(Apr 1, 1901 – July 9, 1961) His autobiography Witness, published in 1952, details his life as an agent in the Fourth Section of Soviet Military Intelligence from 1932 to 1938, where he coordinated espionage activities with high-ranking United States government officials. Witness also movingly explains Chambers’ departure from Communism and his conversion to Christianity. From his conversion, Chambers grasped that revolutionary ideology lied about the nature of man and the source of his being. Chambers’ conversion inspired him to atone for his past betrayal of his country. He divulged to the federal government information about the Soviet espionage cell he had organized during the 1930s in Washington, its membership, and his complicity in its operation.
Of those officials in Chambers’ Soviet-allied cell, Alger Hiss, Director of the Office of Special Political Affairs in the Department of State and Chambers’ close friend, would prove to be the most consequential. Hiss formally denied any involvement in Communist activities and insisted that he had never even met “that man named Whittaker Chambers.” The truth was that Hiss and Chambers had been close friends in their subversive activities, and even their wives and children had frequently socialized together.
Alger Hiss had regularly passed State Department documents to Chambers during the 1930s; in turn, Chambers carried them to various handlers, who then sent them to Soviet authorities. … READ ENTIRETY (Two Faiths: The Witness of Whittaker Chambers; By Richard M. Reinsch; Acton Institute; Volume 22, Number 1 – Winter 2012)
In William F. Buckley Jr.’s words, Chambers was “the most important American defector from Communism.”
Chambers carried on his espionage activities from 1932 until 1937 or 1938 even while his faith in Communism was waning. He became increasingly disturbed by Joseph Stalin’s Great Purge, which began in 1936. He was also fearful for his own life, having noted the murder in Switzerland of Ignace Reiss, a high-ranking Soviet spy who had broken with Stalin, and the disappearance of Chambers’s friend and fellow spy Juliet Stuart Poyntz in the United States. Poyntz had vanished in 1937, shortly after she had visited Moscow and returned disillusioned with the Communist cause due to the Stalinist Purges.
Chambers ignored several orders that he travel to Moscow, worried that he might be “purged.” He also started concealing some of the documents he collected from his sources. He planned to use these, along with several rolls of microfilm photographs of documents, as a “life preserver” to prevent the Soviets from killing him and his family. In 1938, Chambers broke with Communism and took his family into hiding, storing the “life preserver” at the home of his nephew and his parents. Initially, he had no plans to give information on his espionage activities to the U.S. government. His espionage contacts were his friends, and he had no desire to inform on them.
In his examination of Chambers’s conversion from the political left to the right, author Daniel Oppenheimer noted that Chambers substituted his passion for communism for a passion for God. Chambers saw the world in black and white terms both before his defection and after. In his autobiography, he presented his devotion to communism as a reason for living, but after defecting saw his actions as being part of an “absolute evil.”
(Wikipedia) In 1924, Chambers read Vladimir Lenin’s Soviets at Work and was deeply affected by it. He now saw the dysfunctional nature of his family, he would write, as “in miniature the whole crisis of the middle class”; a malaise from which Communism promised liberation. Chambers’s biographer Sam Tanenhaus wrote that Lenin’s authoritarianism was “precisely what attracts Chambers… He had at last found his church”; that is, he became a Marxist. In 1925, Chambers joined the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) (then known as the Workers Party of America). Chambers wrote and edited for Communist publications, including The Daily Worker newspaper and The New Masses magazine. Chambers combined his literary talents with his devotion to Communism, writing four short stories in 1931 about proletarian hardship and revolt, including Can You Make Out Their Voices?, considered by critics as one of the best fiction from the American Communist movement.[13] Hallie Flanagan co-adapted and produced it as a play entitled Can You Hear Their Voices? (see Writings by Chambers, below), staged across America and in many other countries. Chambers also worked as a translator during this period; among his works was the English version of Felix Salten’s 1923 novel Bambi, A Life in the Woods.
In 1978, Allen Weinstein’s Perjury revealed that the FBI has a copy of a letter in which Chambers described homosexual liaisons during the 1930s. The letter copy states that Chambers gave up these practices in 1938 when he left the underground, attributed to newfound Christianity. The letter has remained controversial from many perspectives.
