Six Crises (11 page)

And then a story had been leaked to the press that the Justice Department was “going to drop the Hiss-Chambers investigation for lack of evidence”—two weeks after the Justice Department had received documentary evidence pointing to Hiss's guilt.

Under the circumstances, we felt our lack of confidence was well justified.

We also faced an acute problem of time. The term of the blue-ribbon Grand Jury in New York was to expire in just nine days, on December 14. If it failed to return an indictment against Hiss, it would probably be months before the case could be presented to a new grand jury. By that time, the political pressures which Hiss would be able to summon to his aid would build up immensely.

And, as a result of the November elections, the Chairmanship of the Committee on Un-American Activities would change in January from the Republicans to the Democrats. Some Democrats, like Ed Hébert, might be just as vigilant in pursuing the investigation as the Republicans had been. But in view of Truman's campaign promise to seek the outright abolition of the Committee, we thought it was more likely that the Chairmanship would go to someone less independent of Administration pressures than Hébert. Consequently, we decided to hold public
hearings beginning Monday, December 6. But even more important, we decided that under no circumstances would we turn over the microfilm which we had in our possession to the Justice Department until we had been given absolute assurance that the case would be vigorously prosecuted.

The week of December 6, the Committee's schedule was even heavier than it had been during the critical period before the decisive Hiss-Chambers confrontation on August 17. It became a tug of war between the Committee and the Hiss apologists.

“After all,” their argument went, “even if these papers did come from the State Department, they didn't contain information which was too important and the security of the United States was not, therefore, endangered by their removal from the Department.” We quickly and effectively laid that one to rest—and by the State Department's own witnesses. We requested permission to make all the documents public. This permission was refused on the ground that publication of some of the documents would be injurious to the national security, even though ten years had passed since they were taken from government files.

On the matter of the importance of the documents, John Peurifoy, the Assistant Secretary of State charged with security affairs, and Under-Secretary Sumner Welles testified that a foreign agent having in his possession even one of these documents would thus have been able to break the secret State Department code used at that time for the transmittal of messages. This meant that the Soviet agents who obtained these documents might have broken the State Department code and thereby could decipher all confidential communications transmitted in that code between the United States and other foreign governments during the critical period immediately preceding the Hitler-Stalin pact.

I later discussed the case with William C. Bullitt, who had been American Ambassador to both France and the Soviet Union during this period. Several of the secret messages appearing on the microfilm had been sent by him. He pointed out another reason why such documents would have been of tremendous value to the Soviet Government. “An Ambassador's reports to his government can only be as reliable as the sources from which he obtains information. These messages disclose the names of my best sources—representatives of other governments who were providing information to me on a confidential basis. Once their activities become known to others, the source immediately dries up.”

Because of our hearings in this period and an aroused public opinion, attempts to dismiss the stolen documents as “not too important” failed to get off the ground. The St. Louis
Post-Dispatch,
which up to this point had editorially strongly supported Hiss, now said: “Whatever else President Truman may say in the future about the spy investigation, he cannot again call it a ‘red herring.' It is no longer a ‘red herring' after the release of more than two hundred documents which are out of their places in the confidential files of the State Department.”

•  •  •

But the key witness in the case was still Chambers. And Chambers was testifying in New York before the Grand Jury. The Justice Department would not allow him to come to Washington to appear before the Committee. Consequently, we decided to go to New York that day (Monday) and to question him that night after he had completed his appearance before the Grand Jury.

But that morning, before taking the train to New York, a telephone call came in for Stripling. It was from Keith Lewis of the Eastman Kodak Company. We had asked Eastman to check the microfilm which Chambers had turned over to us and to determine when it had been manufactured. Rumors had been circulated that Chambers might have put the documents on film not ten years ago but only after the Committee hearings of the past summer, in order to manufacture evidence to prove his charges. A look of complete dismay came over Stripling's face as he took the call. I heard him say, “You mean this film couldn't have been manufactured before 1945?” Stripling hung up and turned to me. “Well, we've had it. Eastman did not manufacture the type of film Chambers turned over to us until 1945.”

The news jolted us into almost complete shock. We sat looking at each other without saying a word. This meant that Chambers was, after all, a liar. All the work, the long hours we had put into the investigation had been useless. We had been taken in by a diabolically clever maniac who had finally made a fatal mistake.

I buzzed my secretary in the outer office and asked her to get Chambers on the phone in New York.

Before he had a chance to say anything, I asked him: “Am I correct in understanding that these papers were put on microfilm in 1938?”

He answered, “Yes”—obviously mystified by the question.

“We have just had a report from the Eastman Kodak Company that film of the type you turned over to us was not made by the company until after 1945,” I retorted. “What is your answer to that?”

There was a long silence at the other end of the wire. For a moment, I thought he must have hung up.

Finally he answered in a voice full of despair and resignation: “I can't understand it. God must be against me.”

Then I took out on him all of the fury and frustration that had built up within me. “You'd better have a better answer than that,” I said. “The Sub-committee's coming to New York tonight and we want to see you at the Commodore Hotel at 9:00 and you'd better be there!”

I slammed the receiver down without giving him a chance to reply.

“What'll we do now?” Stripling asked.

“There's only one thing we can do,” I answered. “I want you to have the staff call the reporters who cover the Committee and ask them to come to my office in thirty minutes for a statement I will make at that time.”

I have made some decisions in my life more difficult than this one, but none could approach it in terms of personal embarrassment and chagrin. But there was no other choice. I reminded Stripling that it was the Committee's responsibility not to prove Hiss guilty but to find out who was telling the truth.

Stripling made several calls to the press from my office while his secretary was making the others. In the meantime, I tried to collect my thoughts and put down some notes for the statement I had to make. This would be the biggest crow-eating performance in the history of Capitol Hill, but I was ready to go through with it.

