Witness

by Whittaker Chambers

  Later, I developed a system of meeting on the street which I believed to be almost surveillance-proof. Two men would pre arrange a meeting. Both would agree to start walking toward one another at the same time from two different points some twenty blocks apart on the same street. One might walk east, one west. One would walk on one side of the street, one on the other. They would meet about midway. Usually, each would sight the other several blocks away. While they were walking, each would have a clear view for blocks behind the other. No one could follow either without being observed by the other. If either were suspicious, he would not greet the other. Each would continue walking until one turned and followed the other to catch up with him later in a side street. This method was only good in quiet residential neighborhoods where there were few people on the streets. These conspiratorial methods, while technically justified, were almost wholly unnecessary, for even a decade later the nation still could scarcely believe that such a thing as an underground existed.

  Bykov, too, introduced an innovation into the Washington underground. It was Alger Hiss’s custom to bring home documents from the State Department approximately once a week or once in ten days. He would bring out only the documents that happened to cross his desk on that day, and a few that on one pretext or another he had been able to retain on his desk. Bykov wanted more complete coverage. He proposed that the Advokat should bring home a brief case of documents every night. These would be typed in the Hiss household, either in full or in summary. Then, when I next visited him, Alger would turn over to me the typed copies, covering a week’s documents, as well as the brief case of original documents that he had brought home that night. The original documents would be photographed and returned to Alger Hiss. The typed copies would be photographed and then returned to me by Felix. I would destroy them.

  Sometimes important documents passed through Alger’s hand, but he was able to keep them only for a short time, often only long enough to read them. He took to making penciled copies of such documents or notes of their main points, which he wrote down hastily on State Department memo pads. These he turned over to me also, usually tearing off the State Department letterhead lest I forget.

  It was a number of these typed documents and penciled memos in Alger’s certified handwriting that I secreted during the days when I was breaking with the Communist Party.

  Harry Dexter White, in addition to giving original documents, also wrote a weekly or fortnightly longhand memo covering documents that he had seen, or information that had come to him, in the course of a week’s work in the Treasury Department. One of those memos, running to four or five pages, I also secreted. It is now in the custody of the Justice Department and Senator Nixon read it into the Congressional Record shortly after the conviction of Alger Hiss.

  Abel Gross and Wadleigh never turned over anything but original documents.

  XV

  Harry Dexter White was the least productive of the four original sources. Through George Silverman, he turned over material regularly, but not in great quantity. Bykov fumed, but there was little that he could do about it. As a fellow traveler, White was not subject to discipline. Bykov suspected, of course, that White was holding back material. “Du musst ihn kontrollieren,” said Bykov, “you must control him”—in the sense in which police “control” passports, by inspecting them.

  I went to J. Peters, who was in Washington constantly in 1937, and whom I also saw regularly in New York. I explained the problem to him and asked for a Communist in the Treasury Department who could “control” White. Peters suggested Dr. Harold Glasser, who certainly seemed an ideal man for the purpose, since he was White’s assistant, one of several Communists whom White himself had guided into the Treasury Department.

  Peters released Dr. Glasser from the American Communist underground and lent him to the Soviet underground. Glasser soon convinced me that White was turning over everything of importance that came into his hands. Having established that fact, I simply broke off relations with Dr. Glasser. Later on, he was to establish a curious link between the underground apparatuses, current and past. Testifying before the McCarran Committee in 1952, Elizabeth Bentley told this story. In 1944, she was working with what she identified as “the Perlo Group” (after Victor Perlo of the former Ware Group). In the Perlo Group was Dr. Harold Glasser. At one point, Miss Bentley had made a routine check of the past activities of all the Group members. The check showed that Dr. Glasser had once worked with a man whom both Victor Perlo and Charles Kramer (also a member of the Group) at first refused to identify beyond saying that the unknown man was working with the Russians. When Miss Bentley insisted, Perlo and Kramer at last said that the unknown man was named Hiss. She had never heard the name before and checked with her Soviet superiors. “It is all right,” they told her. “Lay off the Hiss thing. He is one of ours, but don’t bother about it any more.”

  Early in our acquaintanceship, I had told White that I knew nothing whatever about monetary theory, finance or economics. Nevertheless, in our rambles, when he was not complaining that the Secretary was in a bad humor, or rejoicing that he was in a good humor, White engaged in long monologues on abstruse monetary problems.

  One project that he kept urging was a plan of his own authorship for the reform of the Soviet monetary structure or currency. He offered it as a contribution to the Soviet Government. I sensed that the project was extremely important to White. I took the proposal to Bykov. He was lukewarm. But he informed Moscow, which reacted with enthusiasm to the idea of having its monetary affairs “controlled” gratis by an expert of the United States Treasury Department.

  Bykov suddenly instructed me to get White’s plan from him at once. Haste had now become all important. But by then, White had gone on his summer vacation at a country place near Peterborough, N. H. I saw that I would have to go after him. While I was wondering how I should manage it, I met Alger Hiss.

