Whittaker, Mrs. Charles (grandmother)
Wiggens, Worthington
Wilde, Oscar
Wilder, Thornton “Willi, See “Bill”
Williams College
Wittoughby. General Charles A.n.
Wilson, Edwin
Wilson, Woodrow
WINC (radio station)
Winchell, Walter
Witt, Nathan n.
Wittvogel, Karl
Wohlforth, Robertn.
Wolfe, Bertram D.
Women’s Christian Temperance Union
Workers Center
Works Progress Administration
World Bank, See International Bank for Reconstruction and Development
World Tomorrow, The (magazine)
World War I
World War II
World War III
Worthington Pump Company
Y
Yagoda, Henry
Yale University
Yalta Conference
Yearling, The (Rawlings)
Yezhov
Yi Ying Sung
Yonkers (New York) Statesman
You Have Seen the Heads
Young Communist League
Young Men’s Christian Association
Z
Zhotonnirsky
Zimnierman See Carpenter, David
Zinovicv
Zionists
Zola, Emile
Zomig Col.
Zysman, Dale
1 Later the N.K.V.D. Later still the M.V.B. Throughout this book I use the term G.P.U., the term most familiar to me.
2 The Terror Brigade, the underground section of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, made no secret of its purpose and methods. It organized and carried out the assassinations of the Russian Prime Minister von Plehve, the Grand Duke Sergei, and others. The Brigade was headed at one time by Yevno Asiev, the classic type of the double agent. As head of the Terror Brigade, Asiev planned and executed political murders. As a lifelong police agent, he constantly betrayed the terrorists to the police. Among those he betrayed was the young Lettish terrorist, Karl Trauberg, who had organized a highly mobile and effective unit of the Terror Brigade known as “Karl’s Flying Detachment of the Northern Area.” It was as a gesture of revolutionary respect to Karl Trauberg that I took the underground pseudonym “Carl.”
3 Except for one moment, which I shall relate. when I felt that Cod had left me.
4 Enough, however, so that when a Time researcher in later years called up Columbia University to check my translation of a paragraph of gypsy, she was asked: “Why do you call me? One of your editors knows more about gypsy languages than any man in the United States.” This is wild exaggeration. I never knew that much, and I have forgotten most of what I knew.
5 Circa 1941, Zysman’s party membership was suspected or discovered. He was eased out of the schools in an incident that made a day’s headlines. Later, he went to work for the Communist Labor Research Croup, which included among others, Comrade Grace Hutchins, whom I have mentioned in the first section of this book.
6 Besides Minor and his wife, the affluent Lydia Gibson, William Gropper, the artist, and his family, Harry Freeman and his wife (Vera Schap, the sister of Al Schap, in my time an organizer of the Young Communist League); Joseph North, of the Daily Worker and the New Masses, and his family; Anna Rochester and Grace Hutchins. These two implacable revolutionists named their rural retreat “The Little Acorn.”
7 A “C. I. Rep” is attached by the Comintern to every Communist Party except the Russian. He is never a citizen of the country to whose Communist Party he is accredited. Therefore, he is usually, if not always, illegally resident in the country to which he has been sent. His purpose is to keep Moscow posted on developments within the party he is attached to, and to advise and guide its Central Committee. In fact, his authority is such that he can usually dictate policy. The first C. I. Rep to the American Communist Party was the Japanese Communist, Sen Katayama. He was presently followed by a Red Army officer named Gusev, known in the American Communist Party by the pseudonym, P. Green. P. Creen was succeeded by John Pepper. Pepper was succeeded by a member of the Central Committee of the British Communist Party, whom I was presently to meet rather mysteriously.
8 I went to see it one night, probably in 1935, with Maxim Lieber. I pointed out to my friend a young woman who was the center of a lively group in the audience. “That,” he said, “is Hede Massing”—my one and only glimpse of that important witness until after the second Hiss trial.
9 When these lines were written some time in 1950, I had not intended to divulge the messenger’s name. Since then it has been in the news. For, one day, in our local newspaper, I saw a picture of Oliver Edmund Clubb, a U. S. consular official in China who had recently returned to the United States after the Communists captured Peking. I said to my wife: “I know this man. He paid me a visit in the New Masses office in 1932. But they have his name wrong. It should be Chubb.” I mentioned the fact because it amused me that my memory could retain an impression of someone of no particular importance ( then supposed) and details of a conversation held fleetingly almost two decades before. Out of the same sense of amusement, and for no other reason, I mentioned the incident in a casual conversation with two F.B.I. friends.
I was startled by their burst of interest in my memories of Oliver Edmund Clubb (for the newspaper had been right, and my recollection wrong about his last name). Presently, an investigator for the House Committee on Un-American Activities called and questioned me about Clubb. Presently, Clubb testified before that committee. He had no recollection of visiting Whittaker Chambers in the New Masses office in 1932.