Five minutes before the time scheduled for the press conference, after some of the reporters had already arrived in the reception room of my office, the buzzer sounded on the intercom. I answered and my secretary said, “The man from Eastman Kodak is on the phone and wants to talk to Stripling again.” He picked up the phone and I saw the expression on his face change to one of sheer joy. He shouted into the receiver, “You mean you were wrong? You did manufacture that film through 1938 but then discontinued it during the war?”

I had no need to hear the answer. Stripling put the receiver down, let out a Texas rebel yell, grabbed me by the arms, and danced me around the room.

“Chambers' story has stood up again,” he exulted. “Every time we check into something which sounds questionable, he comes through.”

After the rest of the reporters had arrived, I asked them to come into my office and informed them that we had checked with the Eastman
Kodak Company and had found that they had manufactured that type of film during the period Chambers claimed to have used it. I am sure they wondered why I had called them to make such a routine announcement; but I explained that the Committee was checking every aspect of Chambers' story and that they would be informed when we found holes in it as well as when it was corroborated.

But if the first inaccurate report on the microfilm had been disturbing to Stripling and me, it was almost fatal for Chambers. I immediately asked Dorothy Cox, my secretary, to reach Chambers on the phone in New York. I wanted to tell him of the new report and express my regrets for what I had said earlier. But she could not reach him before we boarded the train for New York. In
Witness,
Chambers recounts his reactions to my telephone call. He paced the streets for hours in utter despair. Even after he finally learned of the new report, as he relates it, this mood persisted. Chambers gave way momentarily to the inhuman pressures of his ordeal. He made an unsuccessful attempt at suicide late that same night.

Looking back, I think I can understand how he must have felt. His career was gone. His reputation was ruined. His wife and children had been humiliated. But all this would not have mattered to him if the cause for which he had taken these calculated risks had some chance to prevail. And now it did seem that “God was against him.” From the time he testified on August 3, through the months of summer and fall, I had been the one public official who had stood by him and on whom he thought he could count. And now I was deserting him. Chambers was to go through many crises during Hiss's two trials, but this proved to be his most difficult moment. It seemed the height of irony that I was the one who found it necessary to put him through this ordeal—and all because of a mistaken first report.

•  •  •

When we arrived in New York at 7:30 that evening we were met by representatives of the Justice Department. They went with us to the Commodore Hotel where we were scheduled to meet Chambers at nine o'clock. There, we engaged in a violent verbal battle as to whether the Committee should continue its investigation of the case or should turn over the microfilm to the Justice Department and leave the entire responsibility to them. I made it clear that we had the greatest respect for lower echelon Justice Department officials who were just as interested in getting at the truth in this case as we were. But I also made
it clear that I had no confidence in some of their superiors who were under great political pressures and who so far had made a record which, to put it politely, raised grave doubts. Did they intend to bring out any facts that might be embarrassing to the national Administration?

In short, we did not trust the Justice Department to prosecute the case with the vigor we thought it deserved. The five rolls of microfilm in our possession, plus the threat of a congressional public hearing, were our only weapons to assure such a prosecution. In retrospect, I imagine that some Justice Department officials suspected our motives were primarily political and that we were impeding the regular law-enforcement agencies by withholding evidence. We compromised the matter by agreeing to furnish the Department with full-sized copies of the documents which appeared on the microfilm, and the Department agreed to allow us to question Chambers, even though he was bound by their subpoena.

Our questioning of Chambers began at nine o'clock and went on until midnight. Finally the full story, which he had told in part in his first appearance before the Committee on August 3, unfolded. He admitted that Hiss and the other government officials with whom he worked were active participants in an espionage ring. Their procedure varied but generally followed this pattern: Alger Hiss would take documents home in his brief case at night. On some occasions he turned them over to Chambers, who had them microfilmed by a Communist photographer in Baltimore or Washington and then returned the documents that same night to Hiss, who replaced them in their proper files the following morning. On other occasions, Mrs. Hiss would type copies or summaries of the documents at home on the Woodstock typewriter. Chambers would then take the microfilms or the typewritten copies which Mrs. Hiss had made to New York where he gave them to Colonel Bykov, his superior and a Soviet intelligence agent. Bykov transmitted them to Moscow.

When Chambers made his decision to leave the Communist Party, he had systematically collected documents which had been given to him by Hiss, White, and other members of the espionage group so that he would have some physical evidence of their activities to hold over their heads in the event of threatened reprisals. These were the documents he had turned over at the deposition hearing in Baltimore and which appeared on the rolls of microfilm the Committee had subpoenaed.

It was in this hearing that Chambers also cleared up the mystery of
the rug which Hiss had tried to explain away as a “payment on account” for the rent of the apartment in which Chambers had lived. We now were able to understand why the rug, like the car, had seemed to cause Hiss so much concern. Colonel Bykov had been greatly impressed by the volume and quality of documents produced by the Hiss-Chambers espionage ring. He wanted to express his appreciation and that of the Soviet Government. He had delivered to Chambers in Washington six Bokhara rugs which he directed Chambers to present as gifts from him and the Soviet Government to the members of the ring who had been most co-operative. One of these rugs Chambers delivered to Harry Dexter White. Another he gave to Hiss—but not as a routine “payment on rent.” In the classic tradition of espionage operations, Hiss had parked his car on a street corner, and Chambers had driven to a point nearby. Chambers had taken the rug from the trunk of his own car and put it in Hiss's—but not while Hiss was in the car. Again, the story was almost too fantastic to believe. But by this time we had learned that where Communist espionage was concerned, we had to become accustomed to actions that stretched our credulity.