Recognition opened the door for Soviet spies. Both networks, the NKVD and the GRU, could now operate under the cover of the Soviet embassy in Washington and the consulates in New York and San Francisco. This system of “legal” spies, protected under diplomatic cover (sometimes the ambassador himself, sometimes a lowly clerk), long since established in every other Soviet embassy, was now adopted in the United States. In tandem with the legals, the Soviets expanded the illegal networks of agents who came on false passports as immigrants and acted under the cover of various occupations.
An open society such as the United States, where snooping is frowned upon, and where congressmen in the early days of the FBI had compared its tactics to those of the czarist Secret Police, was unprepared to deal with the widespread and determined efforts of a horde of Soviet agents who were now allowed to enter the country. After the negative publicity that followed the Palmer raids, and after the reforms of Harlan Stone, the FBI had gone into a period of hibernation. By statute, the bureau was limited to “the detection and prosecution of crimes,” and since no federal laws were on the books to punish Communist activities there was no crime to investigate. By 1930 Hoover’s staff was down to 581, from 1,127 in 1920.1
There were times when Hoover, under orders from the White House, was obliged to act in violation of departmental policy. Late in May 1932, small groups of unemployed veterans began to gather in Washington, arriving from near and far, on foot or by hopping freight trains. They were called Bonus Marchers. In 1924, Congress had promised them a bonus, not payable until 1945. But they needed the money right away. Soon their number grew to fifteen thousand. They squatted in an open space called the Anacostia Flats, creating sanitation and food problems and becoming an embarrassment to President Hoover, a seething, daily reminder of his inability to cope with the Depression. Their aim was to pressure Congress to pass a bill for immediate payment of the bonus, but in mid-June, the bill was narrowly defeated. The disappointed Bonus Marchers lingered on, until late July when they were ordered to evacuate. Most of them left, but about two thousand diehards remained. On July 28, the President ordered the Army to have the veterans removed. General Douglas MacArthur, who was in command, ignored the President’s directive to use unarmed soldiers and stormed in with tanks, cavalry, tear gas, and a bayonet charge, leaving four dead and hundreds wounded.2
An appalled President Hoover, who was about to launch his campaign for reelection, summoned J. Edgar Hoover to the White House on August 1. The bureau could help him discredit the marchers by obtaining evidence that they were Communist-driven. Sensing that the President could not win in November, Hoover did as little as he could. Why help an administration on the way out? Hoover agreed to search his fingerprint files to see if any of the arrested Bonus Marchers had records. He also sent agents to railroad yards, where they monitored the movement of the marchers as they rode the freights back home. But the bureau did not obtain any hard evidence that the Bonus March was a Red plot.3
As expected, Herbert Hoover lost the election, ushering in FDR and the New Deal. At first, Roosevelt’s victory posed a serious threat to Hoover’s tenure as FBI Director, for the President chose as Attorney General Thomas Walsh, the senator from Montana who had vowed to get rid of him. The seventy-four-year-old Walsh had just married the widow of a Cuban sugar planter, but the honeymoon exhausted him and he died of a heart attack on March 2, 1933. Hoover was saved, and FDR hurriedly found a replacement for Walsh in Homer Cummings, a Connecticut lawyer who had been chairman of the Democratic National Committee in 1919.4
FDR brought to the presidency a broad view of the use of federal powers and a predilection for making the FBI his private detective agency. He came to office at a time when the threat of war in Europe and Asia increased the danger of espionage at home and made it necessary to expand Hoover’s jurisdiction. As a result of both the world situation and the President’s fondness for undercover shenanigans, Hoover flourished during the twelve years FDR was in office, under four Attorneys General. Indeed, it seemed that one of the requirements for the post was that the occupant be on good terms with Hoover.
The President dealt directly with Hoover, instead of making his requests through the Attorney General. Thus the FBI became a service organization for the White House. It was under FDR that the myth of Hoover as the indispensable man emerged. FDR was thankful that Hoover managed to sidestep legal niceties that might have hampered some investigations, while Hoover soon realized that this President had “a natural affinity for the intelligence process,” as one historian put it, “a gossipy and voyeuristic delight in the insider’s role, and a callousness to the claims alike of privacy and free expression.”5
It was FDR’s concern regarding pro-Nazi groups in America that overturned Harlan Stone’s 1924 ban on investigating political activities. Suspecting that these groups had ties to the German government, FDR called a meeting at the White House on May 8, 1934, attended by Hoover, Attorney General Homer Cummings, Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau, Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, and W. H. Moran, head of the Secret Service, a bureau of the Treasury Department assigned to the protection of the President, among other duties. FDR asked Hoover to collect information on homegrown fascists, who were calling the New Deal a tool of the Communist conspiracy, and to determine whether the German embassy had any connection with them, which would of course require the use of wiretaps. Two days later, Hoover instructed his field offices “to initiate an intensive investigation of activities of the Nazi group.” On May 18, Hoover’s bailiwick was further expanded when FDR signed a series of bills giving the FBI the authority to investigate cases involving extortion, kidnapping, fugitives, and the murder of federal officers. In a time of threats to national security and notorious crimes such as the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby, it seemed not only natural, but imperative, to rely on the FBI.6
In a climactic meeting in the summer of 1936, FDR secretly gave Hoover the authority to investigate all subversives, not just the pro-Nazis. FDR summoned Hoover to the White House on August 24 to discuss the dangers of foreign espionage. According to Hoover’s memo of the meeting, he briefed the President on right-wing as well as Communist intrigues, while providing more detail on the latter. Harry Bridges’s West Coast longshoremen’s union, he said, “was practically controlled by the Communists,” who also “had very definite plans” to seize control of the United Mine Workers and who had considerable influence in the Newspaper Guild. “I told him,” Hoover’s memo went on, “that my information was that the Communists planned to get control of these three groups and by doing so they would be able to paralyze the country in that they could stop all shipping in and out through the Bridges organization; stop the operation of industry through the mining union of [John L.] Lewis; and stop publication of any newspapers of the country through the Newspaper Guild.”7 He also mentioned Communist infiltration of government agencies, such as the National Labor Relations Board. Although Hoover’s information was well founded, his conclusion was hyperbolic.
Impressed by Hoover’s alarming scenario, FDR asked him to investigate “subversive activities in the United States.”
Hoover said the FBI had no authority to conduct such investigations.
FDR asked him if he had any ideas.
Hoover mentioned a 1916 statute that allowed the Secretary of State to authorize FBI investigations, which was broad enough to include political activities. FDR liked the confidential aspect of the arrangement, for it did not require congressional approval, and it would protect him against attacks from civil liberties groups. He arranged a meeting with Hoover and Secretary of State Cordell Hull the next day.
At the meeting, FDR told Hull that Communist and fascist activities were “international in scope and that Communists in particular were directed from Moscow.” FDR said he wanted the FBI to investigate subversive activities, which required a request from the State Department. Hull, who came from the Tennessee hill country where feuds were commonplace, reportedly replied: “Go ahead and investigate the cock-suckers.”8
With this secret verbal instruction, FDR gave the FBI a clear mandate to gather political intelligence, which it continued to do for forty years. Bureau surveillance was quickly expanded to labor organizers, university professors, journalists, and radical political leaders. The effort to recruit informers was stepped up.
