World Famous Spy Scandals
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The meaning of treason has changed unimaginably in three or four centuries. And there is no clearer way of grasping it than to think of two names: Prince Andrei Kurbski and Kim Philby.
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Bhave-Bakshi Episode
This is a case of spying for our neighbour Pakistan. Many of the people involved in this scandal had escaped the dragnet in earlier cases and continued their treacherous activities. This is the inside story of attempts made by enemy agents to find out secrets about the Indian navy.
An ambassador car was stationed on the side of the road that goes towards Jama Masjid from Chandni Chowk. The car belonged to Intelligence officers who were waiting to catch a spy. A man lay under the car posing to be doing some repairs while two sat on the back seat. Suddenly, the man sitting in the car knocked with his fingers and the man came out from under the car. He rubbed his hands and pretended to be looking for some public tap to wash them. He surveyed the goods spread by the pavement shopkeepers and the crowd going either way on the busy road. He saw a man in that crowd whom he recognised. Nodding towards the man sitting in the car, he advanced towards a water tap.
On the other side of the road, a drama was being enacted. A man collided with another man in the crowd and said, “Brother, you should look where you are going.” He spoke in faultless chaste Urdu. “I am sorry, please excuse me. Some of your papers have fallen, let me retrieve them,” replied the other man as he picked up an envelope from the pavement and handed it to the man who spoke in Urdu. Then, he melted into the crowd.
This drama had been enacted many times by these two men. Only this time final curtain was to be rung down. Actually, defence secrets had been passed to Pakistan in that envelope.
The intelligence officer who was washing his hands at the water tap, took out a large handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his hands. He then moved towards the man who had been given the envelope. That man was signalling for a three wheeler to stop. The intelligence officer waved the handkerchief, before he could get into the three wheeler. Within seconds, a man selling old books at the pavement and a labourer lying in a hand cart rushed towards the scooter and surrounded it. The driver of the three wheeler stood astounded when these three men surrounded the man who hailed him. In the meantime, the car also approached them and stopped near them by the side of the pavement. The man with the envelope was taken into custody at gun point. A curious crowd started to gather there and the intelligence officer calmly told them, “This man is a spy and we have arrested him.”
The man arrested was Gul Zaman, an officer of the embassy of Pakistan. The news of his arrest was displayed in the papers of November 24. Three officers of the Pakistani embassy were declared persona non grata and asked to leave India. They were Gul Zaman, Mohammad Mushtaq and Munnavar Ali. They were suspected of spying. In retaliation, Pakistan also expelled four officers of the Indian embassy at Islamabad.
On 23rd November, Pachbhave, who worked in the photography section of the naval headquarters and an advocate Rajan Bakshi were also arrested in connection with this incident. Some secret documents pertaining to Navy were recovered from Gul Zaman on that day in Chandni Chowk. Many confidential documents were recovered from the residence of Pachbhave, when it was searched by officers of the intelligence department. He used to sell these documents to Gul Zaman. Bhave’s modus operandi was quite simple. He made some extra copies of the documents given to him for copying and then smuggled them out in his tiffin box.
During investigation, it transpired that Pachbhave used to sell secret documents to the spy ring of Tika Ram, Captain Jeet Singh and Mam Chand. These people worked for Pakistan. At that time, Pachbhave worked in the Defence ministry. Somehow, he escaped detection at the time of the arrest of this gang. After some time, he re-established his contact with Pakistani spies.
Rajan Bakshi’s father was commander T. Bakshi, who retired from the Indian navy. A lot of papers were seized from Bakshi’s residence in Vasant Vihar. Rajan did not divulge much information to his interrogator. In 1977, a spy ring was discovered in the Planning Commission. Rajan Bakshi had defended the accused Mahabir Prasad and Natasha Reddy in that case. Natasha was a citizen of Czechoslovakia. Rajan worked as an agent for America. He maintained contacts with other countries as well. Pachbhave also spied for China apart from supplying secret documents to Pakistan.
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Communist Spy: Alger Hiss
For Alger Hiss it was the second time around. Back in the summer he had undergone the ordeal of a five-week trial which ended with the jury disagreeing, eight being in favour of conviction, four against. Now, in November 1949, he faced the same ordeal all over again.
He looked older and greyer after the months of waiting, but his voice was firm as he pleaded not guilty to the two charges against him. They alleged that, giving evidence before the Red-Hunting Un-American Activities Committee, he had lied when he denied passing “classified” State Department papers to Whittaker Chambers, an admitted ex-Communist; and he had lied again in saying he had never talked with Chambers in February or March 1938.
In the normal way, he would have faced trial as a spy. Under the statute of limitations, however, he could be charged only with the lesser offence of perjury because more than three years had elapsed since the alleged events.
Hiss was 44 with a distinguished government career behind him. Apart from his work in the State Department, he had been a policy adviser to President Roosevelt at the Yalta conference, and secretary-general of the post-war United Nations conference at San Francisco. He was currently—although in a state of suspension pending the outcome of the trial—President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Yet, at the first hearing, Chambers had claimed categorically that Hiss was a member of a Communist spy ring in Washington in the 1930’s, and had refused to follow his example when, disenchanted with the Stalin purges, he quit the party.
