We have now traced the history of Russian Communism up to 1938. In order to appreciate what happened after 1938 it is necessary to understand the historical development of Communism in the United States.
The conquest of the United States by Marxist forces has been an important part of the plan of Communist leaders for many years: “First we will take Eastern Europe; then the masses of Asia. Then we will encircle the United States of America which will be the last bastion of Capitalism. We will not have to attack it; it will fail like an over-ripe fruit into our hands.” This clearly reflects the Marxist intent to overthrow the United States by internal subversion.
It is sometimes difficult for us to realize how enthusiastically encouraged the Communist leaders have frequently felt toward the progress of their program in the United States. The answers to the following questions will indicate why:
• Have Americans who embraced Communism overlooked a vigorous warning from the Pilgrim Fathers? Why are the Pilgrim Fathers described as having practiced Communism under “the most favorable circumstances”? What were the results?
• How soon after the Russian Revolution was Communism launched in the United States? How extensive was the first wave of Communist violence?
• What was William Z. Foster’s testimony under oath concerning a Communist revolution in the United States?
• Why was Whittaker Chambers able to furnish so many details concerning Communism in the United States? In June, 1932, Chambers was asked to pay the full price of being a Communist—what was it? How did Chambers’ small daughter influence him to abandon Communism?
• What was the background of Elizabeth Bentley? How did she happen to become the Communist “wife” of a man she did not even know?
• How did Communists who were employed as Russian spies successfully clear themselves?
• How would you expect the Communist leaders in Russia to react as they reviewed the U.S. list of top-level government employees who were risking imprisonment and disgrace to commit espionage and otherwise carry out the orders of the Soviet leaders?
One of the forgotten lessons of U.S. history is the fact that the American founding fathers tried Communism before they tried capitalistic free enterprise.
In 1620 when the Pilgrim Fathers landed at Plymouth, they had already determined to establish a Communist colony. In many ways this communal society was set up under the most favorable circumstances. First of all, they were isolated from outside help and were desperately motivated to make the plan work in order to survive. Secondly, they had a select group of religious men and women who enjoyed a cooperative, fraternal feeling toward one another. The Pilgrims launched their Communist community with the most hopeful expectations. Governor William Bradford has left us a remarkable account of what happened. The Governor reports:
“This community… was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort. For the young men that were most able and fit for labor and service did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense. The strong… had no more in division of victuals and clothes than he that was weak and not able to do a quarter the other could; this was thought an injustice… and for men’s wives to be commanded to do service for other men, as dressing their meat, washing their clothes, etc, they deemed it a kind of slavery, neither could many husbands well brook it.” (Note that even in a Christian brotherhood, Communism cannot be practiced without setting up a dictatorship.)
But the colonists would have continued to endure Communism if it had only been productive. The thing which worried Governor Bradford was the fact that the total amount of production under this communal arrangement was so low that the colonists were faced with starvation. Therefore, he says:
“At length, after much debate… the governor gave way that they should set corn every man for his own purpose, and in that regard trust to themselves… and so assigned to every family a parcel of land according to the proportion of their number.”
Once a family was given land and corn they had to plant, cultivate and harvest it or suffer the consequences. The Governor wanted the people to continue living together as a society of friends but communal production was to be replaced by private, free enterprise production. After one year the Governor was able to say:
“This had very good success; for it made all hands very industrious, so that much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been…. The women now went willing into the fields, and took their little ones with them to set corn, which before would allege weakness and inability; who to have compelled would have been thought great tyranny and oppression.”
The Pilgrim Fathers had discovered the great human secret that a man will compel himself to go ever so much farther than he will permit anyone else to compel him to go. As Governor Bradford thought about their efforts to live in a Communist society, he wrote down this conclusion:
“The experience that was had in this common cause and condition, tried sundrie years, and that amongst godly and sober men, may well evince the vanity of that conceit of Plato and other ancients—applauded by some in later times—that the taking away of property, and bringing it into a commonwealth, would make them happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser than God.”{66}
It becomes apparent that Governor Bradford concluded that Communism is not only inefficient but that it is unnatural and in violation of the laws of God. This may raise a question in the minds of some students who have heard that Communism provides the most ideal means of practicing the basic principles of Christianity. Elsewhere, we have considered the historical background of this problem.”{67}
It is interesting that after the pilgrim fathers tried communism they abandoned it in favor of a free enterprise type of capitalism which, over the centuries, has become more highly developed in the united states than in any other nation. In its earliest stages this system was described as a heartless, selfish institution, but economists have pointed out that after a slow and painful evolution it has finally developed into a social-economic tool which has thus far produced more wealth and distributed it more uniformly among the people of this land than any system modern men have tried.{68} The evolutionary process of further improving and further adapting capitalism to the needs of a highly industrialized society is still going on.
