Witness

by Whittaker Chambers

  Those were the days when we probably saw the Hisses most frequently. Sometimes Priscilla would drive over from Washington and we would meet her downtown for lunch. Often Alger would drive over to see his mother and finish the evening at Eutaw Place. In general, the Hisses arrived after Edith had gone home. But once or twice they came while she was there. We never told her their names. But from hearing us talk with them, Edith, who missed very little, took to calling Priscilla, “Miss Priscilla” or “the lady from Washington.”

  On one occasion, Priscilla Hiss and Edith spent some time alone together in the apartment. My wife was carrying our second child. She wished to go and see the same doctor in New York who had delivered our daughter. For some reason, I was away and Edith could not stay all night. We arranged with Priscilla to spend the night with our child while my wife was in New York.

  Edith was alone with the child when “Miss Priscilla” arrived and stayed until the baby was bathed and put to bed. It was while they were bathing the child together that “the lady from Washington” told Edith that she had a little boy of her own.

  One of, the incidental results of our summer on the Delaware had been Maxim Lieber’s discovery of Bucks County. Near Ferndale, in upper Bucks, he had bought a farm. He was alone in an empty house on some hundred acres. He begged us to come and share the house with him. In the spring of 1936, we moved to Lieber’s. Once more we used the Breen name, since it was under that name that I expected soon to represent Lieber in England. But just before we arrived at Ferndale, Lieber suddenly married for the second time. It was not a happy marriage and it did not last long. But it caused us quickly to look for another house of our own.

  Again, the Hisses were involved. Since we expected to be at Ferndale, they had decided to rent a summer place in Bucks County. Priscilla would spend most of her time there. Alger would drive up for week-ends, holidays and spend his vacation there. They went house hunting and discovered a “charming little stone house” near New Hope. It stood on the property of Tom Marshall at the foot of his apple orchards.

  By prearrangement, we met the Hisses at New Hope one day. We told them about our new plans to move and they suggested that the stone house, which rented for something like thirty dollars a month, would be just the thing for us. They would rent another (actually, they never did). They were so enthusiastic that we all went up to look at the stone house. We were as enthusiastic as the Hisses and rented the house out of hand. When we went back alone to take another look at our new home, the Marshalls were somewhat disturbed that the real-estate agent had rented the place to us without first consulting them, for they knew nothing about us and their own house stood just below ours. A short conversation reassured them, and it was not until 1948 that they realized that the Soviet underground had operated from their orchards.

  The stone house had been an old loom house. It was just big enough for the three of us. Its long, small-paned windows were set deep in the stone walls. There was a pleasant irregularity about the ground floor, with the little kitchen set below the one big downstairs room with its wide floor boards. The walls were cold-water-painted in a neutral cream color set off with white trim. As in many country farmhouses, there were black shields painted around the door handles so that small hands could not soil the door. The effect was a Quaker tranquillity, a basic tone style of such simplicity and dignity that since then we have used it exclusively wherever we have lived.

  The front windows of the stone house looked out to big maples and a woods beyond which the orchards swept up the hill. The back windows looked out across a long garden of bee balm and sweet William to sloping farm lands. The seclusion was deep. It touched us all, even the child. My daughter always made a great din in the early morning, shaking the bars of her crib, like a young orangutan, and shouting: “Ya! Ya! Ya!” One morning she was so quiet that my wife and I went to investigate. The child did not hear us even when we entered the room. She was standing upright in her crib, motionless and completely silent. She was watching a hen pheasant pick its fastidious way across the lawn.

  The Marshalls were completely friendly. They were an old county family. They read the latest books and had something to do with a summer theater north of New Hope. But Tom Marshall was an outdoor man who spent most of his time in work clothes in his orchards. Mary Marshall was a big, forthright, sensible, wonderfully relaxed woman. We took a great liking to them, which lasted in memory through all the years that we have not seen them. Similarly my daughter remembers Charlie Marshall, their very self-reliant son, a boy about her own age. The two children played happily through many summer days.

  While we were living at the stone house, our second child was born. For that event, I again rented my friend Meyer Schapiro’s Greenwich Village house for two weeks. I took my daughter there and left her in Grace Lumpkin’s care while I got my wife to the Booth Memorial Hospital. It was another long and terrible birth.

  Through her fog of anaesthetic, sickness and pain, my wife managed to whisper to me in the morning how happy she was that she had given me a son. But this time she did not urge me to look at the baby, who had been taken with instruments. She warned me not to be shocked. John Chambers, when I finally saw him, was completely unlike his sister at the same age. He was wrinkled and red and hideous. The instruments had sloped in one side of his head. The nurse assured me that it would grow back to the usual shape, and so it did, very quickly. But I did not venture to look at my son again until I was driving my wife back to New Hope. Then I parked in a quiet spot and gingerly lifted the blanket from the basket in which my son was sleeping on the back seat of the car. I hastily dropped it again. Nature has compensated John Chambers for his initial rough handling by man. Together with a very satisfactory set of features he has inherited his mother’s character, gentle, generous, courageous.

