Witness

by Whittaker Chambers

  I went to the Lores’ early. The first guest to arrive was Max Nomad, the author, a militant anti-Communist, to whom Lore introduced me simply as Carl. Nomad looked me up and down, turned away and asked: “How long is it, Ludwig, since you entertain the G.P.U. in your house?” Worse was to follow. Alphonse Goldschmitt, the economist, arrived. Again, I was introduced as Carl. It was then that Dr. Goldschmitt fixed me sternly and asked: “Why do you call yourself ‘Carl’? I knew you in Moscow in 1932. You are Colonel Dietrich of the General Staff.” There was some natural stir among the guests, of whom there were several others, including a former editor of the Berliner Tageblatt, and a little round woman who played the harpsichord. After that, it was a somewhat strained evening, with everyone uncomfortably eyeing everybody else to try to guess what apparatus he belonged to—not without reason I was soon to learn.

  I left before the rest Lore accompanied me into the hall and apologized. “I am so sorry,” he said. “It was impermissible of Dr. Goldschmitt to embarrass you by telling your name in front of everybody.” I said that Dr. Goldschmitt certainly had a remarkable memory.

  The next time I met Bykov, he greeted me by saying: “Du bist bei dem Lore gewesen—you’ve seen Lore.” I said, yes, that I had seen Lore. Bykov was surprisingly relaxed. “He is a Trotskyist, isn’t he?” he asked in a purring voice. I said that Lore was an old and tired revolutionist who had become some kind of liberal. “He is a Trotskyist,” said Bykov flatly.

  The Great Purge was on. Trotskyists were now held to be “diversionist mad dogs and counterrevolutionary wreckers.” The implication was that, if Lore was a Trotskyist, and I had visited him, especially against orders, then I must also be a counterrevolutionist (like Don, Bykov was ahead of time). I saw that his gloating pleasure at having caught me was greater for once than his fear.

  I never knew which of my fellow guests had been the other underground worker who reported to Bykov that I had sat with him at Lore’s table.

  VI

  Bykov’s friendly moods were much harder to bear than his routine rages. Their purposes were so transparent and their hypocrisy so painful. For he alternated calculated roughness with calculated chumminess, according to a pattern practiced by police the world over. But, like almost everything else, Bykov had simply memorized the rules. He applied them by formula without skill or intuition. When he had decided to be charming, he would veil his reddish eyes with his reddish lashes and, instead of glaring sullenly, would peer furtively from under them. In a burst of uncomfortable comradeship, he would grasp my arm in a grip that was as comradely as if he were marching me to a chopping block. He would soften his badgering voice to a mere banter or wheedle.

  The first time that I experienced this startling transformation amidst the storms of our early acquaintanceship, Bykov hooked his arm in mine and said with alarming coziness: “Tell me about the Quellen.” The image that always came into my mind when I heard that German word was a spring of water welling from the ground. “What Quellen?” I asked. “What Quellen!” Bykov echoed derisively, stopping and gesturing. “Die Quellen, die Quellen!” I turned the word into French to see if that would widen its meaning: die Quellen—les sources. Then I understood. We had never before called Alger Hiss and the others “sources.”

  VII

  I described the sources. Bykov put me through a long cross-examination about them. The main theme, repeated in endless variations, was always the same: “Are they secret police agents? How do you know they are not?” Obviously, if I knew, they could no longer be secret police agents. Therefore, the question was always unanswerable, and its pointlessness, iterated, sometimes for hours, exhausted me physically. But I sensed that cross-examination was one of Bykov’s intellectual pleasures. In time, I came to think that it was his only one. I suspected that he was a former G.P.U. examiner.

  From Bykov’s questions, it was clear that he had already studied some report on the Washington sources and had memorized it minutely. He was most interested in Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White, least interested in Wadleigh and Abel Gross. But whenever I suggested that we drop Wadleigh and Gross to make the apparatus more compact and more secure, he would not hear of it.

  “What is Hiss’s profession?” he asked me at one point. I said that Alger Hiss was a lawyer (in German, Advokat). “That is right,” he said, as if checking it against his own information. “Henceforth, we will call Hiss ‘Der Advokat.’”

