Gods of deception, p.51
Gods of Deception, page 51
“A survivor’s manual,” she offered. “But essentially a work of literature—which sets it apart, which gives it enduring power.”
“Yes.” Weinstein gazed at the young woman with a hint of awe, as if sensing some repressed indefinable power in her graceful demeanor. “I’m sure he’d insist on the soul’s journey to God, but yes, the GRU would probably have dispatched him even earlier, before he defected, when he was ordered back to Moscow during the purges—a dead man walking, should he have followed the orders from Moscow Center.”
“So, in theory,” she continued, “your civilians—Duggan, Smith, White, and George Altmann—should have been left alone, especially since they had bowed out quietly and weren’t threatening to spill the beans.”
“There are exceptions, of course, situations that might require special handling.”
“You mean threatening Alger Hiss … or what Hiss was protecting?”
Weinstein picked up the sketch of a bespectacled Lauchlin Currie. “White House aide working hand in glove with Harry Hopkins, a facilitator for Hopkins and FDR and Alger Hiss. Fled to Colombia before the trial.” He placed the Currie sketch facing outward now with the others, then picked up the sketch of Noel Field and flipped it outward, too. “Held incommunicado behind the Iron Curtain in a Hungarian prison during the trial and for years after. Hopkins, of course, was dead by then. While Alger Hiss remained unperturbed, formidable, and in control, and in control of Priscilla, even if she was cracking under the pressure.” He flipped the sketches of Duggan, Smith, and White, pondering, as if searching for the most apt expression, the precise word. “Undependable … running scared.”
George stood, suddenly agitated.
“George Altmann was a pipsqueak,” he said, raising his voice, “an artist, hardly political, and he’d turned over these damn sketches to Edward Dimock.”
“He panicked.” Weinstein sighed and shook his head. “If Edward Dimock had shared the sketches with the defense team, with Hiss— well. A man who panics, who is running scared, is undependable, not to be trusted to hold his tongue under interrogation. And he’d already squealed to the FBI once.”
“Bastards!” she exclaimed, reaching out to George.
“He never shared the sketches with his colleagues on the defense team, so he confirms in his memoir.”
“Still,” Weinstein continued, a hint of doubt flickering in his eyes, “to have ordered execution squads to eliminate the three men—four— in question—possibly Remington later—systematically so on orders from Moscow Center, the rationale would have had to have been larger than the guilt or innocence of Hiss. The level of Stalin’s paranoia may have been extreme but the world Hiss, White, Hopkins, and Currie had helped bring into being at Yalta would have had to have been under immediate threat to trigger—what shall we call it?—such drastic action.”
Wendy stood now as well and reached to the sketch of Harry Dexter White, noting his oval face, shiny hairless forehead, and rimless glasses; even in repose, there was a certain rigidity and fiery intolerant cast to his features.
“But … the very people who had, what, given them what they wanted?”
“White had already done his worst; he was finished, a sick man, but possibly close to breaking. Maybe his heart attack saved them the trouble.”
She pointed to the sketch of Laurence Duggan.
“Long since served his purpose, not just a useless asset but a security risk should he break and spill the beans on the others. Even his brother mentioned he had a weak stomach and had been ordered to drink milk to try to settle it.”
“And Smith?”
“A minor bit player, but if he’d testified on the transfer of Hiss’s Ford—well … Or, as you point out, knowing about the mural just doors down from his office may have been the clincher on his doom.”
George nodded intently. “Why suddenly … so certain?”
Weinstein sighed, a look of wonderment on his face as he again pondered the sketches, as if they were specters rising before him. Slowly, deliberately, he turned to the last of them: husband and wife.
“So alive,” he murmured, more to himself than to George. “And how odd for you, both grandfathers involved in the Hiss trial.”
“Not by happenstance. Edward Dimock tried to return the sketches to the artist’s son, by way of his daughter, who became my mother.” George adjusted the sketches of Alger and Priscilla Hiss, aligning them with the others. “But you didn’t answer my question.”
