Witness

by Whittaker Chambers

  The existence of the Ware Group itself also rested for a long time on my unsupported word. During the pre-trial examination in the libel suit which Alger Hiss brought against me in Baltimore, one of his attorneys, William L. Marbury, was hugely amused by my claim that such a group had ever existed. At one point, he asked me to name the seven men on its leading committee. After hours of questioning, I was fatigued and, for a moment, could remember only six. “You have forgotten your prize exhibit,” said Marbury helpfully in the tone of breezy skepticism and heavy sarcasm that characterized the proceedings. My “prize exhibit,” the forgotten man, was Lee Pressman.

  But, two years later, my “prize exhibit” testified under oath, before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, that he had been a member of the Communist Party, that there had been a Ware Group of which, of course, he had been a member, and that Nathan Witt, John Abt and Charles Kramer had also been members. Pressman’s memory failed (or confused) him on most other relevant points, so that his testimony fell far short of the full facts. He should know, for example, that Hiss and Collins were both Communists and both members of the Ware Group. He should know that Hiss was connected with me, when, and for what purpose, and should be able to clear up those matters. But Lee Pressman’s testimony settled once for all the basic question of the existence of the Ware Group.

  Even without his assistance, the facts may presently become clearer and fuller. For I have reason to believe that there is still another witness with first-hand knowledge of the Group. At least, like Hamlet. I see a cherub who sees one.20

  V

  The Ware Group was a background and a base for my activities, from the time I arrived in Washington, in 1934, until I broke with the Communist Party, in 1938. Until his death, I was constantly in touch with Harold Ware. As long as Henry Collins lived at St. Matthews Court, his apartment was one of my informal Washington headquarters. Through it, I maintained contact with the Group, which stood ready to help me in any way that I saw fit. Through it, I often maintained contact with J. Peters, whose comings and goings in Washington it was sometimes more convenient to keep track of through the Ware Group than by direct contact in New York City.

  Though members of my special apparatus were officially separated from the Ware Group, they continued to meet their former comrades by chance, socially or in the course of Government work. Sometimes Alger Hiss, in particular, found his separation and inactivity in the special apparatus so wearing that he broke the rules and spent a few hours with his former cell mates. Now and again, Alger would confess that he had seen Henry Collins, usually on the pretext of giving him party dues. I winked at these irregularities.

  Two members of the Ware Group became my unofficial helpers and continued to act as such almost until the time that I broke with the Communist Party. One was Henry Collins. The other was Lee Pressman.

  But the historical importance of the Ware Group is as the root from which divided two sinister stems—the Soviet espionage apparatuses of Elizabeth Bentley, about which the world now knows a great deal, thanks to her remarkably detailed recollection; and whatever apparatus Alger Hiss continued with after my break. The second, and the more important, still lies in the shadows.

  VI

  Harold Ware was a man without personal ambition. The whole purpose of his life lay in promoting Communism. Many Communists would have been disturbed to have a newcomer intrude into their province. Ware, once he had formed his opinion of me, welcomed me without reservation, inducted me into all (and more than all) that I needed to know of his work, and built me up for my own work by discreet words dropped about my special experience.

  As a result, no sooner had I reached Washington than I found myself wrapped in the aura of a man who had worked with “them”—the Russians. So great is the revolutionary spell of that word “Russian,” that American Communists, who might hesitate to do certain things for another American Communist, will all but beg to do the same things for a Russian or anyone directly connected with the Russians. This attitude, which must seem outrageous or incredible to non-Communists, was the tribute that hope paid to success. The Russian Revolution had succeeded. The Russians incarnated success and power. The heart of every revolution is a struggle for power and there was little that the bright young men of Washington worshipped more fervently than power, often without being at all aware of the fact.

  I reflected power in one of its most fascinating forms—invisible power. I was introduced to all the underground Communists simply as Carl. The decades-old practice of underground pseudonyms was excitingly new to the Washington revolutionists. I presently realized (and Ware used to smile at) the fact that I had become a figure of awe, not because of anything I pretended to be—I was simple and friendly—but because that was what those young zealots wanted me to be and made me. Their wishful thinking, almost at once, took a turn that neither Ware, Peters nor I could possibly have foreseen.

  After my introduction to Alger Hiss, and some of the others in the underground, there occurred an interval of a month or more which long puzzled me in trying to recollect those days, because I could not remember why I should have gone to Washington, and then abruptly left it, or what I had been doing in the meantime. I shall report what I now believe to be the reason for that gap in the next chapter. In any case, I did not see Alger Hiss, after my first meeting, until he had moved to an apartment in one of three almost identical apartment houses on 28th Street near Woodley Road.

  I looked forward with some concern to my first meeting alone with Hiss. In a special underground apparatus, where an isolated Communist’s contact with the body of the party is maintained, as a rule, solely or chiefly through one man or woman, the personal factor is all important (as Ulrich well knew). On it depends whether the relationship is to be one of confident co-operation or mere grudging association, which, in a Communist sense, is unproductive, and may lead to personal crises, like my relationship with Herman, or worse. On me, therefore, rather than on the party’s disciplinary power, depended the future success of the new apparatus.

