They walked together in the direction of the barn. Chambers chatted, asking about Harry’s background. Harry spoke quickly, compressing it all into the minute or two they had. He added this, that he thought Chambers’s trial and the little he had written about it moving and memorable. “I think the whole world is waiting for your book, Mr. Chambers.”
They had reached the barn door. Chambers opened it and called out, but John was not there. Chambers turned to Harry. “I can see that you are close to the senator. He has grave responsibilities. I know you can help him. Do not hesitate to write to me if you need—anything.” Harry was bowled over. An invitation, evidently sincere, to stay in touch with the poet—Harry thought Chambers just that—the poet of the Western resistance to Communism. “Thanks so much, Mr. Chambers. I really appreciate that.”
Chambers smiled, and they met his guests coming out of the door. Extending his hand, McCarthy looked Chambers directly in the face. “I really would like it if you would … think of me as Joe.”
Chambers smiled, nodded, and said quietly, “Yes. Thank you, Joe.” Then he narrowed his eyes. “Be careful. Be very careful.”
Back in the car they were silent. After a while Jean turned on the radio. The broadcaster spoke of 500,000 East Germans carrying Lenin banners who had marched that afternoon in Berlin. He commented that the demonstration was an obvious answer to the 500,000 West Germans who had marched early in the month in protest against the Communist government in the eastern part of the city.
“You got to hand it to the Communists,” McCarthy commented. “If they want a mass demonstration, they get a mass demonstration.”
“Yup. And some of them, we got to believe, believe in what they’re cheering,” Nixon observed.
25
A covert messenger
On June 4, several weeks into the Senate’s scheduled debate on McCarthy’s charges, the telephone rang at his apartment, two blocks from the Capitol. A month after his return from what forever after would be referred to in his office as “Joe’s Wheeling week,” McCarthy had unlisted his telephone number. He had heard the phone ring every few minutes for days on end, bringing calls from newspaper reporters, radio interviewers, agitated citizens, and what he referred to, in the office, as “the spook patrol.” (“We got enough spooks of our own,” he commented to Mary Haskell. “We don’t need somebody on the telephone prepared to dictate the names of three hundred fifty homosexuals in the Bureau of Weights and Measures.”)
McCarthy, dressed in shorts and T-shirt, a half-consumed cup of coffee in hand, picked up the phone that now rang only when dialed by the few who had his new, secret number, leaving him secure in the knowledge that whoever was calling was an intimate.
The voice wasn’t one he had heard before. It was a refined voice, a man whose words were soft-spoken, the syntax poised, his message intriguing.
“Senator, I’m not permitted to tell you on whose behalf I am calling you. And there is no way you can, over the phone—or for that matter in person—verify my credentials because I cannot give you any credentials to verify. I’d like your permission to come to your apartment and to take fifteen minutes of your time. It doesn’t matter what time of day, if you consent to see me, but you should know that my message is urgent and may lead to information useful to you in the Senate investigation. May I come?”
“Hang on.” McCarthy put down the receiver and looked at his watch. He reached into the inside pocket of his brown tweed jacket, lying over the couch, and pulled out his appointment book. He scanned the schedule.
He picked up the telephone again. “Is what you want to tell me something one of my aides can listen in on?”
“Under no circumstances. I am authorized to give my message only to you.”
Joe hesitated. “How soon could you get here?”
“Five minutes.”
Joe said, “Make it ten minutes. When you call up from downstairs, say it’s Henry calling. I’ll ring the door release.”
He hung up and dialed his office. “Hello, darling,” he greeted Marge, the telephone operator. “Put me through to Don.”
“Don? Joe. Look, it’s nine-oh-five. Go down, right now, to the delicatessen across the street from me. Yeah. That one. They have a pay phone there. Now, I want you to ring my number here at exactly nine-twenty. I got somebody coming in. I don’t know anything about him, but I have a hunch about it so I’m having a look. When I answer the phone, if I say, ‘Don, I’m running late,’ then that means everything is okay—go on back to the office. If I say, ‘Okay, I’ll be right with you,’ that means I want you to use your key and come to my apartment as soon as you can make it, which I figure should be like twenty-five seconds. Got that? I hope so; I don’t have time to say it again.”
