testified before the House Committee, Hiss (if he was to be believed)
had telephoned Dulles, who was then Chairman of the Board of the
Carnegie Endowment. In view of Chambers’ testimony, he had offered
to resign if Mr. Dulles thought that his fellow trustees would be
unduly disturbed by the allegations that the _Time_ editor was making.
Although Dulles could not remember any such conversation, he did recall
that he had had a discussion with Hiss late in August. “Mr. Hiss said
... that he had come to the conclusion that he had probably better
resign, but that it would be questionable whether he ought to resign
while the hearings were going on, because that might seem to be some
admission on his part--and I quite agreed with him that any action like
his resignation ought not to take place while the hearings were going
on.” Hiss did indeed tender his resignation on December 12, 1948, but
it was not accepted and he had remained as President until his term
expired on May 31, 1949.
After Murphy tried--unsuccessfully--to put Hede Massing, the former
wife of Communist Gerhard Eisler, on the stand, the trial ground to
a halt in a welter of minor rebuttal witnesses on both sides of the
fence, none of whom contributed a great deal to anyone’s store of
essential information. An FBI agent who had interviewed Hiss in 1946,
the assistant registrar of the University of Maryland, a counselor at
a camp attended by Hiss’ stepson, and the proprietor of a small summer
hotel in Chestertown, Maryland, who, because of illness, testified by
deposition, did little more than add a few hours to a trial that was
already into its sixth sweltering week.
Stryker’s summations lasted more than four hours. As far as he was
concerned, it was simply a question of Chambers’ credibility. Murphy,
he reminded the jury, had summed it up best himself in his opening when
he had said that “... if you don’t believe Chambers then we have no
case under the federal perjury rule.” And who could believe a chronic
perjurer, a fornicator, a confessed spy, an atheist, a pornographic
poet and a blasphemer? “The case comes down to this,” he told his
twelve auditors, “who is telling the truth? Alger Hiss or Chambers?”
There was no doubt as to how he had answered this question for himself.
“I would not believe Chambers on a stack of Bibles if the FBI stacked
them as high as this building!”
Toward the end, Stryker’s face was as red as the hand with which he
relentlessly pounded the rail of the jury box. “Ladies and gentlemen,”
he begged them, “if I have done anything that you don’t like, if I
have offended you, any one of you, in any way, hold it against me, not
against Alger Hiss.” Exhausted and shaken, he turned slowly and looked
toward the counsel table where his impassive client sat. “Alger Hiss,
this long nightmare is drawing to a close. Rest well. Your case, your
life, your liberty are in good hands. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.”
Murphy, retreating somewhat from his ill-chosen definition of the
federal perjury rule, confessed that he wasn’t resting his case on
Chambers alone. There were the documents and the Woodstock. If Hiss’
contradictions about the apartment and the car he had turned over
to Chambers weren’t convincing enough, how could the handwritten
documents be explained away? Even the defense’s location of the missing
typewriter was suspect--if the FBI couldn’t find it, why was it so
ridiculously easy for Ed McLean to trace it to Ira Lockey’s house? “I
submit that two things must be clear; one, that the typewriter was
in the possession of the Hiss family until at least Mr. Chambers’
defection, until he left the Party; and two, that the Catletts had the
typewriter for some time after that....”
“We have shown you here,” he thundered at the jury, “the typewriter,
the original State Department documents, the documents in this
case--three solid witnesses.” The dozen or so character witnesses the
defendant had put on the stand couldn’t change that. “Mr. Stryker
said that he was going to call the shade of Oliver Wendell Holmes
and have the ghost of that revered Justice testify on behalf of the
defendant. And I said to myself, if he is going to call the shade of
Justice Holmes, there are a couple of shades that I would like to call
here. One man’s name was Judas Iscariot and the other’s Major General
Benedict Arnold.” He paused a moment to let that sink in. “But let
me dwell a moment on reputation. I dare say that Judas Iscariot had a
fairly good reputation. He was one of the Twelve. He was next to God,
and we know what he did. Benedict Arnold came from a fine family. He
was made a major general and sold out West Point. He wasn’t caught.
But, if he had been caught, don’t you think he could have had George
Washington as a reputation witness?”