While FDR unshackled Hoover in the pursuit of Communists, the climate of the New Deal was in some ways favorable for Soviet espionage. Since some sixty new federal agencies had to be staffed, hundreds of lawyers, many of them friendly to the Soviet Union and some of them already Communists, came to Washington and became the mandarins of the regulatory state. George Peek of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (known as the Triple A) called them “the boys with their hair ablaze.”9 Among them were recruited a sizable number of Soviet spies. They were hired without any sort of loyalty check, in the frenetic urgency of the New Deal.
The first “legal” NKVD Rezident was installed as the Soviet consul in New York in early 1934, a few months after the recognition agreement. Peter Gutzeit was a rather slight, fine-featured young man with wavy brown hair, who was so eager to recruit agents that he had to be restrained by his Moscow superiors. He was told to proceed cautiously, so as not to “complicate our relations with the masters of your country…. The slightest trouble in this direction can cause serious consequences of an international character.”10
As Gutzeit noted in an April 1934 memo to Moscow, his dilemma was that “at present we don’t have any agents. It is necessary to start this work with a blank slate.” This is where the American Communist Party performed a crucial function, pointing out to Soviet agents party members with interesting government jobs, and recruiting other members directly into the espionage underground. The American Communist Party always maintained a liaison officer with the Soviet espionage apparat. For years, Earl Browder, the General Secretary of the party from 1932 to 1945, filled the job of talent-spotter.11
Cresting the waves of young men who tumbled into Washington in 1933 to join the administration were romantic anti-fascists, college liberals, party members, and their friends. Lawrence Duggan was almost all of the above, for he was not a party member. His parents, who lived in White Plains, an affluent suburb of New York City, were New Deal liberals. His father, Stephen, had taught political science at City College before being named director of the esteemed Institute of International Education. His mother was active in social causes, such as the Negro Welfare League. At Harvard, Duggan was a friend of Henry Collins’s, who would be recruited as a Soviet agent while working for the Department of Agriculture. Two years after graduation, in 1929, Duggan’s father named him director of the Institute of International Education for Latin America. He spent much of his time roaming around the hemisphere to set up student exchange programs, and learned to speak fluent Spanish and some Portuguese.12
The IIE was a launching pad for the State Department, which Duggan joined in 1930, continuing to specialize in Latin American affairs. In 1932, he married a Vassar graduate, Helen Boyd. Two of his friends at State, Noel Field and Alger Hiss, were Soviet agents. Tall and athletic-looking, with a broad face and pug nose, Duggan was like a camp counselor, fun to be with, but trustworthy. He was popular at State, and came under the wing of Assistant Secretary of State Sumner Welles, a confidant of FDR’s who was sometimes thought of as the de facto Secretary of State, in light of Cordell Hull’s poor health and other limitations. Duggan was so well thought of that he was promoted three times in 1935. The career diplomat Joseph Green observed in his diary that “His career has certainly been meteoric…. I fear he has created some jealousies.”13 But since he was under Welles’s protection, the envy was muted.
Duggan was a garden-variety liberal dedicated to the principles of the New Deal. In the anti-fascist climate of the times, he was sympathetic to the Soviet Union, which he saw as a forward-looking, peace-loving nation. His willingness to spy for the Soviets came out of a gullible desire to please rather than any doctrinaire Communist convictions.
When his agents approached Duggan in October 1934, Gutzeit was far more impressed with Helen, whom he described as “an extraordinarily beautiful woman, a typical American, tall, blonde, reserved, well read, goes in for sports, independent.” Duggan was depicted less thrillingly as “a very soft guy…under his wife’s influence…cultured and reserved.” What Gutzeit mistook for softness was Duggan’s penchant for self-examination. Once he agreed to spy for the Soviets, he constantly fretted—had he done the right thing, was he putting his family at risk, would he get caught, was the Soviet Union sincere in wanting to avoid war?14
In 1935, Gutzeit passed Duggan on to the German-born, Washington-based agent who had recruited him, the wily and seductive Hede Massing. In the Soviet underground since 1929, she had been married briefly to German Comintern agent Gerhart Eisler—until he went off with her younger sister. Her second husband, Paul Massing, an anti-fascist publisher and writer, was sent to a detention camp when Hitler came to power in 1933. Hede fled to Washington, where Paul joined her in 1934 after being released.
Her first coup as a recruiter was the State Department man Noel Field, whose wife, Herta, was German. Looking rather severe with her blond braids pinned up in a circle, Massing gave them the obvious pitch: “We must fight fascism.” Field, a close friend of Alger Hiss’s, was willing. He was about to join the open party, but Massing convinced him that underground work was more important. Despite his qualms, Noel Field provided classified State Department reports until he left State in 1936 to work for the League of Nations in Geneva.15
Along with the Soviet embassy and consulates, the trading agency Amtorg continued to provide cover for Soviet spies. Gaik Ovakimian, whom the FBI called “the wily Armenian,” operated under Amtorg cover from 1933 to 1939. He is something of a celebrity in Soviet espionage circles, not only for the number of spies he recruited, but also for his nimble avoidance of the purges.16
Ovakimian had such a high forehead that his features seemed compressed beneath the dark and bushy demarcation line of a single eyebrow. He had a doctorate from the Moscow Higher Technical School and worked at Amtorg as an engineer, which gave him the credentials to gather scientific intelligence.
Ovakimian’s prize catch was the only member of the United States Congress known to have spied for the Soviets. Samuel Dickstein was one of the four sons of a Russian rabbi who brought his family to America in 1887, when Sam was two. Sam said he didn’t want to follow in his father’s footsteps because he didn’t like beards. Instead, he studied for a law degree and went into politics in his Lower East Side tenement neighborhood. In 1917, he was elected alderman and got the firemen a raise. He went on to the New York State Assembly in 1919 and opened a law office, defending tenants against landlords. When he ran for Congress in 1922, all the tenants he’d helped voted for him. He stayed in the House for twenty-two years and continued to serve the interests of his immigrant constituents.17
Samuel Dickstein’s political career was founded on his posture as a superpatriot. He said he loathed the philosophy of Socialism, which he described as “borderline Communism.” When he was elected to Congress, he boasted that he had defeated the only Socialist in the House, Meyer London.
In the New York law office he shared with his brother, Dickstein specialized in immigration issues. People came asking, “How can I get my sister to America?” He told them to go to Montreal and see his friend the American consul, who would provide a visa. For a fee, he would draw up a guarantee that the immigrant would not be a public burden. Always a protector of the underdog, as long as he got paid for it, Dickstein ran a visa racket in cahoots with the U.S. consul.18
When Hitler came to power in 1933, Dickstein turned his attention to the Nazi issue. Fascist groups like the Silver Shirts and Friends of New Germany sprang up. Heil-Hitlering Bundists goose-stepped down Manhattan’s 86th Street and sang the “Horst Wessel” in swastika-draped beer halls. Dickstein sounded the alarm against the “Brown Menace.” As chairman of the House Immigration and Naturalization Committee, he convinced Congress in March 1934 to sponsor a special committee to investigate Nazi propaganda, offering himself as chairman. But the speaker of the House, Henry T. Rainey, turned to the tall, dour Boston Democrat John W. McCormack instead. McCormack expanded the committee’s mandate to include Communist propaganda as well. After a few perfunctory hearings, the McCormack Committee closed down at the end of 1934, having accomplished next to nothing.19
On July 8, 1937, an Austrian illegal working for the Soviets and code-named Buby came to Dickstein’s law office for help in obtaining citizenship. Dickstein told him that the 1937 Austrian quota of 1,413 had already been filled and proposed the Montreal solution. He had settled dozens of similar cases, he told Buby. It would cost $3,000. After clearing the deal with his station chief, Ovakimian, Buby paid Dickstein $1,000. Dickstein protested that “others take huge money for these things…and I, Samuel Dickstein, am a poor man.”20
Ovakimian reported to Moscow that Dickstein headed “a criminal gang involved in shady businesses, selling passports, illegal smuggling of people…getting the citizenship.”