“Got it, Joe.”
He opened the door to a short man, neatly dressed in a dark blue suit, white shirt, and regimental tie. His hair was full, carefully parted, and there were signs of gray. He wore tortoise-shell glasses and carried a briefcase. Slung over his right arm was a light tan overcoat he had evidently removed in the hallway.
“May I put down the coat?”
“Yes, sure,” Joe said. “Give it to me. Er, coffee?”
“No, thank you, but I will sit down.”
McCarthy indicated the chair at the other end of the room. He positioned himself by the telephone, behind the coffee table.
“So what’s up, Henry?”
The stranger made only the slightest effort at a smile at the reference to him as “Henry.”
“Senator, you may pretty soon infer who sent me, or try to do so. Do me the favor of not suggesting who you think it is, as I can say nothing on that score.”
“Okay, Henry. So go ahead.”
“A woman who was for six years active in the government and served as a Soviet agent has turned. She has a very detailed story to tell, we have reason to believe. She recounted to her interrogator the names of two people who worked closely with her. One—there is reason to believe—is still in the government. The relevant people have tried to persuade her to tell the whole story to the FBI or to the loyalty board of her government … division. At one point we thought she would. Then she changed her mind. A few days later she left her lodging. May I smoke?”
“Sure.”
“She disappeared. Until yesterday we were afraid she might have left the country, or maybe—had an accident. Yesterday, almost four weeks after we were last in touch, she telephoned—to a number—a number she had been given. And what she said was that she would be willing to tell the whole story, but would tell it only to ‘Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin.’ ”
McCarthy was a good listener. But a lifetime of poker playing had taught him not to reveal what he felt. He looked on, impassive.
“We asked if we ourselves could come by. She said she was not giving out her new address, but would give it to Senator McCarthy. She did say that she is an hour’s driving distance from Washington. You can probably guess what else she said, but I have to repeat it. She said that if she hears from anyone—anywhere—anything that she thinks traces to her initiative, no one will ever hear from her again.”
The telephone rang. Joe picked it up. “Yeah, Don. I’m running a little late.” He put the phone down. Don Surine could return to the office.
He turned back to his visitor. “What does this lady want me to do?”
“You’re to tell me yes or no. If the answer is yes, you’re to say when. ‘When’ means—she warned—that you’ve set aside a minimum of four hours. One hour driving each way, two hours with her to hear her story. If you say yes, we’ll tell her. She’ll call her special number twice a day until she gets the word. When the time is set, one hour before you’re ready to go, she calls our number and gives us driving instructions. I then drive you out.”
Joe said nothing for a few seconds, then stood up and walked to the stove nearby. He filled his coffee cup.
“Y’know, Henry. I’m just wondering what the FBI—this is
hypothetical, of course—I know you’ve got nothing to do with the FBI—or the CIA—but suppose I am a trainee at either of those places and the training officer takes me through a security exercise.
“Situation: A nice guy comes to the door of a page-one hot senator, says interesting things, and Page-One Hot Senator is invited to make a date with this nice stranger, step into his car, and disappear … for only four hours, of course.
“I’m wondering what my instructor would say if I answered, ‘Sure, why not?’ ”
“You would be dropped from the trainee section and sent for work at some other part of the organization,” McCarthy’s visitor said matter-of-factly. And then quickly went on, “But you know, Senator, that’s the problem with categorical rules. Any rules. They just don’t cover every situation—like this one, for instance. And there is, in this situation, a very special lure. We’ve looked at the two people the lady told us about. If it’s true they’re Communists, and worked for Soviet intelligence, then they’re headline-making material. Page-one hot senators don’t mind headlines.”
