The Elite

The congressional investigation of Communists turned last week from a story of espionage to a story of Communists in high places in Government. The course was changed by the testimony of a soft-voiced ex-Communist, who sat down before the House Un-American Activities Committee and calmly told a tale of high powered plotting in New Deal days.

He was Whittaker Chambers, 47, for 13 years (1924-37) a member and "paid functionary" of the Communist Party, a strong anti-Communist since 1937. In 1939, two years after his break from Communism, Chambers joined the editorial staff of TIME, is now a senior editor.

As a member of the party, he told the committee, he was a courier between headquarters in New York City and the party's Washington "apparatus," a group of Communists who occupied key observation posts in the U.S. Government. The apparatus was organized, said Chambers, by Harold Ware, a son of the Communist Party's 86-year-old veteran, Ella Reeve Bloor, and took its orders from "the head of the whole underground U.S. Communist Party"--J. Peters.*

The Shocker. Chambers gave a list of men he described as members of the apparatus. Three of them--John Abt (of Henry Wallace's Progressive Party), Victor Perlo (Wallace leader and onetime key worker for the War Production Board), and Charles Kramer (onetime researcher for Florida's Senator Claude Pepper and West Virginia's Harley Kilgore)--were among those previously named by Courier Elizabeth Bentley TIME, Aug. 9). Chambers had other names: Lee Pressman, onetime New Deal legal eagle, later C.I.O. counsel and currently one of Henry Wallace's left-hand men; Nathan Witt, onetime secretary for the National Labor Relations Board; Henry Collins (ex-Agriculture Department); Donald Hiss, who left the State Department in 1945.

Chambers had one more name, and it was a shocker: Alger Hiss. Harvard-trained Alger Hiss (43-year-old brother of 41-year-old Donald) went to Washington as secretary to the late Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, became one of the brightest of the New Deal's young men. He was an assistant counsel with the famed Nye Committee, which investigated the munitions industry and was largely responsible for the Neutrality Acts. For ten years, until 1946, he had been one of the State Department's most trusted men.

He was an adviser to Franklin Roosevelt at Yalta. He had been secretary of the Dumbarton Oaks and San Francisco conferences at which the United Nations ras brought to being. Then he had quit to become president (at $20,000 a year) of the $10 million Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in New York (he said that John Foster Dulles had urged him to take that job).

On the Rise. About 1936, Chambers related, Peters and others decided that some members of the apparatus were "going places in the Government," and they were divorced from other Communist contacts. Said Chambers: "I should perhaps make the point that these people were specifically not wanted as sources of information. These people were an elite group, an outstanding group, which, it was believed, would rise to positions--as indeed some of them did--in the Government, and their position . . . would be of very much more service to the Communist Party." Alger Hiss and Lee Pressman, said Chambers, were among the elite.

Another of the group, Chambers said, was Harry Dexter White, who rose to be Assistant Treasury Secretary and chief U.S. fiscal architect of the World Bank and International Fund. Chambers did not say positively of White--as he did of Alger Hiss--that he was a C.P. member, but White "was certainly a fellow traveler. . . and perfectly willing to cooperate."

Chambers said that he and Hiss became close friends in Communism and that he had tried to persuade Hiss to join him in breaking with the party. Chambers' story: "I went to the Hiss home one evening at what I considered considerable risk to myself, and found Mrs. Hiss at home. Mrs. Hiss is also a Communist [and] attempted while I was there to make a call, which I can only presume was to other Communists . . . But I quickly went to the telephone and she hung up . . . Mr. Hiss came in shortly afterwards and we talked and I tried to break him away from the party . . . He cried when we separated . . . but he absolutely refused to break. His reasons were simply the party line." Chambers said he also tried to get Harry White to make the break: "He left me in a very agitated frame of mind and I thought I had succeeded. Apparently I did not."

Chambers' own break had put him in fear of his life. For a year, he said, "I lived in hiding, sleeping by day and watching through the night, with gun or revolver within easy reach." In 1939, after the Stalin-Hitler pact, Chambers took his story to Adolf Berle, then Assistant Secretary of State. But nothing came of his warnings. In 1943, Chambers told his story to the FBI. Chambers did not spare himself. Did he consider himself disloyal to the U.S. during his Communist days? Said he: "Certainly."

On the Opposite. Two days later, tall, handsome Alger Hiss strode briskly before the committee. He was there at his own request. His voice was positive as he gave his answer to Chambers' accusation. It was, he said flatly, a lie; he had never been a Communist, never followed the party line. He did not know Chambers; he had never laid eyes on him. Hiss smiled grimly through a reading of Chambers' story. Said Hiss of all its details: "I am testifying the exact opposite." He had heard of Chambers only once; FBI men had come to his office in New York City and mentioned the name.

He admitted that he did know almost all of the others Chambers had named. He and Lee Pressman had been on the Harvard Law Review together and had worked in Henry Wallace's Agricultural Adjustment Administration. John Abt and Nathan Witt had been on the same staff. He had also "casually" known Charles Kramer. South Dakota's Karl Mundt spoke up: "It looks like someone has committed perjury."

Pursuit of Truth. Up against this sharp contradiction in testimony, which left the committee wondering which witness to believe, Karl Mundt sent investigators scurrying off to New York City in a big-headlined pursuit of the truth. Witness Chambers was heard again, in secret. In Brooklyn, the investigators located a man who, Karl Mundt announced, would crack the Communist spy ring wide open.

When he appeared before the committee this week he turned out to be a slight, bespectacled man named Alexander Koral, for more than 20 years a New York City school board engineer. The only thing he cracked was the committee's patience as he repeatedly refused to answer any questions on the constitutional ground that he might incriminate himself. Among the questions left hanging: Had he not once confessed spying for Russia?

The committee also hauled in droop-shouldered Victor Perlo, 36, named by Elizabeth Bentley as head of a spy ring. Of all the people named in the investigation to date, he acknowledged knowing only one: Harry Dexter White. Pale and squirming, he gulped hard at pertinent questions and, more than 40 times, refused to answer--on the ground that he might incriminate himself.

The committee got out its subpoenas for more witnesses.

*Peters, also known as Alexander Stevens and Isadore Boorstein, grew up in Communism in Bela Kun's regime in Hungary, is under a deportation order, has been hunted by the committee's subpoena-servers for almost a year. He is the author of the C.P.'s Manual of Organization.

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