Witness

by Whittaker Chambers

Due to Carpenter’s special feelings, I never knew any of his three contacts in the way in which I knew Alger Hiss or Harry White. I met them from time to time, especially at first, chiefly to give them a sense of belonging to a new apparatus. One was never at any time more than a superfluous connection. The other, Abel Gross, was a much more mature character, quiet, observant, taciturn and solid. He was a chemist or a physicist.

  Wadleigh seemed to me one of the oddest people I ever knew. He was an Oxford man. He always went bareheaded on principle and he affected a careful disorder in his dress. After some argument, Carpenter finally prevailed upon him to buy a hat, but he seldom wore it. My recollection of him is as very youthful-looking, with distracted hair and thick-lensed glasses. He was both highly sensitive and informed and, as time was to show, courageous. As sometimes happens with rather owlish young men, there was a puckish streak in him too. I think that nothing sums up that side of Wadleigh quite so well as a name he took during the second Hiss trial. To avoid the press, Wadleigh registered at his hotel as Jasper Q. Sprigg.

  Shortly after I met him, Wadleigh was able to transfer from the Agriculture Department to the Trade Agreements Division of the State Department. He soon brought out several small batches of documents to be photographed. For Peters had had his usual motive in arranging these new connections, and he was once more stirred to photography. Abel Gross also brought out some documents from the Bureau of Standards. I must have photographed them, probably at Alger Hiss’s, for at that time the apparatus had no independent facilities for such work in Washington.

  Once more Bill showed no interest in the film. What his reasons were, he never told me. But I presently drew my own conclusions about them which I shall presently give. That was the fifth and last attempt at sporadic espionage while Bill headed the apparatus.

  XXII

  In 1935, the French police traced a post card which had been sent from Finland to Lydia Chekalova Stahl in Paris. The sender of the post card was a woman, who had recently been arrested together with the rest of a Soviet espionage apparatus, which also included Arvid Jacobson, the young Finnish-American with the missing fingers to whom I had introduced Ulrich in New York.

  Lydia Stahl, known simply as “Lydia” while she worked for a Soviet espionage group in the United States circa 1930 and perfected her knowledge of Chinese at Columbia University, was the photographer of another Soviet espionage group in Paris. In that group was Paula Levine, the tenant of The Gallery, one of the first underground meeting places I knew·in New York. She escaped when the French police swooped down and arrested, among others, Robert Gordon Switz, the young American who, unknown to me, had run the photographic workshop in the apartment of Joshua Tamer’s mother, a floor or two above The Office in Brooklyn. Many paths crossed and some ended in Paris.

  The head of the Soviet apparatus in Paris had been a neurotic Rumanian Communist. The group was filled with dissension and was on the point of inner collapse when the French police pounced. One of the most disaffected members was Robert Gordon Switz. He and his wife were placed in French prisons. For some time Switz refused to talk. Then he began to tell the French police everything that he knew.

  I assumed that Switz would henceforth be an outcast from the Communist Party. To my surprise, Bill one day instructed me to get in touch with The Bank at once and arrange to meet a relative of Switz. For Robert Gordon Switz was not the only member of his family close to the Communist Party. Then Bill gave me five hundred dollars to turn over to the relative for any legal, or other expenses that might result from Switz’s arrest.

  Since the members of the Switz family in the United States might well be under surveillance, the meeting with the relative was carefully organized. A second surprise was in store for me. To guide me to my rendezvous, Peters brought along one of the witnesses of my marriage, Comrade Grace Hutchins.

  Miss Hutchins led me to the West Side of New York, somewhere in the twenties, I believe. There, in a small park, we found Switz’s relative. I turned over the money and hastily left him.

  The Switz Case was not the only backlash of collapsing apparatuses abroad that I was to experience. Bill met me one day in great agitation. “There has been a Durchfall [an arrest],” he said. “Don has been arrested in Tokyo.” Bill instructed me to liquidate the American Feature Writers Syndicate as quickly as possible, to get everybody in the office out of town and in every way to “make it nothing.” We arranged to meet again the next day.