  Clearly, Alger Hiss was no ordinary Communist. My own first impression of him had been brief, but his manner told me something, and from Peters and Ware, I had learned enough of his background to know that he was highly intelligent, but without real Communist experience. Like almost all the Washington Communists, he belonged to a new breed-middle-class intellectuals who had gone directly underground without passing through the open party. Hence we had no common experience that could float us along until we found some other common ground in activity. I had no immediate task for Hiss to perform, so that there was nothing specific that we could discuss and agree or disagree about. I had the task of presenting myself as a man with whom he would henceforth be almost exclusively connected, and in whom, in that singular relationship, he must have confidence and find some intellectual community.

  I arrived at Hiss’s apartment after supper, about nine o’clock at night. It was a hot, sticky Washington night. We sat in the stifling living room, which was also the dining room, and the first room entered from the hall. Priscilla Hiss took almost no part in a conversation which was rather pawing and aimless. She watched me intently. I wondered rather desperately how I could give the conversation some point. I knew that intellectual Communists, especially those who are most fastidious, are usually fascinated by the image of the proletarian, or by proletarian experience. I thought that I could convey to Hiss something of the kind of man I was, and what Communism does to the workingman, by telling him what had been teasing my mind ever since I had returned to Washington. I told him how I had once laid rails on New York Avenue and tried to communicate to him the curious feeling of the man, who has once been on the bottom of society, when he returns to the same scene as an agent of the Communist Party.

  There was a polite but complete short circuit. I left shortly after, feeling that it had been pretty awful. I thought that I should probably have to call upon Ware or J. Peters to help me. But I also thought that I m
ust make one more try.

  A night or two later, I visited the Hisses again. The change in climate was a little stupendous. There were welcoming smiles and Alger was gracious in the way which is his peculiar talent. Graciously, he ventured an explanation. He was sorry about the other evening. But at first he had not known what to make of me. I had talked about laying rails, but I was obviously not a proletarian. I had said that I was an American, but I was not like any American he had ever known. Then the truth had suddenly dawned. I was a European who had spent some years in the United States. My mastery of English was remarkable (later, when we drove together, he would also be struck by my remarkable knowledge of American roads). But, said Alger, with the knowing air of a man who cannot be deceived, there were certain turns of expression, certain tones of voice, that gave me away. It was true. I had been with Russians so much that, to make myself understood quickly, I had taken to simplifying my sentences along the lines of their thought processes, and to relying, like a European, on intonation rather than phrasing to express shades of meaning. Moreover, said Alger, by way of a clincher, my habit of mind was ironic, and Americans do not like irony. That was also true. The habit of my mind is ironic, and was much more so then.

  I do not remember whether the word Russian was actually used. But, if not, that was the unspoken word that made possible this strange self-deception. Carl was one of “them”—if not actually a Great Russian, what was even more appealing in a revolutionary sense, a member of one of the old subject nationalities that had been liberated by the revolution. Much later on, I was once talking about the Volga Germans,21 and I suddenly realized, from an intent expression on Hiss’s face, that he felt that I had unwittingly disclosed myself: Carl was a Volga German.

  On that second visit to 28th Street, I was merely astonished. I was delighted at the change of atmosphere, and I meant to do nothing at the moment to unsettle it. I also sensed two other things. A curious kind of snobbery was playing a part in the delusion. Alger Hiss wanted to be one of those who were in direct touch with the real revolution, with the Workers’ Fatherland. I sensed, too, that he felt more confidence in dealing with a Russian than he would have in dealing with the most trusted American Communist. And so I merely smiled to indicate that I did not wish to pursue a subject that bore on my identity and my status in the country. At that, I saw that I had also become something else in his eyes: the heroic revolutionist who lives always one jump ahead of the police. We spent a very pleasant evening together.

  But I was also disturbed. I knew that when the deception was discovered, and I supposed then that that must happen almost at once, Hiss would be embarrassed, and probably resentful, precisely because it was he who had deceived himself. J. Peters was in Washington. That night or the next day, I went to him for counsel. “He thinks I am a Russian,” I said. “What shall I do?” Peters laughed. “Let him think so,” he said. “It’s all the better.” Like any Communist, he did not care how something was done so long as it produced results. Actually, that strange delusion lasted for more than four years.

  When I broke with the Communist Party, Hiss, as he then told me, had learned from the party my true identity or at least the fact that I was an American. I am sure that, at that time, the disclosure of the deception had on him exactly the effect that I feared it would have in the first place.

  Word quickly spread through the underground that Carl was a Russian. I have a feeling that Peters also gave the story a discreet nod. I myself quickly began to play the part assigned me. At first, it was as amusing as any charade. Soon it became another of the underground nuisances. It was not difficult. The great thing was not to overdo it. I had only to appear, not as a man with an accent, but as a man who is trying to purge his voice of any trace of accent. In part, the illusion was possible because every language implies a special logic of thought. I had only, once in a while, to think out loud like a German, though in unaccented English, to create the effect. An occasional European intonation, perfectly natural to someone who speaks another language, and the trick of never saying Russia, or the Soviet Union, but always saying “home,” completed the illusion. But, in fact, it was scarcely necessary for me to do anything at all. Once the idea had been fixed, it was less anything I did than what they wanted to believe that made the illusion possible. In any case, my stature shot up overnight. I no longer needed to call upon Ware or Peters for support. With two exceptions (Victor Perlo and, later on, David Carpenter, neither of whom I suspect was ever deceived), there was almost nothing that the underground Communists in Washington would not gladly do for me as a Russian.

