Another Witness

Another Witness Reporters and spectators were paying scant attention one morning last week when Nathaniel Weyl, 41, a thin, broad-shouldered writer, came forward to take the witness stand in a fourth-floor committee room in the Senate Office Building. "Mr. Weyl," said Counsel Robert Morris of the Senate subcommittee on internal security, "have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?" "Yes, I have, Mr. Morris," said Weyl firmly, and the room quieted to attentive silence. A few moments later reporters were scribbling: as a member of a Communist cell in Washington in 1934, Nathaniel Weyl swore that he attended secret Communist meetings with Alger Hiss, and saw Hiss pay his party dues.

Secret Assignment. It was an important new underpinning to the case against Hiss which Whittaker Chambers had been forced to build almost singlehanded. Weyl dragged deeply on cigarette after cigarette as he told of joining the party through the National Student League in January 1933, while he was a graduate student in economics at Columbia. When, he went to work in Washington for the Agricultural Adjustment Administration in late 1933, he was assigned to a secret AAA Communist cell by Harold Ware, named by Chambers and other witnesses as the boss of the Washington Communist apparatus. Weyl, a deliberate, conservative witness, was positive that he had seen Hiss at "more than two" cell meetings while Hiss was an assistant counsel to AAA. Others in the cell, said Weyl, included Lee Pressman, John J. Abt, Victor Perlo, Nathan Witt, Charles Kramer and Henry H. Collins Jr.

The names echoed the list of top Washington Communists which both Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley gave the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1948. Weyl's testimony, however, was in the nature of a foundation, for he was describing a period two years before the era detailed by Chambers. In 1934, said Weyl, the AAA cell devoted itself mostly to studies of Marxism, and was composed of hand-picked bright young men whose prospects in Government were better than average. Weyl did not know Chambers. According to Chambers' testimony, Harold Ware picked these same bright young men for his apparatus in 1936, and provided the direct link between them and J. Peters, head of the Communist underground in the U.S.

Open Break. Weyl lost contact with the cell in mid-1934, he told the committee, after persuading Harold Ware to allow him to give up his AAA job. For a while Weyl went to the Middle West as an organizer for the Communist United Farmers League, then turned principally to writing and speechmaking. He broke openly with the party at the time of the Nazi-Soviet pact in 1939, "culminating a period of doubt and indecision." But not until the outbreak of the Korean war (five months after Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury in his second trial) did Weyl go to the FBI and offer his evidence. Why had he waited so long to tell his story? His answer gave a clue to the reluctance which may keep other ex-Communists from coming forward. "It was a feeling that I had an obligation to protect people who had been associated with me in the Communist Party and who, I thought, might very well have broken quietly," said he. "[After Korea] we were at war. The Communist Party is an organization mobilized for the specific purpose of committing treason. I didn't think I could continue to be silent."

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