He was almost through. “You are the second jury to hear this story,” he
told them. “The Grand Jury heard the same story. The Grand Jury heard
this traitor and Mr. Chambers, and that Grand Jury indicted Hiss. It
indicted Hiss because he lied. He lied to them and I submit he lied
to you. The Grand Jury said he lied twice on December 15th. And as a
representative of 150,000,000 people of this country, I ask you to
concur in that charge of the Grand Jury. I ask you as a representative
of the United States Government to come back and put the lie in that
man’s face.”
The jury retired at 4:20 on the afternoon of July 7th. Six hours
later, after their foreman had informed Kaufman that there was no
possibility of reaching a verdict that night, the jurors were sent to
a hotel. At noon the next day, they filed back into the jury box to
listen to Kaufman’s repetition of the portion of his charge dealing
with corroborative and circumstantial evidence. Three hours later, the
foreman asked a bailiff to deliver a note to the judge informing him
that “the jury feels that it cannot arrive at a verdict.” At 4:45, he
forwarded a similar communication. Kaufman begged them to try once
more, but at 8:55 they announced that “the jury finds it impossible to
reach a verdict.” This was enough for Kaufman who discharged them “with
the thanks of the court.” The trial was over.
Four months later, the United States of America _versus_ Alger Hiss
encored, this time with District Judge Henry W. Goddard at the helm.
Tom Murphy was still around but Stryker had yielded to Claude B.
Cross, a quiet, unassuming Boston elder who looked as if he had never
pounded a counsel table in his life. A jury of seven women and five men
was quickly selected and, on the afternoon of November 19, 1949, the
Government began its second go-round in its attempt to convict Alger
Hiss of perjury.
With only minor discrepancies, most of the witnesses who had testified
at the first trial repeated their stories. But there were parvenus.
Goddard was determined to admit any evidence that was vaguely relevant
and several of the witnesses who had been rejected by Kaufman were
permitted to tell their once-verboten stories. Hede Massing, for
instance, said that she had met the defendant in 1935 at the Washington
home of Noel Fields, an erstwhile League of Nations official. Mrs.
Massing, an ex-Communist, who admitted that “I have a bad memory,”
stated that she and Hiss had had a conversation as to which one of them
was going to win Fields for his cell.
Henrikas Rabinavicius, a former Lithuanian diplomat, later testified
for the defense against Mrs. Massing. According to him, he had met her
at the home of Eugene Lyons in the Fall of 1949. There, she told him
that, during the early thirties, she had been assigned by the Party
“to endeavor to contact young men in the Department of State.” She had
carefully concealed her Communist affiliation from her “young men,”
she had told him, “because that would have frightened them away from
her.” When Rabinavicius had intimated that he doubted the truth of her
remarks, she threatened to write a devastating article about him.
William Rosen, the elusive vice-president of the Cherner Motor Company,
to which the old Hiss Ford had been transferred, had been located by
Murphy in California after the first trial. He proved to be a far from
loquacious witness. Outside of admitting that he did not know either
J. Peters or Alger Hiss, he refused to answer every question Murphy
threw at him on the ground that “any answer I may give may tend to
incriminate me.” When Rosen stepped down, Goddard warned the jury it
was not to draw any inference unfavorable to Hiss because the witness
had claimed his constitutional immunity.
Sergeant George Norman Roulhac had been stationed in the Aleutians
during the first trial. Murphy now called him to prove that the
Woodstock had not been in the Catletts’ possession until after the date
of the most of the typewritten documents and not on December 29, 1937,
as Priscilla Hiss had claimed. Roulhac had signed the lease for Mrs.
Catlett when she had moved to P Street on January 17, 1938, because the
rental agent would not deal with a colored lady. He was sure that he
had not seen any typewriter at P Street until “about three months after
we lived there.” The machine he had seen in a downstairs hallway was
“the same design” as the Woodstock he had been shown in court.
Cross called Dr. Binger back to the wars. The answer to the famous
hypothetical question that Kaufman had blocked in July was about to be
delivered with Goddard’s blessing. Binger waited patiently until the
question was in the record, and then, with his eyes on the ceiling,
opined that “Mr. Chambers is suffering from a condition known as a
psychopathic personality, a disorder of character the distinguishing
features of which are amoral and social behaviour.” One of the most
significant symptoms of this malady were “chronic, persistent, and
repetitive lying and a tendency to make false accusations.” However, he
admitted to Murphy that doctors frequently disagreed on diagnosis and
that he had been wrong more than once in his own professional life.