When the Bolshevik Revolution took place in Russia in 1917, it held a particular interest for a certain group of Americans. This was the left wing faction of the Socialist Party. For years, the Socialists had been trying to get the Federal Government to take over all major industries and socialize the country, but this attempt at peaceful legislative reform had failed. Then suddenly, in November, 1917, these people heard that the Russian Bolsheviks had used revolutionary violence to seize power and had thereafter socialized their country overnight.
This was promptly accepted by the left wing Socialists as the formula for America. They immediately determined to form a Communist party and use violent revolutionary activity to sovietize America at the earliest possible date. They were greatly encouraged in this venture by a man named John Reed, a journalist, who had recently returned from Russia with glowing enthusiasm for the revolution and world Communism.
This group made contact with Moscow and was invited to send delegates to Russia in March, 1919, to help form the Third International (copied after Marx’s First International to promote world revolution). When they returned home they started their campaign. John Reed used the columns of the “New York Communist” to agitate the workers to revolt. The Communist ranks were swelled by members of the old I.W.W. (International Workers of the World) who gravitated to the new movement with suggestions that the party members learn to use the techniques of sabotage and violence which the I.W.W. had employed during World War I.
Further encouragement came to the movement when the Russian Communist Party sent over an official representative of the Soviet Government to help organize a full-fledged Bolshevik program. His name was C.A. Martens. He brought along substantial quantities of money to spend in building cells inside the American labor unions and the U.S. armed forces. It was not enough that the Communists should save the proletariat of Russia; Comrade Martens assured all who heard him that his mission from Moscow was to free the down-trodden workers of capitalistic America. As the movement progressed, American representatives were sent to Russia to get permission to set up the “Communist Labor Party of the United States” as a branch of the Russian-sponsored Communist International (organization for world revolution). Later the word “Labor” was dropped.
The officers of the new Communist Party signed the “Twenty-one Conditions of Admission” which were to embarrass them many years later when the Party was ordered to register in 1952 as an agency under the control of the Soviet Union.
Here are typical commitments from the “Twenty-one Conditions of Admission”:
“The Communist Party (of the USA) must carry on a clear-cut program of propaganda for the hindering of the transportation of munitions of war to the enemies of the Soviet Republic.”
“The program (of the U.S. Communist Party) must be sanctioned by the regular congress of the Communist International.”
“All decisions of the Communist International… are binding upon all parties belonging to the Communist International (which would include the U.S. Communist Party).”
“The duty of spreading Communist ideas includes the special obligation to carry on a vigorous and systematic propaganda in the Army. Where this agitation is forbidden by exceptional laws, it is to be carried on illegally.”
“Every party wishing to belong to the Communist International must systematically and persistently develop a Communist agitation within the trade-unions.”
It was basic commitments such as these which led the U.S. Subversive Activities Control Board to make the following statement in 1953 after extended hearings:
“We find upon the whole record that the evidence preponderantly establishes that Respondent’s leaders (leaders of the Communist Party, USA) and its members consider the allegiance they owe to the United States as subordinate to their loyalty and obligations to the Soviet Union.”{69}
Beginning April 28, 1919, a series of 36 bombs were discovered in the mails addressed to such persons as the Attorney General, Justice Holmes of the Supreme Court, J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller and similar persons of prominence. One of the bombs got through to the home of Senator Hardwick who had been trying to shut off the migration of Bolsheviks to the U.S. A servant opened the package and the bomb exploded, blowing off her hands.
On September 16, 1920, a large bomb was carried in a horse-drawn carriage to the corner of Broad and Wall Streets in New York City—the vortex of American capitalism. The vehicle was brought to a halt across the street from the un-ostentatious three-story limestone building occupied by the firm of J. P. Morgan and Company.
