I Led 3 Lives

Herbert A. Philbrick

• Publisher: Burtyrki Books
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781839742156
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

I Led Three Lives: Citizen, Communist, Counterspy, first published in 1952, is a fascinating account of the author's infiltration into the American Communist party in the 1940's as a counterspy who then passed on his information to the FBI. Beginning as an advertising executive in Boston, Philbrick was inadvertently drawn into a front organization of the Communist Party. He was subsequently recruited by the U.S. Government to document Soviet efforts, operations and plans in the U.S.A. The book concludes with his testimony at the 1949 trial of the top eleven Communist Party-USA leaders. I Led Three Lives was a bestseller after its 1952 release, and was made into a popular television series of the same name. Included are five pages of illustrations.

CHAPTER ONE

Nine long years led me breathlessly down a tightrope to a small platform and a chair. It was a dozen paces through a doorway now to the end, almost within reach. The nearness made my prison seem smaller and more suffocating. I was held in the shadows of a darkened elevator. Outside the elevator door a special agent stood on guard. I must not be seen until the moment ripened.

It was 2:05 o’clock in the afternoon of April 6, 1949. Beyond the guard, whose back was turned, I could glimpse the crowded courtroom, hear a murmur of words and the rustle of the crowd. I shifted uneasily on my feet. There was nothing to sit on in the blacked-out elevator. I watched the bailiff on the side of the room that was open to my view, waiting for his signal.

Then I heard the District Attorney say, “Shall I proceed? Mr. Bailiff, will you call Mr. Herbert A. Philbrick.” The moment had arrived. The bailiff nodded in signal. My guard motioned me to go. It was only a few quick paces through the doorway and onto the platform. The spectators in the crowded Foley Square courtroom moved restlessly, whispering and following me with their eyes.

The light in the vast room was diffuse. My racing thoughts, the hum of voices, and my vision of the room spun dizzily together in my brain. A circle of upturned faces whirled past me. I braced myself to recover my balance. A single figure rose out of the crowd, and I heard him speak.

“Do you solemnly swear...“ The mass of faces spun away, but one long row came distinctly into my view, separated itself from the crowd, and stood out ..to tell the truth....” Directly across from me at the end of the row was Jack Stachel, an unbelieving look on his face, as if a dangerous name had been tailed out of his past. Farther along I saw Bob Thompson, who also recognized me from earlier days. He sat morosely, chin pulled in against his big neck causing heavy pouches to bulge. “...and nothing but the truth...John Gates I remembered from Boston functions, also Henry Winston, his big shoulders hunched, powerful hands clasped in front of him, his face brooding and stony. Eugene Dennis reddened with anger beneath his brittle shock of graying hair...so help you God?”

“I do.” My response startled me. I sat down stiffly, and glanced quickly around the room. For this moment I had been smuggled lo New York. For this moment my presence, my very existence, had been meticulously guarded. My address was unknown even to my wife. For this moment I had somehow managed to live through nine years—for this moment and for this place, the United States District Court in the Southern District of New York.

High on the judge’s bench, close by my right side, sat Judge Harold R, Medina, dignified in his robes and his spectacles. A long, polished table stretched across the center of the room almost at my feet Behind it, in varying attitudes of defiance, sat eleven men in a row—The Eleven. I knew why they were there. “United States of America, plaintiff, vs. William Z. Foster et al., defendants.” They were accused of conspiracy to teach and advocate the overthrow of the government of the United States by force and violence. These were nominally the top leaders of the Communist party in the United States, exclusive of their chairman, Foster, who for reasons of illness was granted a severance of trial. They were there to answer to a little-known law, the Smith Act at 1940, making such teaching and advocacy illegal—a law never before fully tested in the courts, and regarded with scorn by the defendants. I knew that The Eleven did not know why I was there—not yet. But the sands of nine years were fast running out in the courtroom at Foley Square.

Nine years of conspiracy, uncertainty, fear. Nine years in the shadows where glances must be furtive, where I looked in vain for the face of a friend I could talk to. Days of deception and guile, plotting every move, guarding my words, gestures, even my thoughts. Blind calls from telephone booths; the drop of a coin; a code number; hushed instructions hurriedly given. Sleepless nights and secret meetings on darkened street corners, where automobiles drove up, swallowed me, and whirled away. Nine years with my face smothered in a mask that could never be taken off; no face of my own to look a man in the eye and say, “I am Herbert Philbrick.”