  The Christmas holidays were not far off. “What shall we give the sources?” Bykov asked. “Shall we give them a big sum of money?”

  I was horrified. “Money!” I said. “They would be outraged. You don’t understand. They are Communists on principle. If you offer them money, they will never trust you again. They will do nothing for you.”

  “All right, so they are Communists,” he said, “but it is you, Bob, who do not understand.” He spoke with a patient cynicism that pled with my stupidity, which baffled him. “Siehst du, Bob,” he said, “wer auszahlt ist der Meister, und wer Geld nimmt muss auch etwas geben —who pays is boss, and who takes money must also give something.” In those words, as if he stood beside me, I can still hear clearly the ring of Bykov’s voice. He is saying: Communism has turned to corrupting itself.

  Something in me more lucid than mind knew that I had reached the end of an experience, which was not only my experience. Out of that vision of Almighty Man that we call Communism and that agony of souls and bodies that we call the revolution of the 20th century was left that pinch of irreducible dust: “Who pays is boss, and who takes money must also give something.” It might stand as the motto of every welfare philosophy. I sensed that those rags were truth because they were rags. They pretended nothing, for they had lost the knowledge that there is anything but rags. They concealed nothing, for they had lost the distinction between good and evil. The innocence of their shamelessness was its pathos. Henceforth, I knew that I was in the pit, though my mind would seek to elude the knowledge for many months.

  I said to Bykov hopelessly: “You will lose every one of them.”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “Then we must give them some costly present,” he said, “so that they will know that they are dealing with big, important people. You will buy four rugs, big, expensive rugs. You will give White, Silverman, Wadleigh and Der Advokat each one a rug. You will tell them that it is a gift from the Soviet people in gratitude for their help.”

  I said: “You know, these are good people, but they are not stupid people.”

  “Stupid!” he snapped. “Who’s stupid? Porca madonna!” It was Bykov’s invariable blasphemy, apparently the one thing that he had learned during his brief stay in Italy. I had insulted him. In time, I discovered that the only way to get along with him was to insult him. Every time he made me insult him, I disliked him more because he made me dislike myself more. On the other hand, he respected me more.

  Before we separated, Bykov gave me a thousand dollars, or close to a thousand dollars, to buy the four rugs.

  VIII

  Eleven years later, during the Hiss Case, Bykov’s “costly presents” became important in a way that he could never have foreseen. For they were tangible evidence. They still existed. They established a material link between me and the four members of the apparatus.

  I did not buy the rugs myself. I knew nothing about Oriental rugs. I went to my old college friend, Meyer Schapiro. His knowledge was great and his taste flawless. Without telling him my purpose, I asked him if he would select and buy for me four Oriental rugs, and have them shipped to Washington. I gave him the money and George Silverman’s address.

  Schapiro did not ask me why I wanted the rugs. Nor did I ask him, when he presently told me that he had shipped them, where he had bought them. No experienced underground worker would want to know such a detail.

  The rugs arrived in Washington. I had already carried out Bykov’s instructions. I had given White, Silverman and Hiss Bykov’s message from the grateful Soviet people. To my surprise, I s
aw that in the case of Silverman and White, Bykov had been right and I was wrong. They were clearly impressed. I was not quite sure what Alger Hiss thought For the first time, I felt a riffle of disgust at my comrades, that is to say, at myself. I was one of them.

  Silverman delivered Harry White’s rug to him.

  Years later, a member of Elizabeth Bentley’s apparatus, with which Harry White was then working, visited his home. She noticed a handsome Oriental on the floor and said, “Why, that looks like one of those Soviet rugs” (presumably there had been other gifts from the grateful Soviet people). There was an awkward silence during which White became very nervous. When his friend next visited White, the rug was no longer on the floor.

