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PERSON FILE · 1 April 1901 – 9 July 1961

Whittaker Chambers

Former Communist courier and Time editor whose 1948 testimony, documents and 'pumpkin papers' led to Alger Hiss's perjury conviction and made him a central figure of the early Cold War.

1901–1961

3 min read · 4 sources, 3 primary

Portrait: Whittaker Chambers, photographed for the New York World-Telegram, 1948. Fred Palumbo, World Telegram staff photographer. Wikimedia Commons, Public domain.

Born Jay Vivian Chambers in Philadelphia and raised in an unhappy household, Chambers left Columbia University in 1925 after a controversy over a play he wrote and joined the Communist Party that year4. He wrote and edited for the Daily Worker and New Masses before the party ordered him underground in 19324.

In the underground

By his own later account, which a federal jury accepted, Chambers spent the mid-1930s as a courier between Communist sources in Washington and Soviet military intelligence, the GRU1,4. The appeals court summarized his trial testimony: he was "sent to Washington to act as a courier or liaison man to gather information from Communists or their sympathizers there and to take it to the Communist representative of Russia in New York"1. He said that in early 1938 Alger Hiss of the State Department brought documents home about once every two weeks, and that Chambers took them to Baltimore to be photographed and returned them before daylight1. His last Soviet superior was a GRU officer he knew as Colonel Bykov4.

Frightened by Stalin's purges and the murder of defectors, Chambers broke with the underground in 1938 and went into hiding with his wife and children. Before leaving he hid a package of documents, his "life preserver", with a relative4.

Warnings unheeded

After the Nazi-Soviet pact of August 1939, the journalist Isaac Don Levine took Chambers to Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle, to whom he named a number of officials, including Alger and Donald Hiss4. Berle kept his notes, but nothing followed; President Roosevelt reportedly dismissed the matter4. The FBI interviewed Chambers in 1942 and in detail in May 1945, and his story, the CIA and NSA history notes, "dovetailed" with what Elizabeth Bentley and Igor Gouzenko reported in 19452. Meanwhile he had joined Time in April 1939 and risen to senior editor4.

The Hiss case

Called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities on 3 August 1948, a few days after Bentley, Chambers named Hiss as a member of a secret Communist group in Washington but did not at first accuse him of espionage1,4. Hiss denied knowing him, then identified him at a confrontation on 17 August as a freelance writer he had known as "George Crosley"1. Hiss sued for libel. Pressed during the suit, Chambers produced on 17 November 1948 typed copies of State Department documents and four handwritten memoranda. The appeals court counted forty-three typewritten documents, all but one typed on the Hisses' Woodstock typewriter, all dated in the first months of 19381. On 2 December, answering a House committee subpoena, he produced from a hollowed pumpkin on his Maryland farm five rolls of microfilm, two developed and three undeveloped, including photographs of State Department documents1,4.

Chambers admitted that he had lied in earlier testimony, including about the date of his break, and he was never charged4. Hiss was convicted of perjury in January 19501.

Witness

Chambers resigned from Time in December 19484. His memoir Witness (1952), an account of his conversion from Communism to Christianity and of the Hiss case, became a bestseller and a founding text of postwar American conservatism4. He was a senior editor of National Review from 1957 to 19594. He died of a heart attack on his farm in Westminster, Maryland, on 9 July 19614. President Reagan awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously in 19844.

Key dates

  1. 1925 Joins the Communist Party.
  2. 1932 Goes underground as a courier for Soviet military intelligence.
  3. 1938 Breaks with the underground and goes into hiding with his family.
  4. September 1939 Names alleged Communists in government to Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle.
  5. 3 August 1948 Testifies before the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
  6. 17 November 1948 Produces typed State Department copies and handwritten notes in Hiss's libel suit.
  7. 2 December 1948 Hands investigators microfilm hidden in a pumpkin on his Maryland farm.
  8. 1952 Publishes his memoir, Witness.

Sources

  1. Court record United States v. Hiss, 185 F.2d 822 (2d Cir. 1950), Caselaw Access Project, Harvard Law School (1950-12-07).
  2. CIA Venona: Soviet Espionage and the American Response, 1939–1957 (Introduction), Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency (1996).
  3. Congress Report of the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy, Appendix A, US Government Printing Office (1997).
  4. Wikipedia Whittaker Chambers, Wikipedia.
  5. Wikipedia English Wikipedia article (used for cross-checking).

Elsewhere in the files

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