Whittaker Chambers, an America who spied for the Soviet Union but later defected to the FBI and exposed the Soviet's deep penetration of the US Government
AIM, 4 Feb 10: A library featuring the personal papers of anti-communist hero Whittaker Chambers is being planned on the site of his farm in Maryland. Unfortunately, local authorities are considering a water project that could damage part of the property. Chambers’ son John is asking for help to save the farm. Time is of the essence.
Whittaker Chambers blew the whistle on the Communist penetration of our government and exposed Soviet spy Alger Hiss.
Alger Hiss became the first acting secretary-general of the United Nations, causing it to be dubbed “the house that Hiss built.” Hiss also advised President Franklin Roosevelt at the Yalta conference, which defined post-World War II Europe and betrayed Eastern European nations to Soviet control.
The farm is the scene of the famous pumpkin patch where the “pumpkin papers” had been hidden by Chambers before being turned over to the House Committee on un-American Activities. The “papers” were actually microfilm copies of secret and stolen State Department documents given to Chambers by Hiss for transmission to the Soviet Union. They constituted absolute proof of Hiss’s guilt. The patch today is part of the lawn. . . .
. . . . The case gripped the nation after the end of World War II and Chambers’ charges that top State Department official Alger Hiss was a communist and Soviet spy were proven in court. Chambers went on to write Witness, which not only described the details of the case and his effort to tell the truth about communist penetration of the highest levels of the U.S. Government, but served as a basis for the establishment of the modern conservative movement. Chambers maintained that the nation’s only hope of surviving was in maintaining its spiritual foundation, belief in God, and commitment to freedom. Chambers passed away in 1961. Hiss died in 1996.
While the “pumpkin papers” are remembered as the most direct evidence of the communist penetration of the U.S. Government, Chambers himself wrote that the evidence could also be seen in the policies adopted by the government under the influence of Soviet agents.
He wrote, “In the persons of Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White, the Soviet military intelligence sat close to the heart of the United States Government.” He called it “a situation with few parallels in history” in which “the agents of an enemy power were in a position to do much more than purloin documents. They were in a position to influence the nation’s foreign policy in the interests of the nation’s chief enemy…” Chambers said “That power to influence policy had always been the ultimate purpose of the Communist Party’s infiltration.” Chambers emphasized in his book Witness that these secret communists not only served the interests of the Soviet Union but had promoted the triumph of communism in China. . . .
♦ CI CENTRE COURSE: 501–An Overview of Critical Counterintelligence Issues
