Clearly, Bill was trying to tell me that his successor was a bad character. He could not risk saying so openly in case the note fell into the wrong hands. But there would have been no reason, of course, to warn me to “do what he tells you to do” unless Bill expected the new man to behave in such a way that I could not do what he told me to do. “You will treat him as if he was my friend.” What could that “as if” mean except that he was not Bill’s friend? The implication was that he would be no friend of mine, either. It was the first hint I had of the character of Colonel Boris Bykov.
That little effort to warn me, passed along thousands of miles of devious route by unknown hands, was the last of Bill that I would ever know. It was like a final signature hurriedly scrawled in darkness with what generous desperation we can scarcely guess at. My instinct tells me that Bill was a man, by nature too kind, too human, to have survived the Purge, and that the note he sent me was his last effort to help someone else when he knew that he could no longer help himself.
8
COLONEL BORIS BYKOV
I
A “sleeper apparatus” is an underground group whose most important duty is to do nothing at all. Its first function is to exist without detection. Any kind of action exposes a secret apparatus to the risks of detection. Therefore, a “sleeper apparatus” exists not to act. It waits for the future. It is a reserve unit which will be brought into play only when those who control it see fit, when events dictate, or when it has matured. It takes time to mature a good apparatus. Any apparatus that includes an assistant to the Assistant Secretary of State and an assistant to the Secretary of the Treasury is a “good apparatus.”
The special apparatus in Washington had been a “sleeper apparatus.” That was why Bill had kept me for the better part of three years in the capital. That is why he had listened to my reports of the growth of the apparatus like a somnolent (but vigilant ) cat. That is why he had curtly rejected Peters’ premature attempts at photography.
There is no reason to assume that the special apparatus that included Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White was the only “sleeper” in Washington even during those years. The device is standard practice. Colonel Boris Bykov, the Soviet agent whose activities I am about to report, informed me, in 1938, that I had been selected to head a second “sleeper apparatus” which would become active “only in event of war.”
Ten years later, when I was testifying before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, a journalist whose integrity I know no reason to challenge described to me in considerable detail a Soviet “sleeper apparatus” which had been organized by a member of the United States Government (he has since left it) then so highly placed that, for fear of reprisals, I have never publicly uttered his name. Fortunately, I did not need to, since the existence of the “sleeper” and the names of its personnel were known to a security agency of the Government.
It is a conservative assumption that at least one “sleeper apparatus” exists in the United States at present. It is waiting for the time when orders reach it to pass from inactivity to active espionage.
For the special Washington apparatus that time came in 1936.
II
It came at the end of a weeping autumn day. J. Peters had walked me up Fifth Avenue. It was early evening. The rush-hour traffic was jamming Fifth Avenue and the rush-hour crowds were jamming the intersections. At 49th Street we were held up by the traffic and the crowd. Peters peered across in front of St. Patrick’s cathedral and said: “There’s our man.” Neither of us then knew any name for him. Peters, who had already been connected with him in ways I never asked about, was there to connect me with him.
He was standing at the curb with his back to the traffic, staring steadily at the sidewalk. When we came up, he did not glance at me or greet me. He looked like a short, sturdy needle-trades worker who has been dressed by a tailor, instead of by a cut-rate clothing store. His hair was red and his reddish brown eyes peered resentfully from under ginger-colored eyelashes. He thanked Peters gruffly in German and, without moving, watched him distrustfully until he had disappeared in the crowd. Then he grasped my arm, and, dragging me with him, waded into the middle of the Fifth Avenue traffic, as if our safety lay in putting its plunging perils between us and pursuit.
We charged toward Sixth Avenue much too fast to waste breath on words. On Sixth Avenue, the stranger halted a cab practically by throwing himself in front of it. As the driver waited for directions, my companion growled in German: “Tell him, ‘Drive on, drive on!’ ” After a block, my companion muttered: “Tell him, ‘Stop ! Stop!’ ” He swarmed out of the cab on the traffic side. As I paid the driver, I saw that he was on the point of asking me if his other passenger was a mental case.
We continued our flight for several blocks and plunged into a B.M.T. subway entrance. I was about to board the first train that drew in. With a murderous look, my companion dragged me back. After many furtive glances around us, we took the next train. Eventually we made our way to Columbus Circle.
I thought that our flight had gone far enough. “Tell me, just where do you want to go?” I asked in German.
“Na!” snapped my companion. “What is your name?”
I knew that he must know my name, but I answered that in the underground I was called Bob or Carl. I asked what his name was. He did not answer. Instead, he enveloped me in a sly stare and asked: “You know the Richard?” I said that I knew Richard (Robinson-Rubens).
“Too bad for you,” he said dryly. It was meant to be menacing. But since he had used “du,” which in German is used only among members of a family or by extremely close friends, it was also ridiculous, and I smiled.
That was the beginning of my acquaintance with Colonel Boris Bykov, whose behavior baffled me beyond anything I had met with even in a Russian. It was only very slowly, as we continued to rush down streets and on and off conveyances, that I realized that Bykov was frightened.
