Whittaker Chambers and "The Americans"

Whittaker Chambers and "The Americans"

(c) Copyright (2016) by Kathleen Spaltro

All Rights Reserved

A compulsively watchable television series, "The Americans" concerns two unhappily married KGB agents. They pose as an all-American couple owning a travel agency while living in suburban Washington, DC, with their genuinely American children. An American counterintelligence officer lives next door. These Soviet agents conduct covert operations at the behest of Moscow Center in Ronald Reagan's Cold-War Washington during a period of heightened US-Soviet tensions. Married as cover, they also had their two American-born children as cover.

The most interesting parts of the drama depict their conflicting feelings, within themselves and between them, about their roles as spies, spouses, and parents. This well-acted series portrays complex human feelings breaking through all the lies and deception--real feelings about each other as spouses, about their American kids, about their training to be killers and spies for their cause, about their victims and enemies.

In itself, this TV series rivets my attention. Although it is fiction, its situation apparently derived from a true story. Indeed, I always find stories about Western and Eastern intelligence and counterintelligence interesting--whether they are fictional stories, like John le Carré's George Smiley novels, or real accounts, like those about the Cambridge Spies or about Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss. The whole Chambers/Hiss saga is fascinating.

Friends, fellow American citizens, and fellow Soviet agents, according to Chambers, Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss belonged to a spy ring that operated during the New Deal years, engaged in espionage, and also  influenced federal government policymaking. Sam Tanenhaus's "Whittaker Chambers" asserts, "the Soviets assembled a massive North American espionage network that reached a peak of efficiency during the war, recruiting more than one hundred agents who penetrated the departments of State, War, Treasury, the Office of Strategic Services (the wartime precursor to the CIA), the War Production Board, even the FBI."

Chambers left the service of Moscow in the late Thirties after experiencing intense anguish created by the suppression of dissent among American communists, the show trials and executions in Russia of comrades fallen out of ideological favor, reports about the murders of people whom he knew or knew of, Soviet actions during the Spanish Civil War, and, finally, the nonaggression pact between Stalin and Hitler—the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop accord. Fearing Nazi acquisition of Soviet-acquired intelligence about the United States, Chambers alerted the United States Department of State in 1939 about some of his knowledge. The FBI did not focus on this intelligence. Several years later, after Hitler's defeat, news about another Washington-based Soviet spy ring emerged, and Chambers was then subpoenaed to testify to the House Un-American Activities Committee about what he knew.

The postwar focus on spying by American citizens for our former wartime ally, the Soviet Union, made both Chambers and Hiss famous, ruined both of their lives, and jumpstarted the career of the young Congressman Richard M. Nixon (R-California). Eventually, it led to the ugliness of Senator Joseph McCarthy's (R-Wisconsin) campaign to smear political dissidents with the charge of treason. Chambers considered McCarthy's reckless demagoguery disastrous for responsible anti-communism: "for the Right to tie itself in any way to Senator McCarthy is suicide. Even if he were not what, poor man, he has become, he can't lead anybody because he can't think."

McCarthyism confused the real treason of spies with the unpopular but constitutionally protected dissent of citizens. Conversely, many who protested the McCarthyite attack on the civil liberties of blacklisted citizens and upheld the innocence of Hiss minimized or denied the real threat posed by espionage. Even today, this confusion of two very different issues distorts much discussion of the historical record.

Commenting about Chambers's autobiography, "Witness," a friend of mine asserted, "It is one of the great under-appreciated American autobiographies. There is little chance of it getting taught much, given its length and its politics, but it's a very moving book." "Witness" explains what had attracted Chambers to communism, what had led to his membership in the American Communist Party and then to his service in the Soviet underground, and what eventually had motivated his rejection of communism. His title bears many meanings—witnessing treason, testifying as a congressional committee witness, bearing witness to his Christian (Quaker) faith, being a martyr or witness in his own life—a casualty of ideological war. Neither political nor economic, the book's tone and focus are eschatological/apocalyptic and religious/spiritual, for Chambers had rejected communism, not for capitalism, but for Christianity and for freedom. He depicts communism as the struggle of one faith against another.

Indeed with its emphasis on faith against faith, "Witness" provides the most insightful of commentaries on "The Americans." Believing, both as a communist and as an anticommunist, that faithless materialism was strangling the West, Chambers remembers about his attraction to communism, "it offered me … faith and a vision, something for which to live and something for which to die. It demanded of me those things which have always stirred what is best in men—courage, poverty, self-sacrifice, discipline, intelligence, my life, and, at need, my death." Chambers admired the dedication of many of his fellow communists. He deplored the ills of Western culture, manifested—for example—in the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. But, aghast at the pitiless workings of totalitarian dictatorship, at the use of terror to enforce policy, Chambers lost faith in communism because he heard the screams of those it murdered. He lost faith in the easy justification of their deaths.

first appeared in The Woodstock Independent