Perhaps Buby let slip a clue as to his real occupation, for Dickstein sensed a more lucrative opportunity than selling visas. As a member of the House, he had entrée to embassies, and paid a visit in December to the Russian ambassador, Alexander Troyanovsky, who sent a report to Moscow, explaining that Dickstein had served on the McCormack Committee and investigated Nazi propaganda. Dickstein claimed to have found a connection between Nazi agents and White Russians in the United States, but lamented that Congress had not provided funds to investigate the Russian fascists. He offered to give Troyanovsky the information he hoped to develop, if the ambassador would let him have $5,000 or $6,000 to pay his investigators.
Troyanovsky soon received instructions from his NKVD boss in Moscow, Nikolay Yezhov, to recruit Dickstein. The Russian ambassador saw Dickstein again on April 20, 1938, and introduced him to his contact, code-named Igor. Dickstein was given the code name Crook. He wanted a retainer of $2,500 a month, but Igor offered $500. They compromised on $1,250. On May 25, 1938, Peter Gutzeit, who handled Dickstein with Ovakimian, endorsed the arrangement, saying that Dickstein had access to useful information regarding American fascists. He added, however, that “we are fully aware of whom we are dealing with…. This is an unscrupulous type, greedy for money…a very cunning swindler.”21
When Dickstein failed to get named to the 1938 House Un-American Activities Committee chaired by Martin Dies, his stock plummeted. Gutzeit was hoping to obtain grand jury interrogations of suspected German agents. Dickstein was told that he wasn’t giving the Russians their money’s worth. Igor reported that “He blazed up very much…that he is employing people and…demands nothing for himself.” Dickstein told his handler on June 23 that when he had worked for Poland he had been paid without question. And when he had worked for the English he was paid good money. Only with the Russians did he have any trouble. Once Dickstein had revealed that he was a congressman for hire, Igor pointed out that while his other involvements had been for money, this time he should be guided by ideological consideration in the struggle against fascism.
Gutzeit was summoned back to Moscow during the 1938 purges and shot as a suspected Trotskyite. Such was the reward for many a Soviet operative in the thirties, when Stalin’s security apparatus devoured its own. The NKVD soured on Dickstein and warned that any further dealings were dangerous because he was “not simply a crook but a mercenary of many intelligence services.”22
By 1940, Ovakimian had so many agents under his supervision that he was overworked to the point of exhaustion. He saw as many as ten a day and his bosses in Moscow noted that his workload had “blunted his vigilance.” The purges had thinned the ranks of Soviet agents operating in America. One NKVD memo noted “an acute crisis in operatives.”23
Ovakimian was recalled in 1941. The FBI got wind in April that he was leaving the country. His car and other belongings had been crated and loaded onto the SS Annie Johnson, a ship chartered by Amtorg and scheduled to leave New York in May for Vladivostok via the Panama Canal. A warrant for his arrest was issued on April 26. On May 5, as Ovakimian sat in a taxi with an agent code-named Octane, who was passing him documents, the cab was surrounded by FBI agents. Ovakimian jumped out and tried to break free. Octane, who has never been identified, fled out the other side. Ovakimian was taken in handcuffs to the federal courthouse, where he was charged with violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act. A Soviet consular official soon appeared, claiming that Ovakimian had immunity as an Amtorg official. He was charged and released on $25,000 cash bail, which was paid by Amtorg.24
The Soviet embassy eventually struck a deal with the State Department to exchange Ovakimian for six Americans who were being detained in Russia and Russian-occupied Poland, charged with illegal possession of firearms and being “bourgeois capitalists.” Ovakimian left in July aboard a Soviet ship, but only three of the six detained Americans were returned. Once again, the Soviets broke their word. 25
In June 1939, with Europe on the cusp of war, Attorney General Frank Murphy, Homer Cummings’s successor, proposed to FDR that all “espionage, counter-espionage, and sabotage matters” be handled by the FBI and military intelligence, who had “perfected their methods of investigation.”26 FDR approved in a memo that amounted to a formal charter for the FBI: “It is my desire that the investigation of all espionage, counter-espionage, and sabotage matters be controlled and handled by the FBI, the Military Intelligence Division of the War Department, and the Office of Naval Intelligence…. No investigations should be conducted…except by the three agencies mentioned above.” By then, a number of laws had been passed that facilitated the FBI in making arrests. The Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 allowed the FBI to arrest spies who had not registered. The Hatch Act of 1939 barred federal employees from membership in any political party that advocated the overthrow of government.27
In September 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, FDR declared a national emergency and ordered Attorney General Murphy to hire at once 150 more FBI agents. Hoover instructed his field offices to compile a list of “German, Italian, and Communist sympathizers.” On that list, a number of names were flagged to be arrested in case of a national emergency. As the President’s policy evolved from neutrality to assisting England, he asked Hoover to investigate those who sent telegrams to the White House calling him a warmonger and opposing national defense measures. In the name of national security, when fifteen Negro mess attendants aboard Navy ships protested racial discrimination, Hoover launched an investigation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which went on for thirty years.28
Aside from its “legal” agents, that is, those who had diplomatic immunity as embassy or consular officials, the Soviets ran a network of “illegals” out of New York, who settled in the city as private citizens, working at jobs or small businesses. Alexander Ulanovsky, a veteran revolutionary, arrived in New York in 1931 with his wife, Nadia. They had previously served in China and found Manhattan more congenial. As Nadia put it, “If you wore a sign saying ‘I Am A Spy,’ you might still not get arrested.” There was no place like New York for an illegal Soviet agent. Where else could a man who spoke broken English pass unnoticed among millions of other immigrants? The teeming, polyglot metropolis was a protective habitat for the illegals, who were at a greater risk, since they did not wear the cloak of diplomatic immunity. If they were caught, no deals could be made with the State Department.
In and out of a dozen czarist jails, Ulanovsky had been imprisoned with Stalin in a Siberian camp, from which he made a sensational escape. One of his agents, Whittaker Chambers, recalled that “there was something monkeylike in his loose posture, in the droop of his arms and roll of his walk…[and] about his features, which were small, lined and alert…. It was his brown eyes that were most monkeylike, alternately mischievous and wistful…. They had looked out on life…from top to bottom, from stinking prison cells to diplomatic dinners.”29
The Ulanovskys lived in a sumptuous apartment, in a brownstone off Fifth Avenue, at 7 West 51st Street. It belonged to a wealthy Communist, Paula Levine, who was doing espionage work in France and was later arrested there. They also kept a workshop on Gay Street, a short, curving block in Greenwich Village, in a house owned by a Negro schoolteacher who rented the second floor to the apparat.