At that time, I did not know that his real name was Boris Bykov or that he was a pathological coward—that under certain unexpected pressures, or in special situations, like his arrival in a strange country whose language he could not speak, his nerves came apart in rage, fear and suspicion. Those facts, and Bykov’s name, I was to learn two years later from General Walter Krivitsky. Bykov had once been sent to assist Krivitsky in a Soviet espionage group in Fascist Italy. After a fortnight of the same kind of panic that I witnessed in New York, Bykov had to be sent back to Moscow because his flagrant terror endangered the whole apparatus.
Again, I asked Bykov what I should call him. Again, he snorted: “Na!” but added: “Call me Peter.” I said that that might cause confusion with J. Peters. Bykov stared at me angrily. He intended the confusion.
We parted without my learning anything more from him than that I must meet him next day at the Rockefeller Plaza.
III
I met him the next morning. Soon we were tearing around the lower levels of the R.C.A. Building. Bykov was in flight again. As I watched him hunch his shoulders and thrust his head forward, while the sensitive tip of his nose seemed to twitch slightly, I nicknamed him (to myself): The Weasel.
On the lower level of the R.C.A. Building, the galleries are flanked by shops retailing curios, rugs, dolls and souvenirs of New York to the tourist trade. There is usually a drift of out-of-town window shoppers around the show windows. Bykov kept nervously eyeing them. At last he jerked his head toward them and asked in a tone of unfathomable cunning: “What are they?” I did not know a German word for window shoppers, but I tried to explain what they were doing. “Nein,” said Bykov triumphantly, “Geheimpolizei—secret police.”
I saw that I had on my hands a new Herman, but one beside whom Herman no longer seemed an intermittently drunken barbarian whom the West had also taught to speak a mellow German and to play the piano. Herman at least had been fearless. Bykov was afraid, and he appeared to have no graces at all (his German was gritty and I always had difficulty in understanding
it). Moreover, by almost every word he uttered, and the tone he uttered it in, he gave me pointedly to understand that he did not trust me. Underground work cannot exist without a basic mutual trust. For a man not to be trusted in the underground is the next step to being charged with disloyalty to it. And the fact that a man is suspect destroys in advance practically any chance that he might have to establish his innocence. The walls simply cave in and the ground drops out from under his feet, for he is absolutely at the mercy of his superior. But I was no longer the novice whom Herman had so nearly demoralized. I was used to dealing with many kinds of people and to making decisions about them.
Bykov’s suspicion of me, it was soon evident, centered, at least in part, around my association with Richard. No doubt, he knew, what the world and I would shortly learn, that Moscow was about to lure Richard to Russia and execute him. In view of that fact, Bykov’s hostility to me, and his panic in dealing with me, are more understandable.
I sensed at once that I was in for trouble, though I did not understand its cause. More trouble was not long in coming, and from a quarter where I least expected it.
IV
Maxim Lieber had moved from 47th Street to 52nd Street. His apartment was still my New York headquarters and I had a key to it. I walked in one night to find that Lieber was not alone. John Sherman was with him. I was overjoyed to see Don and asked him how he had managed to get out of Russia alive. He brushed off my questions in a way that made it clear that he wanted to be alone with me. We went out together.
We had no sooner reached the street than Sherman grasped both my arms, and, in a voice shaken with emotion, said: “I will not work one more hour for those murderers!” His story has become a fairly familiar pattern since then. As soon as he reached Russia, after his recall from Japan, his passport had been taken away from him. He was completely without identification, a situation made all the worse by the fact that he had been traveling on a fraudulent passport. In effect, he was a prisoner. He was filed away in a room somewhere in Moscow, and for weeks no one came near him. He tried daily to make some official contact. No one would see him. Despair engulfed him—the despair of a man who finds himself in a hermetic trap from which there is no apparent escape, who realizes that he has given the better years of his life to an activity that he suddenly perceives to be monstrous, and who remembers that, far away and beyond communication, a wife and small child are waiting for him, and that he may not see them again.
His despair was heightened by the discovery that he was not alone. He found that there were a score of other Americans in Moscow, hopeless, wretched derelicts of Communism, who, like him, had been used and cast away, but who were not permitted to leave Russia. But Don was a courageous man (he had served in the U. S. Navy in World War I). He induced the other Americans to sign with him a petition of grievances. He made contact with Herbert, to whom he had introduced me on my first night in the underground, and tried to enlist his support. Herbert was frightened and warned Don that he would destroy himself.
Don persisted. He presented his petition to some official. Interrogations about his loyalty began at once. Don was questioned for hours. At last he was called before Colonel Uritsky, one of the top apparatus leaders. Don thought that the end had come. But he is also a man of ruses. He pretended that he had a cold and wrapped his throat in some foul-smelling ointment. After a few moments of the smell, and Don’s deliberately idiotic answers, Uritsky waved him out of the room.