  This story will seem perfectly incredible to anyone who has had no experience of the underground and cannot imagine its strange atmosphere and emotions. But it has been confirmed by witnesses before the Grand Jury of the Southern District of New York. I have already described how one witness had to be brought into the witness waiting room to listen to me speak because I was an American, and the man he knew as Carl spoke like a European. Thereafter he identified me.

  Much more striking are two other instances. Ludwig Lore also knew me in the underground as Carl. The former editor of the Volkszeitung, a man of wide experience, had been born in Silesia and spent his youth there before coming to the United States. He himself spoke with a pronounced German accent. Yet almost until the day of his death, he believed that I was a German or a Russian despite the fact that his three sons (all living witnesses to this fact) insisted that I was an American. So far had the illusion gone, that, although I always wore the most ordinary of American clothes, Lore described me in an official report as “dressed like a German businessman.”

  Nor was Lore the most surprising case. Dr. Alphonse Goldschmitt, the German economist, then a fugitive from Nazi Germany, not only identified me as a Russian (I have never been in Russia), but identified me by name. He once asked me in Lore’s house, before a number of guests, one of whom was Max Nomad, the author of Rebels and Renegades: “Why do you call yourself Carl now? I met you in Moscow in 1932. You are Colonel Dietrich of the General Staff.”

  VII

  One difficulty in trying to reconstruct this period of the underground past, chiefly by the action of my undocumented memory, has been in establishing the order of events and the time intervals between them. Originally, I supposed that I had been with J. Peters and out of touch with any Soviet apparatus for some time. As other facts have come into focus, I am forced to conclude that the interval was much shorter than I had at first supposed, and that it blended in my memory with a longer interval when Peters and I were alone together before the arrival of Colonel Boris Bykov. Several factors bear this out, among others the recollections of my fellow underground worker, Keith.

  I am now as sure as I can be, in the absence of corroborating proof or testimony, that the event which occurred between my first meeting with Ware and others in Washington, and my first conversation with Hiss on 28th Street, was the arrival in the United States of a Soviet agent known as “Bill.”

  After Ulrich had gone, I remained in touch with Dr. Rosenbliett, dropping in from time to time to see him at his office. One day The Doctor told me that he must introduce me to “somebody important.” A day or two later, I met, in the privacy of the inner dental office, a tall, lank, unsmiling Soviet agent, with a very wrinkled face which should have been imposing, but was chiefly forbidding. The Doctor introduced me to him as Bob and him to me as “Willi.” After the introduction, Willi left The Doctor and me alone. I suggested to him that Willi was scarcely the name for a man six feet tall and that, if its owner wanted to maintain his unbending dignity, he had better change it to “Bill.” Thus Willi became Bill.

  Bill was an Esthonian or a Finn. He was, though this fact I did not learn until recently, a Red Army officer, an authority on the problems of India, about which he had written a book. We got along well in a rather formal way, not at all like my easy relationship with Ulrich. Of the Soviet agents I knew, Bill is the one about whom I recall least, though, af
ter Ulrich, he was the one with whom I was friendliest. He was a very tight-lipped man, literally and figuratively. He never told me more of what was in his mind than was strictly necessary. In time, I came to believe that that was because there was not much to tell. At first, I had supposed that that wrinkled mask concealed special ranges of experience and knowledge. By degrees, I came to believe that Bill was a nat urally kind and generous man, but also a very limited one, and sensitive enough to fear that he might be found out—hence the mask. Hence, too, his taciturnity and, in part, his sudden shifts in plan and uncertainty of judgment.

  Bill quickly took me away from Peters, put me in his own Soviet underground apparatus and attached me to himself. I used to meet him once a week or so, sometimes in Automats, sometimes in tearooms where few people could have looked more out of place than Bill. Once more I was the liaison between the Soviet apparatus and the Bank.

  I have no such picture of Bill at work as I have of Ulrich. I assume that Bill was no more talkative with The Doctor than with me, for during that period, Dr. Rosenbliett’s gossip was thin. But I do know about Bill’s chief project. It was to set up a Soviet apparatus in England. This use of the United States as a base for establishing Soviet apparatuses in other countries was then a common practice.

  I had been selected to assist Bill in London. This project Bill outlined to me in the course of several conversations. He instructed me to provide myself at once with a business “cover”—an American firm that would send me to represent it in London. I must also provide myself with papers on which I could secure a fraudulent passport. I needed papers for my wife, too, and what was much more difficult, for my infant daughter, both of whom were to accompany me to England. Furthermore, I was to organize in the United States a courier system such as I had formerly known of on the German boats. But the couriers for the English apparatus were to travel between New York City and Southampton, Portsmouth, or, preferably, the port of London.