The Eagle's Brood

Close to a million Americans at one time in their lives joined the Communist Party, but very few talk about it now. Last week one did. He told the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee a shoddy tale of party membership in the U.S. and of spy service abroad on behalf of the Kremlin. As sometimes happens, he triggered a chain reaction of disclosures about other people. Almost all had been or were still connected with the business of reporting the news, like the witness himself: Winston Burdett, 41, now a $20,000-a-year Columbia Broadcasting System radio and TV commentator.

Long Way from Brooklyn. Burdett, son of a prosperous civil engineer, graduated from Harvard magna cum laude at 19, worked five years on the Brooklyn Eagle, went abroad in 1940. For CBS he reported the war from Norway to North Africa, later covered Washington. Rome and the United Nations. Last week, after reporting the U.N. anniversary session at San Francisco for CBS, he went to Washington for a hearing in the Senate caucus room.

For nearly three hours Burdett--poised, precise, prissy--detailed his secret career as a Communist and a spy. He first worked with a Communist clique in the American Newspaper Guild, joined the party in 1937. "My whole life was in the party," he said. "I was an emotionally fanatic person." In January 1940 the party tapped him for espionage.

Through an elaborate clandestine ritual, a meeting was arranged in a Union Square cafeteria with a stranger who told Burdett: "We have a mission for you in Finland," which was then fighting the Russian invasion. The stranger: the late Soviet spy chief, Jacob Golos. Reporter Burdett, financed by the party, arranged to travel as an unpaid roving correspondent, accredited by the Brooklyn Eagle.

In Stockholm a "Mr. Miller" gave him $200 and orders to report on Finnish morale. Burdett was visiting Finnish army positions when Finland capitulated three weeks later. When he went back to Stockholm, he met his contact, Miller. "Well," Miller asked, "how did the Finns take the end of the war?" Burdett said that they "were prepared to go on fighting." "Well, Mr. Burdett," said Miller, handing him $400, "thank you very much. That's everything. Here is your money to go back to the U.S."

Footless Frenzy. On the stand last week, Burdett still sounded puzzled: "I was surprised it was all over." Actually, his spy career continued for two more years of footless frenzy and melodramatic bungling. As Burdett told it, he chased around wartime Europe waiting for orders that seldom came and contacts that he often missed.

In Moscow he was told to report to the Soviet consulate in Bucharest; he reported twice, waited for weeks but got no orders. In Belgrade he met one contact (who wore one glove and carried one as proof of identity), then lost track. "It just went up in the air," he testified. In Ankara he reported to "Madame," a Soviet embassy official whom he met at a ball. "I got to know her very well," he testified, but he could not remember her name. When he finally broke off with Madame and the party in March 1942, Burdett related, "she acted like a child who has just been deprived of something she enjoyed."

Burdett blamed the Russians for instigating the murder shortly afterward of his first wife, Lea Schiavi, an anti-Fascist Italian journalist, while visiting the Soviet-occupied Iranian province of Azerbaijan. Kurdish gunmen stopped her car, singled her out and shot her. "She knew too much," said Burdett.

The Harder Decision. Burdett, who had wanted to be a foreign correspondent, was hired full-time by CBS in 1941 while still a Commie, but said nothing about his Communist or spy career until CBS sent all staff members a loyalty questionnaire in 1951. He filled in the truth, with an explanatory letter. CBS accepted his explanation, and Burdett told his story to the FBI. "It was not," he said, "a hard decision to make." This year he came to a harder decision: to quit CBS and tell his story publicly. He had, it seemed, lived too long with the secret.

New York Municipal Judge Robert Morris, onetime chief counsel to the Senate subcommittee, advised him to testify, and helped to make the arrangements. CBS wanted Burdett to resign first, but Morris persuaded the network officials that recanting Communists should be encouraged rather than penalized for making public confessions. Last week both CBS and the subcommittee extravagantly praised Burdett's "strong sense of duty."

Burdett named some two dozen persons whom he knew or strongly suspected to have been Communists. He disclosed the existence of a prewar Communist cell in the editorial offices of the Brooklyn Eagle. He confirmed the Communist Party membership of the men who controlled the American Newspaper Guild until 1941 and the New York Guild, the largest local, until 1947.

Milton Kaufman, once the executive vice president of the American Newspaper Guild, now an outdoor salesman, invoked the Fifth Amendment's protection. Monroe Stern, onetime Hearst writer and president of the New York Guild local, who became pressagent for the Yugoslav embassy, told the committee he never was a party member. Jack Ryan, a commissar of the New York Guild local until 1947, said he was now a self-employed "horticultural researcher"; he, like others, invoked the Fifth Amendment.

Nat Einhorn, once an Eagle reporter and active Guild official, was named by Burdett as the man who first tapped him for Soviet espionage. Einhorn, now a public-relations man for the Communist Polish embassy, blandly replied on the stand that he had merely suggested sending Burdett to Finland as an "objective" reporter for the Communist New Masses or Daily Worker. He refused, under the Fifth Amendment, to answer questions about past party membership.

The Senate subcommittee got very little response from most of the twelve subpoenaed witnesses, all named by Burdett. One man called, however, was Charles Grutzner, 51, since 1941 a reporter for the New York Times. By chance, Grutzner was presented on a CBS Omnibus TV program as a typical Times reporter. Burdett named him as a member of the prewar Brooklyn Eagle Communist unit. Times executives, tipped off to Grutzner's Communist background, questioned Grutzner in May. He quickly admitted party membership from 1937 to 1940. He had been recruited by Nat Einhorn, he testified, over a cup of coffee. "I considered it a closed chapter," said Grutzner, explaining his previous silence. "I just forgot about it."

Then the subcommittee counsel, Julien Sourwine, brought up Grutzner dispatches from the Korean front. One story served Communist purposes, Sourwine said; another dispatch disclosed the first F-86 Sabre jet victory in Korea. The Times answered that the Sabre jet dispatch had been cleared by the Pentagon.

The Burdett testimony and the run of witnesses touched off by it added no sensational fact to the nation's knowledge of the Communist conspiracy. But it did help to fill in the background where such figures as Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley had stood in semi-isolation. As a result of Burdett's disclosures, it was a little easier to understand the extent of Communist influence on prewar American life.

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