On the trial’s last day, Murphy produced his one surprise
witness--Edith Murray who had worked as a maid for the Chamberses at
their two homes in Baltimore from the Fall of 1934 to the Spring of
1936. She swore that she had seen Mrs. Hiss there four times and the
defendant once. However, when she had first been shown a photograph of
Mrs. Hiss by FBI agents, she was not quite sure of her identity. “They
asked me did I know this lady, and I said it looks like someone that I
know. It looked like--I thought maybe it was an actress or something. I
say it looks like someone I know, but I just couldn’t remember at that
time.”
On November 17th, the first day of the trial, she had been stationed
in the corridor outside of the courtroom. She was told by the FBI
agents who had brought her to New York that “all they wanted to do was
bring me up here to see if I could recognize the woman that was in the
picture and the man on the picture.... I just stood out in the hall and
it was a crowd of people. They asked me did I see anybody in the crowd
that I know, and I looked around, and I didn’t see anyone at this time,
and stood there; so then, after a while, in the back of me where I was
standing was an elevator, in the back of me, like, and I looked around,
and then I see Mr. and Mrs. Hiss come over, and right away I knew them.”
The jury filed out at 2:50 p.m. on January 20th. On the afternoon
of the next day, it found the defendant “guilty on the first count
and guilty on the second.” Four days later, Goddard sentenced him
to five years on each count, the terms to run concurrently. A few
minutes earlier, Hiss had thanked his Honor for allowing him to say a
few words. He denied again that he was guilty of the charges against
him and promised that “in the future the full facts of how Whittaker
Chambers was able to carry out forgery by typewriter will be disclosed.”
Goddard set $10,000 bail and paroled Hiss in Cross’ custody. In
December, the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit affirmed the
conviction. When the United States Supreme Court refused to intervene,
the last door was closed. On March 22, 1951, Alger Hiss entered the
federal penitentiary at Danbury, Connecticut. What Whittaker Chambers
once called “the spectacle of tragedy” had run its course.
8
_They Gave the Bomb to Russia_
The United States of America
_versus_
Julius Rosenberg, Ethel Rosenberg and Morton Sobell
Early on the evening of Wednesday, September 5, 1945, Igor Gouzenko,
an obscure twenty-six-year-old cipher clerk in the Russian Embassy
in Ottawa, walked into the editorial offices of the _Ottawa Journal_
with an armful of secret Soviet files. When the Canadian authorities,
with Gouzenko’s help, translated the 109 documents he had pilfered,
they discovered that the country was honeycombed with Russian spies
who were part of an extensive network that covered Great Britain, the
United States and Canada. Perhaps the most important name that was
found in the Gouzenko papers was that of Allan Nunn May, a British
atomic scientist, who was then working at the Montreal Laboratory of
the National Research Council. It was through Dr. May’s efforts that,
on August 9, 1945, Colonel Nicolai Zabotin, the Russian Embassy’s
military attaché, was able to report to Moscow that he had obtained
samples of Uranium 233. May was arrested when he returned to England in
late September and, after pleading guilty to a charge of violating the
Official Secrets Act, was sentenced to ten years in prison.
The secret service agents who examined Dr. May’s papers had found the
name ‘Fuchs’ scrawled on several pages of notes. For some reason, no
attention was paid to this name although Dr. Klaus Emil Julius Fuchs, a
German-born physicist who was a naturalized British subject, had just
returned to England from a tour of duty with the Manhattan Project, the
American atomic bomb station at Los Alamos, New Mexico. It wasn’t until
four years later that Fuchs was arrested, and immediately confessed
that he had been supplying atomic information to a Soviet courier who
regularly visited him in New York and New Mexico. He did not know the
name of the courier but indicated that he had appeared to have an
excellent knowledge of chemistry.
