted to organize one. Nor did I know how Don received in Tokyo the large sums of money necessary to finance such an apparatus as his.
But about that I was presently to draw some conclusions that are not necessarily correct, but are probably not far from the facts. For later in 1934 or early in 1935, Bill instructed me to get myself a money belt. I bought one at R. H. Macy and Company in New York—a rayon belt with many little snap pockets rubber-lined against sweat. I gave it to Bill who returned it to me neatly packaged. By then it contained money, probably about ten thousand dollars in American currency, though I have no recollection of counting the money. Bill’s instructions were to put on the money belt and not to take it off until I had delivered it to Keith in San Francisco. Separately, Bill gave me money for first-class fare to and from San Francisco and New York, and for other expenses. I took the Twentieth Century from New York.
The rubber lining of the money belt acted as insulation. It was hot and stiff with the bills packed in its pockets, and, of course, I slept with it on. But the trip proved otherwise pleasant. For outside Chicago, I became aware that there was someone I knew on the train. In the club car with me was Comrade Charles Kramer of the Ware Group who was traveling (to Omaha, I believe) on Government business. As the snow-covered prairie drifted past, we discussed the Russian Revolution, Communism and related matters. He was much excited at the mysterious circumstances of our meeting. He was prepared to believe that the world revolution was at hand when we crossed the frozen Platte River, and I pointed out to him, carved in four-foot letters on the icy surface, a rousing slogan: “Long Live Socialism!” I think that for a moment he believed that I had arranged it on purpose, for part of a growing illusion among the Washington Communists was that Carl could arrange almost anything.
In San Francisco, I stopped at the Golden Gate Y.M.C.A. and waited in my room for Keith to contact me. He reached me about noon the next day. How he knew where to find me, I have forgotten. It is his recollection that he was informed through a cover address in San Francisco.
All afternoon, Keith drove me in his car around San Francisco. In the evening, he took me to the house of the “Old Man.” The “Old Man” is a California businessman and lifelong Communist of Russian birth, very active in party affairs on the West Coast. At the time I met him, he was also connected with my old comrade from the Daily Worker, Harrison George, who was then heading the West Coast office of the Pan-Pacific Trade Union Secretariat, an international Communist organization, which among other activities, was running couriers on the ships to Australia, Japan and Asiatic mainland ports. The “Old Man” was almost certainly involved in Don’s Japanese operation.
To him or Keith, I turned over the money belt. I have always assumed t
hat the greater part of the money went by some secret route to Don in Japan, though I have no proof of this. Some of it, however, remained in Keith’s hands, for he later brought me back the money belt with about two thousand dollars in it, which he returned to me in New York.
A few days after delivering the money belt in San Francisco, I was able to report to Bill that I had completed my assignment:
XII
J. Peters, whom I was seeing regularly, gave the Washington activity a sudden new turn. I have already mentioned his plans for financing the American Communist underground with the help of the Russians. One day, by way of broaching this idea, he observed that, until the first Five-Year Plan began in the Soviet Union (circa 1929), the Communist International had subsidized the American Communist Party. During the rigors of the Five-Year Plan, that subsidy had been stopped, and the American Communist Party had been ordered to support itself. “The beggars of the Machavaya,” as Comrade Stalin sometimes graciously called the representatives of the foreign Communist parties (after the Moscow address of the 370 Witness Communist International), would now have to beg elsewhere. This, said Peters, had worked great hardships. Therefore, he had contrived a plan whereby the Russian Communists might continue to finance the American Communist Party—for services rendered. Through the Ware Group and others, Peters had access to Government documents. He proposed to connect me with the right people who would turn such documents over to me. Peters would provide me with a Leica camera. I would copy the documents, return them to whomever gave them to me and turn the copies over to Bill. If he were interested, Bill would pay for them. Peters appealed to me, as an American Communist, to co-operate.
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