Nine Years Under Cover

I LED THREE LIVES (323 pp.)--Herbert Phil brick--McGraw-Hill ($3.50).

The Communists never really had a chance against Herb Philbrick. They tried to make a fool of a man who was not only a born salesman but an active and dedicated Baptist too, and they paid a high price for the blunder. Three years ago, at the trial of the eleven top U.S. Reds, Philbrick took the stand as a surprise Government witness. His testimony, compiled during nine years as an FBI counterspy, helped to show the workings of the U.S. Communist Party.

Counterspy Philbrick tells the story of those nine years in I Led Three Lives. It is the story of a sane man who subjected himself to "a manufactured schizophrenia," who postponed indefinitely his own life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, to get to the bottom of the great Communist conspiracy in the U.S.

First Assignments. Philbrick's nine-year adventure began innocently, even comically, on a fine spring day in 1940. An ad salesman of 25 at the time, he was following his nose around Boston, sniffing for new business. At a door marked "Massachusetts Youth Council" he dropped in to run off his spiel. The comrade-in-charge, a pleasant-faced young woman, must have been amused at the spectacle of a man trying to sell direct-mail advertising to a front organization of the Communist Party.

Instead, she sold Philbrick on the need for a Youth Council in his neighborhood. She played up to his obvious interest in young people's organizations, to his starry-eyed belief that such groups could help keep the U.S. out of war, reduce unemployment and build "character, confidence and stability." With the help of some new-found friends and members of the Massachusetts Youth Council, Philbrick set up a Cambridge branch and was elected chairman--and then began to have the uneasy sensation of a man who is having the rug pulled slowly from under his feet. Gradually it came to him that the friends, who were quietly taking over the organization, were Communists.

Into the Shadows. Philbrick went to the FBI. He was told to go along with the friends, if he felt able to, and to see what would happen. Slowly, point by point, Philbrick let himself be argued over to the Communist way. In 1942 he was invited to join the Young Communist League. After two more years of grubbing at preparatory assignments -- circulating petitions, raising funds for front organizations, attending interminable discussion groups--he was invited to join the Communist Party itself.

The decision was a hard one. For four years, Philbrick had given at least three nights a week to Communist work. In addition, he was carrying a full-time public-relations job with Paramount Pictures. On top of that, by his own inclination (and with party approval) he was busy in neighborhood church work. And finally, late at night, after everything else was attended to, Philbrick had his reports to write for the FBI. There was not much time for home life with his wife and three children.

And there was the double risk of detection. If his employers found out he was a Communist, his career might be wrecked; if the Communists found out he was a counterspy, he felt pretty sure that his life would be in danger. Already he suspected that he had been followed by Communist counterspies. Nevertheless, Philbrick felt that he had to go on. He took out all the life insurance he could swing and, with the courageous support of his wife, stepped into the shadows as Comrade "Herb."

End of an Ordeal. During the next five years, Herb wrote publicity and pamphlets for the cause, was named to the party's "education" committee for New England (headed by Jack Stachel, of the Eleven), joined a supersecret professional group that collected U.S. financial and industrial data, arranged receptions for such personages as the Very Reverend Hewlett Johnson, the "Red Dean" of Canterbury --and even, for awhile, acted as a counter-counterspy, assigned to search for possible informers within the party.

Everything Comrade Herb saw and heard went into his reports to the FBI.

At times, the strain of maintaining his three identities--citizen, Communist, counterspy--was almost more than Philbrick could stand. He would find himself involuntarily flushing during a discussion of party loyalty. And sometimes, in the darkness and exhaustion of the night, there came to his mind the bleak fear that "the sheer power of the party leaders with whom I worked" would break his will, and turn him into a real Communist.

All at once, the ordeal was over. The FBI called him to the witness stand. As Comrade Herb began his testimony, he had some measure of reward for his pains in the looks of dazed astonishment that passed over the faces of the defendants.

There have since been other rewards: public acclaim, a chance for some family life, the restoration of old friends who had been alienated as, one by one, they came to suspect something of his apparent political sympathies. But perhaps best of all for Salesman Philbrick has been the chance to get back to selling only products which he can believe in. The New York Herald Tribune, which delegated a pair of staff writers to help Philbrick with his book and serialized I Led Three Lives on its front page, has also hired its author as an ad salesman.

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