Weinstein smiled and sat back in his seat, waving them to their chairs. He picked up his phone to call his assistant and cancel his next appointment. He motioned to the far corners of his spacious office, as if attempting to embrace both time and space. “The world as we think we know it, the comforts of memory, the past that is never the past—or as Faulkner put, ‘It’s not even past.’”
“But doubt,” prompted George, “as you suggested, a scholar’s strong right arm.”
“As a scholar … well, it was this feeling I got sitting with those ancient intelligence officers, as I told you, legendary colonels of the KGB and GRU. I expected, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the breakup of the Soviet Union, to find shattered and disillusioned doddering men who had seen their life’s work come to nothing. But instead—albeit they were broke, for sure, and wanted the money for their cooperation from Random House—I found men who had to fight to hold back all that they knew, whose glinting eyes and garrulous lips fairly drooled with pearls of information, hints, feints of recollection, teasing me with allusions, dropping names like Harry Hopkins and Henry Morgenthau as if they had been mere puppets dancing at their fingertips. How many times I watched”—Weinstein paused to hold out his hands in front of him, his fingers prancing like a marionettier—“their rheumatoid shaking hands, veined and sun-damaged, their fingers moving in a show of exquisite skill … It was always ‘Ah, my good friend Weinstein, if you only knew—if you only knew.’ The diplomatic bags were always full to bursting, they claimed. And they would make swimming motions with their flattened palms, as if seeing those packed C-47s take off, heading for Siberia and then Moscow Center. They bragged about flying trunks of information out on the Dakotas from our air bases in Great Falls and Fairbanks. They would never divulge the whole story—they were still KGB to the bone—just enough to drive you crazy with anticipation of the next dollop of honey. Fragments, names, places, events—see if you were quick enough to pick up on the context, if you might provide them with something in return. A good intelligence man never gives anything away for free. Except when he’s had enough vodka to loosen his tongue and his pride gets the better of him.”
“Could you get out of them whether certain people had been murdered by a hit squad?” Wendy asked, still agitated.
“Never. Even if they’d known about it, they would never have admitted to anything so distasteful. They might brag about the liquidation of an enemy, but not the liquidation of an innocent witness. It would offend their delicate consciences—that terror was ever resorted to: Stalin’s mother’s milk.”
“What about records?” she asked.
“Probably verbal communications; anything put to paper would have been destroyed to protect reputations. Better to employ the apparatus to destroy a man’s reputation the way Edward Dimock did Chambers’s. The ad hominem smear was second nature, a totalitarian tactic refined to the purity of an art form: to tar and feather Chambers with insanity, homosexuality, and God knows what perversions of body and spirit they could cook up in that witches’ brew of a pathological personality.”
George stirred uneasily in his chair.
“Like I said, he makes it clear in his memoir, he’s not proud of that tactic. In a way, the memoir is a kind of an apologia,”—he glanced at Wendy, a silent admission that the word had obviously been hers first—“for—what?—a failure of nerve, failure of character, failure to live up to his impossibly high standards.”
“He wouldn’t be the first. The apparatus corrupted everything it touched,” said Weinstein darkly.
“What are you suggesting?”
“If you could provide me with a copy of his memoir, I might be more specific—more helpful to your finding what you want. That memoir, you said … written five years ago—so already an historical document, before the new …”
“You’re not suggesting—you said ‘corrupted.’”
“You see, that was one of the things that fascinated me when I went through the defense files: It was quite clear that much of the dirt that was dug up on Chambers had to have come from Communist Party or even KGB sources.” Weinstein again raised an inquiring finger. “Which poses the interesting paradox, all these lawyers from white-shoe firms, Harvard men of the establishment, like Edward Dimock: Where did they think the dirt was coming from and provided by whom? And where did the funds come from, tens of thousands of dollars, for the two trials and then the appeals?”
“You mean,” said George, “how did Edward Dimock resolve that paradox … of the Soviets and Harvard Law pulling on the same oar?”
“You’ve had the advantage of reading his memoir.” Weinstein looked at them both knowingly. “You tell me. How much did he suspect?”
George looked intently into Weinstein’s ironic, if not sardonic, eyes, not a little spellbound.
