For this purpose, and without at first taking Colonel Bykov into my confidence, I instructed one of the apparatus men in Washington (George Silverman) to get me a job in the United States Government, where I knew he had placed other Communists. I gave as a pretext my need for a “cover.” Almost overnight, I found myself employed by the National Research Project. I used the name Chambers. It had been a simple matter for the party to place me in the Government, since one of the national heads of the Research Project, George Silverman, the research director of the Railroad Retirement Board, for whom the project was making a study, and my immediate boss on the job were all members of the Communist Party.
I told Alger Hiss and others that I had taken a job in the Government, for I thought that the knowledge might give them pause, if, after I broke, they were moved by zeal (or by others) to attempt reprisals against me. Hiss laughed when I told him: it was the capstone of the legend of “Carl’s” Bolshevik daring. “I suppose you will turn up in the State Department next,” he said. I kept the job only long enough to establish the fact that I had it, three or four months.
Shortly before my break, I began to organize my life preserver. I secreted copies of Government documents copied in the Hiss household, memos in the handwriting of Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White, microfilm of documents transmitted by Alger Hiss and the source in the Bureau of Standards. This selection was not aimed at any individual. There was much of the Hiss material because he was the most productive source. There may actually have been more of the material from the Bureau of Standards, but by the time it was developed in 1948, the film from which it was copied had deteriorated so that much of it could not be read. There was no material from Julian Wadleigh because, in the spring of 1938, he was out of the country on a diplomatic mission to Turkey, though I believe that he had returned by the time I broke.
I was now ready to desert.
It seemed to me that the deserters from Communism whom the party had killed had nearly all made one mistake. They had shared in advance with other Communists their doubts, fears and plans to break. Out of friendship, or pity, or loneliness, they had tried to move those others to break with them. Their comrades had then betrayed them. I resolved to say nothing to anyone. Yet, like the others who had broken before me, I found that I could not leave these people whom I had known intimately for years, with some of whom I had formed close attachments, for all of whom I must answer the question asked of Cain, without trying to tell them something.
One night, as Felix Inslerman, one of the photographers for the apparatus, drove me around Baltimore, I found myself brushing the dangerous subject. I did not particularly like Felix. He looked like an average young fellow, seemingly simple, not overbright. Actually he had been a Communist from boyhood. But I knew that he had recently been married. I felt pity for him. I asked him if he never thought of leading a more ordinary life, if he never thought of settling down quietly and having children. The complete blankness with which he listened warned me that it was probably no use, and certainly dangerous.
In a very different way, I also worked around the subject with Alger Hiss. I made a point of criticizing Bykov, carefully feeling out how far I could safely go. Plainly, Hiss thought that my attitude was the usual subaltern’s grudge against his superior. He was sympathetic, but he smiled off my remarks and tried to justify Bykov without wounding me. Later I ventured into the much more perilous field of Communist politics, criticizing the Russian purges and especially the character of Stalin. For the first time, I saw Alger glance at me out of the side of his eye. “Yes, Stalin plays for keeps, doesn’t he?” he said. I had not heard the expression used before except in marbles. I thought that it was a neat summing up. I also thought that I had gone too far, and stopped.
In April of 1938, on the morning of a day when I was to have met Colonel Bykov in New York, my wife drove the children away from the Mount Royal Terrace house to our hiding place on the Old Court Road. I followed with the moving men. For the move, we had hired a Negro with a truck and helper. We had little furniture and it fitted easily into the small van. This move was the only direct link between Mount Royal Terrace and our hideaway. It could not be avoided. The best solution seemed to be a Negro mover, who was least likely to be traced if a hunt began and most likely to play dumb with inquisitive white men.
As usual on moving day, we left something indispensable behind —something of the children’s, though I no longer remember just what. I decided to drive back later to retrieve this treasure. It was dusk when I reached Mount Royal Terrace, an hour or so after I should have met Colonel Bykov in New York. I could imagine that unhappy little man becoming more frantic when I failed to appear. Not to be punctual is one of the underground’s cardinal sins.
I parked the car several blocks from the house and reconnoitered the back. I saw no sign of prowlers. I let myself in through the kitchen. I found whatever I had come for, and was peering out the front windows to see if there might be any watchers on the street, when, in the bare, darkening rooms, the telephone rang shrilly. I froze perfectly still at the window. “Dear comrades,” I thought, “it is you,” for we had a telephone by order of the apparatus and almost no one but Bykov ever called us.
While the telephone rang and rang, I picked my way across the resounding floors. I caught myself closing the kitchen door over-quietly, and smiled as I hurried down the brick path, beside which, in autumn, the spoon chrysanthemums bloomed. In neighboring houses, the windows were lighted. The quiet people of Baltimore, where life is so uneventful, were sitting down to their suppers. As I opened the gate upon the alley in back, I could still faintly hear the telephone, exploding regularly in the empty house, like an alarm clock in a bucket.