For his part, Hiss had refused even to acknowledge that Chambers was Chambers, preferring to call him George Crosley, “ A man I knew in 1933 and 1934 . . . a sort of deadbeat who purported to be a cross between Jim Tully and Jack London.”
Thomas Murphy, the prosecutor, devoted much of his opening speech at the start of the second trial to Chambers, his star witness. He was an intellectual, he explained, who had become a Marxist-Leninist and a Communist agent out of fear of Hitler and men like him. “There were many people who thought that only the Russians could stop the threat of Fascism,” said Mr. Murphy.
“When Chambers decided to break with the Communists,” he went on, “he had to go into hiding and sleep with a gun beside him.” Then, conscious of the error of his past ways, he had reemerged and started to rebuild his life, rising to be a senior editor with Time and Life magazines. “But he sometimes worked 48 hours round the clock and his health broke,” said Mr. Murphy. “He then retired to become a farmer.”
In August the previous year, he had testified before the Un-American Activities Committee that Hiss had been a Communist agent, but produced no documentary evidence. It was only when he repeated the charge on a radio program, and Hiss issued a libel writ, that he had lodged the documents in the case with his Baltimore lawyer.
They consisted of microfilm of State Department documents which had been hidden in a pumpkin at Chambers’s Maryland farm, typed copies of State Department papers, and four memoranda in what was admittedly Hiss’s own handwriting. Why had Chambers taken so long to produce them? “He just couldn’t bear to go that far with his former friend,” Mr. Murphy explained.
At the first trial, Hiss had been represented by Lloyd Paul Stryker, a flamboyant and dramatic courtroom operator. For the new one he had switched to Claude Cross, a big-shouldered, bullnecked lawyer from Boston with a plodding style. The main points of Cross’s opening address were that Chambers, a self-confessed liar who had taken false oaths in the past to further the Communist cause, could not be believed now, and that the State papers had been leaked by someone other than Hiss.
Chambers, big, ruddy-faced, the black sheep turned white, was the first prosecution witness. He admitted cheerfully his past errors—expulsion from Columbia University, where he had stolen more than 50 books from the library . . . conversion to Communism . . . editor of the Daily Worker and New
Masses . . . living with a girl Party worker . . . spying.
“Hiss,” he told the court, “was such an obedient Communist in 1935 that he asked the Party’s permission to take a new job in the Justice Department and later in the Department of State.”
Hiss had provided documents right up to April 1938. Some were microfilmed, others copy-typed by Mrs. Hiss on an old Woodstock typewriter—which now stood on a table before the jury, and was to prove one of the most critical factors in the case. Then he, Chambers, became disillusioned with what was going on inside Russia, “I considered myself a better Communist than Stalin” and he decided to abandon spying.
As late as Christmas 1938, he had come out of hiding to try to persuade Hiss to break with the Communists. “That was the last time I called on them,” he said. “I feared an ambush and even thought that Hiss might assassinate me.”
Nevertheless, he had stayed for dinner, and Hiss had given him a toy rolling pin as a Christmas present for his daughter. “What did you do with it?” asked Mr. Cross. “I threw it away,” said Chambers. “You didn’t hide it in any pumpkins, did you?” suggested the lawyer in a rare departure from his correct, plodding style.
Chambers clasped his hands together and decided to treat the sally with contempt. Judge Henry Goddard interrupted to ask: “Was that meant as a serious question?”
Cross stumbled over a few words of apology and regret. “I don’t think lawyers should ask foolish questions just because some of the witness’s answers may be inappropriate,” said the judge. “This case will take long enough as it is.”
In all, Chambers spent more than six days on the witness stand. Before he was finally allowed to step down, Murphy hammered home the point that he was a reformed character who had put his Communist treachery behind him, and who could now be relied upon to tell the truth once he had sworn on the Bible.
On re-examination Murphy asked: “On your oath and before God, Judge Goddard and this jury, did you say that Mr. Hiss passed government documents to you?”
“I did,” replied Chambers firmly.
It was now time for the cool voice of bureaucracy to cast doubts on the defence claim that the four handwritten memoranda had been composed by Hiss in the course of his normal duties, and later filched by someone else.
Eunice Lincoln, secretary to Hiss in 1938 and a State Department employee for 31 years, took the stand and examined the memoranda. Her comment suggested that Hiss must have written them for some private purpose rather than as part of his job. “I cannot recall seeing anything similar to these in all my years in the State Department,” she said.
It was next the turn of the Woodstock typewriter to go under the microscope. Four easels were set up in court. One held private letters and memos which Mrs. Hiss admitted typing; the second the 47 documents which Chambers had produced to his lawyer in Baltimore; the third blow-ups of the microfilmed documents hidden in the pumpkin, and the last the State Department originals.
The jury, which had flagged under the strain of listening to the cocky and self-assured Chambers for more than six days, sat up and took a new interest as Ramos Feehan, an F.B.I. typewriter expert, probed the exhibits from his special point of view. Their eyes swivelled from easel to easel as he pointed out the peculiarities of some of the type faces: a capital A, the small g, e, i, o, a, u, d, r, l.