  Our family was once more knit together at the stone house. At Christmas, 1936, the Communist Party first relaxed the bans against the Christmas spirit. “Father Frost,” the Soviet Santa Claus, made his appearance on the streets of Moscow. Christmas had always been our one great holiday when I was a boy, and I determined to take advantage of the new Communist attitude. I drove up to Lynbrook and brought my mother down to spend the holiday with us at the stone house. She loved and was loved by my wife. With her grandchildren around her, the grief of the past began to thaw away, and all of us felt the continuity of the generations. Thereafter, my mother and I grew closer and closer together, despite her hatred of Communism and all its works.

  In retrospect, it is clear that our life in the stone house had influences on us which, at the time, and even much later, we did not realize. I suspect that in that simple, beautiful and tranquil haven, and from the warm neighborliness of the Marshalls, a subtle chemistry began its work, which if it were possible to trace it, would be found to have played an invisible part in my break with Communism. The long ordeal of that break was to begin not many months after the early spring of 1937, when with real grief, we left the little stone house forever, and, with the snow still on the ground, I headed my family once more for Baltimore. I had rented a house on Auchentoroly Terrace, opposite that Druid Hill Park, where, as he once told me, Alger Hiss, when he was a boy, had bottled spring water to sell to the neighbors.

  XXV

  The last debris of Don’s Japanese apparatus drifted into New York. Keith arrived, trailing two or three others until then unknown to me. One of them was a former Italian naval officer, a Communist who had been training himself as a short-wave radio operator with the idea of joining Don in Tokyo. His wife had been studying photography so that she could also serve with Don. Vaguely I remember meeting the Italian, though I cannot recall his face or his wife’s. I should never have recollected him but for Keith’s testimony about him. It was Keith, too, who recollected that he had brought back the money belt which I had given him in San Francisco. In it was still two thousand dollars. He had counted it out, he said, in my presence in the apartment of an underground worker named Paul, a li
terary agent. The apartment was between Broadway and Fifth Avenue in the forties. Obviously, the literary agent was Maxim Lieber. But until then, I had no recollection of the return of the money and had even forgotten that Lieber’s underground pseudonym was Paul, though I recognized it as soon as I heard it.

  I do not remember whether or not Bill was still in New York when Keith returned from the West Coast. In any case, he must have left soon after. Nor do I recollect the details of our parting, except that he assured me that we would soon meet again in London. I never saw Bill again.

  It was the summer of 1936. Dr. Philip Rosenbliett left about the same time as Bill. His daughter had at last died of her lingering illness. In a few weeks, I saw The Doctor change from a robust man to a grief-stricken, gray-faced, almost voiceless, doddering skeleton from whom his clothes now hung in loose folds. The Doctor’s office equipment, including the chair where so many curious patients had sat without benefit of dentistry, was shipped to the Soviet Union.

  A period began in which I was left alone, in touch chiefly with Peters and Keith, who remained in New York. My only instructions were to hold together the Washington group and wait for orders to proceed to England. By then, I had begun to suspect that the English apparatus would never be organized.

  During that period of waiting, I brushed another man’s disaster.

  XXVI

  Bill had not been gone long when Peters brought me word that Richard wanted to see me. Richard was the head of a Soviet passport apparatus with which Peters did a prosperous business. Peters brought Richard and me together at the Rockefeller Plaza, just below what would later be my office at Time magazine.

  Richard was a cat-faced Lett with an appropriately purring voice. He had a message, for me about “the tomato-juice people.” The message concerned my old acquaintance, Joshua Tamer, the proprietor of The Office and former employe of a big steel company, then a fugitive in the Soviet Union. He had had difficulty in getting his furniture shipped to Russia. Richard wanted me to report something about the status of the furniture (I believe that it was then in the hands of the Amtorg) to one of Tamer’s relatives.

  The Tamers were known as “the tomato-juice people” because of an unfortunate remark of Rose Tamer’s. After her husband’s flight to Russia, she and their baby had followed by another route. She had hesitated to go because, she said, she was afraid that in Moscow she could not get tomato juice for her little girl. That thought, in the moment of flight, struck the comrades as hilariously funny and soon spread through the international underground.

  I met Richard once or twice afterwards, simply because Peters had business with him and I was seeing a good deal of Peters. Richard, Peters explained to me, was not a happy man. The chief of his international apparatus was known as “Starik” (Russian for Old Man). Starik was also a Lett and Richard’s protector. Starik had just been removed and Richard was afraid that he had been liqui. dated (the purge was on). I did not know that Starik was really General Berzin, and that he was not only Richard’s international chief, but mine. Nor did I guess that Starik’s removal might have had something to do with the strange, delayed history of the English apparatus. Least of all did I realize that Starik’s removal was a stride in Stalin’s consolidation of power and that it meant that the G.P.U. had moved in on the Military Intelligence, most of whose chiefs were about to be secretly shot, together with much of its personnel, including Richard.