Prior to recognition, communications with Moscow depended on microfilm and messages in invisible ink. German Communists working as stewards or seamen on the Hamburg-American Line smuggled letters into New York. The tiny frames of microfilm were concealed between the glass and the backing of Woolworth dime mirrors. The Ulanovskys’ workshop was set up to enlarge the microfilm and develop the invisible ink. Letters typed triple space would be soaked in a bath of potassium permanganate until the reddish brown Russian script appeared between the typed lines.30
With the ascent of Hitler in 1933, the courier system collapsed. It was in any case made redundant by recognition, for the Soviets could from 1934 on use coded cables to and from the embassy and consulates.
Aside from the time-consuming labor of deciphering instructions from Moscow, the Ulanovskys collected tons of technical and scientific documents that were freely available in America’s open society. From the U.S. Patent Office they obtained hundreds of patents, which they mailed to Moscow by the box. From the Government Printing Office, they ordered technical manuals. From an explosives manufacturer they bought a sample of flashless powder. Coming from a country where even a telephone directory was considered a confidential document, they were amazed at what was up for grabs in America.
Beyond obtaining what was openly available, however, the Ulanovskys were abject failures. Several attempts to steal submarine blueprints came to nothing. Alex tried to recruit the muckraking, pro-Soviet author Lincoln Steffens, who wasn’t interested.31
In the spring of 1934, Alexander and Nadia were recalled to Moscow. They left New York with genuine regret, having come to appreciate the features that made Manhattan life agreeable, from Woolworth’s and the Automat to Central Park at sundown. Nadia had given birth to a daughter, who, being born on American soil, had the right to U.S. citizenship.32
In its formative years, Soviet espionage in America was a scattershot affair, tentative and mismanaged. The illegals often spoke no English and seemed ill-suited to their task. They landed in New York and stayed at the garrison-like Hotel Taft. A note would arrive with “greetings from Fanny” for the newcomer, who was given his instructions.
Valentin Markin operated concurrently with Ulanovsky, but lasted less than a year. The son of a Petrograd janitor, Markin was so short that he wore elevated shoes. His hair stood up, like the hair of cartoon characters struck by electricity, adding another inch, and his arrogance compensated for his bantam size. Since he did not speak a word of English, he communicated with other agents in German. He turned up drunk at meetings and was given to tantrums. Told to focus on Washington and develop agents in the State Department, his only achievement was to recruit a conman code-named Leo, who invented two State Department sources, sending Markin their fictitious reports, which included transcripts of recorded conversations between Cordell Hull and foreign ambassadors. For these fabrications Markin paid a total of $900 a month. Eventually, he came to his senses, and a cable to Moscow on November 27, 1934, said: “We assume there is no Daniel or Albert and that [they] were created fictitiously by Leo to increase his remuneration.”33
At the end of the year, Markin came to a violent end. Emerging from a bar in midtown where he had flashed a roll of bills, he was mugged and left to die in a gutter with a fractured skull. The official account in his Moscow file states that he was killed in a car accident.34
These inept illegals would have been lost without the American Communist Party, which provided from its ranks assistants who acted as guides, couriers, handlers, and all-around gofers. For, upon being dropped into New York, the illegals knew nothing about such vital matters as the geography of the subway system or how to order breakfast at a diner. If they got lost, they did not know enough English to ask for directions. The maps and mores of the country they had been sent to spy on were an enigma, and it was here that their helpful American accomplices could be as indispensable as a seeing-eye dog. They had to be reliable Communists who spoke German, the lingua franca of the GRU (since Germany was then the main enemy), with a pliant personality that would not be offended by their gruff and overbearing charges.
The liaison between the GRU and the American party was a Swiss barber, Max Bedacht, whose day job was to run the party’s insurance company, the International Workers’ Order. In June 1932, Bedacht was looking for the right person to work with the newly arrived Ulanovsky. On a sweltering summer day, he summoned to his office on 13th Street a thirty-one-year-old Communist who was then editor of New Masses, Whittaker Chambers. An overweight, placid man, Chambers wondered why Bedacht, whom he knew only as the self-effacing father of five, wanted to see him.
Looking disapprovingly at Chambers, who always appeared somewhat rumpled, Bedacht asked him, “What are you doing now, Comrade Chambers?” When Chambers told him, Bedacht said, “For some reason, they want you to go into one of the party’s ‘special institutions.’ ” Chambers looked blank, so Bedacht added: “They want you to do underground work.” He would have to give up his party membership and leave the editorship of New Masses, for which he had a particular affinity. He would have to discard his friends and his pleasant daily routine. Chambers had been in the party seven years, mainly as a writer for the Daily Worker; he knew nothing about underground work. His wife pleaded with him not to accept such a risky job. But Chambers was elated at having been chosen. Someone, he thought, must have seen in him the ability to handle a difficult assignment.35
Actually, the principal point that recommended Chambers for his new job was that he spoke German. His acceptance, however, had much to do with the ingrained party discipline. If you were given a job, you obeyed, even when you had no idea what that entailed. It was a tribute to blind obedience that a talented intellectual such as Chambers would give up an important editorship to become a courier, a glorified messenger boy.
Chambers soon grew weary of waiting for hours under streetlights, taking roundabout ways to get to a contact, meeting ships at dockside to collect a pocket mirror concealing microfilm. It was wearing him down and wrecking his home life, for he rarely saw his wife and baby daughter.
