New Witness

Joe McCarthy last week provided the vehicle for a significant footnote to the Hiss-Chambers case. Previously, two members of the Washington Communist ring, Nathaniel Weyl and Julian Wadleigh, had corroborated portions of Chambers' accounts of Communist underground activity. Last week, after receiving a subpoena from McCarthy to appear at the Albany hearing, a 44-year-old draftsman named Felix A. Inslerman became-the third.

In his book, Witness, Chambers describes the man whom he knew only as "Felix," and who knew him as "Bob," thus: "I did not particularly like Felix. He looked like an average young fellow, seemingly simple, not overbright." Many times, in the late '305, Chambers met Felix on a Washington or Baltimore street corner, gave him documents to be photographed with a Leica purchased by the Communist underground. For such work, Felix had been trained in Moscow, where he traveled on a forged U.S. passport. Once Chambers went to Felix's Baltimore home, but he had only a vague impression of its whereabouts.

Up in Central Park. In 1949 Chambers led the FBI to the block in which he thought Felix had lived. From records, the FBI found that a Felix Inslerman had lived in one of the block's houses, had moved to Schenectady, N.Y. to work as an engineer on a secret guided-missile project for General Electric. In 1946 Inslerman, in a way never publicly explained, became one of the few civilians who attended the atomic tests at Bikini. Called to testify before a grand jury and in the second Hiss trial, Inslerman confessed nothing, pleaded the Fifth Amendment's protection. But in Inslerman's Schenectady home, the FBI found a Leica whose imperfections matched the scratch marks on Chambers' famed pumpkin film.

On the stand last week, Felix Inslerman said he had never actually carried a Communist card, but he recited the events which led him from a 1934 meeting in New York's Central Park with an Estonian named "Bill" to his dealings with Chambers. Bill paid him in cash, Felix said, for various services to the party, arranged for his trip to Moscow and introduced him to "Bob."

UG v. Ul. Inslerman then produced a remarkable document. It was a copy, he said, of part of a letter he received from a man, name unknown, on a Washington street corner in 1938. He was to deliver the letter, which was written by "Bob" after his break with the party, to one "Jake," Inslerman's New York contact. Felix, in characteristic underground fashion, copied the letter before delivering it. He had lost part of his notes. What remained was garbled by wear and tear, and much of it was in underground jargon. It read:

"Tie fied a on, but if it is this somebody else of the same breed, so that it does not make ch difference. Two months ago, such a warning might have alarmed me. At this moment, I find it funny. Ul is racing the UG. I feel that if you can afford to take that risk, so can I, and that if you really must continue violent projects against me or my family you are certainly going to have competition ... No doubt the handling of the g~n case, especially the verbal parts and certain reports that have come to your recent attention, not only from the intelligence but from the Foreign 0. lead you to believe that the UG, both from domestic and international reasons, dreads nothing so much as an exposure of your activities. As regards the Pres. and the Att. G. directly under the Pres., this may be true. But not every office (and this is a direct warning) of the Att. G. is in line with the Pres. policy. For more than one reason some of them may be interested in initiating investigations of their own. One of them is engaged in such an investigation now. After all, even in non-purge years, there is frequent jurisdictional conflict 'at home,' not only between the commis, but between depts within the same commis--as my misfortunes of last year are in part a good example. It is no different in America. Do not imagine that F. Murphy is there wholly for the purpose of dampening all investigations or that the State Department can forever put the brakes on them. In fact, I should guess the State Dept. is going to be sitting on some very hot coals in the near future . . ."*

Death Was There. Inslerman, recalling his horror upon reading the letter, said: "Death was mentioned there. Bob was afraid of his life and the lives of his fam ily." When he delivered it to Jake, Inslerman testified, he asked some questions about it. Dissatisfied with the answers, Inslerman broke with Communism, but he waited 15 years to tell about it.

*Chambers was ill at his Maryland home last week, unavailable to expound the letter. However, a reasonable paraphrase of it in overground language might be: Having received threats from Jake, Chambers warned him to beware of 1) a Soviet apparatus other than Jake's, and 2) the U.S. Government, if there were reprisals against Chambers. Since the UG (underground) was fighting the Ul (another branch of Soviet apparatus) for control of their U.S. operations, Jake might get caught in the riptide between them, as Chambers himself had been. Although President Roosevelt and Attorney General Frank Murphy, in Chambers' opinion, were soft-pedaling Communist investigations, some branches of the U.S. Justice Dept. (perhaps the FBI) were still interested in tracking down Communists and might go after Jake if any harm came to Chambers.

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