Suddenly a great roar went up from the carriage, and blue-white flame shot into the sky. The bomb exploded with tremendous violence, killing thirty people outright and injuring hundreds more. It wrecked the interior of the Morgan offices, smashed windows for blocks around and shot an iron slug through a window on the thirty-fourth floor of the Equitable Building.
These acts of murder and violence created a blistering resentment against the Bolsheviks in every part of the United States. Occasionally counter-violence was used by aroused citizens in retaliation. Numerous arrests were made by the Attorney General and finally a whole shipload of Bolshevik aliens and Communist leaders were deported to Russia via Finland on the S.S. Buford. Aboard the boat was the notorious Emma Goldman whose anarchist speeches a quarter of a century earlier had induced Leon Czolgosz to assassinate President McKinley. Little did she know that in twenty-four months she would not only repudiate Lenin and his Bolsheviks but that by 1940 her great last hope would be to die in the United States.
Few names among Communist leaders today are better known to the American public than the name of William Z. Foster. He was a charter member of the party in the United States and was the person designated by the party to take over the U.S. labor unions. Most of the money for the campaign came from Moscow where the Profintern (Red International of Trade Unions) had received $1,000,000 from the Soviet Government to help spread Communism in the labor unions of other nations.
Foster’s drive hit the labor front soon after the armistice, when the workers were already in a state of agitation resulting from wartime conditions. Foster found little difficulty in sparking strikes in several important industries and even where he had nothing to do with a strike he was often given the credit. As a result, many people began to identify their pro-labor sympathies with Communism without completely realizing it.
The coal miners were believed to have come under Foster’s influence when they voted enthusiastically to have the coal industry nationalized and a similar label seemed to attach itself to the steel strike because Foster was very much in evidence as an agitator and promoter of the strike. Many people knew that both the coal miners and the steel workers had many legitimate reasons for striking and to them the fact that Foster and his Communist associates seized this opportunity to worm their way into the labor movement seemed of little importance.
But William Z. Foster never really concealed his fundamental ambition to overthrow the United States government by violence and subordinate the American laborer (as well as every other American) to the mandates of a Communist dictatorship copied after the Russian pattern. In fact, Mr. Foster visualized himself as the coming dictator. He was the Communist candidate for President on two occasions and wrote a book called Toward Soviet America, telling just how the Communists would take over.
When a Congressional committee placed him under oath and asked him about Communism, he was voluble and frank:
The Chairman: “Do the Communists in this country advocate world revolution?”
Mr. Foster: “Yes.”
The Chairman: “Do they (the Communists) advocate revolution in this country?”
Mr. Foster: “I have stated that the Communists advocate abolition of the capitalist system in this country and every other country….”
The Chairman: “Now, are the Communists in this country opposed to our republican form of government?”
Mr. Foster: “The capitalist Democracy—most assuredly.”
The Chairman: “What you advocate is a change of our republican form of government and the substituting of the soviet form of government?
Mr. Foster: “I have stated that a number of times.”
The Chairman: “Now, if I understand you, the workers in this country look upon the Soviet Union as their country; is that right?”
Mr. Foster: “The more advanced workers do.”
The Chairman: “They look upon the Soviet flag as their flag?”
Mr. Foster: “The workers of this country and the workers of every country have only one flag and that is the red flag.”
The Chairman: “…If they had to choose between the red flag and the American flag, I take it from you that you would choose the red flag, is that correct?”
Mr. Foster: “I have stated my answer.”
The Chairman: “I don’t want to force you to answer if it embarrasses you, Mr. Foster.”
Mr. Foster: “It does not embarrass me at all. I stated very clearly the red flag is the flag of the revolutionary class, and we are part of the revolutionary class.”{70}
From 1921 to 1924, members of the Communist Party sought to avoid arrest by operating underground, but when the wartime emergency acts were repealed the Communist leaders gradually surfaced again and continued their campaign for a revolution to overthrow the United States government.
However, during the next few years the general psychology of the country was not particularly security conscious. It was an era of fads, frivolity and general post-war frenzy. The national scene was entirely too prosperous and intoxicating to worry about a few fanatic-minded men who wanted to rule the world. Somehow or other the word “Communist” began to have a far-away flavor, and people jokingly spoke of the former years of bomb-throwing, strikes, arrests and deportations as the days of “the great Red scare.”
