The Dusty Bomb

He looked as unprepossessing as a baker--a calm, pudgy little man who kept an old pipe in the pocket of his untidy blue serge suit. But his looks were deceiving. Whittaker Chambers, a senior editor of TIME, a Quaker, was a brilliant intellectual. Before 1938, he had been a Communist courier for the Soviet "apparatus" in Washington, D.C.

Sitting in the jammed, floodlighted congressional committee room last summer, he made his enormous, softly worded accusation--that Alger Hiss, a former high State Department official, had also been a Communist. The nation was shocked. Hiss shocked it again. He vehemently denied every accusation and filed a $75,000 libel action against his detractor. Chambers, who thought that his own word as an ex-Communist was enough, produced no more evidence to back his charge.

But there was more evidence--a plump, heavy package which had been lying in a Brooklyn attic like a dusty bomb during all the ten years in which Chambers had been trying to live down his past.

Sixty-five Documents. Last month Chambers was called for deposition hearings by Hiss's attorney, William Marbury of Baltimore. He was subjected to questioning in connection with the slander suit which made him believe "that Hiss was determined to destroy me--and my wife, if possible." He went to his farm at Westminster, Md., waited for two days for his anger to cool.

Then he went back to Marbury's quiet, book-lined law office. There, from the package which he had brought back from Brooklyn, he handed over 65 copies of confidential State Department documents. Some were typewritten; three were memoranda in handwriting (later identified by California's Congressman Richard Nixon as that of Alger Hiss).

Lawyer Marbury and Federal Judge W. Calvin Chesnut took an appalled look, secretly turned the documents over to the Department of Justice. Suddenly, Chambers was engulfed in something far bigger and infinitely uglier than his original controversy with Alger Hiss.

Moment of Silence. At first no hint of the new disclosure leaked out. But early last week, Robert E. Stripling, chief investigator for the House Committee on Un-American Activities, got an inkling of what had happened.

He rounded up Congressman Nixon, drove to Maryland, found Chambers in the cowbarn at his farm, finishing the evening milking. They bluntly accused him of withholding evidence from the congressional committee. After a long moment of silence Chambers admitted that they were right. Did he have more information? He would not say.

The next day Stripling telephoned Chambers to come to the committee's Washington office; on arrival he was served with a subpoena which directed him to turn over all forms of documents and evidence in his possession. Chambers looked at the legal form; then, matter-of-factly, he admitted that he had more evidence, and promised to turn it over.

He was asked why he had not produced the documents before; why had he kept them hidden for so many years? He was a Quaker; he recoiled at the idea of hurting anyone or of ruining anyone's life.

That night two committee investigators tramped up to the door of the farmhouse. Chambers examined their credentials, switched on a string of yard lights, and led them to his garden. He pointed to a rude circle of squash, each of which had been arranged to point at a yellow pumpkin, and said: "Here's what you're looking for."

After a moment of hesitation, one agent leaned over curiously and examined the pumpkin. Its stem had not been severed and it appeared to be growing on the vine. But close examination revealed that its top had been sliced off and then carefully replaced. Its hollow interior held three aluminum capsules of microfilm.

Amazing Haul. Chambers explained that he had picked the pumpkin as a hiding place that morning before leaving for Washington, said that he had been afraid Communists might search his house and barn while he was away.

Next day, with the aid of the FBI, the committee began sorting through its amazing haul. The microfilm yielded a three-ft. pile of photostatic copies of highly confidential military and State Department dispatches. One came from Ambassador William Bullitt in Paris. One bore a heading which explained that it had been handed to the German Ambassador by Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles. They were dated during the years 1937 and 1938.

The uses to which Soviet Russia could have put such material in the years before World War II were obvious. By following key words in the documents, experts might have been able to crack the code from which they had been translated. They would also have formed a guide to U.S. thinking about Soviet Russia, Italy, Germany and Japan, would have furnished valuable clues to future U.S. diplomatic maneuvers.

New Lease on Life. This week the film and documents set off two new espionage investigations. A special New York Grand Jury, which has been investigating Communist activity for 18 months, called in both Chambers and Hiss for extensive questioning. The Republican-dominated Un-American Activities Committee took a new lease on life. It voted to send a subcommittee to New York, to meet in secret session.

Meanwhile, Congressman 'Nixon (who had been taken off a Panama-bound steamship by a Coast Guard airplane and dramatically flown back to Washington) made public an excerpt from Chambers' Baltimore deposition testimony.

"Some time in 1937," Chambers had testified under oath, "J. Peters [head of the Soviet underground in the U.S.] introduced me to a Russian who identified himself under the pseudonym of Peter. The Russian Peter was one Colonel [Boras] Bykov [once identified by the late General Krivitsky as head of the American branch of Soviet Military Intelligence].

"Colonel Bykov was extremely interested in the Washington apparatus. In August or early fall of 1937 I arranged a meeting between Alger Hiss and Colonel Bykov. For that purpose Mr. Hiss came to New York, where I met him. Colonel Bykov raised the question of procuring documents from the State Department, and Mr. Hiss agreed. Following that meeting Alger Hiss began a fairly consistent flow of such materials as we have before us here . . ."

Nixon also criticized the Department of Justice: "[It] has been almost frantically trying to find the method of placing the blame for having these documents in his possession on Mr. Chambers. This, of course, is not a debatable question at all. Mr. Chambers admits that he has them in his possession and is prepared to take the consequences whatever the consequences may be."

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