  Hiss has testified that at that time, August, 1937, he and his wife were vacationing on the eastern shore of Maryland. Probably that is true. But, if so, Hiss must have returned to Washington or Baltimore on personal business or for the purpose of meeting me, for we met. Simply in the course of conversation, as an example of the underground problem of the week, I told him, without mentioning Harry White’s name or my reason for seeing him, that I had to go to Peterborough.

  Suddenly it was decided that we make an outing of it and all three drive to New Hampshire. Priscilla stipulated only that we should drive most of the way on Route 202, which avoids the cities and winds through the countryside. It was a favorite route of hers and we usually took it when we drove in Pennsylvania together. That trip, completely unimportant in itself, became important in the Hiss trials. It was one incident of our clandestine association that I thought must yield some evidence to support my story of our association. At first, it seemed that I was right. I had said that, near Peterborough, the Hisses and I had seen Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer. The F.B.I. soon established the fact that the Peterborough Players had presented She Stoops to Conquer just once, on the night of August 10, 1937, and never before or after. My careful description of White’s summer house and its approaches tallied with photographs of it. The pond was where I said it was. But, after twelve years, I could not locate the tourist home in Thomaston. I located the tourist home in Peterborough, but its guest book showed no signature of Alger Hiss in 1937. Obviously, if I had been lying, I would have taken care to contrive a better story, since there was no need to invent any story at all.

  White turned in his plan for monetary reform, though I recall no particular excitement about it. I had assumed that his eagerness was the evidence of a disinterested love for monetary theory and concern for the Soviet Union. But I sometimes found myself wondering curiously why he worked for the apparatus at all. His motives always baffled me, possibly, I now think, because I kept looking for them in the wrong place.

  I believe that someone else understood him much better. One day, when I was working at
Time magazine, there passed over my desk a little news story. It said that in Washington, there lived a carpenter named Harry White. To his surprise, he received one day a container of caviar. Then a case of vodka arrived. Once the mail brought an engraved invitation to attend a social occasion at the Soviet embassy. Then Harry White, the carpenter, received a telephone call. It was from Harry Dexter White, the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury. He had traced his strayed presents. The Soviet embassy had made a mistake in the address because of the similar names. Generously, Harry Dexter White proposed that the other Harry White keep half the goods and return half.

  “I was going to send them all back to him,” the carpenter told a newsman, “but I thought: ‘He’s the kind of fellow, that if I send them all back, will still think that I kept half.’ So I did.”

  The fellow traveler had met the proletarian mind.

  XVI

  David Carpenter worked incessantly to broaden his side of the apparatus, and so secretly that even I seldom knew just what he was doing. Toward the end of 1937, he proposed a new recruit for the apparatus. His name was Franklin Victor Reno, but Carpenter introduced him to me as “Vincent,” and so I always called him.

  Reno had been an organizer for the Communist Party or the Young Communist League in Montana. There he had used the name Lance Clark. When Carpenter first mentioned him to me, Reno had just taken some special examination and thought that he might get a job working on a bombsight at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. It did not seem probable to me that he would. For, in addition to his Communist past, he was an immature-looking young man with somewhat timid, rabbitlike eyes and a nervous manner. I underrated him grossly. He was a very able mathematician who had no difficulty in passing his examination and securing a job at the Proving Ground.

  The bombsight on which Reno went to work ceased to be a military secret when American planes equipped with it were shot down in Europe and Asia during World War II. But in 1937 it was a military secret, and considerable precautions were taken to keep it one. Once Reno had begun to work at the Proving Ground, it became almost impossible to maintain contact with him. Moreover, he was living at the house of the officer who supervised his project-Contact was finally resumed through an employe of the Federal Government in Washington.

  Reno was obviously a source of great potential importance, and Bykov at once proposed that we set up a photographic workshop in Aberdeen. I suggested that he set it up in the railroad station since it would scarcely be more conspicuous there than anywhere else in that small, security-conscious town. By the time I broke with the Communist Party, Reno had brought out material only two or three times. There was not much of it and none of it was on the bombsight. It was photographed by Felix in Baltimore.

  When I came to testify about it, in 1948, I could not tell what material Reno had given. But Reno knew. My defection apparently loosened his ties with the Soviet underground, though after my break I never saw him again. He seems to have drifted away from the Communist Party. He corroborated my testimony about him.

  XVII

  Henry Collins, the treasurer of the Ware Group, made several attempts to find himself a post in the State Department. They always failed, although by background, education, experience and manner, Collins seemed to be a natural candidate. Moreover, he had at least one good personal connection in the State Department. I found myself wondering a little anxiously why Collins failed. But it was not until one day in 1951 that I thought I understood at last, when a State Department officer said to me: “I noticed Collins trying to get in and I distrusted him from the start.”