However, a fertile field for future Communist conquests was being developed among the very people who feared it least. The United States was going sophisticated in an atmosphere of half-baked intellectualism. Pedestals of the past crumbled to the cry of scandal and the rattling of closeted skeletons. An age of daring debunking had arrived. At the time few people realized that the economic and spiritual collapse toward which the nation was drifting would produce an intellectual revolt that would permit the agents of Communism to propel them into every echelon of American society—including some of the highest offices of the United States Government. This brings us to the story of Whittaker Chambers. Because Chambers was converted to Communism during this period and worked himself up to the highest levels of intrigue as a leader of Russian espionage, his disclosures give a sweeping panoramic picture of the growth of Communism in the United States from 1925–1938.
A brief review of Whittaker Chambers’ conversion to Communism will perhaps reveal an evolutionary pattern which was followed by a considerable number of young American intellectuals during the Nineteen-Twenties and early Thirties.
Whittaker Chambers was raised on Long Island not far from suburban New York. In the Chambers home was an impersonal and disinterested father (a newspaper illustrator), an over-loving and therefore overbearing mother (who had formerly been an actress), an insane grandmother and a younger brother toward whom Chambers felt no particular fraternal affection.
Both Chambers and his younger brother came to maturity during the hectic post-war period and, like many people of their time, both became moral and spiritual casualties. Chambers’ younger brother returned from college cynical and disillusioned. He became an alcoholic and finally committed suicide. The whole family seemed to have degenerated into a pattern of life which was precisely the mess of purposeless Pottage that Marx and Engels had declared it to be. Whittaker Chambers describes his own experiences as follows:
“When I entered (college shortly after World War I) I was a conservative in my view of life and politics, and I was undergoing a religious experience. By the time I left, entirely by my own choice, I was no longer a conservative and I had no religion. 1 had published in a campus literary magazine an atheist playlet…. The same year, I went to Europe and saw Germany in the manic throes of defeat. I returned to Columbia, this time paying my own way. In 1925, I voluntarily withdrew for the express purpose of joining the Communist Party. For I had come to believe that the world we live in was dying, that only surgery could now save the wreckage of mankind, and that the Communist Party was history’s surgeon.”{71}
Chambers went to work for Communism in real earnest. He became co-editor of The Textile Worker, wrote for the Daily Worker, took a Communist “wife” and learned the strike tactics of trade union violence. He writes that during this period, “I first learned that the Communist Party employed gangsters against the fur bosses in certain strikes…. I first learned how Communist union members would lead their own gangs of strikers into scab shops and in a few moments slash to pieces with their sharp-hooked fur knives thousands of dollars’ worth of mink skins.”{72}
It was his intention to make the Communist program the permanent pattern of his life. Before long, however, his Communist “wife” left him to go her own way and Chambers felt it would be more to his liking to make his next union (which took place in 1931) an official “bourgeois marriage” at some city hall. At this stage, Chambers would never have guessed that he also had other sensibilities which would one day take him out of Communism and make him senior editor of Time magazine at a salary of around $30,000 per year!
In 1928, Chambers saw the first series of purges in the American Communist Party. For several years, the party had been dominated by Charles E. Ruthenburg, “the American Lenin.” When Ruthenburg suddenly died there was a mad scramble for power. Jay Lovestone came out on top with William Z. Foster representing a small, noisy minority. But soon Lovestone made a serious political mistake. He sided with one of Stalin’s most powerful Russian opponents. Nikolai Bukharin, who stood for a less violent program than Stalin had in mind.
Lovestone and William Z. Foster were summoned to Moscow. When they returned, Lovestone was a broken man. He had been called a traitor by Stalin and thrown out of the party. Stalin had named Foster the heir to the throne. The next step was to force every member of the party in the United States to support Foster’s radical program or be expelled. Most Communists picked up the new set of signals from Moscow and immediately swore allegiance to Foster. But not so with Chambers. It looked to him as though Stalin were behaving exactly like a Fascist dictator by forcing the majority of the American Communists to follow leadership they had already voted against. Chambers stopped being active in the party.
For two years, by his own choice, Chambers remained outside the regular ranks. He was never expelled, nor did his loyalty to Communism change, but he deeply resented Stalin. The entire situation was changed, however, by the great depression. Chambers’ sympathies for the unemployed once more drew him back toward the party program. He also felt forced to admit that from all appearances the long-predicted collapse of American capitalism had arrived.