When he was shown photographs of various American chemists who were
suspected of espionage, he had pointed to one and said, “That is the
man!” The photograph he had identified was that of a biochemist named
Harry Gold who was employed by the Pennsylvania Sugar Company in
Philadelphia. It was Gold, Fuchs said, who had met him in various parts
of the United States and to whom he had turned over certain information
for transmission to Anatoli A. Yakovlev, a Russian diplomatic agent in
New York. He had first met Gold in Woodside, Queens, in June of 1944,
and continued these clandestine meetings until he was transferred to
Los Alamos early in 1945.
Upon Gold’s apprehension, he admitted that he had been working as
a Soviet espionage agent for more than fifteen years. He had first
met Yakovlev, a long-nosed young man who walked “with somewhat of a
stoop” and who was known to him only as ‘John,’ in March of 1944, at a
Manhattan restaurant. Yakovlev had ordered him to contact Fuchs, who
was then working in New York with a British-American atomic team. At
the Woodside meeting, the physicist had told Gold that he was “going to
give me information. This information was to relate to the application
of nuclear fission to the production of a military weapon.” A few weeks
later, the two men had met in Brooklyn’s Borough Hall area where Fuchs
gave the courier “a package of papers” for transmittal to Yakovlev.
Just before Fuchs left for Los Alamos in February of 1945, Gold saw
him in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In addition to the usual package of
documents which he had turned over to Gold, Fuchs “made mention of a
lens which was being worked on as a part of the atom bomb.” Before the
two parted company, they made a date to meet in Santa Fe in June. When
Gold told Yakovlev about the lens, the Soviet agent “was very agitated
and told me to scour my memory clean so as to elicit any possible
scrap of information about this lens.”
Four months later, Gold and Yakovlev met in Volks’ Cafe on 42nd Street
and Third Avenue. After the details about meeting Fuchs in Santa Fe had
been discussed, Yakovlev told Gold that, on the same trip, he would
also have to visit Albuquerque where he was to see an American soldier
named David Greenglass who was stationed at Los Alamos. He was to tell
Greenglass that “I come from Julius” and show him a piece of cardboard
from a dessert box. “Yakovlev told me that the man Greenglass ...
would have the matching piece of cardboard.” Either Greenglass or his
wife would have some information for him and he was given an envelope
containing $500.00 which he was to turn over to them. Yakovlev told him
that he would find the Greenglasses in an apartment at 209 North High
Street.
On June 2, 1945, Gold, after seeing Fuchs, took a bus from Santa Fe
to Albuquerque. About 8:30 that evening, he went to the High Street
address that Yakovlev had given him but was informed by a neighbor
that the Greenglasses were not home. Early the next day--a Sunday--he
returned to High Street and this time found the couple in their
apartment. After informing Greenglass that he “was from Julius,” Gold
produced the piece of cardboard which matched that in the other man’s
possession. Greenglass, who was “a young man of about twenty-three
with dark hair,” then introduced Gold to his wife, Ruth, and asked him
to come back later that day as the information was not yet ready for
delivery. That afternoon, Greenglass gave Gold “an envelope which he
said contained ... the information on the atom bomb.” Before Gold took
his leave, Greenglass informed the courier that he expected to come to
New York on furlough around Christmas and that “if I wish to get in
touch with him then I could do so by calling his brother-in-law Julius
and he gave me the telephone number of Julius....”
Gold returned at once to New York and turned over the material he had
received from Fuchs and Greenglass to Yakovlev. Although he returned
to New Mexico again in September of 1945 to see Fuchs, he never saw
the Greenglasses again. Fuchs told him that the first atomic bomb
had been exploded at Alamogordo in July and that he thought that “he
would probably very soon have to return to England.” The scientist
was extremely upset because the British had entered Kiel ahead of the
Russians and he was afraid that his Gestapo dossier would fall into the
wrong hands. Gold told him not to worry and that, after his return to
England, he would be contacted on the first Saturday of every month at
the Paddington Crescent station of the London subway. He was to carry
five books in one hand and two in another, while the man who would meet
him would have a copy of Bennett Cerf’s _Stop Me if You Have Heard
This_ in his left hand.
