Monday, July 25, 2005
Whittaker Chambers was a member of the pro-Soviet Communist underground during the 1930's. While he was in the underground, he cultivated contacts and facilitated the transfer of stolen intelligence through a wide-ranging clandestine network that reached all the way back to Moscow.
The day came when he realized the folly of his ways and the evils of Communism. He made his break and, as a way of clearing his conscience decided to spill the beans on everything he knew about the mechanisms he knew were working against the interests of his country.
He tried, but failed, to get an appointment to see President Roosevelt, but did manage to get in to see Assistant Secretary of State in charge of security, Adolf Berle. For three hours he poured his guts out to Berle about all he knew.
He was, for the moment relieved to do so, but much to his surprise, for months heard nothing more. Hoping for the best, he tried to assure himself that it must just be that the power that be were simply not ready to move yet.
His optimism was misplaced.
In fact, Berle had gone to Roosevelt himself and passed on what he had been told. Roosevelt simply laughed and told Berle to get the hell out of his office.
Reflecting in his 1952 book, Witness, Chambers wrote:
I perceived that the Communists were much more firmly embedded in Government than I had supposed, and that any attempt to disclose or dislodge them was enormously complicated by the political situation in which they were parasitic. Every move against the Communists was felt by the liberals as a move against themselves. If only for the sake of their public health record, the liberals, to protect their power, must seek as long as possible to conceal from themselves and everybody else the fact that the Government had been Communist-penetrated. Unlike the liberals, the Communists were fully aware of their superior tactical position, and knew that they had only to shout their innocence and cry: "Witch hunt!" for the liberals to rally in all innocence to their defense. I felt, too, that a persistent effort by any man to expose the Communists in Government was much less likely to lead to their exposure than to reprisals against him. That fact must be borne constantly in mind in understanding what I did and did not do in the next nine years, and indeed throughout the Hiss Case, which was to prove on a vast scale how well-founded my fears had been.
One of my close friends, himself an ardent New Dealer, who knew my story in full detail, summed up the situation tersely. "I see," he said one day, "why it might not pay the Communists to kill you at this point. But I don't see how the Administration dares to leave you alive."
Great Posting Sol;
The VENONA Project, an ultra secret US effort to crack the Soviet code, was highly successful in reading much of the diplomatic traffic from the Soviet Embassy at that time. Even though only about 10% of these documents have been released, they not only confirm Mr. Chambers charges, but show that the infiltration of Communist agents and sympathizers into sensitive government posts was even more widespread than he knew. These documents also exonerate Senator McCarthy, showing that he was correct in many of his statements, a fact the media still has not reported.