Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (12 page)

When Noel Field and his wife were formally released from Hungarian prison in 1954, all that was publicly stated was that they had been rehabilitated. Meeting with Western reporters in 1955, Field passed off his
imprisonment as a mistake and announced he was seeking political asylum in Communist Hungary. He even denied being a Communist, although in 1961 he would admit in a memoir to having been a party member from the 1930s onward. In return for his public cooperation, security
police provided him with a private villa, servants, and a highly paid post
with a government agency. He remained faithful to the Soviet cause,
never returned to the West, and died a loyal Communist in 1970.r2

Publicly, in accord with the Communist position on the subject, Field
denied that either he or Hiss had anything to do with Soviet espionage.
But what he secretly told Hungarian security police was very different.
The transcripts of his rehabilitation interviews were not made public until
the 199os, after the collapse of the Hungarian Communist regime. In
them, Field explained that in 1935 Paul and Hede Massing recruited him
for Soviet intelligence and that Hede was his regular liaison with the
KGB. In the course of discussing his espionage work for Massing, Field
stated the following:

Alger Hiss wanted to recruit me for espionage for the Soviet Union. I did not
find the right words and carelessly told him that I was already working for the
Soviet intelligence.... I knew, from what Hiss told me, that he was working for
the Soviet secret service. I drew the conclusion that Chambers was Hiss's upper
contact in the secret service, too. Later, it became certain, first when in Chambers' flat they found the secret material obtained by Hiss, and then when Cham hers' testimony made it clear that he knew of the conversation between Hiss and
myself, when Hiss tried to recruit me into the secret service....

We made friends with Alger Hiss, one of the top officials of Roosevelt's
New Deal. Through our gatherings we discovered that we were Communists.
In the summer of 1935, Alger Hiss tried to persuade me to render services to
the Soviets, which led me to commit the unforgivable indiscretion of telling
him he had come too late. At that very moment, I notified Hede [Massing]
about the event. She loaded me with the worst reproaches. She did not know
what her boss would say to that, with whom, by the way, I never got acquainted. A little later, she told me that I had done greater damage than I
would believe, and that because of me the whole work had to be reorganized.... Our misfortune was that not only had the Massings become traitors,
but so had Hiss's connection-Chambers.

Field's secret testimony conformed to Massing's and Chambers's testimony at the Hiss trials and in their memoirs, as well as the documents
quoted in Vassiliev's notebooks, with the exception that Field in 1954 remembered Hiss's approach having been in 1935 while the documents
demonstrate that it was early 1936.13

Yet another brush with GRU in 1938 once again brought Alger Hiss
to the KGB's attention. This brief incident involved Michael Straight
(cover name "Nigel"). Recruited by Soviet intelligence in England while
at Cambridge University, Straight (discussed in chapter 4) used his family's social and political connections to President Roosevelt to obtain a
post by 1938 as an assistant to Herbert Feis, the State Department's chief
adviser on international economic affairs.

At the KGB's urging, Straight brushed aside contacts by secret Communists in Washington, who had heard about his activities in England
and were anxious to enlist him in the cause. However, Iskhak Akhmerov,
his KGB contact, became more alarmed when Straight took notice of
Alger Hiss. Akhmerov informed Moscow:

"Through his job, N. ["Nigel"/Straight] unfortunately made contact with Hiss.
N. had told me previously that he was an interesting employee with a senior
post, etc. That Hiss, as he said, was very ideologically progressive. I am not betraying any interest in him, but at the same time I'm not telling him not to
meet with him. If I tell him that, then he will figure out that Hiss is a member
of our family.

There is anoth. danger: that the fraternal's [CPUSAs] or neighbors'
[GRU's] station chief (I don't know for sure who Hiss is connected with) might
instruct Hiss to work on recruiting N-1, considering that fraternal workers al ready approached him once through [Solomon] Adler. I am confident that N-1
won't take this bait and that he will refuse if they try to recruit him, but still, if
this happens, N-1 will learn Hiss's nature. It is possible that they might send a
diff. recruiting agent to N-1. I am writing about all this for your information
and to see if, when you have a chance, you could influence the neighbors' station chief if he decides to work on recruiting N-1 through Hiss. If Nikolay
[Gutzeit] worked on recruiting 1g, the same way the neighbors may try to approach N-1. Enclosed with this mailing is N's note about his meeting with
Hiss."

Possibly due to Akhmerov's warnings, Straight and Hiss did not get entangled, and there was no repeat of the Hiss-Field snarl.14

In 1938 Akhmerov reported another incident involving Hiss. He periodically met with Josef Peters (chief of the CPUSAs underground) to
seek CPUSA assistance for various KGB tasks. In July Akhmerov reported:

"During one of our earliest conversations, Storm [Peters] blurted out that Hiss
was a member of the fraternal [CPUSA] organization who had infiltrated the
Surrogate [State Department] and was then transferred to the neighbors
[GRU]. He told me this when I was hunting for Hiss. During one of our conversations, Nikolay [Gutzeit] told me that it was possible the neighbors were
not currently connected with Hiss, apparently in connection with certain difficulties of an organizational nature."