In the spirit of the times, Chambers wrote a story called, “Can You Hear the Voices?” It was a great success. It was made into a play, published as a pamphlet and hailed by Moscow as splendid revolutionary literature. The next thing Chambers knew he was being feted by the American Communist Party as though he had never left it. Chambers soon went back to work for the revolution.
It was in June, 1932, that Chambers was asked to pay the full price of being a Communist. The Party nominated him to serve as a spy against the United States in the employment of the Soviet Military Intelligence. For the sake of his wife Chambers tried to get out of this assignment, but a member of the Central Committee in New York told him, “You have no choice.”
Chambers soon found himself under the iron discipline of the Russian espionage apparatus. Because Communism had become his faith, Chambers blindly followed instructions. He became expert in the conspiratorial techniques of clandestine meetings, writing secret documents, shaking off followers, trusting no one, being available day and night at the beck and call of superiors.
Before long Chambers was assigned to be the key contact man for Russia’s most important spy cell in Washington, D.C. Chambers has described his espionage associations with the following persons who were later to become top officials in the United States Government:
1. Alger Hiss, whom Chambers says became a close personal friend. Hiss started out in the Department of Agriculture, and then served on the Special Senate Committee investigating the munitions industry. For awhile he served in the Department of Justice and then went to the State Department. There he made a meteoric rise, serving as Director of the highly important office of Political Affairs. He served as advisor to President Roosevelt at Yalta and as Secretary General of the International Assembly which created the United Nations.
2. Harry Dexter White, who later became Assistant Secretary of the United States Treasury and author of the Morgenthau Plan.
3. John J. Abt, who served in the Department of Agriculture, the WPA, the Senate Committee on Education and Labor and was then made a Special Assistant to the Attorney General in charge of the trial section.
4. Henry H. Collins, who served in the NRA, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Labor, and the Department of State. During World War II he became a major in the Army and in 1948 became Executive Director of the American Russian Institute (cited by the Attorney General as a Communist front organization).
5. Charles Kramer, who served in the National Labor Relations Board, the Office of Price Administration, and in 1943, joined the staff of the Senate Sub-committee on War Mobilization.
6. Nathan Witt, who served in the Department of Agriculture and then became the Secretary of the National Labor Relations Board.
7. Harold Ware, who served in the Department of Agriculture.
8. Victor Perlo, who served in the Office of Price Administration, the War Production Board, and the Treasury.
9. Henry Julian Wadleigh, who became a prominent official in the Treasury Department.
Chambers testified that he received so many confidential government documents through his contacts that it took the continuous efforts of two and sometimes three photographers to microfilm the material and keep it flowing to Russia. Chambers says he considered Alger Hiss his number one source of information. He has described how Hiss would bring home a brief case each night filled with material from the State Department. Some of these documents would be microfilmed. Others would be copied by Hiss on his typewriter or he would make summaries in longhand. It was a number of these typed documents and memos in the certified handwriting of Alger Hiss which became famous as the “Pumpkin Papers” and subsequently convicted Hiss of perjury.
In later years when Chambers was asked to give his explanation as to why so many well-educated Americans were duped into committing acts of subversion against their native country, he explained that once a person has been converted to the ideology of Communism he will consider espionage to be a moral act—a duty—committed in the name of humanity for the good of future society.
The unbelievable extent to which Americans participated in Russian-directed espionage against the United States during the depression and during World War II has only recently become generally recognized. Many complete books have now been written which summarize the evidence unearthed by the FBI, the courts and Congress.
In 1938, at the very height of his career as a Russian courier and contact man, Chambers found his philosophy of materialism collapsing. It was one morning while feeding his small daughter that Chambers suddenly realized as he watched her that the delicate yet immense complexity of the human body and human personality could not possibly be explained in terms of accumulated accident. Chambers dated his break with Communism from that moment.
At first he was highly disturbed and tried to thrust the new conviction from his mind, but as he opened his thinking to the evidence around him he finally became completely persuaded that he was living in a universe of amazingly immaculate design which was subject to the creative supervision of a supreme intelligence. Consequently, just as Communist philosophy had brought him into the movement its collapse made him determined to get out. It was many months later before he finally disentangled himself and ran away from the Soviet Intelligence Service.