  One day, Peters reported that Richard was much cheered up. The rumors were false. Starik had not been removed. Richard had received a friendly message from him, pointing out that Richard had been away from “home” a long time, that he deserved a rest and Inviting him back for the celebration ( Russians are epicures of a grim irony) of the October Revolution. The letter was genuine, for Richard had recognized Starik’s signature. With Peters’ help, Richard began to prepare to return to Moscow.

  First, Richard and his American wife procured two sets of fraudulent passports. The first set was actually taken out for an unknown young man and woman in the name of Robinson. The second set was taken out for Richard and his American wife in the name of Rubens. Both sets of passports were applied for the same day, but not, as is customary, at the passport bureau in downtown New York. Until late in 1937, the County Clerk’s office of New York had the right to receive passport applications. Richard applied for both passports through the County Clerk’s office where three contacts of J. Peters’ underground apparatus were employed. After Richard received the passport in the Robinson name, he had the Robinson pictures replaced by pictures of himself and his wife. But the application filed in the State Department still bore the Robinson pictures. Hence the first confusion about the identity of the users when in the fall of 1936 Richard’s return to Russia became the international mystery known as the Robinson-Rubens case.

  With the Robinson passports, Richard and his wife set sail for Naples on an Italian steamship. Peters told me when Richard left After that there was silence.

  Then, one autumn day, there walked into Spasso House, the American embassy in Moscow, a frightened woman, who claimed that she was an American citizen whose name was Rubens. She said that she had a small daughter in the United States. Her husband had disappeared and she wanted help in locating him. She was, of course, Richard’s American wife. The embassy officials took her address and she left.

  She had not been gone long before the embassy people began to think that perhaps it had been imprudent to let Mrs. Rubens return to her hotel. Two or three of them went after her. At the hotel, they asked for Mrs. Rubens. The manager had never heard the name. She had never lived there. “But we know she is here,” said the embassy officials, “we know her room number.” “You are mistaken,” said the manager. The Americans insisted on going to her room. There was no one in it. In fact, there was nothing in it. For, as they climbed the stairs, the embassy officials had met porters carrying down the furniture (possibly in case Mrs. Rubens had concealed a message in it).

  It was some time before the American embassy located Mrs. Rubens. She was in the Butirki prison. An interview was arranged with her in the presence of a G.P.U. officer. Mrs. Rubens thanked the embassy officials for their interest and said that she was happy in prison and did not wish them to make any efforts on her behalf. The Soviet Government presently announced that Mrs. Rubens had decided to remain in Russia and become a Soviet citizen.

  In West Palm Beach, Mrs. Rubens’ mother received an unexpected visitor. He was a rather well-known American theologian, who is even better known as a fellow traveler of the Communist Party. He urged Mrs. Rubens’ mother not to make any shrill outcries about her daughter. He was, he said, about to visit the Soviet Union and would personally intercede for Mrs. Rubens with Stalin.

  Little more was ever heard again of Richard Robinson-Rubens, except for that State Department message in Alger Hiss’s handwriting, which was one of the exhibits at the Hiss trials. But neither Peters nor I had any doubt as to what had happened to Peters’ former passport purchaser. As Colonel Boris Bykov, whom I would soon meet, was to say to me in another connection: “You are right. You can be absolutely sure that our Bukharin is dead.”

  “Starik has been removed,” Peters said to me one day. “Yes,” I said, “Starik’s signature was a forgery or was written under pressure. And Richard knew it.” From the first, I had been puzzled as to why an underground worker of Richard’s experience would make two passport applications in one day, in an unusual way in an unusual place. I also wondered why he would take his American wife to Moscow during the Purge. I decided presently that he had taken her on purpose so that she might intercede for him if necessary. And he had left that curiously open trail (there were other easily followed clues also) so that it would be discovered. How desperate he must have been ! And, in returning to Moscow, what a razor’s edge he elected to walk on.

  I had never liked Richard. Yet it is all but impossible to have any man whom you have talked with, walked with, lunched with, shot down
beside you, without feeling a small, very definite jolt.

  XXVII

  Between Bill’s departure in the summer and Colonel Bykov’s arrival in the fall of 1936, only two things of any moment happened.

  Following Bill’s last instructions, I secured an American passport in the name of David Breen which was mailed to Lieber’s New York office. Later, Lieber accompanied me to the British consul general’s office in New York, where he introduced me as his future representative in London and requested a visa for me.

  Then one day, by way of Richard through Peters, I received a tiny penciled note. It was from Bill. Where it came from I could not tell, but I supposed that it came from Moscow. Underground workers were strictly forbidden to carry on personal correspondence, especially about apparatus affairs. I burned the note at once. As nearly as I can recall it, it said: “You will meet a man. You will do what he tells you to do. You will treat him as if he was my friend.”

  I knew that it was a warning and that only a sense of great urgency could have led Bill to send it. I knew that Bill meant me to read between the lines. That kind of double-talking letter, almost incredible to the rest of the world, is commonplace to underground Communists.