The matter did not end there. The State Department’s Loyalty Board requested me to testify before it about a month later in the Case of O. Edmund Clubb, sending me one of its customary letters with the somewhat deterrent ending which notes that the Board, of course, pays no transportation or witness fees. Testifying before Loyalty Boards is entirely a voluntary matter. I had already testified before the State Department’s Board in the cases of two other employes. The Board had treated me with a formally faultless courtesy under which I thought I sensed an indomitable hostility sublimated into glances, smiles and intonations of complacent amusement.
Since I was busy writing. this book, I had little time to spare. Before my belated answer, saying that I would testify, had reached the Board, one of the higher officials of the State Department telephoned me. Warmly, he reminded me that we had a great mutual friend. Generously, he offered to send a car to fetch me if I would testify at once at the Clubb hearing. I agreed to testify, though I preferred to drive myself. The sudden urgency surprised me as much as the sudden warmth which again enfolded me when I reached the State Department.
The hearing began. Usually in a hearing it is possible to detect a logic and purpose in the questions asked. The questions put to me that day mystified me completely. Among other questions, I was asked if Mike Cold had been present at my conversation with Clubb, if Mike Gold had been present at all at the New Masses that day in 1932. I was asked if Mike Cold on meeting a stranger would be likely to call him “Comrade,” what the geography of the New Masses building was like, if there were revolutionary posters on the wall. Two points, in particular, puzzled me. I could not understand why I was asked if a Communist would keep a diary (my answer: no). I could not understand the degree of importance which was obviously attached by the Loyalty Board to the case of a man whose rank in China had not been especially exalted. For I did not know two facts that I was to learn shortly after. The first fact was that Clubb, on his return from China, had abruptly been upped to head the State Department’s China desk. The second fact was that he had kept a diary. In the course of his hasty departure from China that diary had passed into the hands of the British authorities. Always great readers of diaries, the British read this one and found an entry to the effect that, in 1932, O. Edmund Clubb had had a conversation with Whittaker Chambers
in the New Masses office. Other entries provided the basis for the mystifying questions at the hearing. This diary the British had turned over to the American authorities. Clubb’s recollection was refreshed by it so that he subsequently was able to recall our meeting. Recently, Clubb was completely cleared of any aspersion of disloyalty, but was deemed a “poor security risk.” Secretary Acheson then had the case reviewed by his own deputy who not only cleared Clubb of any suggestion of disloyalty, but also of the imputation of “a security risk.” Clubb at once resigned and was given a pension. In fairness to the State Department, it may be noted. too, that the two employes against whom I had testified earlier also subsequently resigned.
10 Circa 1946. Time’s Moscow bureau employed a Russian woman as a part-time translator. One day she casually pointed to my name in the magazine’s masthead, and asked Craig Thompson, Time’s bureau chief: “Do you know that man?” Thompson said that he knew me very well. “So do I,” she said. Her name was Nadya Ulanova. She was Ulrich’s wife. In that way, I learned Ulrich’s real name more than a decade after I last saw him.
11 I described this episode to the F.B.I., In 1949, without at first mentioning Jacobson’s name, for I knew that this was one point of my story that the F.B.I. could absolutely check; and, at a rather unpleasant time, it gave me a childish pleasure to defer the climax. Then I held up one hand to show how Jacobson’s fingers were missing. “Arvid jacobson!” exclaimed Special Agent F. X. Plant who is a walking archive of the identities, features and peculiarities of Soviet agents.
12 For details of Leon Minster’s later activities in China, see General Charles A. Willoughby’s testimony before the McCarran Committee in 1951.
13 George Mink, an American citizen and former Philadelphia cab driver, was then the head of the Communist Party’s seamen’s organization on the New York waterfront. Mink was a nephew of George Lozovsky, formerly chairman of Moscow’s Red International of Labor Unions (the Profintern), later a Soviet press chief. Subsequently, Mink was a member of a Soviet espionage group arrested, chiefly because of his carelessness, in Copenhagen. Ulrich, also a member of the group, was also arrested. During the Spanish Civil War, Mink was charged with personally supervising the murders of anti-Stalinists in the Spanish Republic’s jails. Still later, he was reported to be in the United States, organizing the assassination of Leon Trotsky, who was then in Mexico. Shortly after my break with the Communist Party, Carlo Tresca, the editor of Il Martello, told me that Mink was in the country and warned me against him. In 1943, Tresca himself was shot and killed as he stepped out of a building on lower Fifth Avenue. Mink is wanted by the United States Government for a variety .of interesting reasons.
14 According to Peters, the aluminum company had been plagued by microscopic flaws in its propellers, the cause of which a careful check failed to reveal. The flaws were caused by members of the cell making tiny spitballs from the cellophane wrapping of their cigarette packs, and spitting them into the molten flux. Peters’ problem was whether to order this pointless sabotage to be stopped, and thereby risk dulling the revolutionary temper of the comrades, or whether to wink at it and thereby risk eventual detection. I have forgotten what he decided
15 George E. Allen, writing about the San Francisco Conference in Presidents Who Have Known Me: “So I asked Stettinius if he could get some State Department attaché, who was familiar with the preliminary negotiations, to give me a fill-in. That very day he sent around to my room a personable, bright, obviously well-informed young man to tell me about the UN organization, its origins at the Yalta Conference, and its probable setup. He briefed me for several hours, using simple language, and treating me quite properly as an eighth-grader in my knowledge of diplomacy. When he was through, he asked me whether I had a copy of the speech President Truman would deliver at the close of the San Francisco meeting. When I said I had, he asked whether he might borrow a copy to read at his leisure and return. He did return it in due course with the comment that he considered it excellent. He was extremely curious as to who had assisted in the preparation of the material. The young man’s name was Alger Hiss.”