Chambers was recruited to join the “Communist underground” and began his career as a spy, working for a GRU apparatus headed by Alexander Ulanovsky (aka Ulrich). Later, his main controller in the underground was Josef Peters (whom CPUSA General Secretary Earl Browder later replaced with Rudy Baker). Chambers claimed Peters introduced him to Harold Ware (although he later denied he had ever been introduced to Ware), and that he was head of a Communist underground cell in Washington that reportedly included:
- Henry Collins, employed at the National Recovery Administration and later the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA).
- Lee Pressman, assistant general counsel of the AAA.
- Alger Hiss, attorney for the AAA and the Nye Committee; he moved to the Department of State in 1936, where he became an increasingly prominent figure.
- John Abt, chief of Litigation for the AAA from 1933 to 1935, assistant general counsel of the Works Progress Administration in 1935, chief counsel on Senator Robert La Follette, Jr.’s LaFollette Committee from 1936 to 1937 and special assistant to the United States Attorney General, 1937 and 1938.
- Charles Kramer, employed at the Department of Labor National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).
- Nathan Witt, employed at the AAA; later moved to the NLRB.
- George Silverman, employed at the Railroad Retirement Board; later worked with the Federal Coordinator of Transport, the United States Tariff Commission and the Labor Advisory Board of the National Recovery Administration.
- Marion Bachrach, sister of John Abt; office manager to Representative John Bernard of the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party.
- John Herrmann, author; assistant to Harold Ware; employed at the AAA; courier and document photographer for the Ware group; introduced Chambers to Hiss.
- Nathaniel Weyl, author; would later defect from Communism himself and give evidence against party members.
- Donald Hiss, brother to Alger Hiss; employed at the Department of State.
- Victor Perlo, chief of the Aviation Section of the War Production Board, later joined the Office of Price Administration Department of Commerce and the Division of Monetary Research at the Department of Treasury.
Apart from Marion Bachrach, these people were all members of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal administration. Chambers worked in Washington as an organizer among Communists in the city and as a courier between New York and Washington for stolen documents which were delivered to Boris Bykov, the GRU station chief.
Using the codename “Karl” or “Carl”, Chambers served during the mid-1930s as a courier between various covert sources and Soviet intelligence. In addition to the Ware group mentioned above, other sources that Chambers dealt with allegedly included:
- Harry Dexter White – Director of Division of Monetary Research at Treasury
- Harold Glasser – Assistant Director, Division of Monetary Research, Treasury
- Noel Field – Employed at Department of State
- Julian Wadleigh – Economist with Agriculture; later, Trade Agreements section of Department of State
- Vincent Reno – Mathematician at U.S. Army Aberdeen Proving Ground
- Ward Pigman – Employed at National Bureau of Standards, then Labor and Public Welfare Committee
A great deal more than the reputations of the two men was at stake. If Hiss was innocent, anti-Communism–and the careers of those closely associated with it, like Richard Nixon, a prominent member of the congressional investigating committee–would be dealt a deadly blow. If Hiss was guilty, anti-Communism would become a permanent part of the political landscape, and its spokesmen would become national leaders.In August 1948, Chambers, an editor at Time, identified Alger Hiss, a golden boy of the liberal establishment, as a fellow member of his underground Communist cell in the 1930s. Hiss, a former assistant to the Secretary of State and former General Secretary of the United Nations founding conference at San Francisco, and then president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, immediately denied Chambers’ allegation.
It took two protracted trials (Hiss reluctantly sued Chambers for slander), but Hiss was finally convicted of perjury for denying his espionage activities and sentenced to five years in jail. Hiss went to his grave more than 40 years later still protesting his innocence–and still lauded by many on the Left. But the Venona transcripts of secret KGB and GRU messages during World War II (released in the mid-1990s) confirmed that Alger Hiss had been a Soviet spy not only in the 1930s, but at least until 1945.
In 1952, Chambers published his magisterial, best-selling autobiography, Witness. The work argued that America faced a transcendent, not a transitory, crisis; the crisis was one not of politics or economics but of faith; and secular liberalism, the dominant “ism” of the day, was a watered-down version of Communist ideology. The New Deal, Chambers insisted, was not liberal democratic but “revolutionary” in its nature and intentions. All these themes, especially that the crisis of the 20th century was one of faith, resonated deeply with conservatives.
