Eventually he would become disillusioned with Soviet-driven operation and leave the party. He would provide valuable information to authorities who were looking to prevent any attempted overthrow of the United States government.
Sam Krieger, known as Comrade Krieger, directed young Whittaker Chambers, in addition to his service to the CPUSA, to attend meetings which would further his ideological formation. The CPUSA wanted to ensure that new members were ‘oriented’ or ‘orientated’ - Chambers recalls these as favorite words among the party’s leaders - to communist doctrine.
Chambers describes his entry into advanced communist indoctrination. Note the use of the word ‘violent’ - the CPUSA was explicit in its quest for a violent revolution:
He pressed me to join a study group to which he and his wife belonged, with some ten or fifteen others. The group was led by Scott Nearing. It met once a week, sometimes in the Rand School, the Socialist headquarters on East 15th Street, sometimes in a Communist office. Its members were trying to formulate (another favorite word) “the law of social revolution.” The members of the group, singly, or in teams, were writing papers on each of the great modern revolutions. When the papers were completed, the group would ponder upon the result and from it deduce the unifying law that underlay all violent political change. Scott Nearing and some of the more “developed” students would then formulate this revolutionary law in a study which would form a preface to the book that was to be made of all the papers.
As an extension of the USSR, the CPUSA hoped to bring an end - a violent end - to not only the United States government, but to civil liberties and property rights enjoyed by American citizens. The insistence on violence was meant to ensure the complete destruction of not only the form of government, but of the society and culture which had arisen around Western Civilization’s concept of individual liberty.
Alger Hiss was not only a key Soviet operative, but also a networking leader among scores of Soviet spies inside the United States. After Chambers left the CPUSA, he would offer evidence which confirmed Hiss’s guilt.
Hiss did not work for the famous KGB, which wasn’t formed until 1954, but rather for the GRU, a military intelligence agency in the USSR which had a clandestine New York office. Hiss would funnel confidential information out of the State Department to the Moscow, and then receive instructions from the USSR about how he should nudge U.S. foreign policy into one direction or another.
As an upper-level State Department official, Hiss met personally with FDR and was able to suggest or recommend policy options to the president. Robert Novak writes:
Hiss, as a senior State Department official, had in fact been a secret agent of the Fourth Section of Soviet Military Intelligence.
Because of his experience as a CPUSA insider, Whittaker Chambers was able to provide information about the underworld doings of criminals like Scott Nearing, Sam Krieger, and Alger Hiss. For his work, Chambers received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, posthumously, in 1984.