  Bill was unfamiliar with American tempo. I set to work at once. By the next morning, the American Feature Writers Syndicate no longer existed. The name had been removed from the office door. The stationery was hidden somewhere by Lieber, who had declared a holiday and left town.

  I was ready to report to Bill. When we met he seemed a little sheepish. “There has been a mistake in decoding,” he said. “Don was not arrested.” I asked Bill if I should put the pieces together again. He said no, that Don was about to be recalled from Tokyo in any case. There was great dissatisfaction with him.

  Don arrived in the United States a month or so later. He was a saddened man. Everything had gone wrong with the Japanese apparatus. He had had difficulty establishing contact with Hideo Noda. When they did meet, it was on the Ginza, Tokyo’s main street, and the day was the Emperor’s birthday. The city was jammed with police. As nearly as I could learn, the Japanese apparatus, which must have cost thousands of dollars to organize and maintain, had produced exactly nothing. Don had just one success to report. He had won the handball championship of Japan at the Tokyo Y.M.C.A.

  That would scarcely help him much in Moscow, where he was ordered to report at once. Again, I procured him a birth certificate from Peters, and Don secured a second passport in his new name. Then he left for Russia. He was to proceed to London where the Soviet embassy was alerted to give him a special visa for the Soviet Union. It would not show on his passport because, unlike the visas of other governments, it was not stamped there. It was stamped on a separate piece of paper.

  I never expected to see Don again alive. I do not think that he expected to see me.

  The second survivor of the Japanese debacle presently arrived in the United States, too. Hideo Noda appeared and made contact with me through a mutual friend. Bill gave me instructions and money for Noda. He was to go to France and in a hotel at Nice or Antibes simply wait until someone got in touch with him.

  I met Noda in New York at night. I felt extremely sorry for him. For the talented young Japanese seemed to me to be destroying his great gifts. I thought that he was already showing signs of disillusionment as a result of his experience in Japan. I walked with him up Fifth Avenue along the east wall of Central Park. I wanted to say something to him, but I could not risk being too explicit. We sat down on a bench.

  “Look, Ned,” I said, “Russians are a very remarkable, but a very strange people. They have great virtues, but order is not one of them. You may sit in the hotel in France for weeks and no one will come near you. You will think that you are completely forgotten. You will get desperate. Instead of doing that, why don’t you use the time you are waiting to go back to painting? That is what you were meant to do.”

  The next day Hideo Noda denounced me to the American Communist Party as a Trotskyist wrecker. Peters laughed when he told me. But I have sometimes wondered whether, before he died, Noda remembered the “Trotskyist wrecker” and his warning—if at the end, as I suspect, he knew moments of final terror not revealed in his public obituary. For Noda, though he still had many thousand miles to travel on three continents, was all the while traveling to his death.

  XXIII

  The underground worker at my level never knows where the impulses come from that shift him from one task to another. He can only guess that someone in Moscow or Paris or London has had an idea, or made a contact, or heard something that sets in motion a score of people in more than one country working at tasks whose real meaning and purpose they will probably never know.

  Bill asked
me one day what I knew about Ludwig Lore. I had been hearing the name for years. Lore had been the editor of the Volkszeitung, the very literate German Communist paper that had helped to swing me into Communism. He had been expelled from the Communist Party in 1925, a few months after I had joined it. For years, the whisper had run around the party that Lore was an enemy agent. At the time Bill spoke to me about him, Lore wrote a column called “Behind the Cables” for the New York Evening Post. It purported to give the news behind the news.

  “He can have valuable contacts,” said Bill. I knew what that meant. That meant that Bill had had instructions from “home” to get in touch with Lore. “You must meet him and talk with him,” said Bill. He added that Lore had once been connected with an apparatus, but that “something stupid” had happened. I asked how I was to get in touch with Lore. Bill screwed up his face and said, “Your problem.”

  I had never seen Lore. I did not know anyone who knew him. I asked J. Peters about arranging a contact for me with Lore. His reaction was violent. He absolutely refused to have anything to do with contacting Lore in any way. “You people know what you are doing,” he said, “but the party will not deal with Lore.” I decided that the simplest approach was the best one. I relied on Lore’s past underground experience and my own improvisation to carry me through.

