The Redhunter (27 page)

The telephone rang. Joe picked it up. “Yeah, Don. I’m running a little late.” He put the phone down. Don Surine could return
to the office.

He turned back to his visitor. “What does this lady want me to do?”

“You’re to tell me yes or no. If the answer is yes, you’re to say when. ‘When’ means—she warned—that you’ve set aside a minimum
of four hours. One hour driving each way, two hours with her to hear her story. If you say yes, we’ll tell her. She’ll call
her special number twice a day until she gets the word. When the time is set, one hour before you’re ready to go, she calls
our number and gives us driving instructions. I then drive you out.”

Joe said nothing for a few seconds, then stood up and walked to the stove nearby. He filled his coffee cup.

“Y’know, Henry. I’m just wondering what the FBI—this is hypothetical, of course—I know you’ve got nothing to do with the FBI—or
the CIA—but suppose I am a trainee at either of those places and the training officer takes me through a security exercise.

“Situation: A nice guy comes to the door of a page-one hot senator, says interesting things, and Page-One Hot Senator is invited
to make a date with this nice stranger, step into his car, and disappear … for only four hours, of course.

“I’m wondering what my instructor would say if I answered, ‘Sure, why not?’ ”

“You would be dropped from the trainee section and sent for work at some other part of the organization,” McCarthy’s visitor
said matter-of-factly. And then quickly went on, “But you know, Senator, that’s the problem with categorical rules. Any rules.
They just don’t cover every situation—like this one, for instance. And there is, in this situation, a very special lure. We’ve
looked at the two people the lady told us about. If it’s true they’re Communists, and worked for Soviet intelligence, then
they’re headline-making material. Page-one hot senators don’t mind headlines.”

“Listen, Henry. Sure, I don’t mind headlines. That’s how politicians get votes and how they lobby for their policies. I’m
also interested in doing something about a country that just lost a world war, know what I mean? It was a free Poland that
the war was all about, back in 1939.”

“I don’t deny your sincerity, Senator. I’m simply saying that in the hypothetical situation you’re describing, the trainee
should also be told that the page-one hot senator is looking very, very hard for the
kind of information that the nice stranger says he can lead him to—if he’ll make the date and reserve four hours.”

Joe McCarthy always thought instinctively, and acted impulsively.

“Okay, Henry. I’ll scrub other appointments for this afternoon. Tell me where to be at two
P.M.
”

Senator McCarthy did exactly as requested. He got out of the car at Sequoia and Fourth and told the kid (a volunteer driver
doing a paper in Georgetown) to wait until he returned. He didn’t tell him to keep his eyes away from where McCarthy would
then walk to, but he didn’t feel he needed to do that. He walked west (“away from the Liggett’s drugstore”) one block, turned
left, and found himself at the specified address. He gave the shabbily dressed doorman a name, “Joseph McPherson,” and, after
a quick phone check, was told to go to apartment 6M. She opened the door.

McCarthy correctly assumed that the woman who let him in wordlessly was the object of all this feverish curiosity. The apartment
was neat and sparely furnished. Perhaps it was rented as a furnished apartment. She motioned him to an armchair, and he could
see that her arm was shaking. She wasn’t old, but she looked fragile, and her voice sometimes broke. She asked him if he wanted
tea; he shook her hand and said, “Coke all right?” She produced it, sat down, and they talked for two hours.

“She’s an aristocrat, Jeanie. With sad, sad eyes, and not much of a smile. But she knows how to tell her story, the part of
the story I got. There’s apparently a lot more. And she cares a lot.”

“Who is she?”

“I won’t write down her name, not anywhere. I’ll refer to her as—Ouspenskaya. Madame Ouspenskaya.”

At the office everyone who knew about her adopted the name quickly. “Maria Ouspenskaya.” Joe rolled the name about his tongue.
He
loved
it! and spoke with near proprietary expression about Hollywood’s venerable character, the slightly mysterious old lady with
the long, mellifluous Slavik name—oo-spen-SKY-ah—who was featured in film after film playing character parts, the classic
lady-not-to-be-crossed.

“I found her an authentic lady,” he told his inner staff, Don, Harry, Jean, and Mary. “She’s fragile, you can tell. She talks
with just a slight accent—Russian, Czech, something like that. But there’s grit there, and her story is completely, well—composed.
The background isn’t all that unusual. It was her husband, he’s dead, who joined the party. She strung along, became a true
believer, stayed on after he died. She did some courier work for somebody called ‘Allan,’ and in 1944 was told that two of
the people working in her division, one man, one woman, were fellow agents. She knew the man—a code clerk. The woman she knew
only by her secret agent name. They collaborated on one operation. After that she was told not to be in touch with her again.”

“What turned her?” Mary Haskell asked.

“Czechoslovakia. Masaryk was her—’devoted friend’ is how she put it. They were in college together and stayed friends till
she came to America, fifteen, twenty years ago.”

“Has she told the FBI her whole story?”

“No! That’s
their
point. Herpoint. She’s waiting for us. Waiting for McCarthy to weigh in on the problem. She’s suspicious that if all she
does is tell it to the FBI nothing will happen except that she’ll be in danger. She’s waiting for McCarthy, for me, to give
her case to the Tydings Committee as one more example of system failure, but I think there’s a surprise coming. The FBI are,
excuse me, Mary, excuse me, Jeanie, pissing in their pants. She wants to tell it to everybody and decided to do it to the
Tydings Committee.”