V
Pursuing feet are not less disturbing because they are not seen or heard. Of an evening, when the children were in bed, my wife and I would sit in our small room, where we were so packed in that our goods were stacked against the walls and we had somewhat the feeling of sitting in a sandbagged dugout. The blinds were drawn. It should have been rather snug. But that time remains in my memory as a smudge of feeling, a bad time from which the details have been rubbed out by a merciful erasure. Two things I remember. Whatever we were doing, we were really always listening; and I remember my wife’s rising from time to time during the night to see if I was all right and the children were in their beds.
We were absolutely alone. In the whole world, no one, friend or (we hoped) enemy, knew where we were. For we had followed the basic underground rule: what a man does not know, he cannot tell, inadvertently or otherwise. So we had not told even the few people we trusted where we were hiding. That was our safety. But I soon found out that it worked two ways. If the Communist Party did not know where we were, we could not know what the Communist Party was up to. So we waited and listened. We had joined the millionfold households of fear over each of which the revolutionary century has closed its individual night. They were less common in the American spring of 1938 than they have since become.
In the small city of Westminster, Md., near which we now live, there is a little German girl. She and her mother and father had lived in the Russian sector of Berlin. One night the knock came on the door. The secret police took her father away. Now she knows only two things: he died in Siberia; she will never see him again. That knock, in another form, was what we were listening for on the Old Court Road.
Our listening was made stranger by the fact that we listened in the midst of people leading simple, open, busy American lives. Outwardly, we were composed enough. But inwardly, we cried out to those around us. Our cries were paralyzed by the knowledge that no one could hear us, or if he heard us, he could not understand because he could never believe us; so that we were like a trapped man in a nightmare who summons up his last strength to cry: “Help!” and then realizes that he has lost his voice, no sound comes at all, and he strangles on the cry he cannot utter.
In those weeks on the Old Court Road we began a routine which
we kept up, except for my infrequent absences, until I went to work for Time magazine in 1939. All night I would sit up watching while my family slept. I would sleep for a few hours in the daytime. Fortunately, I had found work—translation—that I could best do in the still nights.
VI
The party moved at once to find out what had become of me. The day after my disappearance, Colonel Bykov, the head of the Soviet apparatus, and J. Peters, the head of the underground Communist Party, U.S.A., paid a somewhat awesome visit to “Paul.” The mood of both chiefs was glum and that of Bykov rather desperate. This information, and what follows, was given me by Paul himself on a later occasion.
“Paul” was the pseudonym of a secret Communist who had been turned over to the Soviet apparatus by the American Communist Party for the specific purpose of using his business to provide legal “cover” for a Soviet underground apparatus to be set up in England. For various reasons, that apparatus was never set up. Instead, Paul provided legal “cover” for a Soviet apparatus operating in Japan.
The world knew Paul better as Maxim Lieber, an authors’ agent who handled, among others, the profitable marketing problems of Erskine Caldwell, author of Tobacco Road, God’s Little Acre and other best-selling fiction. Paul also handled Tobacco Road when it was made into a play which, lacing social consciousness with a dash of pornography, ran so long on Broadway that it closed at last chiefly because there was scarcely a literate American of play-going age who had not seen it. This enabled Paul to buy a farm in Bucks County, Pa., which also played its small part in the underground. In 1938. Paul’s office was on Fifth Avenue in New York City.
Paul knew J. Peters from earlier days in the American Communist Party. He was seeing Colonel Bykov for the first time. Paul was then a short, slight, nervous man with a shoebrush mustache. He affected tweeds and a bulldog pipe, and his eyes behind his horn-rims were those of a frightened rabbit. Paul is timid, but he is not a coward. Colonel Bykov, on the other hand, who was menacing by force of habit, was a pathological coward—the only cowardly Communist I ever knew. Like most cowards, he was a bully. He set out to bully Paul. Where, he demanded, is Chambers? It was a question that Paul could not possibly have answered. Bykov made it plain that he did not believe him.
In Paul’s presence, the head of the Soviet underground apparatus and the head of the American underground apparatus then exchanged theories about my disappearance. As so often happens in life, each was discovered to hold exactly the view that the other might have been expected to hold. Bykov, the astute and experienced Russian, nursed the hope that I had merely been killed outright in an automobile accident, perhaps with my wife and children. Peters, the representative of the provincial American Communist Party, shook his head. “He has deserted,” he said quietly. Perhaps some trifling change in my manner, which I always feared might betray me in the days when I was preparing to break, had registered on Peters’ mind, and he had dismissed it, but now it hardened into certainty.
Both chiefs agreed on one point: Paul must go to Baltimore at once and trace me. Paul had no choice. He had to go. But he made the trip reluctantly. Among the world’s mistaken ideas about Communists is the notion that they are never swayed by simple human feelings. Because a man submits himself to a rigorous discipline, because, in the last instance, he will act on that discipline and against his natural feelings, it does not follow that he lacks such feelings. In the first place, life, even among Communists, is not in general made up of last instances. And while Communists are more self-consciously consistent than the run of men, they cannot escape the inconsistency that is life’s most consistent pattern. Hence, on the human side, the terrifying conflicts that come to light in the party’s purges, in its expulsions, in its defections.