“You mean,” he asked, “when the experience, the moment of the thing, turns into mere data … photons from a distant star? When the scientists, the academics, take over the ruins of our past lives.”
“Ah, you mentioned you were once an astrophysicist.” The national archivist leaned forward with a glittering, intent stare. “Why, it must be a little like playing God to look out at all those lost worlds, all that lost time, and grapple with the big picture—which only you can see, for the first time, a picture that rightly seen—or I suppose analyzed—changes the very nature of reality.”
George nodded, as if transfixed at the turn of inquiry. “He, the Judge, in his memoir, struggles, as if the radiance of Hiss’s smiling face, the light of such integrity, still obscures the truth, like a cloud of cosmic dust and gas, rendering even a relatively close galaxy near invisible.”
At this, Wendy laughed out loud. Then suddenly she leaned forward, tossing her head, her blond hair ashimmer, giving in to her instinct for casual flirtation, as if her force of personality was more than enough to navigate that invisible field of gravitation that hovered so tantalizingly before them.
“Once an astrophysicist”—and she raised her eyebrows at George— “always an astrophysicist.” Again she smiled fetchingly, an ingénue in bloom. “But the memoir is less about facts; it is way more nuanced than that. It’s really more a literary work, like Chambers’s Witness: what’s between the lines. The Judge’s impressions of people and things and moments are far more revealing—the life of the spirit. Love, too, I suppose. Did George mention that his stargazing includes letters from Priscilla Hiss to Edward Dimock?”
George made a face, something between dismissive and disgruntled (that she’d played his ace card), while Weinstein seemed to freeze with anticipation in his swivel chair, as if struggling to preserve his savoir faire.
“Letters,” echoed Weinstein, as if making light of the whole thing, “imagine such archaic methods of communication in our disposable e-mail age.”
George, retrieving his poker face, waved a hand as if to dispel a silly rumor or change the subject.
“Alger Hiss must have been thrilled with all your research.”
“He was a very angry man when my editor at Alfred Knopf told him in my presence that I’d changed my mind about his innocence in Perjury. Never spoke to me again. And strange to say, I think he even expected the Soviets to cover his ass after 1989, to officially absolve him of ever having been a GRU agent. They did, halfheartedly. And in the brief window when we had access to the KGB files, they never confirmed he’d been an agent, but the proof slipped out anyway—that, along with the Venona decrypts. I often wonder in his last days if Alger was bitter about that, that Moscow hadn’t done more to protect him. Or more to the point, protect his—White’s, Currie’s, and Hopkins’s— achievements, which some might argue included the enslavement of much of Eastern Europe and China.”
Weinstein carefully slid the sketches of Alger Hiss and the others, so accused, forward across his desk: four horsemen of the apocalypse.
“Achievements?”
“I tell you what—I have a proposition for you. Let me help you on your journey, for it will long outlast mine. And surely Edward Dimock’s, as well, as your grandfather nears the end of his.”
Weinstein rose from his chair, went to a nearby bookshelf, slid out a thick volume, and carefully placed it on the desk.
“My personal copy of Witness, a first edition. When I first read it, I considered Chambers the devil incarnate, a stooge in the employ of Nixon and the FBI, a Manchurian candidate of the right wing. Now, whatever one thinks of Chambers’s politics, his religious faith, his chronicle has turned out to be an intimate, fascinating story”—a nod of acknowledgment to the young woman seated before him—“of a certain time and place in our history, a milieu of the underground that has largely escaped recording elsewhere. Irreplaceable. And yet”—he raised a cautionary finger—“there are two glaring anomalies. As I noted to you, Chambers failed to mention Edward Dimock in Witness, who had treated him so badly in the trial. Why such an oversight—even for a Quaker? He didn’t spare others who had tried to harm him. Years ago, when I was researching Perjury, I turned up an old friend of Chambers, an ex-Communist who is named anonymously in Witness, who confirmed almost everything about Chambers’s narrative. But even he couldn’t explain the omission of Edward Dimock. And even later, in the years before his death, there is no record from the lips of any of Chambers’s friends—and I asked this of Bill Buckley—who ever heard him say a bad word about Edward Dimock.”