  Lore was an old Bolshevik. He had been a Socialist before the Russian Revolution. In those pre-revolutionary days, he had been the friend of Trotsky, then a New York Socialist journalist. After the Revolution, Lore had managed an American speaking trip for Alexandra Kollontai, the author of Red Love, later the Soviet ambassador to Sweden. Bukharin, in his New York days, had eaten and slept in the apartment on 55th Street in Brooklyn, where Lore, his outspokenly anti-Communist wife and three wholly American sons still lived. When he was ejected from the editorship of the Volkszeitung, Lore had been brutally slandered. His wife never forgave that ordeal. But in his heart, Lore, I believe, never quite freed himself from the spell of the party, even though he was divided in his feeling about it, even though in 1938, he was afraid, with good reason, that the G.P.U. meant to take his life.

  I went to Brooklyn and rang Lore’s doorbell. On the second floor of the apartment house, a short, stout man, in his upper fifties, came into the hall to meet me. With his thick moustache and shrewd eyes, he looked like a genial Stalin. He spoke with a heavy German accent. I said: “My name is Carl. I would like to talk to you.” He led me into his office. I sat down beside his desk, which was cluttered with newspaper clippings. Lore’s eldest son, Karl, was sitting at another desk. Big aquariums, filled with all kinds of tropical fish, stood around the walls. There was a constant gurgle from the pumps aerating the water in the tanks. A gray African parrot was loose in the room and he swooped down from time to time, using his beak, to climb over Lore’s shirt and perch on his shoulder.

  “Comrade Lore,” I said, “I have come to mend a broken rope.” As I expected, Lore had seen so many of my kind. He had spent thirty years of his life in the revolutionary movement. To such a man a great many things do not have to be said. “Such strange birds as you,” says Ivanov to Rubashov in Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, “are found only in the trees of the revolution.” Lore and I understood one another at once with a birdlike intuition in which common experience took the place of explanation. An old revolutionist, especially a foiled revolutionist, if he is not embittered, is usually stirred by the sight of a younger man in whom he sees embodied his revolutionary self of years ago. In part, that is what I had counted on in going without credentials to Lore.

  Lore asked me what nationality I was. I told him that I was an American. He laughed at me. “You are not an American,” he said. He asked me whom I knew in the apparatuses, if I knew someone whom he called “Jim”—a short, dark, rough man who seemed to be a Turk. I did not know Jim. Then Lore asked me if I had known a Russian called Oskar, who spoke very fluent German and who had been killed. I suddenly realized that Lore had also worked with Herman. We talked about him for a long time. Herman-Oskar had been a constant guest in Lore’s house. As much as I disliked Herman, Lore had liked him. Our common knowledge of the murdered man was like a password. Lore accepted me as an emissary from the underground.

  He asked me to stay for lunch. I was introduced to those massive German meals. I was introduced to Lillian Lore, Ludwig’s remarkable wife, who in large part provided those meals, and, by some economic miracle, had kept that amazing household together during the long, lean years, had fed the endless procession of guests. “Die unvergessliche Lores—the unforgettable Lores,” a German friend had called them. (German was the household language. ) I have seldom seen a happy family life so explicit in the characters of all who shared it. I have never known another in which hospitality was less a rite than a reflex. Nor have I often known one where family and hospitality seemed so much the achievement of a strong, devoted woman.

  I soon came to regard the Lores’ house as a kind of second home. For Ludwig I developed an almost filial feeling as of a younger for an older revolutionist. The kindness of all the Lores to me was personal, and in spite of politics, for all the other members of the family, except Ludwig, were outspoken in their detestation of the Communist Party.

  I used to watch very carefully to see if I was followed when I visited Lore. For I could not entirely disregard the rumors about him. I did not know that at the very time I was visiting him most frequently, Lore was under surveillance. He was being watched, not by the American authorities, but by the Russian secret police. Eyes must have seen me come and go to that apartment house a number of times without knowing who I was or that I was going there to meet Lore, for there were other tenants in the house.