“Mr. Philbrick.” I started inwardly at the voice, but training and habit checked me from giving any outward sign. “Where do you reside?” My eyes shifted slowly, inexpressively, to the speaker. It was Frank Gordon, special assistant to the United States Attorney General. The examination was starting. I slowly let out my breath.

“I live in Melrose, Massachusetts, which is a suburb of Boston.” An average community, an ordinary neighborhood.

“What is your occupation?”

“For the past fifteen years I’ve been in advertising.” Yes, I had led an ordinary life—Herb Philbrick, Citizen. The questions seemed to come from far off. The answers were automatic.

“Have you ever been a member of the Communist party of the United States?” I felt a stone slab drop down, and I seemed to hear my voice sealed in the silence of a nine years’ secret. I had led two lives, the second life secret, unknown to my parents, my employers, my friends, my business associates.

“Yes, I have been a member of the Communist party since—well—for the past five years.”

“Prior to the time that you joined the Communist party, were you a member of any other Communist organization?”

“Well, for the two years previous to the—“ I shifted in my chair. It was a difficult story to begin. “—to my membership in the Communist party I belonged to the Young Communist League.”

Under Mr. Gordon’s patient questioning I told about my first encounter with Communists nine years before, in 1940. I heard other questions and my mechanical replies. “Yes, there were meetings—many, many meetings—yes, as chairman I—what’s that?—I soon came to realize...” The Eleven were arrayed before me as if they were held in check, straining against some Invisible leash. I saw the knuckles of a hand whiten against the polished table, and I felt the familiar clutch of fear.

In front of the eleven defendants, a lawyer jumped to his feet. “I object!” his voice cracked.

“And after you attended these meetings did you discuss anything about the group with any law-enforcement agency?”

“Objected to, Your Honor. We wish to plead surprise.”

“I shouldn’t wonder,” Frank Gordon murmured.

“Overruled.” Judge Medina’s voice over my shoulder was firm and level. He turned to the witness chair. “Just say Yes or no.”

“Yes.” I saw movement in the line of The Eleven. One or two started forward anxiously.

“And what was the agency?”

A stirring of feet, a rising figure. “Object to that!” Louder now, with desperation in the voice. “If the court pleases—”

“Overruled!” sounded in the courtroom like the closing of a door.

Mr. Gordon nodded at me by way of repeating the question. I felt something grasp hard at my right hand, nails digging into my palm. I loosened my fist and my hand was wet.

There was another secret to reveal to the court, a secret hidden from the world for years. I led three lives.

“The Federal Bureau of Investigation!”

The words slammed through the courtroom and echoed away in silence. I saw Carl Winter tighten his jaw. Ben Davis glared, his mustache cutting a straight line across his lip. I watched the mounting reactions of the others—John Williamson, Irving Potash, Gil Green, Gus Hall, all growing tense with rage. And I remembered them in different circumstances, their speeches, their written directives, their Leninist-Stalinist teachings.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation! I sagged back in the chair, suddenly relieved of a great, exhausting weight. Judge Medina’s voice came out of the silence. “And when was it you did that?”

When was it? Nine years ago. Nine eternal years.

It was a day in late spring, 1940, in Boston. The east wind moved gently through the crooked streets of the old town, and there was leisure in the air. A young salesman starting his daily rounds shifted his heavy brief case of advertising samples from one hand to the other and quickened his pace toward Number 7 Water Street. He appraised his reflection in a store window as if to survey a new acquaintance. The young man in the store window was Herb Philbrick, in the twenty-sixth year of the life of an average Bostonian, an American wage earner pursuing his living.

My appearance, I think, was normal. I had no particular distinguishing marks to set me apart in a crowd; I was neither tall nor short and of medium build. This complete normality was to prove, in fact, one of my most valuable assets. Together with an extrovert’s geniality, it turned out to be my best disguise.

The willing smile belied the serious view with which I regarded the world. It was true that in my twenty-five years no deep shadow had cut across my path. The ordinary problems and severities of life, yes; but these I passed with determination and the confidence of youth and inexperience. I intended that confidence to be discernible in my brisk step. After all, I was a salesman. The confident air was my stock in trade.

But beneath the salesman’s exterior, I frequently paused to wonder about the world around me. It might be said that I had a New England conscience, for myself and for my fellow man. Although I had a good job and one I enjoyed, it had evolved more by chance than by planning and bore little relation to my initial quest in the world of professions. It was a long way indeed from civil engineer to solicitor for a direct-mail advertising house.

