The Naked Communist (23 page)

In the spirit of the times, Chambers wrote a story called, "Can You Hear the Voices?" It was a great success. It was made into a play, published as a pamphlet and hailed by Moscow as splendid revolutionary literature. The next thing Chambers knew he was being feted by the American Communist Party as though he had never left it. Chambers soon went back to work for the revolution.

It was in June, 1932, that Chambers was asked to pay the full price of being a Communist. The Party nominated him to serve as a spy against the United States in the employment of the Soviet Military Intelligence. For the sake of his wife Chambers tried to get out of this assignment, but a member of the Central Committee in New York told him, "You have no choice."

Chambers soon found himself under the iron discipline of the Russian espionage apparatus. Because Communism had become his faith, Chambers blindly followed instructions. He became expert in the conspiratorial techniques of clandestine meetings, writing secret documents, shaking off followers, trusting no one, being available day and night at the beck and call of superiors.

Before long Chambers was assigned to be the key contact man for Russia's most important spy cell in Washington, D.C. Chambers has described his espionage associations with the following persons who were later to become top officials in the United States Government:

1. Alger Hiss, whom Chambers says became a close personal friend. Hiss started out in the Department of Agriculture, and then served on the Special Senate Committee investigating the munitions industry. For awhile he served in the Department of Justice and then went to the State Department. There he made a meteoric rise, serving as Director of the highly important office of Political Affairs. He served as advisor to President Roosevelt at Yalta and as Secretary General of the International Assembly which created the United Nations.

2. Harry Dexter White, who later became Assistant Secretary of the United States Treasury and author of the Morgenthau Plan.

3. John J. Abt, who served in the Department of Agriculture, the WPA, the Senate Committee on Education and Labor and was then made a Special Assistant to the Attorney General in charge of the trial section.

4. Henry H. Collins, who served in the NRA, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Labor, and the Department of State. During World War II he became a major in the Army and in 1948 became Executive Director of the American Russian Institute (cited by the Attorney General as a Communist front organization).

5. Charles Kramer, who served in the National Labor Relations Board, the Office of Price Administration, and in 1943, joined the staff of the Senate Sub-committee on War Mobilization.

6. Nathan Witt, who served in the Department of Agriculture and then became the Secretary of the National Labor Relations Board.

7. Harold Ware, who served in the Department of Agriculture.

8. Victor Perlo, who served in the Office of Price Administration, the War Production Board, and the Treasury.

9. Henry Julian Wadleigh, who became a prominent official in the Treasury Department.

Chambers testified that he received so many confidential government documents through his contacts that it took the continuous efforts of two and sometimes three photographers to microfilm the material and keep it flowing to Russia. Chambers says he considered Alger Hiss his number one source of information. He has described how Hiss would bring home a brief case each night filled with material from the State Department. Some of these documents would be microfilmed. Others would be copied by Hiss on his typewriter or he would make summaries in longhand. It was a number of these typed documents and memos in the certified handwriting of Alger Hiss which became famous as the "Pumpkin Papers" and subsequently convicted Hiss of perjury.

In later years when Chambers was asked to give his explanation as to why so many well-educated Americans were duped into committing acts of subversion against their native country, he explained that once a person has been converted to the ideology of Communism he will consider espionage to be a moral act -- a duty -- committed in the name of humanity for the good of future society.

The unbelievable extent to which Americans participated in Russian-directed espionage against the United States during the depression and during World War II has only recently become generally recognized. Many complete books have now been written which summarize the evidence unearthed by the FBI, the courts and Congress.

In 1938, at the very height of his career as a Russian courier and contact man, Chambers found his philosophy of materialism collapsing. It was one morning while feeding his small daughter that Chambers suddenly realized as he watched her that the delicate yet immense complexity of the human body and human personality could not possibly be explained in terms of accumulated accident. Chambers dated his break with Communism from that moment.

At first he was highly disturbed and tried to thrust the new conviction from his mind, but as he opened his thinking to the evidence around him he finally became completely persuaded that he was living in a universe of amazingly immaculate design which was subject to the creative supervision of a supreme intelligence. Consequently, just as Communist philosophy had brought him into the movement its collapse made him determined to get out. It was many months later before he finally disentangled himself and ran away from the Soviet Intelligence Service.

Chambers says that when he ultimately made his break with Communism he did everything in his power to get his close friend, Alger Hiss, to leave with him. Alger Hiss, however, not only refused but, according to Chambers heatedly denounced him for trying to influence him.

From watching the fate of others, Chambers already had some idea of what it meant to try and leave the conspiratorial apparatus of Communism. Nevertheless, the course he followed brought physical and mental suffering that not even he had suspected.

Today, no more complete account of the agonizing experiences of those who dare to wear the badge of an ex-Communist can be found than that contained in the s of Chambers' autobiography,
Witness
. At one point he worked with a gun beside him for fear the Russian secret police would take his life just as they were doing to so many others. At another point he tried to take his own life to keep from having to expose those who had formerly been his most intimate friends.

Most of these details can only be appreciated in their full text. For our purposes it is sufficient to point out that up until the time Chambers did finally make up his mind to tell the whole story, the American public was almost completely unaware of the vast network of spy activities which Russia had built into every strata of American society. And this unfortunate condition existed even though the FBI had been carefully gathering facts and warning government officials concerning Communist activities for many years.