“Listen, Henry. Sure, I don’t mind headlines. That’s how politicians get votes and how they lobby for their policies. I’m also interested in doing something about a country that just lost a world war, know what I mean? It was a free Poland that the war was all about, back in 1939.”
“I don’t deny your sincerity, Senator. I’m simply saying that in the hypothetical situation you’re describing, the trainee should also be told that the page-one hot senator is looking very, very hard for the kind of information that the nice stranger says he can lead him to—if he’ll make the date and reserve four hours.”
Joe McCarthy always thought instinctively, and acted impulsively.
“Okay, Henry. I’ll scrub other appointments for this afternoon. Tell me where to be at two P.M.”
26
McCarthy meets an informant
Senator McCarthy did exactly as requested. He got out of the car at Sequoia and Fourth and told the kid (a volunteer driver doing a paper in Georgetown) to wait until he returned. He didn’t tell him to keep his eyes away from where McCarthy would then walk to, but he didn’t feel he needed to do that. He walked west (“away from the Liggett’s drugstore”) one block, turned left, and found himself at the specified address. He gave the shabbily dressed doorman a name, “Joseph McPherson,” and, after a quick phone check, was told to go to apartment 6M. She opened the door.
McCarthy correctly assumed that the woman who let him in wordlessly was the object of all this feverish curiosity. The apartment was neat and sparely furnished. Perhaps it was rented as a furnished apartment. She motioned him to an armchair, and he could see that her arm was shaking. She wasn’t old, but she looked fragile, and her voice sometimes broke. She asked him if he wanted tea; he shook her hand and said, “Coke all right?” She produced it, sat down, and they talked for two hours.
“She’s an aristocrat, Jeanie. With sad, sad eyes, and not much of a smile. But she knows how to tell her story, the part of the story I got. There’s apparently a lot more. And she cares a lot.”
“Who is she?”
“I won’t write down her name, not anywhere. I’ll refer to her as—Ouspenskaya. Madame Ouspenskaya.”
At the office everyone who knew about her adopted the name quickly. “Maria Ouspenskaya.” Joe rolled the name about his tongue. He loved it! and spoke with near proprietary expression about Hollywood’s venerable character, the slightly mysterious old lady with the long, mellifluous Slavik name—oo-spen-SKY-ah—who was featured in film after film playing character parts, the classic lady-not-to-be-crossed.
“I found her an authentic lady,” he told his inner staff, Don, Harry, Jean, and Mary. “She’s fragile, you can tell. She talks with just a slight accent—Russian, Czech, something like that. But there’s grit there, and her story is completely, well—composed. The background isn’t all that unusual. It was her husband, he’s dead, who joined the party. She strung along, became a true believer, stayed on after he died. She did some courier work for somebody called ‘Allan,’ and in 1944 was told that two of the people working in her division, one man, one woman, were fellow agents. She knew the man—a code clerk. The woman she knew only by her secret agent name. They collaborated on one operation. After that she was told not to be in touch with her again.”
“What turned her?” Mary Haskell asked.
“Czechoslovakia. Masaryk was her—’devoted friend’ is how she put it. They were in college together and stayed friends till she came to America, fifteen, twenty years ago.”
“Has she told the FBI her whole story?”
“No! That’s their point. Herpoint. She’s waiting for us. Waiting for McCarthy to weigh in on the problem. She’s suspicious that if all she does is tell it to the FBI nothing will happen except that she’ll be in danger. She’s waiting for McCarthy, for me, to give her case to the Tydings Committee as one more example of system failure, but I think there’s a surprise coming. The FBI are, excuse me, Mary, excuse me, Jeanie, pissing in their pants. She wants to tell it to everybody and decided to do it to the Tydings Committee.”
Joe had tried to get Ouspenskaya to go further with him than she had been willing to go in her first encounter with the FBI. She had explained:
“I called the FBI in March. That was two years after the Czech coup. I dreaded it, dreaded it. But couldn’t put it off any longer.”
McCarthy didn’t comment.