In early 1934, the Hungarian Communist Josef Peters took over the underground section from Max Bedacht, becoming one of the two or three most powerful men in the American party. Short and energetic, looking somewhat like a mustached and bushy-eyebrowed chow dog strutting on its hind legs, Peters had first been sent to America in 1924 to organize unions in the Midwest. He became the man in charge of spies just as the mushrooming bureaucracy of the New Deal began to hire a scattering of Communists. Peters proposed to develop them as agents, who would be organized into cells, and to move them from alphabet agencies such as WPA and Triple A into old-line agencies like the State Department, where they would have access to classified information.36
Chambers was assigned to work with Peters and help carry out the new line. In the spring, Peters took him to Washington to introduce him to the man who was running the main cell of Communists in government, Hal Ware. The son of Mother Bloor, the party’s grande dame, Hal was an unlikely spy, having spent his entire adult life on farm problems. With his rimless glasses and plain, down-to-earth, reassuring manner, he looked like an associate professor at a Midwestern agricultural college, who could tell you a great deal about soil grades and average rainfall. In 1922, during the famine, he’d taken twenty-two tractors to Russia to teach the peasants mechanized agriculture and ended up staying there eight years and being decorated by Lenin. When he came back to America, he carried $25,000 in a money belt, which the Comintern had given him to organize American farmers.37
Ware had excellent contacts in the Department of Agriculture and was assigned in 1933 to recruit agents in the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, which drafted the codes to limit agricultural production, in order to raise farm prices. With its staff of five thousand, it was dubbed “the greatest law firm in the country.” Jerome Frank, the general counsel, had sixty lawyers working on marketing agreements, from Oregon apples to Florida strawberries. His closest advisers were the two Harvard Law School classmates Lee Pressman and Alger Hiss. Pressman, the son of Lower East Side immigrants, knew nothing about agriculture and was said to have asked, during discussions with macaroni producers, “I want to know what this code will do for the macaroni growers.” Pressman headed the licensing section and Hiss headed the benefit payments section. Pressman said of Hiss: “If he was standing at the bar with the British ambassador and you were told to give a package to the valet, you would give it to the ambassador before you gave it to Alger.”38
Hiss, then twenty-nine years old, helped draft the cotton contract in late 1933. Cotton, grown on large Southern plantations, was picked by tenant farmers and sharecroppers, most of whom were black. Under the contract, every third row of cotton had to be plowed under all over the South, from Texas to Virginia. This one-third crop reduction program threatened to displace an equal percentage of sharecroppers, who were slated to share Triple A subsidies with the owners. Feeling sympathy for the dispossessed sharecroppers, Hiss drafted a provision in the contract to limit the rights of landlords to evict tenants. He also wanted Triple A checks to be made out separately to owners and tenants, who were being “robbed blind with a fountain pen,” as he put it. To his astonishment, Hiss received a visit from the powerful Southern senator Ellison “Cotton Ed” Smith of South Carolina, a plantation owner himself. “Young fella,” he said, “you can’t do this to my niggers, pay checks to them. They don’t know what to do with the money. The money should come to me.”39 In the summer of 1934, Hiss took a leave from Triple A to serve as counsel on the Nye Senate committee that was investigating munitions makers, the “merchants of death” who had reaped colossal profits during World War I, but he continued to work on the sharecropper problem in his spare time. A memo initialed by Hiss landed on the desk of Chester Davis, the head of Triple A, in February 1935, arguing that landlords should be made to keep all their sharecroppers. This was anathema to influential Southern senators, whom the Department of Agriculture had to appease if they wanted to maintain Triple A appropriations.
“Alger, this is a dishonest opinion,” Davis said when he called Hiss in. “It isn’t true, it can’t be.” The ultimate result of the landlord-sharecropper dispute was the purge of Triple A: Jerome Frank and Lee Pressman were fired and Hiss resigned to continue his work with the Nye Committee.40
When Whittaker Chambers accompanied Josef Peters to Washington in the spring of 1934, he was surprised at how easily the espionage network fell into place. Ware, he recalled, “was like a man who had bought a farm, sight unseen, only to discover that the crops are all in and ready to harvest. All he had to do was hustle them into the barn. The barn in his case was the Communist Party.” At a cafeteria on Pennsylvania Avenue, the two men met Hal Ware and Alger Hiss. The meeting was brief, but Chambers became a close friend of Hiss’s after that, and of his family. He sensed a strange dichotomy in the courtly, personable lawyer, who was a model of rectitude, yet seemed almost to be acting a part. Chambers felt that there were layers to Hiss, like geological strata. Beneath the surface formality, contempt for the establishment. Beneath the external sweetness of manner, a capacity for cruelty. In conversation, he could be unnecessarily vehement, as he was when he unleashed his contempt for FDR, seeing the crippled President as a symbol of America’s breakdown. Hiss seemed to take pleasure in challenging the accepted wisdom. At one point, he told Chambers, “I’m sorry, I just don’t like Shakespeare. Platitudes in blank verse.”41
After the meeting with Hiss, Hal Ware took Chambers to his sister Helen’s studio near Du Pont Circle, where she taught the violin over a florist shop. She had one large, bare, loftlike room, where Chambers spent the night. The next day, he met the eight members of what he called Apparatus A, better known as the Ware group, a directorate made up of the leaders of the seven or eight cells that Ware controlled. Six of the eight worked in Triple A, while the two others worked for the National Recovery Administration, which drew up fair competition codes for business.
The meeting was held at the home of one of its members, Henry Collins, a converted coach house in a mews off Connecticut Avenue, in a large, book-lined living room with a cathedral ceiling, and brightly colored Ethiopian tapestries, which Collins had collected on trips to Africa. When he stepped into Collins’s living room, Chambers entered a new world, far removed from the gruff and primitive Soviet illegals. The Ware group was confined to young men with a promising future in government service, men from Ivy League universities with Phi Beta Kappa keys. Some were the high-achieving sons of Jewish immigrants, while others came from old American families. A graduate of the Harvard Business School, Collins was born into a Philadelphia family that had arrived from England in 1640. He worked in the Soil Conservation Service of the Department of Agriculture. Chambers recalled that he “served voluntarily and in fact irrepressibly as a recruiting agent for the Soviet apparatus.”42
Nathaniel Weyl, another Ivy Leaguer, also came from a family whose roots in America went back to the seventeenth century. Weyl joined the party in 1922 while attending Columbia University. Later he would explain that in the early days of the New Deal there was a benign tolerance of Communism, which was viewed as the inoffensive left wing of the Progressive movement. He did not, however, feel suited to underground work and quit the Ware group just after Chambers arrived to run the School on Wheels, which toured farm areas with party-approved textbooks.43
Hiss, as a lawyer for the Nye Committee, was able to subpoena classified documents from the State Department, which he gave to Chambers to photograph. His friend Lee Pressman, who was also in the Ware group until he was fired from Triple A, had joined the party out of a sense of hopelessness when faced with the Depression at home and the rise of Hitler abroad.
Of the four remaining members, John Abt, Nathan Witt (born Witowsky), Charles Kramer (born Krivisky), and Victor Perlo, all but Perlo were in Triple A. Kramer had a cell of his own, which met at his home on Euclid Street, in a room stacked with Daily Workers and Communist agitprop pamphlets. Nathan Witt, gaunt and mustached, the warm and outgoing son of a tailor, worked his way through Harvard Law School by driving a taxi. In Witt, a strong indignation factor was always ready to surface—runaway profits while millions were reduced to misery, the money changers pushed out the front door and coming back through the side door, and so on.
A second-generation Polish immigrant, Perlo was a mathematical prodigy at City College, hired at the age of twenty-one as a statistician for the National Recovery Administration. Arrogantly doctrinaire, he castigated New Deal reforms and spoke of private charity as alms. When FDR named Joseph Kennedy to head the Securities and Exchange Commission, Perlo was incensed, saying that Kennedy had made his millions as a bootlegger and that FDR was capitulating to “the most vicious political elements.”
