The torch of faith is extinct; let us fall back on the candles of truth.
—Arthur Koestler
IN A BOOK-CRAMMED apartment on New York’s Upper East Side belonging to writer Isaac Don Levine, during the fateful year 1939, two disenchanted former Soviet agents, Whittaker Chambers and Walter Krivitsky, had an extraordinary meeting. By way of a greeting, Krivitsky asked Chambers if he thought the Soviet government was fascist. After pausing to consider this startling opening, Chambers nodded. “Krivitsky and I began to talk quickly as if we were racing time,” Chambers remembered. “We talked about Krivitsky’s break with Communism, and his flight with his wife and small son from Amsterdam to Paris. We talked about attempts to trap or kill him in Europe, and the fact that he had not been in the U.S. a week before the Russian secret police set a watch on his apartment. We talked about the murder of Ignaz Reiss . . . whose break from the Party . . . had precipitated Krivitsky’s. . . . It was then that I learned that for more than a year Stalin had been desperately seeking to negotiate an alliance with Hitler. . . . By means of the [Hitler-Stalin] pact, Communism could pit one sector of the West against the other, and use both to destroy the non-Communist world. As Communist strategy, the pact was thoroughly justified, and the Party was right in denouncing all those who opposed it as Communist enemies.” Mixing German and English, in the shorthand of the underground, they talked through the night. At dawn, they still had more to say to each other. The pudgy, ill-kempt former American Communist and the short, wiry Central European Bolshevik—men electric with intelligence and rage—bonded in bitterness.
“In our time,” Krivitsky concluded the long night, “informing [on the Soviets] is a duty.” This blunt assertion—almost a command from a respected Bolshevik—prompted Chambers to break his own silence and “inform” on his own life in the Communist underground. Chambers’s resolution, reached after that cathartic night between two disenchanted Soviet agents, would have seismic impact.
As they parted, Krivitsky ruefully concluded, “One does not leave Stalin lightly.”
A year and a half later, the chambermaid at the Bellevue Hotel, a few blocks from Washington’s Union Station, was making her morning rounds. Unlocking room 532 with her passkey, she saw a man’s feet and legs on the bed, lying the wrong way around. The maid asked when she should come back, and when he did not answer, she noticed blood pooled by his head. Hotel guests rushed from their rooms at the sound of her shriek. The dead man with a bullet hole the size of a fist in his skull was later identified as General Walter Krivitsky.
The next day, front-page articles raised the obvious question: why was a man so clearly in danger after his very public break with Stalin without security? Krivitsky had been making plans to change his name and to file for American citizenship. He had told State Department officials of his strong suspicions regarding the existence of the Cambridge spy ring burrowed in the British secret services: Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, and Anthony Blunt. In 1939, Krivitsky was summoned to London to be interviewed by Dick White, head of British intelligence (MI5 and, later, MI6) and Guy Liddell, of MI5. Krivitsky did not know the names of the British spies, but the descriptions he provided White and Liddell matched Philby and Maclean. White and Liddell, however, failed to follow up on Krivitsky’s leads. The general had warned his wife that if he were found dead, never under any circumstance believe that it was suicide. He had reported to the police sighting a man known as “Hans”—one of the KGB’s most brutal killers. Yet Krivitsky did not have security.
In a revealing (and shocking) FBI internal memorandum addressed to Director J. Edgar Hoover, Agent C. H. Carson wrote on February 10, 1941, “Agent ___ (redacted) advised that he and Agent ___ (redacted) talked to Krivitsky in the latter’s lawyer’s office and Krivitsky told his story about how he had been accosted by some people who were Soviet Agents. Mr. ___ (redacted) stated that he and Agent ___ (redacted) were not very impressed after the interview with Krivitsky, and they were both of the opinion that though he did not seem like a Jew, he was alleged to have been Jewish.” Though it’s inconceivable that anti-Semitism was the primary reason the FBI did not provide Krivitsky with security, the memo is a reminder of the institution’s casual racism during that period.