There was another long official silence. Again Don demanded his passport and an exit visa. Then one day, he was summoned. His passport and visa were handed to him. He was given several thousand dollars and ordered back to the United States with instructions to organize an underground apparatus—in England. Why did the Russians let him go? I do not know the answer and neither did Don. Of course, he was an American citizen whose wife was not a hostage in Russia, but was free in the United States and capable of making protests. Perhaps the Russians put him down as a harmless crank who had years of underground work behind him and was still useful. Perhaps Herbert took his part. In almost every case where a foreign Communist has been trapped in Moscow and then set free there is some element of riddle.
Don had no intention of setting up an underground organization in England or anywhere else. He was through. He was determined at all costs to get out of the underground. But, curiously enough, his Communist faith was not impaired. Communism still seemed to him the only solution to the crisis of history. He blamed his troubles on the Russian temperament and the special evils inherent in the underground. His one desire was to return to the open Communist Party in California. He seemed to have forgotten that he had once been happy to escape from the open party into the underground.
He insisted that I cable Moscow at once, telling them of his decision and asking permission to keep the money he had in his possession. I explained that I had no way of communicating with Moscow, that I was not alone in the United States, as he seemed to suppose. There was someone else here, though I would not describe him to Don. In that case, said Don, I must take his case to the new man.
I saw that, through no act or will of mine, Don’s crisis involved me in a crisis only a little less acute than his. The fact that I must be Don’s negotiator, the very fact that I was in touch with a man who was trying to break, involved me in his defection, and the G.P.U., never noted for making fine distinctions, might very well lump us together and deal with us together. Whatever suspicions Bykov had about me, imaginary or complicated darkly by the fate of men unknown to me, must become acute, must become a certainty.
Bykov’s reaction exceeded anything I had foreseen. He simply went insane. Volleys of vituperation aimed at Don, but inevitably shared by me, were followed by spasms of distrust and naked fear. How had the Don been able to reach me? Was the Lieber an agent of the American secret police? How could I prove that he was not (“You see, you can’t prove it!”)? Had Don already gone to the police? Clearly, Bykov believed himself trapped in a nest of counter-agents of whom I was certainly one—all the more so since I often smiled at his wilder charges. There was nothing else to do.
Bykov passed several dreadful days of tantrums alternating with despair, during which we outwitted a non-existent surveillance by dizzying chases through upper Manhattan, and, incidentally, considerably enriched all forms of rapid transit. At last, Bykov, who was clearly powerless to make any decision about Don himself, received his instructions, direct from Moscow or by way of the Soviet embassy in Washington. Through me he sent them on to Don. The apparatus granted Don’s requests. He was permitted to leave the underground. He could keep whatever money he had. But he must return at once to the open Communist Party in Los Angeles. Before he left for the West Coast, he must meet with the Russian secret police in New York.
Don refused to meet with the secret police. “You must give me at least two days headway on them,” he said. He had his wife and child with him. I agreed. I stalled off Bykov by telling him that Don had not made up his mind. Then, two days after Don and his family had boarded a train for the Coast, I fired the torpedo: “Don has already gone.” There was another dramatic outburst, with Bykov stammering German in his furious, frightened voice.
At last, he insisted that I telephone a rooming house on upper Riverside Drive, where Don had been staying, to see if he had really left. I called the superintendent. There was a vaudeville scene with Bykov trying to crowd into the telephone booth with me to make sure that I asked the right questions and to try to catch the answers. I hung up and said: “Don is gone.” “Das wird auch abgerechnet,” said Bykov in the quietest tone of voice I had yet heard him use. “That account will also be settled later on.”
Eventually, Don showed up in Los Angeles and Bykov reported to me almost gayly that he had returned to the open party where he could be “eingekreist und beobachtet-surrounded and watched.” Until that time, I knew, whenever Bykov glanced at me that, if Don did not show up, among the accounts to be settled ( and not mu
ch later on) would be my own. I would simply be, in one of Bykov’s favorite words, erledigt-finished.
Thus I helped out of the Soviet underground the man who had helped me into it.
I never saw Don again. When he left, he begged me to break from the apparatus with him. He was too early by more than a year. But I never quite forgot that tone, of a man at the end of all his resources and part of his illusions, in which he had said to me: “I will not work one more hour for those murderers.” Why murderers? I did not ask him. I took it for granted that Don had learned a number of things in Moscow that he did not tell me. So far he has steadfastly refused to tell them, or anything else, to anyone.
V
The Sherman incident, which was no fault of mine, was followed by another that was. Early in our acquaintance, Bykov made me recite a list of all my contacts with minute descriptions of their jobs, backgrounds, habits and a personal evaluation of each. When I reached the name of Ludwig Lore, Bykov had one of his tantrums. “How do you know the Lore?” he asked darkly. I told him. He ordered me never to see Lore again.
But, in the midst of my troubles with Bykov, the Lore household was a peaceful haven to me. I went there less often, and I always watched carefully to see if I were followed, but I still went there. In December of 1936, Lore pressed me to come to a big dinner that he was giving to celebrate the holidays. I pled that there would be too many guests. Lore insisted that they would all be “non-political,” just old friends of his; I need not worry about any of them. I still do not understand what antic mood moved him to invite me. Neither do I understand why I accepted. But in those days I was a troubled man.
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