The Ware group lasted just over a year. On August 13, 1935, its leader, known for driving at breakneck speeds, was on a trip to visit Pennsylvania miners when he crashed his car into a coal truck. Hal Ware died the next day in a Harrisburg hospital, at the age of forty-five, leaving behind his wife, the beautiful Jessica Smith, a Quaker he had met in Russia in 1922 known as the “Golden Goddess.” She later married John Abt, who became the lawyer for the Communist Party.44
In its year under Ware’s direction, the group’s principal activity was not the collection of classified information, but the placing of its people in positions of influence. In 1934, Nathan Witt joined the National Labor Relations Board, which had the crucial responsibility of organizing and certifying union elections, and rose to the position of secretary in 1937. Lee Pressman became general counsel of the CIO, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, in 1936. John Abt in 1935 was assistant general counsel in the Works Progress Administration under Harry Hopkins, and by 1937 he was chief of the Trial Section in the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, with the title of special assistant to the Attorney General. Shuttling between Washington and New York, Chambers acted as the liaison between the Ware group and Josef Peters, reporting on their progress in infiltrating the government.45
Chambers moved away from the Ware group and began to recruit new agents for a “sleeper apparatus,” a new group that would be ready to start operating as soon as it was called upon to act. When a new Soviet agent arrived in 1936, the overburdened Peters passed Chambers on to him. On a rainy autumn afternoon during rush hour, Chambers was walking up Fifth Avenue with Peters when, looking across the traffic to the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Peters said, “There’s our man.” He pointed to a short fellow with red hair and reddish eyelashes, dapper in a tailored worsted suit. Chambers was introduced to Boris Bykov, a colonel in the GRU, with whom he spoke German. Chambers worked with Bykov until his defection in 1938, and came to see him as a man warped by underground work, “a pathological coward,” nervous and high-strung, afraid of his own shadow, bad-tempered and vituperative.46
Bykov wanted to push Chambers’s sleeper apparatus directly into espionage and went to Washington to make his pitch. This was the united front period when the American Communist Party sought allies on the liberal left, backed FDR in the 1936 election, and infiltrated the newly born CIO. American anti-fascists saw the Soviet Union not as a threat, but as an ally against Hitler. The party was able to assume a hidden role in the New Deal and the labor movement. Thus, Bykov told Chambers’s agents that the Soviet Union needed the help of comrades abroad. It needed information concerning fascist plans, actual documents relating to Germany and the Far East, for the fatherland was threatened with encirclement. As Chambers put it, “The water was in the pipes. Bykov’s function was simply to turn on the faucets.”47
Chambers took as much pride in his apparatus as a baseball coach would in a World Series team. His four stars were led by Harry Dexter White, perhaps the most valuable American spy the Soviets ever recruited, who was Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau’s right-hand man.
Next came Alger Hiss, who after serving on the Nye Committee had moved on to work for Solicitor General Stanley Reed. Chambers suggested that he transfer to State, where one of his many mentors, Assistant Secretary Francis Sayre, had beckoned. At State, Hiss began to furnish documents almost at once. Transmissions were made at weekly or ten-day intervals. Hiss would bring documents home in a briefcase and Chambers would pick them up and photograph them, bringing them back the same night, so that Hiss could return them the next morning.48
Julian Wadleigh, Chambers’s third star, a young graduate of Oxford, was also in the State Department, in the Trade Agreements Division. Although not a party member, Wadleigh had agreed, at the party’s request, to move from Agriculture to State. His thick-lensed glasses and feathery uncombed hair gave him a brooding, owlish appearance, which was offset by a puckish sense of humor—he sometimes used the alias Jasper Q. Sprigg.
Last and least of the four was Abraham George Silverman, director of research at the Railroad Retirement Board, whose main utility was that he was a close friend of Harry Dexter White’s and helped him resolve his ambivalence about espionage. Silverman, slight and wiry, combined a childlike spontaneity with a permanently worried look.49
Chambers moved to Baltimore, where he kept an apartment to photograph the documents his agents produced, handing over the undeveloped film to Bykov in New York. There was so much material that at one point he had three photographers processing it. Pleased with his sources, and with Christmas coming up, Bykov wanted to reward them with cash gifts. Chambers thought it was a crude gesture, which sullied the selfless ideological motives of his agents. But Bykov insisted: “Who pays is boss, and who takes money must give something back,” he said.
“You will lose every one of them,” Chambers warned.
“Then we must give them some costly present,” Bykov replied.
He gave Chambers $600 to buy four Bokhara rugs, hand-woven by the tribeswomen of Turkistan. All four were sent to Silverman, who kept one and delivered the other three, taking elaborate precautions. The rug for Hiss changed hands near a restaurant shaped like a boat off the Baltimore Turnpike. Silverman drove up beyond the restaurant with the rug in the back of his car and Hiss and Chambers arrived in Hiss’s Plymouth. With the headlights turned off in both cars, Chambers carried the rug, a loud red with an intricate design, about nine by twelve feet, from Silverman’s car to Hiss’s car. As Chambers learned over the years, espionage was mostly schlepping.50
In 1936 and 1937, Stalin’s purges and show trials created a crisis in the American party. In the absence of any succession mechanism, Stalin had a simple and direct way of eliminating his rivals—he murdered them. The sordid spectacle of Bolshevik leaders confessing to absurd charges before facing the firing squad tested the faithful. Were all these men who had been in charge of building Socialism—men favored by Lenin, such as Bukharin and Zinoviev, as well as the General Staff of the army, 80 percent of the party secretaries, the bulk of the OGPU, two heads of the Five Year Plan—were all these men traitors?
In the fall of 1937, the purges were giving Chambers serious doubts, for they had begun to reach beyond Soviet borders. On September 3, the Swiss police found the body of Ignace Reiss, the Paris-based head of NKVD operations in Europe, on a road outside Lausanne, riddled with twelve bullets from a machine gun. The murder of Reiss, who had defected after writing Stalin, “I cannot continue any longer,” moved Chambers deeply, for he too was about to defect, having come to the conclusion that Communism under Stalin was a malignant force.51
Although badly shaken by Reiss’s murder, Chambers told himself that it had taken place in Europe, and that such a thing could not happen in America. But less than six months later, he learned that his old friend Juliet Poyntz had disappeared. Chambers had known Poyntz, a tall blunt woman from Omaha, Nebraska, since the twenties, when she ran for Congress on the party ticket. Caught up in party factions, she had the distinction of giving her name to an “ism,” when the Daily Worker called for the liquidation of “Poyntzism.” As her mea culpa, she served in China for the Comintern in 1935. Returning to the United States in 1936 via Moscow, she was horrified by the first show trials and quietly dropped out of the party. In June 1937, she vanished. One of the last of her friends to see her was the Italian anarchist Carlo Tresca, who later told the police that “she confided in me that she could no longer approve of things under the Stalin regime.”
On February 8, 1938, the New York Times ran a story, quoting Tresca, that she had been “lured or kidnapped to Soviet Russia by a prominent Communist…connected with the secret police in Moscow, sent to this country for that purpose.” Tresca said Poyntz was “a marked person, similar to other disillusioned Bolsheviks…. I need only recall the case of Ignace Reiss.”52
Chambers learned from his own sources that Poyntz had gone to Central Park to meet an old lover who was now an NKVD agent. She left the light on and an unfinished letter on the table in her room in a hotel for women on 57th Street. In the park, she was pushed into a car by two men who probably murdered her. The thought of this brilliant, stubbornly independent woman ending up as fishbait made Chambers physically ill, though her fate remained a question mark.