Finally, a cloud of witnesses confirmed that it was true.

Chambers had no way of knowing that after he deserted the Russian espionage system, the Soviets would replace him with a woman. Her name was Elizabeth Bentley.

She came from a long line of New England American ancestors, She had attended Vassar, traveled and studied in Italy for a year and returned to the United States in 1934 to find the country deep in a depression. Having failed to get a job, she decided her only chance was to learn a business course so she enrolled at the School of Business at Columbia University. There she met up with a number of people who were friendly and sympathetic toward her. It was quite some time before she knew they were Communists. As these friends explained Communism to her it seemed rather reasonable -- in fact, the way they explained it, Communism would be a great improvement over American Capitalism (which at that moment was bogged down like an iceberg with unemployment and bankruptcy). So Elizabeth Bentley became a Communist. She entered the campaign with all the zeal that could come from a girl in her twenties who suddenly believes that a new era of history is about to open up which will solve all of humanity's problems.

For some time Elizabeth Bentley worked in New York's Welfare Department and while there she was made the financial secretary of the Columbia University Communist unit. She attended the Communist Workers' School and joined so many front organizations under different names that on at least one occasion she went to a meeting and could not remember who she was supposed to be!

Before long the activities of Elizabeth Bentley had tracked the leaders of the Russian underground apparatus and before she really knew what had happened to her she had been carefully shifted from the day-to-day assignments of the U.S. Communist Party to the underground network of Soviet espionage.

She worked for three different individuals before she was finally assigned to an over-worked, old-time revolutionary called "Timmy." Elizabeth Bentley fell in love with Timmy.

One day he said to her: "You and I have no right to feel the way we do about each other.... There is only one way out, and that is to stick together and keep our relationship unknown to everyone.... You will have to take me completely on faith, without knowing who I am, where I live, or what I do for a living."

This was how Elizabeth Bentley became the Communist wife of a man who turned out to be Jacob Golos, one of the all-powerful chiefs of the Russian Secret Police in the United States.

Under his training Elizabeth Bentley became what she later called a "steeled Bolshevik."

In May, 1940, she read that an attempt had been made against the life of Leon Trotsky in Mexico. The attempt had failed but his personal bodyguard had been kidnaped and shot in the back. For years Stalin had been trying to liquidate his old enemy and from the way Jacob Golos behaved Elizabeth Bentley knew her Communist mate was in on the plot. Several months later a killer actually got through to Trotsky and smashed his skull with an alpenstock.

Beginning in 1941, Elizabeth Bentley was used by the Russian espionage apparatus to collect material from contacts in Washington, D.C. She says she first became the courier for the Silvermaster spy group which was extracting information from Communist contacts in the Pentagon and other top-secret governmental agencies. Before she was through she had picked up nearly all of Whittaker Chambers' former contacts and many more besides.

Occasionally there was near disaster, as was the case just after Gregory Silvermaster got a job with the Board of Economic Warfare through the influence of Lauchlin Currie (an administrative assistant at the White House). She says that after taking the Job he was shown a letter addressed to his superior from the head of Army Intelligence indicating that the FBI and Naval Intelligence had proof of his Communist connections. The letter demanded that Silvermaster be discharged.

The panicky Silvermaster asked Elizabeth Bentley what to do. She gave him the same instruction that other exposed Communists were being given: "Stand your ground, put on an air of injured innocence; you are not a Communist, just a 'progressive' whose record proves you have always fought for the rights of labor. Rally all your 'liberal' friends around.... If necessary, hire a lawyer to fight the case through on the grounds that your reputation has been badly damaged. Meanwhile, pull every string you can to get this business quashed. Use Currie, White (Harry Dexter White, top official of the Treasury Department), anybody else you know and trust."
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Anyone familiar with the format of defense followed by suspected Communists who were hailed before Congressional investigating committees will immediately recognize the Party's trade mark on the trite pretension of abused innocence recommended by Elizabeth Bentley. When one considers its relatively naive and childlike simplicity it is almost a cause for national chagrin that it confused and deceived such an amazing number of people for such an inexplicable number of years. As with practically all of the others Elizabeth Bentley's suggestions paid off handsomely for Silvermaster and he soon gained support from many powerful and unexpected sources.

After three months of "fighting back" the Under-Secretary of War became convinced from hearing various pleas that an injustice had been done to Silvermaster and therefore ordered his dismissal cancelled. Silvermaster was allowed to resign and return to his old job in the Department of Agriculture with a clean slate. Elizabeth Bentley concludes by saying, "After a sigh of relief that must have echoed throughout the entire Russian Secret Police apparatus, we went back to our normal routine."

According to the sworn testimony of Elizabeth Bentley, she worked with three major spy cells. The first was the "Ware Cell" -- the same group Chambers had handled. In addition she handled the "Silvermaster Cell" and the "Perlo Cell." She said these three cells were charged with the task of supplying her with an almost endless stream of information for transmittal to Moscow. She testified under oath that the members of the Silvermaster Cell and the Perlo Cell were as follows (the departments in which the members were working during the time she had contact with them are also listed):