16 Currently out on bail after her arrest with other leaders of the Communist Party.
17 One of them, described to me by J. Peters, was headed by Clarina Michelson, a Communist trade-union organizer, who was said to come of a good Boston family, but who had developed the chummy habit of addressing everyone as “dearie.” Posing as a woman of means on her organizing forays, Comrade Michelson stayed at the better hotels in the South. In her underground activities she was assisted by Otto Hall, who posed as her “chauffeur.” Otto Hall was a high man among colored Communists and the brother, or half-brother, of James Ford, the Communist Party’s perennial vice-presidential candidate in national elections.
18 Later in 1934, the lock on the studio door was twice broken. The underground suspected, quite mistakenly, that that had been the work of the F.B.I. So the violin studio was given up as an underground meeting place.
19 The owner of the drug stores was the brother of a New York Communist doctor who was married to one of the party’s highly trusted stenographers.
20 Since this was written, another witness has appeared. In February of this year, Nathaniel Weyl testified before the McCarran Committee that, early in 1934, he had been a Communist and a member of the Ware Group. With one exception (a man who presumably entered the Group after Weyl had left), he named as his fellow members all those whom I had named, including Alger Hiss. Weyl, however, was not the witness referred to above.
21 Formerly, one of the Socialist Soviet Republics. After the German invasion of Russia in World War I, the Volga German Republic was erased. The whole population, men, women and children were marched into some nameless part of Siberia, probably as slave laborers.
22 Not long before this book was published, Lieber suddenly gave up his literary agency and moved to the Southwest.
23 In 1949, he testified before the Grand Jury about these matters. Therefore, I had not intended to divulge his name, for I could see no public advantage, and much private disadvantage, in doing so. But since this chapter was written, the House Committee on Un-American Activities has seen fit to. call him before it, and it is now public knowledge that his name is William. Spiegel.
24 According to a security officer of the State Department, the loitering agent was Dr. Rosenbliett’s old friend, Nicholas Dozenberg, arrested by the F.B.I. as the head of a Soviet apparatus in 1939. following his exposure by General Walter Krivitsky in the Saturday Evening Post.
25 I am not speaking of such people as the F.B.I. and other security agencies send into the Communist Party. In the true sense of the word, they are not informers but spies, working in exposed, and sometimes hazardous, positions.
26 Ignazio Silone, the author of Fontamara and The Seed Beneath the Snow, was the head of the underground section of the Italian Communist Party until he broke with Communism in the 1930’s. Togliatti, once Silone’s close friend, is secretary of the Italian Communist Party.
27 By a curious chance, Joseph L. Roesch had been an unsuccessful aspirant to that judgeship to which President Truman appointed Samuel H. Kaufman, the judge in the first Hiss trial. As he waited to die, Joe somehow found strength to write that I was to have the good-luck pin which had belonged to his father, and which I carried, in memory of a brave and generous spirit, ,through the second Hiss that.
28 Priscilla Hiss had also worked for Time; in the 1920’s, when she had been head of researchen.
29 There is nothing strange in the fact that many of these same people were loud cheerers for Alger Hiss. The wife of one former Time employe—let me call her Mrs. Hinchingbrook—did more than cheer. One morning, during the Hiss Case, a Time bureau chief was reading in the library of a house where he had been an overnight guest. Suddenly, he became aware that there was a caller in the next room. He recognized Mrs. Hinchingbrook’s voice, rising and falling in wrathful crescendo and decrescendo. She did not know that she wa
s being overheard. My friend listened fascinated as the beautiful Mrs. Hinchingbrook proposed one rascally scheme after another for “framing” Whittaker Chambers. Her keening was due to the fact that, while ingenious, none of her schemes was really sound. She was much too intelligent not to know that, so that after each unfeasible suggestion, she would exclaim with a snap of vexation: “No, that won’t workl” This barehanded rascality on the part precisely of the “nicest people” ran through the Hiss Case like rot through an apple.
30 In this connection, another incident. In my first years at Time, the anti-Communist faction in the Newspaper Guild prevailed on me to attend one of the union’s city-wide meetings. In the crowded hall, I became aware that someone was staring at me. I glanced into a face of undisguised hatred which at first I did not recognize. It was Nathan Witt.
31 I did not know that there exited a sealed indictment of the Soviet agent, Arthur Adams. This fact, I am told, has never before been published. I am also informed that it was the intervention of the State Department that prevented the Justice Department from prosecuting that case.
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