Chambers says that when he ultimately made his break with Communism he did everything in his power to get his close friend, Alger Hiss, to leave with him. Alger Hiss, however, not only refused but, according to Chambers heatedly denounced him for trying to influence him.
From watching the fate of others, Chambers already had some idea of what it meant to try and leave the conspiratorial apparatus of Communism. Nevertheless, the course he followed brought physical and mental suffering that not even he had suspected.
Today, no more complete account of the agonizing experiences of those who dare to wear the badge of an ex-Communist can be found than that contained in the s of Chambers’ autobiography, Witness. At one point he worked with a gun beside him for fear the Russian secret police would take his life just as they were doing to so many others. At another point he tried to take his own life to keep from having to expose those who had formerly been his most intimate friends.
Most of these details can only be appreciated in their full text. For our purposes it is sufficient to point out that up until the time Chambers did finally make up his mind to tell the whole story, the American public was almost completely unaware of the vast network of spy activities which Russia had built into every strata of American society. And this unfortunate condition existed even though the FBI had been carefully gathering facts and warning government officials concerning Communist activities for many years.
Finally, a cloud of witnesses confirmed that it was true.
Chambers had no way of knowing that after he deserted the Russian espionage system, the Soviets would replace him with a woman. Her name was Elizabeth Bentley.
She came from a long line of New England American ancestors, She had attended Vassar, traveled and studied in Italy for a year and returned to the United States in 1934 to find the country deep in a depression. Having failed to get a job, she decided her only chance was to learn a business course so she enrolled at the School of Business at Columbia University. There she met up with a number of people who were friendly and sympathetic toward her. It was quite some time before she knew they were Communists. As these friends explained Communism to her it seemed rather reasonable—in fact, the way they explained it, Communism would be a great improvement over American Capitalism (which at that moment was bogged down like an iceberg with unemployment and bankruptcy). So Elizabeth Bentley became a Communist. She entered the campaign with all the zeal that could come from a girl in her twenties who suddenly believes that a new era of history is about to open up which will solve all of humanity’s problems.
For some time Elizabeth Bentley worked in New York’s Welfare Department and while there she was made the financial secretary of the Columbia University Communist unit. She attended the Communist Workers’ School and joined so many front organizations under different names that on at least one occasion she went to a meeting and could not remember who she was supposed to be!
Before long the activities of Elizabeth Bentley had tracked the leaders of the Russian underground apparatus and before she really knew what had happened to her she had been carefully shifted from the day-to-day assignments of the U.S. Communist Party to the underground network of Soviet espionage.
She worked for three different individuals before she was finally assigned to an over-worked, old-time revolutionary called “Timmy.” Elizabeth Bentley fell in love with Timmy.
One day he said to her: “You and I have no right to feel the way we do about each other…. There is only one way out, and that is to stick together and keep our relationship unknown to everyone…. You will have to take me completely on faith, without knowing who I am, where I live, or what I do for a living.”
This was how Elizabeth Bentley became the Communist wife of a man who turned out to be Jacob Golos, one of the all-powerful chiefs of the Russian Secret Police in the United States.
Under his training Elizabeth Bentley became what she later called a “steeled Bolshevik.”
In May, 1940, she read that an attempt had been made against the life of Leon Trotsky in Mexico. The attempt had failed but his personal bodyguard had been kidnaped and shot in the back. For years Stalin had been trying to liquidate his old enemy and from the way Jacob Golos behaved Elizabeth Bentley knew her Communist mate was in on the plot. Several months later a killer actually got through to Trotsky and smashed his skull with an alpenstock.
Beginning in 1941, Elizabeth Bentley was used by the Russian espionage apparatus to collect material from contacts in Washington, D.C. She says she first became the courier for the Silvermaster spy group which was extracting information from Communist contacts in the Pentagon and other top-secret governmental agencies. Before she was through she had picked up nearly all of Whittaker Chambers’ former contacts and many more besides.
Occasionally there was near disaster, as was the case just after Gregory Silvermaster got a job with the Board of Economic Warfare through the influence of Lauchlin Currie (an administrative assistant at the White House). She says that after taking the Job he was shown a letter addressed to his superior from the head of Army Intelligence indicating that the FBI and Naval Intelligence had proof of his Communist connections. The letter demanded that Silvermaster be discharged.