Two of Noel Field’s three control officers, Ignaz Reiss and Walter Krivitky, had paid with their lives for trying to break with Moscow. The third and most important of Noel’s liaisons to Moscow—his recruiters, Paul and Hede Massing—were now also suspect.
In the spring of 1938, in keeping with the Stalinist ritual of recalling to Moscow agents under suspicion, Paul and Hede obeyed their summons. What was the point of defiance? Stalin’s reach knew no borders.
Once in Moscow, the Massings were virtual prisoners of the fabled Hotel Metropol, minutes from the Kremlin. Their passports in official custody, months passed and their interrogation did not let up. They grew daily more anxious that they would not leave the Soviet Union alive, when, “One morning,” Hede recalled, “while I was picking up a batch of mail, I came across a letter addressed to ‘Noel H. Field.’ As casually as possible, I said to the girl at the desk, ‘Oh, is Mr. Field in town?’ ” Indeed, the Fields were on their long-awaited first visit to the workers’ paradise. (Noel, who received his Soviet visa in Paris, did not tell his colleagues at the League of Nations where he was spending his month-long vacation.) Hede immediately understood that if their old friends had not been in touch with them, she and Paul must be officially persona non grata. But at the same time, she saw a way out of a very dangerous situation. She rang the Fields in their room. Feigning a calm she did not feel, she suggested lunch. The Fields were trapped. The chance encounter saved the Massings’ lives.
“When we met in Moscow,” Paul Massing recalled, “the roles were completely reversed. We were in trouble, Noel was completely persona grata. He followed the official line, not calling us. It was the purest chance we learned he was there.”
Noel and Herta filled the awkward reunion with a breathless account of all the wonders they had seen on their tour: Leningrad, Stalingrad, Saratov, Rostov, Baku, Tiflis, Sochi, Yalta, and Kiev. Accompanied by their NKVD “hosts,” they had visited factories and collective farms. The Fields were enchanted by everything they saw. Noel related a “touching” incident with their Intourist minder, who, when told by the Fields they wouldn’t need her one evening, later found her sitting patiently in front of their hotel room, waiting. It somehow did not occur to them that the minder was afraid to leave her post.
Having cornered the Fields into a meeting, Hede took full advantage of the situation. She picked up the hotel telephone as Noel and Herta stood helplessly by and called Bazarov, her control officer, who held the Massings’ passports—and their fate—in his hands. “Hede embarrassed Noel very much,” Paul Massing recalled, “with her phone call in front of him demanding our passports. But I think it helped us.” Their passports were delivered almost immediately. “I think another reason we were allowed to go,” Paul recalled, “was that by then the purge had gone very far. There is a natural tendency to reach a point where you say there has to be a stop—or we will all go under.” So the Massings survived—with the Fields’ inadvertent help.
Agent Bazarov, however, would not fare as well. A two-word memo in the KGB files reveals the dispatch of another agent who had loyally served Stalin, now perceived as the enemy. “Bazarov shot.”
Noel still pined for a tighter bond—a cleaner connection—with the Communist Party. It was all too ambiguous and ill-defined for a man who had sacrificed family, profession, and country. Later Noel explained, “My trip to Moscow had several purposes. The most important was to get to know the Soviet Union. . . . The other reason was that after Reiss and Krivitsky’s betrayals I was left without any connection to the Party and I had hoped that I would be able to establish such connections for further work.”
While in Moscow, Noel and Herta applied to join the CPUSA as secret members. This posed an ironic complication. Since Noel was a spy, the American party would not be informed of their membership. “We asked to be registered in the American Party section of the Comintern,” Field recalled. “But we were told that our admission was going to be treated confidentially. They would not forward it to the American Party, because of our confidential work.”
To placate Noel, the apparatus gave him a name (“Brook”) and told him to expect a contact in Geneva. Noel seemed oblivious to the tangled politics of his situation. As a result of his association with the “traitors” Reiss, Krivitsky, and now the Massings, he, too, was under a shadow.