  The delivery of Alger Hiss’s rug presented a special problem. I solved it by having Silverman drive his car with Alger’s rug in it and park at night behind a restaurant on the Baltimore turnpike, called The Yacht, or some such nautical name, where Hiss and I sometimes had coffee. A few minutes later, I drove up with Alger in his car. The headlights were turned off in both cars, which were parked so that, in the dark, neither Hiss nor Silverman could see each other. I got out and carried the rug from Silverman’s car to Hiss’s, then he and I drove off.

  All the other recipients were delighted with their “costly presents.” But I never felt that Alger was. His was a very handsome red rug, but a little vivid. For a long time, he kept it roped up in a closet at the front of the basement dining room of the 30th Street house. In the Department of Justice Building in Washington, in 1949, I asked Claudia Catlett, one of Hiss’s maids, who testified for him at both trials, if she remembered the rug in the closet. “Oh, yes,” she said in the presence of several F.B.I. agents. Mrs. Hiss had once unrolled the rug and showed it to her, and Claudia Catlett had declared that it was a shame to keep such a handsome rug in a closet.

  I believe that I had David Carpenter announce the coming of his rug to Julian Wadleigh. Probably Carpenter delivered it, for I have no recollection of how that was done. Indeed, for a long time, I remembered only three rugs and so testified. But since Meyer Schapiro was never at any time a Communist, and lacked the conspiratorial flair, he had kept the receipt for the rugs during all those years, so that there was documentary proof that there had been four of them.

  Just before Alger Hiss was indicted, I have been told, George Silverman who, until then, had pled self-incrimination to practically all questions, suddenly admitted to the Grand Jury that he had had the rugs in his house. So far as I know, he never admitted anything else, and he invented a story, according to which, if I remember rightly, he and I had bought the rugs on speculation. But his sudden admission was startling enough in itself. In 1948, Julian Wadleigh still had his rug.

  Alger Hiss had already testified that I once gave him a rug—at an earlier date and as “payment in kind” for “unpaid rent” on his 28th Street apartment. The value of the rug, incidentally, would have been more than the amount of the alleged rent. Hiss never produced the rug, though he admitted that it was still in his possession.

  The date on Meyer Schapiro’s receipt (late December 1936), together with the time it would have taken to ship the rugs to Wash ington, pretty well established the fact that Alger Hiss had known me in 1937, part of the period during which he had denied to the Grand Jury that he had seen me.

  IX

  On the four rugs we marched straight into active espionage. Early in 1937, Bykov began a personal inspection of the sources. He was, in general, so unimpressive, his manner was so rude and his cynicism so habitual, that I was afraid that his effect on a man like Alger Hiss, whom Bykov had chosen as the first subject to be interviewed, would be little short of disastrous. At first by indirection, and then quite openly, I began to prepare Alger for a disillusionment. I warned him not to expect too much, that Bykov was by no means the best that the underground had to show, but that in him we served the party and not the man.

  Alger went to New York for the meeting. I met him by prearrangement in Manhattan, and took him to the Prospect movie theater on Ninth Street, in Brooklyn, where Bykov would meet us. Hiss and I were sitting on a bench in the mezzanine when Bykov came out of the audience. As they shook hands, Bykov smiled pleasantly, almost bashfully. Since Bykov did not trust himself to speak English, I interpreted for them.

  We left the Prospect Theater together and presently made our way to the Port Arthur restaurant in Manhattan’s Chinatown.

  Bykov had himself well in hand. There was no rudeness, no cynicism, and he had stiffened his manner with a briskness that did duty for dignity. He had decided on the historical approach. The Socialist Fatherland (Russia) was threatened, he said, with encirclement by the Fascist powers—Germany and Italy in Europe, Japan in the East. The other imperialist powers, Britain, the United States, France—were secretly abetting this encirclement, hoping that the Fascists would destroy the Soviet Union for them. This was not news to Hiss.

  But Bykov did it rather well, with flashbacks to the Allied attempts at intervention in the Russian civil war, so that the persistent character of the imperialist threat to Communism was stressed, while over the bodies of the “Fascist beasts” could be heard the thundering hoofs of the triumphant “Konarmiya”—Marshal Budenny’s “horse army” which Bykov invoked.