Despite the security of a steady job, no practicing Christian in the spring of 1940 could gloat over his good fortune and turn his back on those less fortunate. I found it difficult to ignore the fact that, out in Kansas, farmers burned the grain they could not sell to take the place of the coal they could not buy. At the same time, in Pennsylvania, coal miners—amid mountains of unmined coal—lined up at welfare soup kitchens to receive bread on dole. In a land of untold wealth of fuel and food, people were both cold and hungry. To a twenty-five-year-old, it didn’t make sense that bread and coal could not be exchanged to the benefit of all concerned. I wanted to help in some way, to do something more public-spirited and constructive than what I was accomplishing at home and in my neighborhood Baptist church. I wanted to operate on a broader level. Yet when I searched for outlets, what did I find? Technocracy, perhaps? What was technocracy?

There was always hard work. That was something I had learned to believe in from the start. Hard work was cast in the rigid mold of a seacoast village, Rye Beach, New Hampshire, where I grew up as the son of a railroad trainman, descended from generations of farmers and fishermen, carriage makers, and sea captains. Studies were to begin at a spindly, scarred desk in a one-room, six-grade schoolhouse, but I received most of my education in Somerville, Massachusetts. Years later, however, when the one-room school at Rye was abandoned, I retrieved one of the ancient desks as a memento.

By high school, I had decided to be a civil engineer. Job experience began, selling newspapers and magazines, saving every cent for college. But I was crossed by fate, even then. Two of the three banks in which my cash was placed closed their doors in the depression. College would have to be earned on a pay-as-you-go basis. I enrolled at Lincoln Technical Institute of Northeastern University in Boston, for evening sessions. Work in the daytime, study at night. Four years of five evenings a week, three of them for classes, two for home study.

To pay my way, I took any available job. Soap salesman was one of the first. From a Boston wholesale house, I purchased boxes of soap, each one marked prominently on the cover to show a retail value of $1.35 for seven assorted cakes, castile, shaving soap, aromatic pine. I developed a spiel. “As a special advertising offer to introduce our product in this area, madam, we are making this assortment available to you for only thirty-five cents—the ordinary price of but a single bar in this box.”

The wholesale cost of the box was eleven cents. I pocketed the twenty-four-cent profit, and went from door to door, from job to job.

I worked as a plumber’s assistant. As an aide to an interior decorator I painted walls, hung wallpaper, varnished floors. In heavy construction labor on a breakwater job, I swung a seventeen-pound sledge in the summer sun—the closest I ever came to civil engineering. I hired myself out as a chauffeur; saved the proceeds; purchased a four-door sedan; then hired out both car and driver in a package for a larger return.

On a day-and-night schedule there was little time for recreation. Occasionally I took a swim at the “Y” pool, or went bowling at the Huntington Alleys across the street from school. A favorite pastime for infrequent dates was the Boston Symphony Pops concert—twenty-five cents for a rush seat in the balcony.

The Baptist Church of Somerville was the focal point for most of my extracurricular activity. Of course, it had its curriculum, too, in the Philbrick family. Sunday began with church services at ten-thirty, Sunday school at noon. The young people’s meeting was held at four o’clock, and then evening worship closed the day at seven. The young people’s groups were both recreational and purposeful, and I was active in them. They had a church orchestra, a dramatic group, and a biweekly newspaper, The Tattler, where I discovered a liking for publicity work, promotion, and advertising.

Through development of this interest I obtained a toehold job in an advertising agency, in 1934. Finally, in 1938, graduated at last from the nightly grind of study and trained as an engineer, I hit the pavements of Boston in search of a job in that field. There was none. One prospective employer showed me a roomful of engineering drafting tables, the stools in front of them all empty. In the f...

Table of contents

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• Acknowledgments
• CHAPTER ONE
• CHAPTER TWO
• CHAPTER THREE
• CHAPTER FOUR
• CHAPTER FIVE
• CHAPTER SIX
• CHAPTER SEVEN
• CHAPTER EIGHT
• CHAPTER NINE
• CHAPTER TEN
• CHAPTER ELEVEN
• CHAPTER TWELVE
• CHAPTER THIRTEEN
• CHAPTER FOURTEEN
• CHAPTER FIFTEEN
• CHAPTER SIXTEEN
• Appendix I - A Short Glossary of Communist Terms
• Appendix II - The Communist and the Liberal
• Appendix III
• ILLUSTRATIONS