By the time he had finished it was clear that all but one—document No. 10—of the 47 Baltimore documents had been copied on the Woodstock belonging to Mrs. Hiss. It was equally clear that, unless the defence could prove conclusively that someone other than her had actually done the typing, the chances of clearing their client were slim.
It was the defence contention that Mrs. Hiss had given the typewriter to the Catletts, the family of her Negro maid, and that it was no longer in her possession at the material time. The second part of that claim took a denting when one of the Catlett boys said in the witness box that he could remember exactly when the typewriter came into the family.
“It was not later than 1936,” he said. “It was the day we moved into a new house and had the electricity turned on. Up to then we’d had kerosene lamps. I’ll never forget the day when we could afford to have the electricity turned on.”
Mr. Murphy slapped into evidence a document from the power company. It showed the family had moved into their new home and had the electricity switched on not in 1936, but on January 17, 1938, a date uncomfortably late for Alger Hiss.
The traitorous Wadleigh, blinking behind thick glasses, denied that any of the 500 or so documents he had passed to Chambers in his years as a courier were among the evidence in court. Finally, on the 16th day, the prosecution rested its case—but only after calling the explosive testimony of
Mrs. Hede Massing, a former Viennese actress.
They had failed to win the right for her to give testimony at the first trial. Now, after several objections from Mr. Cross, she described how she had been an active Communist agent from the end of 1933 to 1937, and how Hiss had tried to lure into his “cell” one of her workers – Noel Field, a former State Department employee, who had fled with his wife behind the Iron Curtain just a few months before the trial.
In a conversation at Field’s home, she recalled, “I said to
Mr. Hiss: ‘I understand you are trying to get Noel Field away from my organisation and into yours.’ He said: ‘So you are this famous girl who is trying to keep Noel Field away from me.’ And I said: ‘Yes.’ And he said, as far as I can remember: ‘Well, we will see who is going to win.’ At which point I said: ‘Well, you realise you are competing with a woman.’
After that, one of them—she couldn’t be sure which one—had commented: “Whoever is going to win, we are both working for the same boss.”
The trial continued in a curious atmosphere on
December 22, the last day before the court closed for the Christmas recess. Judge Goddard insisted on having the windows open, and Mr. Cross proceeded with his attempt to save Hiss to the sound of carols and sleigh-bells.
By the end of the day, he had managed to cast doubts on certain details of the friendship between Hiss and Chambers, and to discredit to a large degree the prosecution’s claim that, in November 1937, they were on such close terms that Hiss had given Chambers a $400 loan to buy a car.
The real assault, however, began when the court resumed on January 6, and Judge Goddard allowed—for the first time in Federal Courts—psychiatric testimony in an attempt to discredit a witness. The two men brought in to attack the personality of Chambers were Dr. Carl Binger, a distinguished, athletic-looking psychiatrist, and Dr. Henry Murray, former director of the Harvard Psychological Clinic.
Dr. Binger, who had heard much of Chambers’ testimony, and had studied all his stories, poems, articles, and translations, said he was “suffering from a condition known as psychopathic personality, a disorder of the character whose distinguishing features are amoral and a social.”
Such people, he explained, did not take into account the ordinary accepted conventions of morality and had “no regard for the good of society and of individuals”. Consequently, they were often destructive of both. Some symptoms of the condition, he went on, were “chronic, persistent and repetitive lying; acts of deception and misrepresentation; alcoholism and drug addiction; abnormal sexuality, vagabondage, begging, inability to form stable attachments and a tendency to make false accusations.”
Dr. Murray said his speci
ality had been the analysis of psychopathic personalities through the internal evidence of their writings. What did he think of the writings of Whittaker Chambers? “I have found,” he stated, “a higher proportion of images of disintegration and destruction, filth and dirt, decay and decomposition and death than in any writings
I have ever examined.”
Juries are notoriously prone to be irritated by the claims of psychiatrists and psychologists to know what really makes people tick. Any prejudices the Hiss jury may have had in this direction were well bolstered by the prosecutor’s masterly handling of the two experts, and of Dr. Binger in particular.
Mr. Murphy, slipping easily into the role of a plain homespun kind of fellow not to be bamboozled by highfalutin nonsense about the roots of personality, took Dr. Binger up on his statement that “personal untidiness and bad teeth are symptoms of the psychopath”.
“But, doctor,” he inquired genially, “how about dear old Will Rogers, and Owen D. Young, and Bing Crosby? They were no fashion plates. Were they psychopathic?”
“Not on that evidence,” replied the witness.
“You say normal people hide things in banks,” Mr. Murphy went on. “How about the mother of Moses? Didn’t she hide him in the bullrushes?”
“She could hardly have put him in a safe-deposit box,” retorted Dr. Binger in his only snappy answer of the day.
They also had a brisk exchange on whether Dr. Binger’s conclusions from studying Chambers’ testimony and writings
were necessarily the only ones that could be drawn. “Doctor,” the lawyer asked in the course of his painstaking attack, “would you say that other psychiatrists, let us say as qualified as yourself, might perhaps have a different opinion based upon the facts you have?”