Joe had tried to get Ouspenskaya to go further with him than she had been willing to go in her first encounter with the FBI.
She had explained:

“I called the FBI in March. That was two years after the Czech coup. I dreaded it, dreaded it. But couldn’t put it off any
longer.”

McCarthy didn’t comment.

“But I decided to be very careful. I gave the FBI one folder of coded documents passed by me to Allan from our … code clerk.”
She didn’t offer his name.

“What did you expect the FBI to do?”

“I asked them to test the documents. To establish that they were top secret and that the … clerk had had access to them.”

“Why did you do that?”

“I wanted to find out if the FBI could verify my story. If yes, then I’d consider giving them more. Giving them the whole
story. If no—if they weren’t persuaded by the documents—then I’d just have to face it, face whatever prison they put me in.”

“What happened?”

“They moved quickly. By April they authenticated it. The documents told of results of tests conducted as late as January at
the Aberdeen Proving Grounds. Tests on antisubmarine detection devices and correspondence with British scientists. The FBI
moved quickly, but not as quickly as the code clerk. One day he was gone. Obviously he found out. And I would guess that he
knows who informed on him. I had one more conversation with my FBI contact. He said not to worry about the clerk. He said
Mr. Hoover wanted a ‘comprehensive counterintelligence’ operation. That would mean I’d have to stay right where I was and
just answer questions on the side for the FBI. That was when I knew I had to move quickly. I didn’t want that, to sit there
doing my job when somebody—I think I know who it is—sitting above me can play with me like—match-sticks.” She picked up the
matchbox, then thought to light a cigarette. She took a deep puff. “I want the whole story known. I saw you on television.
It was when you spoke about Jan Masaryk and the alleged suicide that I decided that you were the man. Your talk about Czechoslovakia—”

“St. Louis, in May.”

“I don’t remember where. But I remember thinking that you would do the right thing and get the public attention.”

“That,” McCarthy told the story, “was when she got really scared, when she figured the FBI planned a full-scale program built
around her staying in place, in her job at Commerce. So she packed her stuff and moved to … the new address. Didn’t tell anybody.

“Well.” McCarthy rose from his desk. “Tomorrow morning I’ll talk about her to the committee, tell about the code clerk spy,
about ‘Allan.’ Then I’ll reveal her real name. In the afternoon session, she’ll come in person and testify about the slipshod
security practices and how the code clerk got away even after she had given his name to the bureau. And the woman spy who’s
still there. And who knows what more.
That
should prove some of the points we’re trying to make.”

“You got hot stuff there, Joe,” Don Surine said.

“Yeah. I want to hear whoever is in charge of security at Aberdeen Proving Grounds and related clients to explain Maria Ouspenskaya
and her little network.”

“Maybe it was a big network, Joe?” Mary put in.

“Naw. The Communists don’t operate that way. They try to keep down the number of people who can be exposed by any one defection.
You know that, Mary.”

“Well, Whittaker Chambers named a dozen, Elizabeth Bentley more than a dozen.”

“True. Well, we’ll see. Tomorrow.”

That night McCarthy and Jean Kerr worked late. “What do you want from Calder’s?” she asked—Calder’s was the delicatessen that
delivered (excellent service for senators, good service for congressmen) to Capitol offices.

“BLT on rye, with chips and coleslaw. And honey, order up a bottle of wine.”

“Chianti okay?”

He nodded and resumed writing on the legal pad that never seemed to give out, because when Mary saw it was running short,
she’d bind in a fresh one.

Two hours later he said, a note of weariness in his voice, “Jeanie, come sit by me for a bit.”

She affected a reluctance to get up from her work, but soon sat in the chair Mary used to take dictation. Joe reached for
her hand.

“Do you realize, Jeanie, the importance of tomorrow? Ouspenskaya—her real name is Kalli, Josefa Kalli—was never caught. She
worked with this guy Allan. Then this code clerk comes in and out and does his bit. The bureau has documented that the files
she stole were high-security stuff. We’ve got the equivalent of the same proof Whittaker Chambers had against Hiss, traceable
secret documents. Both she and Allan sailed through security even though Ouspenskaya’s husband was a declared Communist. We’re
getting deep down now, Jeanie, deep down, and tomorrow is going to get the senior senator from Maryland hopping.”

“Joe, what’s the
matter? Why
don’t our people catch your … your Ouspenskayas?”

Joe took his hand from hers and stood up. “It’s one part because there’s sloppiness out there and one part because their immediate
superiors
don’t think it’s such a big deal
You heard Senator Green. He said—in effect—Well, there are over three thousand lawyers who belong to the National Lawyers
Guild, so—so what?”

She looked at him, then tilted her head, her lips slightly parted. And then, “Joe, do you think after the Tydings investigation
is over you can just, well, move into something else?”

He sat back down on his chair and took her hand again. “It’s rough. … I’m not sure it’s ever possible to back away, not from
this one.”

“I hate to look at the papers in the morning. What they say about you. They’ll say
anything.”
She pulled a handkerchief from a side pocket and turned her head. She wasn’t the crying type, she said to herself. Joe caressed
her shoulders from where he sat. “We’ve got to get it done, Jeanie. And the Ouspenskaya lady, she’ll make a lot of difference,
putting her case on the record. She’ll be, well,
our
Whittaker Chambers. You know we’ve got to see it all through, Jean.”