  But what he could not do himself, Collins found someone else to do. Late in 1937, or very early in 1938, he brought a new recruit to the apparatus. Let me call him Worthington Wiggens. He was a member of the Communist Party and a scion of a socialite family. At the time Collins first introduced him to me, Wiggens was employed in one of the New Deal agencies. He and Collins both believed that Wiggens would have little trouble entering the State Department. Given his social connections, I thought so too, but given his general air of apathy, it seemed unlikely. As in the case of Reno, I misjudged Worthington Wiggens. In a very short time, he had found himself a place in the State Department.

  Wiggens entered the State Department for the express purpose of working for the Soviet apparatus. He, Collins and I discussed the matter in plain terms. But he never gave documents to the apparatus during my time. I broke very soon after he entered the State Department. He remained with it for another ten years, at least until 1948, about which time, after Loyalty Board hearings, Wiggens resigned.

  XVIII

  There was one other member of the Bykov apparatus. He was in the Government. He was never an active source. At no time did he ever turn over information. He knows the pertinent facts in the Hiss Case. We looked at each other in silence in the presence of the Grand Jury of the Southern District of New York. We are still looking at each other in silence.

  It is not my intention to name him here or to write more about him. He must decide whether he can find the strength to speak out. There is a simple decency in men that the Communist experience cannot destroy. It is an instinct that must have justice, that yearns for right and hates wrong. If it must be a party to wrong, it will die. That is why I have insisted, from the beginning, that it is impossible that at least one among the former members of the Ware Group will not at some time come forward to corroborate my story.

  It is to that man, that unnamed member of the apparatus, that I am speaking. I know what it will cost him, not for himself, but for others, to speak out. For myself, therefore, I may not ask it of him. But I will advance three presences to plead with him in silence for the truth—the nation, his honor, my children.

  XX

  Into the strange Hades of the underground, the Soviet Union now and again releases a ghost. Don was one such ghost. By a curious chance, I was to meet another.

  In the course of one of Colonel Bykov’s question and answer periods, I mentioned an explosives chemist, with whom Ulrich’s apparatus had once had contact, and whom I had known. Bykov suggested that I try to get in touch with that once helpful friend and see what he was now doing.

  I found the chemist at the Chemists’ Club on East 41st Street, in New York. We had lunch together. I do not remember what he told me about himself; in fact, I was not to see him again until 1949. when he testified before the Grand Jury in the Hiss Case. What he had to tell me about someone else was more exciting. Dr. Philip Rosenbliett, said the chemist, was back in the United States and for weeks had been trying to make contact with me-without success, an indication of how far underground I then was. The Doctor was staying at the Hotel Albert in New York.

  I went to see him at once. He looked more gaunt and lifeless than he had at the time of his daughter’s death. It was in large part, he told me, to be able to visit his daughter’s grave that he had undertaken his current mission to the United States. It was a mission of extreme importance. The Doctor had been assigned to it by Molotov himself. It had resulted from the fact that Stalin had personally inspected the Soviet munitions industry and discovered, to his wrath, that there was no automatic shell-loading machinery. Shells were still being loaded by hand by women. (I no longer believe this part of the story, which I now take to be The Doctor’s way of misleading me about the real destination of the shell-loading machinery—Republican Spain.)

  The Doctor was in the United States to purchase such machinery. It was not a simple deal. The Soviet Government wanted not only the machines at less than list price. It wanted a mass of technical information along with its order. Would I undertake the task? I explained to The Doctor that that was out of the question.

  Then, said Dr. Rosenbliett, I must put him in touch with the smartest Communist lawyer I knew, preferably one who had some experience with patent work. I proposed Lee Pressman. He not only seemed to me the smartest Communist lawyer I know, but he had once told me that he had done some patent work for the Rust
brothers, not on their cotton picker, but on some minor patents.

  A few days later, I introduced Lee Pressman to Dr. Rosenbliett. The meeting took the form of a late breakfast at Sacher’s restaurant on Madison Avenue near 42nd Street, in New York. I soon left Pressman and The Doctor together. I met Lee at least once afterwards. He told me that Dr. Rosenbliett had connected him with a Russian named “Mark.” Later on, J. Peters told me that Pressman and Mark in the course of an airplane flight to Mexico City, in connection with arms purchases for Republican Spain, had been forced down near Brownsville, Texas. Mark had been worried that newsmen or security agents might pry into the passenger list.

  I also saw Dr. Rosenbliett once or twice again. He was pleased with Pressman. But The Doctor was not destined to spend much time at his daughter’s grave. One morning I met him at his hotel to find him gray and shaken. Something, he said, had happened. It was this.

  His instructions for his American mission had expressly stated that Dr. Rosenbliett was to have no contact with former friends in the United States. Despite that, The Doctor had paid a visit to someone he knew (I suspect, his wife’s sister, the wife of the Trotskyist leader, James Cannon). As he left the apartment house after his call, The Doctor found a loiterer in the lower hall. He recognized the man as a G.P.U. agent whom he knew. The man recognized him.24 The next morning Dr. Rosenbliett received a cable from Moscow curtly ordering him to return to Russia at once—to be purged, I thought, and so, from the haggard look on his face, did he. But I know that Dr. Rosenbliett is very much alive.