When Gold was apprehended on May 23, 1950, he told his story to the FBI
agents who had picked him up. As a result of his revelations, David
Greenglass and his wife, Ruth, were arrested three weeks later in their
New York City apartment. Like Gold, the Greenglasses confessed that
they, too, had been engaged in espionage activities on behalf of the
Soviet Union. They insisted, however, that they had merely been pawns
in the hands of Julius Rosenberg, an electrical engineer, who was
married to David’s sister, Ethel. It was Julius, they both claimed,
who, with an assist from Ethel, had persuaded them to become atomic
spies and who had directed their espionage activities. On July 16th,
the Rosenbergs were arrested in their eleventh-floor apartment in
Knickerbocker Village, a middle-income housing project on Manhattan’s
lower East Side.
One month later, the Federal Grand Jury in New York returned conspiracy
indictments against Julius Rosenberg, Ethel Rosenberg and Anatoli
Yakovlev. Four weeks earlier, Harry Gold had pleaded guilty to the
same crime in Philadelphia and been sentenced to thirty years in
prison. On October 10, 1950, a superseding indictment included David
Greenglass and an electrical engineer named Morton Sobell as additional
defendants. They were all accused of conspiring to deliver to “a
foreign nation ... documents, writings, sketches, notes and information
relating to the National Defense of the United States of America.”
Since Yakovlev had returned to Russia in December of 1946 and David
Greenglass had admitted his guilt, another indictment which named only
the Rosenbergs and Sobell was filed on January 31, 1951, and their
joint trial began in New York City on March 6, 1951.
When court convened at 10:30 that morning, District Judge Irving R.
Kaufman, a comparative newcomer to the Federal bench, presided. Irving
H. Saypol, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New
York, and five assistants appeared for the government. The Rosenbergs
were represented by a father-son team--Alexander Bloch for Ethel and
Emanuel H. Bloch for Julius. Harold M. Phillips and Edward Kuntz stood
up for Sobell while O. John Rogge, the attorney for the Greenglasses,
only hung around long enough to ask Judge Kaufman to notify him when
his client took the stand so that he “could be in attendance.” The
judge assured him that he would be happy to do so and Rogge, with a
grateful smile, double-timed out of the courtroom.
After a jury of one woman and eleven men had been impanelled, Saypol
called Max Elitcher, a former employee of the Navy Department’s Bureau
of Ordinance. Elitcher had attended Stuyvesant High School and City
College with Morton Sobell. He said that Sobell had taken him to a
Communist Party get-together in the fall of 1939 and that he had then
regularly attended such meetings. In 1941, Sobell had left Washington
to study for his Master’s degree at the University of Michigan.
Three years later Elitcher, who had remained with the Navy Department,
received a telephone call from “a person who said he was Julius
Rosenberg,” a former City College classmate, and who, like Sobell
and Elitcher, was an electrical engineer. This man had visited him
that same day and asked him whether he would be willing to obtain
“classified information about military equipment” and turn this
over for transmittal to Russia. He had assured Elitcher that his
old friend Sobell was “helping in this way.” Before the two parted,
Rosenberg instructed the witness to telephone him as soon as he had
any information so that it could be promptly photostated and returned
to the Navy Department before it was missed. Elitcher told him that “I
would see about it.”
On Labor Day, the Elitchers joined Sobell and his fiancée on a vacation
trip to Kumbabrow State Park in West Virginia. When Elitcher mentioned
Julius’ visit, Sobell appeared agitated and said, “He should not have
mentioned my name.” Elitcher tried to pacify him by pointing out that
Rosenberg “knew about our close relationship [and] probably felt safe
about it,” but Sobell kept insisting that “it makes no difference, he
shouldn’t have done it.”
A few months after Sobell’s marriage in March of 1945, the Elitchers
spent a night in New York at Rosenberg’s apartment. The latter
announced that he had been discharged by the Signal Corps for security
reasons. According to Elitcher, “he thought it had to do with his
espionage activity, but he was quite relieved to find out it only had
to do with the party activity.” He next saw Rosenberg in September
when Julius came to Washington and dropped in for “fifteen or twenty
minutes.” The conversation was limited to Elitcher’s work on fire
control devices for the Navy. Rosenberg asked him whether he “would
want to contribute [to satisfy] a continuing need for new military
information for Russia,” and Elitcher testified that “I said I would
see and if I had anything and I wanted to give it to him, I would let
him know.”