The panicky Silvermaster asked Elizabeth Bentley what to do. She gave him the same instruction that other exposed Communists were being given: “Stand your ground, put on an air of injured innocence; you are not a Communist, just a ‘progressive’ whose record proves you have always fought for the rights of labor. Rally all your ‘liberal’ friends around…. If necessary, hire a lawyer to fight the case through on the grounds that your reputation has been badly damaged. Meanwhile, pull every string you can to get this business quashed. Use Currie, White (Harry Dexter White, top official of the Treasury Department), anybody else you know and trust.”{73}
Anyone familiar with the format of defense followed by suspected Communists who were hailed before Congressional investigating committees will immediately recognize the Party’s trade mark on the trite pretension of abused innocence recommended by Elizabeth Bentley. When one considers its relatively naive and childlike simplicity it is almost a cause for national chagrin that it confused and deceived such an amazing number of people for such an inexplicable number of years. As with practically all of the others Elizabeth Bentley’s suggestions paid off handsomely for Silvermaster and he soon gained support from many powerful and unexpected sources.
After three months of “fighting back” the Under-Secretary of War became convinced from hearing various pleas that an injustice had been done to Silvermaster and therefore ordered his dismissal cancelled. Silvermaster was allowed to resign and return to his old job in the Department of Agriculture with a clean slate. Elizabeth Bentley concludes by saying, “After a sigh of relief that must have echoed throughout the entire Russian Secret Police apparatus, we went back to our normal routine.”
According to the sworn testimony of Elizabeth Bentley, she worked with three major spy cells. The first was the “Ware Cell”—the same group Chambers had handled. In addition she handled the “Silvermaster Cell” and the “Perlo Cell.” She said these three cells were charged with the task of supplying her with an almost endless stream of information for transmittal to Moscow. She testified under oath that the members of the Silvermaster Cell and the Perlo Cell were as follows (the departments in which the members were working during the time she had contact with them are also listed):
1. Nathan Gregory Silvermaster served as Director of the Labor Division of the Farm Security Administration; was detailed for a short period to the Board of Economic Warfare.
2. Solomon Adler served in the Treasury Department as an agent to China.
3. Norman Bursler worked in the Department of Justice as a special assistant.
4. Frank Coe worked as Assistant Director, Division of Monetary Research, Treasury Department; special assistant to the United States Ambassador in London; assistant to the Executive Director, Board of Economic Warfare; Assistant Administrator, Foreign Economic Administration.
5. William Gold, known also as Bela Gold, worked as assistant head of the Division of Program Surveys, Bureau of Agricultural Economics, Department of Agriculture; Senate Subcommittee on War Mobilization; Office of Economic Programs in Foreign Economic Administration.
6. Mrs. William (Sonia) Gold worked as research assistant, House Select Committee on Interstate Migration; labor-market analyst, Bureau of Employment Security; Division of Monetary Research, Treasury Department.
7. Abraham George Silverman served as Director of the Bureau of Research and Information Services, U.S. Railroad Retirement Board; economic adviser and chief of analysis and plans, Assistant Chief of Air Staff, Materials and Services, Air Force.
8. William Taylor worked in the Treasury Department.
9. William Ludwig Ullman worked in the Division of Monetary Research, Treasury Department; Material and Service Division, Air Corps Headquarters, Pentagon.
1. Victor Perlo (also connected with the Ware Cell), worked as the head of a branch in the Research Section, Office of Price Administration; served the War Production Board handling problems relating to military aircraft production.{74}
2. Edward J. Fitzgerald served on the War Production Board.
3. Harold Glasser served in the Treasury Department, loaned to the government of Ecuador; loaned to the War Production Board; worked as adviser on North African Affairs Committee in Algiers, North Africa.
4. Charles Kramer (also connected with the Ware Cell), worked for the National Labor Relations Board; Office of Price Administration; economist with the Senate Subcommittee on War Mobilization.
5. Solomon Leshinsky worked for the United States Relief and Rehabilitation Administration.
6. Harry Magdoff worked for the Statistical Division of the War Production Board and the Office of Emergency Management; the Bureau of Research and Statistics of the W.P.B., the Tools Division of W.P.B. and the Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce.