“But I decided to be very careful. I gave the FBI one folder of coded documents passed by me to Allan from our … code clerk.” She didn’t offer his name.
“What did you expect the FBI to do?”
“I asked them to test the documents. To establish that they were top secret and that the … clerk had had access to them.”
“Why did you do that?”
“I wanted to find out if the FBI could verify my story. If yes, then I’d consider giving them more. Giving them the whole story. If no—if they weren’t persuaded by the documents—then I’d just have to face it, face whatever prison they put me in.”
“What happened?”
“They moved quickly. By April they authenticated it. The documents told of results of tests conducted as late as January at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds. Tests on antisubmarine detection devices and correspondence with British scientists. The FBI moved quickly, but not as quickly as the code clerk. One day he was gone. Obviously he found out. And I would guess that he knows who informed on him. I had one more conversation with my FBI contact. He said not to worry about the clerk. He said Mr. Hoover wanted a ‘comprehensive counterintelligence’ operation. That would mean I’d have to stay right where I was and just answer questions on the side for the FBI. That was when I knew I had to move quickly. I didn’t want that, to sit there doing my job when somebody—I think I know who it is—sitting above me can play with me like—match-sticks.” She picked up the matchbox, then thought to light a cigarette. She took a deep puff. “I want the whole story known. I saw you on television. It was when you spoke about Jan Masaryk and the alleged suicide that I decided that you were the man. Your talk about Czechoslovakia—”
“St. Louis, in May.”
“I don’t remember where. But I remember thinking that you would do the right thing and get the public attention.”
“That,” McCarthy told the story, “was when she got really scared, when she figured the FBI planned a full-scale program built around her staying in place, in her job at Commerce. So she packed her stuff and moved to … the new address. Didn’t tell anybody.
“Well.” McCarthy rose from his desk. “Tomorrow morning I’ll talk about her to the committee, tell about the code clerk spy, about ‘Allan.’ Then I’ll reveal her real name. In the afternoon session, she’ll come in person and testify about the slipshod security practices and how the code clerk got away even after she had given his name to the bureau. And the woman spy who’s still there. And who knows what more. That should prove some
of the points we’re trying to make.”
“You got hot stuff there, Joe,” Don Surine said.
“Yeah. I want to hear whoever is in charge of security at Aberdeen Proving Grounds and related clients to explain Maria Ouspenskaya and her little network.”
“Maybe it was a big network, Joe?” Mary put in.
“Naw. The Communists don’t operate that way. They try to keep down the number of people who can be exposed by any one defection. You know that, Mary.”
“Well, Whittaker Chambers named a dozen, Elizabeth Bentley more than a dozen.”
“True. Well, we’ll see. Tomorrow.”
That night McCarthy and Jean Kerr worked late. “What do you want from Calder’s?” she asked—Calder’s was the delicatessen that delivered (excellent service for senators, good service for congressmen) to Capitol offices.
“BLT on rye, with chips and coleslaw. And honey, order up a bottle of wine.”
“Chianti okay?”
He nodded and resumed writing on the legal pad that never seemed to give out, because when Mary saw it was running short, she’d bind in a fresh one.
Two hours later he said, a note of weariness in his voice, “Jeanie, come sit by me for a bit.”
She affected a reluctance to get up from her work, but soon sat in the chair Mary used to take dictation. Joe reached for her hand.
“Do you realize, Jeanie, the importance of tomorrow? Ouspenskaya—her real name is Kalli, Josefa Kalli—was never caught. She worked with this guy Allan. Then this code clerk comes in and out and does his bit. The bureau has documented that the files she stole were high-security stuff. We’ve got the equivalent of the same proof Whittaker Chambers had against Hiss, traceable secret documents. Both she and Allan sailed through security even though Ouspenskaya’s husband was a declared Communist. We’re getting deep down now, Jeanie, deep down, and tomorrow is going to get the senior senator from Maryland hopping.”
The Redhunter Page 19