Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (11 page)

In 1935 Hede Massing, who had been cultivating Laurence Duggan
and his wife Helen Boyd, approached and quickly recruited Noel Field,
given the cover names "17" and "Ernst" in KGB communications. ("Cul tivating" was the KGB's term for getting to know and developing a recruit.) Massing was Austrian-born but had spent several childhood years
in America before returning home. Radicalized after World War I, she
married Gerhart Eisler, a leading figure in the German Communist Party
and later the Comintern. Her second husband was Julian Gumpertz, a
publisher of Communist literature, with whom she traveled to New York
in 1926 and mingled with radical American literati. At the end of the
192os she married Paul Massing, a fellow Communist and a leading figure in the Institute for Social Research, a center of Marxist social thought
at the University of Frankfurt in Germany. In 1929 Ignace Poretsky, a
senior GRU officer, recruited her for intelligence work. After a hiatus in
Moscow, she began to receive assignments in 1931. The Nazis arrested
Paul Massing after Hitler seized power, and Hede was sent to the United
States in late 1933. Posing as a newspaperwoman, she developed extensive contacts in left and liberal circles in Washington and New York. Released from Nazi prison in 1934, Paul became a minor celebrity in the
anti-fascist world. He left Germany, rejoined Hede, and also entered Soviet service. In the meantime, Poretsky had shifted from GRU to KGB,
increasingly the dominant Soviet intelligence agency, and the Massings
moved with him.4

By Field's own account, he provided the Soviets with significant quantities of State Department material in 1935 and early 1936. But he continued to feel frustrated in his State Department assignment, and in April
1936 he took a post with the League of Nations and moved to Switzerland. Before he left, however, his naivete regarding espionage tradecraft
brought about the first entanglement of Alger Hiss with the KGB.5

Field had become a friend of Alger Hiss shortly after Hiss moved to
Washington in 1933 and became part of the group of radicalized young
professionals drawn to the nation's capital by the New Deal's promise to
reconstruct American economic life. Hiss left a Wall Street law firm to
take a position with AAA, where he was part of a secret Communist caucus called the "Ware group" since it was organized by the CPUSAs agricultural specialist, Harold Ware. Hiss later left AAA to take a post with
the U.S. Senate's Committee on Investigation of the Munitions Industry,
chaired by Senator Gerald Nye. From there he moved briefly to the justice Department but then in September 1936 took a salary cut to take a
position at the Department of State, where he remained until the end of
1945. In Whittaker Chambers's account, in 1935 Josef Peters sought to
connect selected members of the party's Washington underground to So viet intelligence. Chambers, a former writer at the Daily Worker and editor of the party's literary magazine, New Masses, had been assigned to
covert work in the early 1930s and worked with Peters and on various assignments for both GRU and the KGB. He related that by early 1936
Hiss was functioning as part of a Washington network of sources recruited
via the CPUSA with Chambers as the network's link to the professional
officers of Soviet military intelligence.6

Hiss, not yet holding a sensitive position himself and not yet attuned
to the need for caution, approached his friend Noel Field in early 1936
and attempted to recruit him for his GRU-linked apparatus. While Hiss
was indiscreet, Field's reaction compounded the problem. Hede Massing
described what happened in an April 1936 report to the KGB quoted at
length in Vassiliev's notebooks:

"Our friend Ernst [Field], the day before he left for Europe, related to me the
following incident, of which he himself will give a detailed account to our
friends overseas. Roughly a week before his departure from Washington, he
was approached by Alger Hiss. A. [Alger Hiss] informed him that he is a Communist, that he has ties to an organization working for the Sov. Union; and that
he is aware that Ernst has ties as well; however, he fears that they are not robust enough and that his knowledge is probably being misused. Then he
bluntly proposed that Ernst give an account of the London conference. Because they are, as E. ["Ernst"/Field] puts it, close friends, he did not refuse to
discuss this topic with him, but he told Alger that he had already delivered a
report on that conference. When A., whom, as you probably recall, I met
through E., insisted that he would like to receive that report himself regardless, E. said that he would have to contact his `connections' and ask their advice. Within a day, having `thought it over,' A. said that he would not insist on
receiving the report himself, but that he will have to ask E. to speak with Larry
and Helen [Duggan] about him and to tell them who he is and give him (A.)
access to them. Once more, E. said that he had already established a connection with Larry and Helen, but A. insisted that E. would have to speak with
them regardless, which E. did. He spoke with Larry about A., and of course
about himself as well, telling him `in what situation they found themselves,'
that their main task at present is the defense of the Sov. Union,' etc., etc., and
that each of them has to use his advantageous position in order to provide assistance in this matter.' Larry seemed upset and frightened and said that he
had not gone so far yet, that some time would pass before he would be able to
take such an irrevocable step, and that he is still hoping to do some work of a
conventional sort, reorganizing his department and trying to achieve some
kind of results in this regard, etc. Obviously, judging by what E. said, he gave no promises and did not prod A. to take action of any kind; instead, he politely
backed down. A. also asked E. a whole series of oth. quest-s, e.g., who would
be his successor, what kind of a person he is, and whether E. would want to establish his connection with him. He also asked him to help him in getting into
the State Department, which E. apparently did.

When I pointed out to E. what a terrible lack of discipline he had shown
and what a danger he had created for the value of his use and for the whole
enterprise by linking three people with each other, he acted as if he did not
understand. He believed that `because A. had been the first to show his cards,
he did not have a reason to keep everything secret, moreover, because A. had
said that he `is doing this for us' and because he is living in Washington and
therefore cannot meet with Larry more often than I myself can, and finally,
because I intend to leave the country for a while, he thought the best thing
would be to establish contact between them."

In the above KGB document Hiss is identified by his real name. There
is no parsing or convoluted argument that can be advanced to avoid the
unambiguous identification of Alger Hiss in a 1936 KGB document by his
real name as "a Communist, that ... has ties to an organization working
for the Sov. Union."'

A letter to Moscow Center from Boris Bazarov, head of the KGB's illegal station, summarized the damage done by Field's actions:

"The outcome is that `17' [Field] and Hiss have, in effect, been completely deprived of their cover before `1g' [Duggan]. Evidently, `1g' also clearly understands the identity of `Redhead' [Massing]. And more than a couple of months
ago, Redhead and Hiss also got exposed to each other. Helen Boyd-'1g's'
wife, having been present at almost all of these meetings and discussions, is
undoubtedly clued in as well, and now knows as much as `1g' himself... .

I think that in light of this incident, we should not accelerate the cultivation of 'ig' and his wife. It seems that apart from us, the persistent Hiss will
continue his initiative in that direction. ig's wife will be arriving in NY any day
now. Redhead will meet her here for a purely friendly meeting. Upon 17's departure from Washington, Helen expressed a great desire to see Redhead
again. It is possible that Helen will tell Redhead about her husband's frame
of mind."

A Moscow Center annotation on the letter specified Hiss's cover name,
"A. Hiss-`Jurist,"' and noted that Hiss was an attorney in Washington.
Likely "Jurist" was Hiss's GRU cover name because the KGB had little
reason to provide its own for someone who reported to GRU.'

The Center, Moscow's KGB headquarters, was not pleased by these developments. For security reasons no intelligence agency wants its different networks to know of each other and even less to intermingle with
networks belonging to other agencies of its government. The KGB's networks, however, did get entangled on several occasions with those of GRU
because both had extensive operations in Washington and tended to recruit from the same pool of CPUSA members or those close to the party.
Moscow Center quickly expressed its irritation to its New York station:

"We fail to see for what reason Redhead [Massing] met with `Jurist' [Hiss]. As
we understand it, this took place after our directive stipulating that `Jurist' is
the neighbors' [GRU's] man and that it is necessary to stay away from him. Experiments of this sort could have undesirable consequences. We strongly urge
you to arrange it so that none of your people undertakes anything without your
consent. This applies in particular to Redhead, bearing in mind her shortcomings, as manifested in her `impetuousness.' Now for the question-how to get
out of this mess. 17 [Field] departed, this isolates him to a certain extent, and
Jurist will gradually forget about him.