7. Allan Rosenberg worked in the Foreign Economic Administration.
8. Donald Niven Wheeler worked in the Office of Strategic Services.
In addition, Elizabeth Bentley named the following individuals who cooperated in obtaining information from government files even though they were not tied in to any particular cell:
1. Michael Greenburg—Board of Economic Warfare; Foreign Economic Administration, specialist on China.
2. Joseph Gregg—Coordinator of Inter-American affairs, assistant in Research Division.
3. Maurice Halperin—Office of Strategic Services; head of Latin American Division in the Research and Analysis Branch; head of Latin American research and analysis, State Department.
4. J. Julius Joseph—Office of Strategic Services, Japanese Division.
5. Duncan Chaplin Lee—Office of Strategic Services; legal adviser to General William J. Donovan.
6. Robert T. Miller—Head of political research, Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs; member, Information Service Committee, Near Eastern Affairs, State Department; Assistant Chief, Division of Research and Publications, State Department.
7. William Z. Park—Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs,
8. Bernard Redmont—Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs.
9. Helen Tenney—Office of Strategic Services, Spanish Division.
These lists of names are set forth to illustrate the remarkable and devastating pipelines of information which Elizabeth Bentley says the Soviet underground tapped in Washington during the time she served as the Russian Secret Police pay-master and courier in the nation’s capital.
Elizabeth Bentley worked doggedly for the Soviets until 1944. However, a great shock had come to her in 1943 when Jacob Golos died suddenly of a heart attack on Thanksgiving eve. Just before his death, Golos revealed to her the ruthlessness of his Soviet superiors who were driving him unmercifully and forcing him to engage in activities which were nauseating even to the revolutionary-hardened sense of his own calloused conscience.
And after Golos’ death further disillusionment came to Elizabeth Bentley when she learned that Earl Browder had agreed to turn over a group of American Communists in Washington to a most unscrupulous set of Soviet espionage agents. When she challenged Browder, he reportedly told her, “Don’t be naive. You know that when the cards are down, I have to take my orders from them. I just hoped I could sidetrack them in this particular matter, but it didn’t work out.”
“But Greg’s an old friend of yours,” Elizabeth Bentley said (referring to a member of the group). “So what?” replied Browder. “He’s expendable.” Shortly afterwards Elizabeth Bentley was surprised by a visit from a top Soviet official from Moscow who told her she had been awarded the highest medal of the Soviet Union—the Order of the Red Star. But she was not nearly as impressed by the proffered honor as she was disgusted and revolted by the kind of individual the Soviet official turned out to be. From that moment on she felt that the Communist leaders in Russia were absolutely incapable of building a great new world—no matter how much information she sent them.
The final blow to her idealism came when the Soviets tried to force her to turn over to them a girl-friend who was wanted for the immoral role of an entertainer for high government officials.
One night, alone, Elizabeth Bentley challenged herself, “What has happened to all of us who started out so gallantly to build a new world?” Deep inside herself she was finally able to admit what had happened. “We had been corrupted and smashed by a machine more merciless than anything the world had ever seen.”
Many weeks later, Elizabeth Bentley finally walked into the FBI ready to do everything in her power to make amends to her native country.
In some ways it was simultaneously a triumph and a tragedy. For her, personally, it was a triumph. It was the chance she needed to square herself with her conscience and her country. However, in 1948, when she gave her sworn testimony before a congressional committee, it threatened to become a tragedy. The Communist press was joined by many so-called “liberal” factions to accuse her of being everything from a degenerate to a psychopathic liar or a victim of insanity. It took time and corroborative testimony of many witnesses to finally halt the clamor.
Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers have testified that they were both typical members of a small but extremely dangerous segment of Americans who, through misguided ideologies, swelled the ranks of Communism during the interval between World War I and the close of World War II. The vast majority passed through the same evolution—first, an ideological conversion followed by a desire to take action; secondly, an exposure to the hard-core realities of Communism in actual operation; and finally, an awakening followed by a dynamic determination to desert the delusion and fight it from the outside.
Fortunately for America, as well as for its citizens who served the Communist cause, these erstwhile members of the party usually returned to the American way of life more loyal to its principles than when they left. Only a few have still refused to open their eyes and ears to all that has been revealed. This unreclaimed group still labors day and night in a dedicated service to “the cause.”