The fate of his fellow agent Arnold Ikal was far more disturbing. Ikal, an affable, easygoing Latvian, had arrived in New York in May 1932, with the mission of obtaining passports for Comintern agents. He had a team of assistants who combed the death records in the Genealogical Division of the New York Public Library, looking for native New Yorkers who had died as children. They copied the information in the records, names of father and mother, date of birth, and so on. Then, Ikal would apply by mail for a birth certificate with the New York City Department of Health, enclosing a fee and a cover address. Armed with the birth certificate, one of Ikal’s assistants would go down to the Passport Bureau with a witness ready to swear he or she had known that person more than five years, and presto, a passport. Once he got going, Ikal was sending as many as one hundred passports a month to Moscow, which meant that about one thousand Soviet agents a year were using good, safe, American boots (as the Russians called passports).
Ikal liked life in New York, and began to think of himself as a small businessman, turning out piece goods. In 1933 he met Ruth, an attractive young American divorcée, whom he married in 1935. Soon he and his new wife had a summer place on Jamaica Bay and a motor launch, which they moored at the Oyster Bay Yacht Club. Life was good.
In September 1937, Ikal was summoned home. This was the time of the purges, but he decided to go when he got a personal message from his mentor and fellow Latvian, General Eduard Berzin, the head of the GRU Fourth Department (military intelligence). Berzin could not have sent it because he had been executed in August. Ikal took his American wife along for insurance, since the recognition agreement specified that U.S. citizens could not be detained. They left in October on the Italian liner Rex with two sets of passports, one set made out to Donald L. Robinson (born in Queens in 1905 and died in 1909) and Norma Birkland (born in 1906 and died in 1916). The other set was made out to Mr. and Mrs. Arnold Rubens, the name under which Ikal had applied for naturalization papers.53
On November 5, they checked into Moscow’s Hotel National as Mr. and Mrs. Rubens. The next day, Ikal vanished. The hotel staff told his distraught wife that he was in a hospital. Loy Henderson, the number two at the American embassy, got wind that an American couple was in trouble and came looking for Ruth at the hotel. By then, she too was gone. According to the recognition treaty, embassy officials had to be notified within seventy-two hours of the arrest of an American in Russia. This was a clear violation of the treaty. Cordell Hull sent Litvinov, the Foreign Minister, a cable to remind him that Mr. and Mrs. Rubens were American citizens. Litvinov finally admitted in December that the couple was in custody, but concocted a story that they had visited Trotsky in Mexico on their way to Russia. This attempt to brand Rubens/Ikal as a Trotskyite was denounced as a fabrication on December 21 by the philosopher John Dewey, who at the age of seventy-eight had gone to Mexico City, as the head of the Committee for the Defense of Trotsky, to hear Trotsky’s rebuttal of the charges brought against him in the Moscow trials.
The Rubens/Ikal story made front-page news in the American press and eroded Soviet-American relations. In Washington, Ambassador Troyanovsky asked the State Department to drop its inquiry. When the State Department refused, Litvinov capitulated and on February 10, 1938, Henderson was allowed to visit Ruth in Butyrka Prison in the presence of a Red Army officer. Visibly intimidated, Ruth said she did not need help. In April 1939, the U.S. embassy was promised that Ruth would stand trial. In June, after eighteen months in jail, she appeared at her trial, which lasted forty-five minutes. She was found guilty of entering the Soviet Union with false documents and was sentenced to eighteen months retroactive and released from jail the next day. Ruth declined to return to the United States, where she faced possible prosecution for violating passport laws, became a Soviet citizen, and moved to Kiev. In December 1939, Ikal confessed to being an agent of the Berzin fascist organization. He was sent to a gulag and died there.54
After the show trials, the murder of Reiss, the disappearance of Juliet Poyntz, and the imprisonment of Arnold Ikal, Chambers was determined to quit the underground. “If you have ever clubbed rats to death in a closed room,” he later wrote, “you will have an exact picture of the state of affairs in the Soviet secret services in 1936, 1937, and 1938.” He did not intend to be one of the rats. In April 1938 he made his getaway. After finding work translating Bambi, the huge best-seller by the Austrian novelist Felix Salten, he fled to Florida with his wife and daughter. This would be the start of an odyssey that would bring him, ten years later, before the House Un-American Activities Committee as a witness. In the fallout that resulted from his flight, Josef Peters was demoted and Boris Bykov was recalled to Moscow.55
The loss of Chambers was not seen as particularly serious, since he was a lowly courier, not an agent of influence. The Soviets still had three valuable agents in the State Department: Lawrence Duggan, Noel Field, and Alger Hiss. With the turnover in Soviet handlers, they were now under the control of the NKVD station chief in New York, Boris Bazarov, a dour man with thinning brown hair combed straight back from a high forehead, and glasses that rested on his beakish nose. Bazarov had arrived in December 1934, following the murder of Valentin Markin. In Washington, Hede Massing continued to supervise Noel Field, and worried over his indiscretions. He liked to pull stunts like standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and singing “The Internationale” at the top of his lungs. He left copies of the Daily Worker lying around at home.56
The problem was solved when Field quit the State Department in 1936 and took a job with the League of Nations in Geneva. In September 1940, George Dimitrov, the head of the Comintern, instructed Communist Party boss Earl Browder to recruit agents who could infiltrate the relief committees then forming in Europe. This would give them the freedom of movement to act as Soviet couriers in the warring nations.57 A month later, Field resigned from the League of Nations and joined the Unitarian Service Committee as head of its Marseilles office. He spent the war years acting as a courier among the underground Communist parties in occupied Europe. One of his colleagues on the Unitarian Committee recalled that “the whole world is wrong but not Noel Field. He did not brook disagreement.”58
When Hede Massing was transferred to Paris in June 1936, Bazarov reported to Moscow that Duggan wanted to work directly with Soviet illegals rather than with intermediaries. Duggan had told Massing, according to Bazarov, that “the only thing that kept him at his hateful job in the State Department, where he did not get out of his tuxedo for two weeks, every night attending receptions, was the idea of being useful to our cause.” Duggan set out the rules under which he would cooperate. He agreed to one meeting a month with someone who knew stenography. He refused to turn over documents.
Bazarov assigned Norman Borodin, a young illegal who had already been stationed in Norway, Germany, and France, to handle Duggan. At their first meeting, Duggan was wary. His wife was pregnant, he had to think of his family, he’d be found out, fired from State, and even blacklisted. But by midsummer, he had thawed, and was turning over documents and coming to meetings every two weeks. Duggan gave Borodin a recent State Department handbook and personnel list, which Bazarov forwarded to Moscow, commenting that he had noted Alger Hiss’s name on the registry, “but the neighbors [GRU] stole him…. Having Hiss one does not need others.”59
In May 1937, at the age of thirty-two, Duggan was promoted to head of the Latin American division, which meant that he was cleared to receive all the classified cables coming into the State Department. The job was such a plum that Moscow cabled, “We cannot lose him for any reasons.”60
When a grateful Moscow Center (NKVD headquarters) proposed paying Duggan in the spring of 1937, Bazarov objected that Duggan would surely reject cash, as he had rejected a monogrammed alligator skin toiletries case. Duggan was an idealist and paying him would only serve to alienate him.