Now with regard to how to save ig [Duggan] and his wife. ig could be of
interest, considering his position in the `Surrogate' [State Department]; his
wife as well, considering her connections. To refuse to cultivate them means
going down the path of least resistance. Therefore it is essential that we skillfully smooth over the emerging situation and steer both of them away from jurist. As a last resort, ig could say that `he is helping the local fellowcountrymen
[Communists] and that the latter suggested to him that he not get involved
with anyone else.' We are to blame for the fact that 17, being already our
agent, was left in the hands of Redhead, who is ill-suited to handle either an
agent or even herself."9

Stung by the Center's criticism, Iskhak Akhmerov, an officer of the
illegal station, forwarded an explanation of what had happened and defended Massing's meeting with Hiss as occurring before Moscow had informed the New York station that Hiss was already a GRU agent:

""Redhead" [Massing] met "Jurist" [Hiss] on only one occasion during the entire time of her stay in this country, in the winter. She went to this meeting at
the behest of Cde. Nord [Bazarov]. After you informed us that he (i.e., "Jurist") has ties with the neighbors [GRU], we did not meet with him.... After
meeting with "Redhead" and speaking with her in our 17's [Field's] apartment,
"J." no doubt informed his superiors about the meeting. By random coincidence, an operative at our fraternal organization [CPUSA], who is connected
to "Jurist," knew "Redhead" well since the time that the latter was connected
with the fraternal line. When it proved absolutely necessary, we occasionally went through "Redhead" to solicit help from this fraternal operative, who is
known to us as "Peter" [Josef Peters]. This "Peter'' is the same fraternal operative whom I described to you orally when I was home [in Moscow]. When the
need arises for us in cases involving only certificates of naturalization, we resort to this "Peter" for help.

This same Peter, during one of his rare meetings with "Redhead," said the
following: `In Wash-n you stumbled across my buddy (meaning "Jurist"), you
had better keep your hands off him, etc....' And apparently Peter, when suggesting in turn to "Jurist" that he not develop ties with Redhead, handled it
rather ineptly, i.e., in such away that jurist more or less understood "Redhead's" identity."'()

In the late 1940s and early 1950s three participants in this episode
provided independent corroboration of this incident. The accounts by
Hede Massing, Noel Field, and Whittaker Chambers, however, were
based on their memories of events twelve to fifteen years earlier. Vassiliev's notebooks offer contemporaneous KGB documentation that corroborates all of the main elements of the story the three provided.

Hede Massing in testimony at the second Hiss trial (1949-5o) and in
her 1951 memoir related that Boris Bazarov, her KGB superior, instructed her to meet with Hiss and evaluate him. Massing stated that in
the fall of 1935 she met Hiss at Noel Field's apartment, a meeting confirmed in Akhmerov's 1936 report above. She wrote that after dinner she
and Hiss bantered about whose apparatus Field would join; neither one
admitted which organization employed them. She also related Field's report of his indiscreet response to Hiss's recruitment effort and of the severe chastisement she received from her KGB superiors for what had
happened. Whittaker Chambers also testified about the incident at the
Hiss trials and in his memoir, stating that Hiss had reported his meeting
with Massing (confirming Akhmerov's prediction to Moscow that Hiss
"no doubt informed his superiors about the meeting"), as well as his attempt to recruit Field and Field's response that he already worked for a
Soviet network."

Noel Field, unlike Chambers and Massing, remained a committed
Communist his entire life. In 1949 he toured Eastern Europe looking for
employment to avoid returning to the United States and being drawn
into the Hiss trials. Unfortunately for him, Stalin was purging the new
Communist regimes, and the KGB needed a Typhoid Mary who could be
used to infect those marked for removal with the bacillus of betrayal of
the Communist cause. Field was arrested and forced to confess to hav ing been an American superspy who used his position in Switzerland at
the League of Nations and later as director of Unitarian war relief in
World War II to recruit refugee Communists, later the leaders of the
postwar Communist regimes of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and
East Germany, as agents of American intelligence. Those implicated in
Field's coerced confessions were arrested, imprisoned, and a number executed. After Stalin's death in early 1953, East European Communist authorities sought to undo the damage done to their regimes by the absurd
purge by rehabilitating those falsely accused. Hungarian security police
(and later the security authorities of other East European Communist
regimes) asked Field, in prison in the Hungarian People's Republic, to
provide an uncoerced, accurate account of his activities to assist not only
in his own rehabilitation but also that of those falsely accused in his earlier confessions.