Paul now suffered such a conflict. He did not want to find me. After the Alger Hisses, Paul, of all the people in the underground, had been closest to me. In many ways our relationship was freer than mine with the Hisses. Paul was engaged in less hazardous activities than Hiss. He had a lively sense of humor which Hiss lacked. We shared a common intense love of music and books. And Paul knew my real name and had known and respected me as a Communist writer before either of us went underground. Paul sensed that Peters was right: I had deserted. It sickened and frightened him, as the defection of a close friend usually sickens a Communist, because it strikes at the root of his own faith. It also endangered him, because we had been closely associated. If there were to be reprisals, he was in the line of fire. The burden of proof of his loyalty to the party was on Paul. He understood quite well the expression in the eyes of the other two men when they ordered him to go to Baltimore.
Paul went. He climbed the stone steps to the Mount Royal Terrace house. He peered through the windows and saw the bare front room. He asked the neighbors: “Where did the Chamberses go?” “We don’t know,” they said. Paul deliberately made no further effort to trace me.
He went back to New York and reported to Bykov and Peters: the Mount Royal Terrace house is empty. Now Bykov knew that I was not dead, that Peters was right, that I had deserted. He had his tantrum. He cursed me (quite justifiably) and shouted at Paul (also quite justifiably) that he had not tried to trace me. Bykov and Peters ordered Paul back to Baltimore the next morning. Dutifully, he made the second trip.
He checked, if I remember correctly, with the post office. There was, of course, no forwarding address. He went to the agent who had rented us the Mount Royal Terrace house. “They paid their rent,” said the agent. “That’s all I know or care.”
Paul reported back to New York again. He was a very worried Paul. But by then, Bykov was more frightened of Paul than Paul was of Bykov. He suspected him of having a hand in my disappearance. Bykov vanished. This glimpse through Paul’s eyes is the last I have of Bykov. No doubt, the G.P.U. came in at the point where Bykov went out.
I know these details because Paul told them to me. I called him up unexpectedly one day some time after I broke, and asked him to meet me in the Automat in the basement of his building. I met him there because I wished to give him as little time as possible between my call and our meeting. He was surprised and pleased, in a perfectly human way, to see me alive. We sat laughing and talking as if I were not a fugitive from the Communist Party, as if his sitting there with me were not grounds for very serious party action.
I think I can hear someone ask: “If you were afraid for your life, why did you get in touch with Paul?” For two reasons. I will discuss the less important one first. It is loneliness. No one who has not known it can readily grasp the annihilating loneliness of the ex-Communist who, after the tight associations of the underground, finds himself not only a fugitive from violence, but absolutely alone in a world which has become alien to him, to which he is an alien, to which a few moments before he was an enemy. His simple longing not to be entirely alone pleads with his sense of caution, and he is drawn back toward the very force that must seek to destroy him for its own security. This almost universal behavior of the ex-Communist, the Communist Party understands quite well and uses it to trap him. Thus Juliet Poyntz, Walter Krivitsky, Ignatz Reiss were trapped. I saw Paul in part because we had been friends. But if this had been all, I would not have seen Paul.
In my case, the decisive reason was practical. The Communist is a new type of man in history—the thinking commando. His rule for action is: caution, careful preparation, swiftness and surprise in striking. In my little war with the Communist Party, I needed to find out what the enemy was doing. I struck unexpectedly at the point where I was most likely to find out what I needed to know.
I saw Paul three times. The last time I took a friend with me for security. On each occasion, I sensed that Paul was becoming more and more worried about seeing me. I suspected that he had told the party that he was seeing me and that he had been instructed to continue meeting me with a view to preparing a trap at a suitable time and place. The last time we met, Paul told me, with a sad embarrassment, that his loyalty to the party
outweighed his friendship for me. I respected him deeply for that. I sensed that it was his way of saying that, if we met again, he would not be responsible for the consequences. He could have betrayed me into the party’s hands. He chose not to do so.
There is much good in this man—so much good that I want to speak directly to him as I cannot otherwise do across the barrier of fear and conflict that divides us. Since there was much humor in our friendship, and it is the instinct of both of us to treat very serious things with a saving lightness, I would like to say the serious thing I have to say in the least serious way. I should like simply to quote (commandolike) from the least expected text—I mean that other pirate story, Treasure Island.
I have in mind the moment when the small loyal party is abandoning the Hispaniola to fight its forlorn hope against the mutineers ashore. As the last boat is ready to push off from the ship, Captain Smollett calls out to the one decent man whom the pirates have somehow won over. “‘Now, men,’ said he, ‘do you hear me?’ There was no answer from the forecastle. ‘It’s to you, Abraham Gray-it’s to you I am speaking.’ Still no reply. ‘Gray,’ resumed Mr. Smollett a little louder, ‘I am leaving this ship.... I know you are a good man at bottom, and I dare say not one of the lot of you’s as bad as he makes out.... Come, my fine fellow, don’t hang so long in stays.’ ... There was a sudden scuffle, a sound of blows and out burst Abraham Gray with a knife cut on the side of his cheek.... ‘I’m with you, sir,’ said he.”
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