The trouble was that Duggan’s idealism worked both ways, and he expressed a growing concern over Stalin’s purges. On July 2, 1937, he raised the question with Borodin: Why had senior Bolsheviks he had learned to respect turned out to be traitors? He was so worried he could not sleep and wanted to break off.61
In August, Bazarov passed Duggan on to a more senior illegal, Iskhak Akhmerov, a Tartar of peasant background who had arrived in New York in 1934 by way of China and the NKVD. Akhmerov was six feet tall, with downward-turning eyes, full lips, and thick, wavy chestnut hair. In New York, he found it so easy to fit in that he married Earl Browder’s niece, Helen Lowry.
Duggan went on vacation to Mexico in October and when he returned his doubts had doubled. At a meeting with Akhmerov on January 3, 1938, he was still harping on the purges. How could the traitors include diplomats whose devotion to the U.S.S.R. he knew to be unquestionable?
Duggan was now under State Department scrutiny, as he learned when he was summoned by his mentor, Sumner Welles, in March and told to be “exceptionally careful in your contacts.” With the new powers conferred upon it by FDR in 1936, the FBI was on the job. Welles added: “It does not fit a person of your status to have Marxist books,” a sign that the FBI had done a black bag job on his house. In April 1939, Duggan told Akhmerov that he was no longer receiving cables from other departments, which meant that he had lost his security clearance.62
On August 24, 1939, Hitler and Stalin signed a nonaggression pact; they would soon be allies in a war against Poland. In September, the politics of revolution became the politics of war. Chambers, who after his defection from the underground had joined the staff of Time magazine, received a visit from the anti-Communist author Isaac Don Levine, who told him it was time to tell what he knew. Chambers reluctantly agreed, recalling the words of another defector: “In our time, informing is a duty.” The shock of the Berlin-Moscow agreement prodded him into action.63
Levine arranged a meeting with Assistant Secretary of State Adolf A. Berle Jr., who was in charge of intelligence matters at the State Department. On September 1, Nazi tanks invaded Poland, their rumbling drumroll announcing a world war. The next day, Chambers and Levine went to Woodley Hall, the nineteenth-century mansion Berle had rented from Henry Stimson, soon to be Secretary of War. They found an agitated Berle, who told them “we may be in this war within 48 hours and we cannot go into it without clean services” (meaning a government that was not penetrated by spies). After dinner, they sat outside in lawn chairs, as the smell of honeysuckle drifted on the muggy September air. Fortified by whiskey, Chambers began to tell the story of his espionage ring. As Berle listened in astonishment, Chambers named men who were his State Department colleagues, such as Hiss, Duggan, and Field, as well as many others.
After more than two hours on the lawn, they went back into the house. Berle sat down at a little desk just inside the front door and began to make quick notes, abbreviating as he went along, and Chambers filled in the details. It was after midnight when Chambers and Levine left. In great excitement, Berle was on the telephone dialing a number, which Chambers assumed to be the White House, as they went out the door.64
“Saturday night,” Berle wrote in his diary entry for September 4, “I had, to me, a singularly unpleasant job. Isaac Don Levine…had opened up another idea of the Russian espionage. He brought a Mr. X around to my house on Saturday evening, after a rather unhappy croquet game had been played between Secretary Hull and some of the rest of us at Woodley. Through a long evening, I slowly manipulated Mr. X to a point where he told me some of the ramifications hereabout; and it becomes necessary to take a few simple measures. A good deal of the Russian espionage was carried on by Jews; we now know that they are exchanging information with Berlin; and the Jewish units are furious to find that they are, in substance, working for the Gestapo.”65
An alarmed Berle called Assistant Secretary Dean Acheson about Hiss and his brother, Donald, whom Chambers had also named. Acheson told Berle that he had “known the family and these two boys since childhood and he could vouch for them absolutely.” Berle confided to his diary, “You had a chain of endorsements…and this seemed to negate any immediate danger.”
Thus, Berle did not notify the FBI of his talk with Chambers until March 1941, one year and five months later, and he didn’t provide his notes until June 1943, so that the high-level spy ring that might have been shut down continued to function.
Chambers, however, had a different explanation for Berle’s inaction. “I was told,” he later wrote, “that Mr. Berle had carried my story to a higher authority…and he had been told to go and jump in the lake, only in somewhat coarser language…. I was given to understand that the president told this to Mr. Berle.”66
In the case of Duggan, however, who was already under suspicion, Berle seems to have acted. On October 2, 1939, a month after the meeting with Chambers, a shaken Duggan told Akhmerov that he had been approached by a State Department security officer who told him he was known to have given secret material to Soviet intelligence and should start looking for another job. Duggan insisted on breaking, suspecting that there was a leak from the Soviet end. He was demoted to the position of personal adviser to Cordell Hull in Latin America, in the hope that he would resign.67
In late 1939, following the outbreak of World War II, a swarm of Soviet agents were recalled to Moscow, among them Akhmerov and Borodin. Akhmerov, newly married, took his American bride back with him. When he said goodbye to Duggan, with whom he had spent so many hours, he felt he was leaving a friend. For want of an agent in charge, the New York Rezindentura was closed down (in NKVD parlance, “the point was put in storage”) and the agents became inactive.
When Hitler invaded Russia in June 1941, there was an urgent need for intelligence from the United States. Akhmerov was sent back in August to reestablish the illegal Rezidentura, traveling with his wife, Helen, on Canadian passports in the name of Reed. Since most of his agents were in Washington, Akhmerov settled in Baltimore. His cover was a small business that made fur hats and jackets, of which he was co-owner.68
Akhmerov tried to reactivate Duggan, who was still at the State Department. When they met in February 1942, Duggan said that he had recently seen Adolf Berle, who warned him about maintaining links with left-wing elements. Akhmerov realized that Duggan was burned out, and told Moscow the situation was “unsatisfactory.” Moscow replied on November 26 that Akhmerov should be firm, although there was no thought of blackmail. Akhmerov tried again, and Duggan supplied some information in March and June of 1944. In July, he resigned from the State Department and replaced his father as director of the Institute of International Education.69
In August 1948, Chambers made his stunning allegations about Alger Hiss before HUAC. In December, Chambers testified before a federal grand jury. On December 10, Larry Duggan was at home in Scarsdale, recovering from a spinal disk injury. Two FBI agents came to call and repeated the names given to Berle by Chambers, of which his was one. Duggan denied being a Communist or a spy, but told the agents he had been approached twice in the thirties, once by Henry Collins and once by his Harvard classmate, Fred Field, heir to the Vanderbilt fortune and an open Communist.70
On December 20, Duggan received a subpoena to testify before a federal grand jury investigating Soviet espionage in Washington. That evening, shortly after six, he jumped from the sixteenth-floor window of his New York office on West 45th Street. He was forty-three years old. There was no note. His body was found with one shoe on. The other shoe was in his office. At midnight Representative Karl Mundt of HUAC summoned reporters to announce that Duggan had been named by Isaac Don Levine on December 8 in executive session. A reporter asked if there were any other names. Mundt said, “We’ll give them out as they jump out of windows.”
In a sympathetic editorial on December 23, the New York Times said that Duggan “fell, leaped, or was pushed to his death.” Mr. Mundt had made “charges of treason” against a man “who was dead…and could not answer them.” And who was this man, asked the Times? He was a man whose colleagues in the State Department “vouch for his honesty and his loyalty. Other close friends say he was a brilliant man, loyal to his bones to those principles of democracy in which must lie the hope of our world.”71