Weinstein flipped the pages to a section heavily underlined and annotated.
“And the second glaring anomaly, the tale of Chambers’s trip with Alger and Priscilla Hiss to Harry Dexter White’s summer home in Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire. Chambers included details of the trip in Witness, even though those precise details about the trip were disparaged by the defense in the trial, and all my subsequent research was unable to confirm any part of the story—about this road trip on Route 202—through Pennsylvania and north to White’s Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire, summer home. Except—except that Alger and Priscilla Hiss were indeed absent for five days, not the four claimed by Chambers, which he testified to under oath and later wrote about in Witness. I have a written affidavit from the Hisses’ baby-sitter that they were away for five days at the end of August 1937. In Witness, Chambers could easily have left out this road trip, or at least corrected the time line by including the extra day—the fifth day … what delayed them and how they spent those twenty-four hours. Something, more details, specifics that might have nailed down the veracity of the thing. Especially since the trip serves no essential purpose—no reason for Chambers to have included it, except another confirmation that he and Alger had been together after 1936 per the second perjury count. Yet he stuck to the damn thing in Witness, like a dog to its bone, and in interviews before his death: this oddity, this anomalous need on his part to record—memorialize may not be too strong a word—a four-day automobile journey from Volta Place to Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire, to retrieve a useless paper on monetary reform in the Soviet Union from Harry Dexter White … when, if it happened, we know it lasted five days. Something is missing.”
“Time,” Wendy said. “Memory.”
“The Judge’s copy of Witness belonged to his wife, Annie; it was signed to her by Whittaker Chambers,” said George with a pained look.
“Oh my God!” she exclaimed, rising from her seat quickly and going to the office window. She closed her eyes a moment and took a deep breath. “George, the Judge’s—no, Annie’s copy of Witness, the part about the trip to Fitzwilliam, Annie underlined it and wrote in the margin, ‘She stoops to conquer—and how!’”
Weinstein drifted back in his chair, his eyes tightening with intense concentration or even apprehension. “The name of the Goldsmith play they attended by the Peterborough Players on the night of August 10, 1937—testified to by Chambers in the trial—the only night the play was presented, according to the FBI investigation.”
“One missing day you said,” murmured George, as if something in his mind had locked up and just as quickly slipped free. “Just a hurried perusal of Annie’s copy and the section on the trip to Fitzwilliam draws the eye for both her and the Judge’s comments in the margin.”
“Comments?”
“She seemed intent, well, on rubbing it in, that it was obvious, at least to her, that Alger and Priscilla Hiss and Chambers had been together on that road trip in August of 1937. While he scoffs, something to the effect of there not being a scrap of evidence.”
Weinstein became uncharacteristically still, as if frozen by some realization. He opened his mouth as if to speak, blinked rapidly, and then seemed to think better of the thought as he quickly swiveled around in his chair, needing to change tack.
“Well”—a convivial if not carefree tone—“I suggest you drive it, Volta Place to White’s country home in Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire. It’s still there. Lovely part of the world. I’ve made the trip. Stick to old meandering Route 202 all the way, fifty miles an hour tops, beautiful landscapes. It’s two days up, two days back.”
“Priscilla Hiss,” intoned Wendy in a dreamy voice, staring blankly, as if seeing the very page in Witness. “She loved that countryside.”
“She wrote about it in her letters?” asked Weinstein.
“No,” said George, glaring at Wendy.
“So”—Weinstein lifted his eyebrows and leaned forward—“here is my proposal. You provide me with a copy of Edward Dimock’s memoir and Priscilla Hiss’s letters—with my word of honor that I will not publish a word from them or about them without your specific approval, or until after your grandfather’s death—or until Norton publishes, if that is a concern. In turn, I will e-mail you with my thoughts and observations on the memoir, and respond likewise to your queries. And I will provide you with something more.” He bent down to a file drawer and extracted two documents, one thick, one just a few pages, and slid them across his desk. “How’s your Russian?”