The "difficulties of an organizational nature" that led to Hiss's temporarily
losing his connection with "the neighbors" are clear in retrospect. In April
1938, Whittaker Chambers dropped out of Soviet espionage. Not knowing
if Chambers had gone to American authorities (he hadn't), GRU temporarily deactivated the sources of Chambers's network (including Hiss)
and withdrew Boris Bykov, Chambers's contact, from the United States.15

In addition to documentation of these KGB-GRU entanglements involving Hiss, there are additional details about the KGB's awareness of
Hiss's status as a GRU agent in the 1930s. In November 1936, Bazarov
sent to Moscow a copy of the just-released State Department directory.
In a cover note he pointed out, "`You will find 11 [David Salmon] at the
start of the directory, along with 19 [Duggan]."' ("11"/Salmon and
"19°'/Duggan were the two leading KGB sources at the State Department
at the time.) Bazarov also said, "`You will not find the neighbors' `Jurist'
in the photograph directory because he has worked there only since September."' And indeed Hiss had begun work at the State Department in September 1936. With a touch of envy, Bazarov also wrote that Duggan
"`reported that J. ["Jurist"/Hiss] is the one who has everything important
from every division on his desk, and must be one of the best-informed
people at the Surrogate [State Department].- Bazarov's envy is clearer
in another letter to Moscow where he noted his station's limited penetration of the State Department and remarked, "We need a suitable recruiting agent. We don't have one. There was `Jurist' [Hiss] .... but the
neighbors snatched him up, as you informed us. (Indeed, if we had J-st,
no one else would really be needed).""'

The KGB New York station sent a letter to Moscow in September
1938 explaining that "we are continuing to look for means of approach to
four persons in the State Department," describing them as "progressive
people who regard our country approvingly." One of the four named was
"Robert Hiss." There were only two Hisses at the Department of State at
the time: Alger Hiss and his brother Donald. One or the other was probably intended, but whoever wrote the letter misremembered the first
name. This is also a letter from the legal station, whereas it had been the
illegal station under Bazarov and Akhmerov that was more familiar with
Alger Hiss.17

During World War II, Alger Hiss appears incidentally in several KGB
documents by or about several of its American sources. Victor Perlo, an
economist with the War Production Board, was a leading figure in a
CPUSA-based espionage apparatus consisting of Communists who
worked in a wide variety of U.S. government agencies. By the fall of 1944
the KGB assumed direct control of his network from Elizabeth Bentley.
As part of the process, it revetted the members of the group. Normally
such background reviews were done prior to or around the time of initial
recruitment, but in this case they were done retroactively due to the network's having been delivered intact to the KGB via CPUSA.

As part of Victor Perlo's own revetting, he was asked to provide a list
of persons not in his own apparatus but who, nonetheless, he had reason
to believe "work with intelligence" (meaning work with Soviet intelligence)
and had a present or past connection with a Soviet intelligence agency.
Perlo prepared a list in English that was in KGB files and that Vassiliev
copied into his notebooks. Dated 15 March 1945, it included fourteen
people and the agency for which they worked and specified if they had a
current connection with a Soviet agency, if they had worked with Perlo at
some point, and whether they knew Perlo had a Soviet connection. Among
the fourteen Perlo listed were Alger Hiss and Donald Hiss:

List of people who, according to "Raid's" [Perlo's] information, work with intelligence, except for those with whom he currently works on a regular basis.
From 15.03.45

Perlo thus became the fourth participant in Soviet espionage (after Whittaker Chambers, Hede Massing, and Noel Field) who identified Alger
Hiss as a fellow Soviet agent.18

Harold Glasser, a senior Treasury Department official, was one of the
most valuable members of Perlo's apparatus. In order to assist in gauging the reliability and potential of agents, the KGB often asked its most
valued sources to prepare autobiographies. Vassiliev's notebooks contain lengthy extracts from the one Glasser wrote in December 1944. He stated that he joined the Communist Party in 1933 while teaching at
People's Junior College in Chicago. In 1936 he joined the Treasury Department as an economist and steadily moved up the ranks of the bureaucracy. He also became a member of the Communist Party's clandestine organization in Washington. Josef Peters judged Glasser suitable
for more serious espionage work. The opportunity came when Whittaker Chambers's GRU apparatus turned to Peters for assistance in
1937. Chambers later wrote that his contact, Boris Bykov, "fumed" that
one of Chambers's sources, Harry Dexter White, then assistant director
of Treasury's Division of Monetary Research, should have been providing much more material than he actually was. Bykov was also frustrated
because White was only a sympathizer and did not respond to orders
like committed CPUSA members. Chambers explained: "I went to J.
Peters, who was in Washington constantly in 1937.... I explained the
problem to him and asked for a Communist in the Treasury Department who could `control' White. Peters suggested Dr. Harold Glasser,
who certainly seemed an ideal man for the purpose, since he was White's
assistant.... Peters released Dr. Glasser from the American Communist
underground and lent him to the Soviet underground. Glasser soon convinced me that White was turning over everything of importance that
came into his hands." 9

Glasser described his relationship with Chambers's network and what
followed after Chambers's desertion in his KGB autobiography:

"I first met "Karl" [Chambers] in 1937, around May. He and I met on a more
or less regular basis until the fall of 1939. During this time, I met with him on
average once a month. The meetings each lasted two or three hours. He knew
everything about me: my past, my activities, my friends, etc. In the summer or
fall of 1939 (though I am not entirely sure of the date), "Karl" did not show up
for our regular meeting, and I never saw him again. He was replaced by a selfstyled successor. . . who tried to approach me in June 1940. He said his name
was "Paul" [Maxim Lieber], but because I was preparing to go abroad, the
matter ceased on its own."

"Karl" is not directly identified in the notebooks, but Chambers in his
1952 autobiography noted that his pseudonym in the underground in the
1930s was "Carl." Additionally, the pseudonym he used in an essay that
he gave to a journalist in 1938 after his defection was "Karl." Chambers's
account of his relationship with Glasser fits with Glasser's account of his
relationship with "Karl." The only discrepancy is that Chambers dropped
out of Soviet intelligence in April 1938, rather than in "the summer or fall of 1939" as Glasser remembered in his 1944 autobiography. But
chronological errors of that sort are common in memoir literature, and
Glasser even told the KGB, "I am not entirely sure of the date."20