  Now the conflict had risen to a new plane, and the Soviet Union was threatened by a greater, more conscious coalition. It would not succeed, of course. For one thing, the Soviet Union could count on the help of the comrades abroad. There were many ways of helping. Alger Hiss could help, too, for one of the great needs was information about the Fascist plans. It was, for example, necessary to know what the American State Department knew about them. It was necessary to see the actual documents—especially those relating to Germany and the Far East.

  “Ask him,” said Bykov, “if he is prepared to help us in that way. I smiled and dutifully put Bykov’s question to Alger Hiss, who also smiled. The question had been answered long ago. The preamble was superfluous. Later, I concluded that Bykov’s method, which would have annoyed me, was effective with the others. Alger said that he was prepared to do whatever we wanted.

  “Ask him,” said Bykov eagerly, “if the brother will also bring out material?” By “the brother,” Bykov meant Donald Hiss, Alger’s younger brother, who was a legal adviser to the newly created Philippines Division of the State Department.

  In his own way Alger answered: no. I translated his answer into German for Bykov: “Ask him,” said Bykov, “if he can persuade the brother.” For “persuade” Bykov used the word, “überreden,” which in his special German, came out “ibber-edden.” I could not understand him and Bykov had to repeat the word several times with growing irritation. I remember the exchange distinctly because I saw a curious expression in Alger’s eyes. He was wondering why Carl, the good European, should have difficulty in interpreting.

  I could have spared myself any concern about Bykov’s impression on Alger Hiss. He said that he had found Bykov “impressive.” I had underrated the transforming power of anything Russian.

  X

  The meeting with Alger Hiss was followed by a meeting with Henry Collins, the treasurer of the Ware Group, also in Brooklyn. Again I was the interpreter. Bykov believed that Collins should be able to enter the State Department or, failing that, that he could make valuable contacts there. Collins was just as impressed by Bykov as Alger Hiss had been.

  David Carpenter followed Henry Collins in Bykov’s inspection. That meeting also took place in New York. Julian Wadleigh followed Carpenter, this time in Washington. Their meeting is chiefly memorable for the fact that Wadleigh carried away from it, over the years, the fixed impression that Bykov, whom I had introduced to him as “Sasha,” had only one arm. During the Hiss Case, that singular error of recollection to which Wadleigh testified (at that time, of course, without my knowledge), was to cause considerable perplexity to the Grand Jury and endless perplexity to me when they questioned me obliquely about it. Fortunately, Kei
th, who knew Bykov, if anything better than I did, soon testified that the Colonel had full use of both arms.

  Next Bykov met George Silverman and Harry Dexter White, also in Washington. He never, to my knowledge, met Abel Gross.

  Those meetings were important chiefly as they marked the beginning of intensive espionage. The water was already in the pipes. Bykov’s function was simply to turn on the faucets. Only in the case of Harry White, I think, did he stimulate any enthusiasm that was lacking before. For, more than any of the others, White, the non-Communist, enjoyed the feeling that he was in direct touch with “big important people.”

  I have sometimes been asked at this point: What went on in the minds of those Americans, all highly educated men, that made it possible for them to betray their country? Did none of them suffer a crisis of conscience? The question presupposes that whoever asks it has still failed to grasp that Communists mean exactly what they have been saying for a hundred years: they regard any government that is not Communist, including their own, merely as the political machine of a class whose power they have organized expressly to overthrow by all means, including violence. Therefore, ultimately the problem of espionage never presents itself to them as a problem of conscience, but as a problem of operations. Making due allowance for the differences of intelligence, energy, background and political development among the individual men involved, and bearing in mind that two of them (White and Wadleigh) were not Communists, but fellow travelers, the answer to the question must still be: no problem of conscience was then involved. For the Communists, the problem of conscience had been settled long before, at the moment when they accepted the program and discipline of the Communist Party. For the fellow travelers, it had been settled at the moment when they decided to co-operate with the Communist Party. And of fellow travelers who co-operate to the point of espionage, it must be observed that in effect they have become Communists, whatever fictive differences they may maintain.