Among those who agreed with and often quoted Chambers’ uncompromising assessment was a future California governor and U.S. President–Ronald Reagan. Indeed, Witness may have enlisted more American anti-Communists than almost any other book of the Cold War. They included, in addition to our 40th President, William A. Rusher, longtime publisher of National Review; veteran journalist John Chamberlain, who worked with Chambers at Time; and columnist-commentator Robert Novak.
The work continues to have a telling impact. At a Washington dinner last November, retiring Senator Bob Kerrey admitted that reading Witness had enabled him, for the first time in his life, to understand what Communism was all about.
The book is not easy reading but is permeated with what Bill Buckley called “Spenglerian gloom.” Exhausted by the demands of the two Hiss trials and in poor health (he had suffered several heart attacks), Chambers believed that he was probably leaving the winning side but found reason to keep fighting against Communism for his children. As he recounts in Witness, he once surveyed, on a dark cold night at his Maryland farm, the formidable forces arrayed against him–the powerful establishment, the hostile press, the skeptical public, the calumnies of the Hiss partisans–and seriously considered suicide. But when his young son John came looking for him crying, “Papa! Papa! Don’t ever go away,” he replied, “No, no, I won’t ever go away.”
Chambers continued to make significant contributions to the conservative movement until his death in July 1961. Publisher Henry Regnery recalled that he sent page proofs of Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind to Chambers, who immediately urged the editor of Time to devote the entire book section to a review of “one of the most important” books he had read “in some time.” Regnery never forgot his “sense of exultation” when the long, laudatory Time review arrived.
Chambers was a close friend and mentor of Bill Buckley. Invited to join National Review‘s masthead, he at first demurred, pessimistic about its chances of success. But he was persuaded to come aboard by Buckley’s argument that “the culture of liberty deserves to survive” and to have its own journal. One of Chambers’ more memorable contributions to the magazine was his evisceration of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. He called its plot “preposterous,” its characterization “primitive,” and much of its effect “sophomoric.” In a lifetime of reading, he concluded, “I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained.” His review, “Big Sister Is Watching You,” helped bar conservatism’s door to Rand’s godless technocratic ideas.
Chambers was also a private critic of Senator Joseph McCarthy (proven right with the Venona intercepts). He told Buckley that McCarthy was “a slugger and a rabble-rouser” who “simply knows that somebody threw a tomato and the general direction from which it came.”
Chambers was “one of the great men of our time,” wrote Henry Regnery, who had known many great men during his decades-long publishing career. As a witness to God’s grace and the fortifying power of faith, Chambers “put all of us immeasurably in his debt.” For countless conservatives, Whittaker Chambers has never gone away.
Lee Edwards, Ph.D., is a Senior Fellow at The Heritage Foundation and the author of several books, including The Conservative Revolution: The Movement That Remade America.
Notable Quotes from Whittaker Chambers
I know that I am leaving the winning side for the losing side, but it is better to die on the losing side than to live under Communism. – Statement before the House Un-American Activities Committee, August 3, 1948
A man is not primarily a witness against something. That is only incidental to the fact that he is a witness for something. –“Foreword in the Form of a Letter to my Children,” Witness, 1952
Religion and freedom are indivisible. Without freedom the soul dies. Without the soul there is no justification for freedom. – Ibid.
The Communist vision is the vision of Man without God. –Ibid.
Economics is not the central problem of this century. It is a relative problem which can be solved in relative ways. Faith is the central problem of this age. –Ibid.
The crisis of the Western world exists to the degree in which it is indifferent to God. –Ibid.
Communism is the central experience of the first half of the 20th century, and may be its final experience–will be, unless the free world, in the agony of its struggle with Communism, overcomes its crisis by discovering, in suffering and pain, a power of faith which will provide man’s mind, at the same intensity, with the same two certainties: a reason to live and a reason to die. –Ibid.
Sources:
- https://oneway2day.wordpress.com/tag/kgb/
- https://www.heritage.org/political-process/report/whittaker-chambers-man-courage-and-faith
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whittaker_Chambers
Chronological history of Events Involving Whittaker Chambers
Ronald Reagan’s Evil Empire Speech: “Freedom Prospers when Religion is Vibrant and the Rule of Law under God is Acknowledged.”
Nationally Recognized School Superintendent William Wirt Testifies to Congress About Plans for a Soviet-style Revolution he Overheard at a Dinner Party