  One pair of those eyes had already seen Alger Hiss as a Communist in Washington. They belonged to Hede Massing, who, under instructions of her apparatus, and with the help of a telescope, was watching Lore day and night from a room that the G.P.U. had rented across the street from his apartment.

  Hede Massing could not imagine why the Russian secret police kept that watch upon Lore. I can. My first slight distrust of him passed through my mind when, after months of promising, he failed to make a single contact for me. But I explained his failure as that of a busy man who did not want to be bothered. I did not really care, for I had come to like the Lores entirely for themselves.

  It was not until much later that I became openly suspicious of Lore’s role. I discovered that he was afraid to walk alone with me on the street at night and that he was terrified to get into an automobile alone with me. Then I knew that there was something seriously amiss. But I had been out of the Communist Party six or seven years, and Lore was dead, before I discovered that the old Bolshevik, in whom, as a younger man, I respected the older revolutionist, had denounced me (around 1941) to the F.B.I. I learned it not from the F.B.I., but from another security agency of the Government.

  I respected Lore all the more for that act. My feeling for him and for all the Lores remained unchanged.

  XXIV

  My family and I lived in a kind of organized flight. For all through 1934 and 1935, regardless of what else was happening, the English apparatus was still held, theoretically, to be the first order of business, and my instructions were to keep myself in instant readiness to leave for London. That led to our housing improvisations. One of them involved the Hisses.

  During her stay at our Delaware River cottage, Priscilla Hiss and my wife worked out a new change of address for us and presented it for my consideration. The plan was that we should move into the third floor of the Hisses’ P Street house. Organizationally, it was not a good arrangement, and I have seldom heard of two families living happily under one roof. But Priscilla was generously insistent. We no longer had any furniture of our own and, in view of England, there seemed to be no point in buying any. But the English project also made the organizational question less important. With some tacit reservations, I agreed. The Hisses made the third floor of the P Street house ready
for us. When we left the Delaware River cottage, we moved in with them.

  I have been asked how it was possible for us to live with the Hisses without meeting their friends at their house. At that time the Hisses had almost no visitors. They lived almost entirely to themselves. Alger was cut off from the Ware Group, which had for, merly provided much of his social life. It was not until they moved to the 30th Street house that the Hisses really began to entertain.

  We did not remain long at P Street. There was never any unpleasantness. The Hisses were the kindest of hosts. But from the first my wife felt in the way. Our daughter required a special food which my wife prepared. She felt that that upset the routine of the kitchen and annoyed the maid. Organizationally, the arrangement seemed worse in practice than in prospect. I was relieved when my wife insisted that we find a place of our own.

  We went to Baltimore together and, in a day of searching, found an inexpensive apartment on Eutaw Place. A narrow park separated the uptown and downtown traffic on the street. My wife could sun the baby in front of our house. We rented the apartment under the name we had used before in Baltimore—Lloyd Cantwell. But we had no furniture. We bought some necessities, a bureau, a bed, a few chairs. The Hisses contributed some odd pieces—an old table that they had started to scrape, but never finished, a patched rug, a worn wing chair, a painted chest of drawers that had been Timmie Hobson’s. Some of these things they brought by car from Washington. Some they brought from Alger’s mother’s house, which was a few blocks away. I knocked together some bookcases. But J. Peters who dropped into the Eutaw Place apartment during one of his Washington trips, shook his head and said that it was too conspicuously unfurnished for an underground worker.

  One day, as my wife was walking down Eutaw Place, she met Edith, the bright young colored girl who had worked for her on St. Paul Street. That chance meeting was to have fateful meaning during the Hiss Case. Edith was delighted to be with us again. She loved our daughter and was loved by her in turn. We trusted her absolutely with the child, whom she called P.G. (for Pretty Girl). P.G. presently became Peachie, Peegee and at last Puggie, which has remained my daughter’s name in the family ever since. Edith Murray was as sensible, shrewd and fun-loving as ever. I, who cannot bear to have people other than my family in the house, loved to have Edith with us. She was part of the family.