Boris Bykov


Boris Bykov was born in Russia. A talented linguist, in 1920 he joined Soviet Military Intelligence (GRU). After serving in Nazi Germany he moved to the United States in the summer of 1936. He worked for Joszef Peter who introduced him to Soviet agent, Whittaker Chambers, who was based in New York City.

According to Sam Tanenhaus, the author of Whittaker Chambers: A Biography (1997): "Bykov, about forty years old and Chambers's own height, was turned out neatly in a worsted suit. He wore a hat, in part to cover his hair, which was memorably red. He gave in fact an overall impression of redness. His lashes were ginger-colored, his eyes an odd red-brown, and his complexion was ruddy.... He also was subject to violent mood swings, switching from ferocious tantrums to grating fits of false jollity. And he was habitually distrustful. Time and again he questioned Chambers sharply on his ideological views and about his previous underground activities." (1)

Boris Bykov & Whittaker Chambers

Chambers wrote in Witness (1952): " When I was with Colonel Bykov, I was not master of my movements. Most of our meetings took place in New York City. We always prearranged them a week or ten days ahead. As a rule, we first met in a movie house. I would go in and stand at the back. Bykov, who nearly always had arrived first, would get up from the audience at the agreed time and join me. We would go out together. Bykov, not I, would decide what route we should then take in our ramblings (we usually walked several miles about the city). We would wander at night, far out in Brooklyn or the Bronx, in lonely stretches of park or on streets where we were the only people." (2)

Chambers questioned Colonel Bykov about the Great Purge that was taking place in the Soviet Union but it was clear that he completely supported the policies of Joseph Stalin. "Like every Communist in the world, I felt its backlash, for the Purge also swept through the Soviet secret apparatuses. I underwent long hours of grilling by Colonel Bykov in which he tried, without the flamboyance, but with much of the insinuating skill of Lloyd Paul Stryker, the defense lawyer in the first Hiss trial, to prove that I had been guilty of Communist heresies in the past, that I was secretly a Trotskyist, that I was not loyal to Comrade Stalin. I emerged unharmed from those interrogations, in part because I was guiltless, but more importantly, because Colonel Bykov had begun to regard me as indispensable to his underground career." (3)

Soviet Spy Network

In December 1936 Bykov asked Chambers for names of people who would be willing to supply the Soviets with secret documents. (4) Chambers selected Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, Julian Wadleigh and George Silverman. Bykov suggested that the men must be "put in a productive frame of mind" with cash gifts. Chambers argued against this policy as they were "idealists". Bykov was adamant. The handler must always have some kind of material hold over his asset: "Who pays is the boss, and he who accepts money must give something in return." (5)

Chambers was given $600 with which to purchase "Bokhara rugs, woven in one of the Asian Soviet republics and coveted by collectors". (6) Chambers recruited his friend, Meyer Schapiro, to buy carpets at an Armenian wholesale establishment on lower Fifth Avenue. Cambers then arranged for the four men to be interviewed by Bykov in New York City. The men agreed to work as Soviet agents. They were reluctant to take the gifts. Wadleigh said that he wanted nothing more than to do "something practical to protect mankind from its worst enemies." (7)

With the recruitment of the four agents, Chambers's underground work, and his daily routine, now centred on espionage. "In the case of each contact he had first to arrange a rendezvous, in rare instances at the contact's house, more commonly at a neutral site (street corner, park, coffee shop) in Washington. On the appointed day Chambers drove down from New Hope (a distance of 110 miles) and was handed a small batch of documents (at most twenty pages), which he slipped into a slim briefcase." (8)

Boris Bykov and Alger Hiss

Alger Hiss was the most productive of Bykov's agents. According to G. Edward White, the author of Alger Hiss's Looking-Glass Wars (2004): Hiss was so productive in bringing home documents that he precipitated a further change in the Soviets's methods for obtaining them... Chambers, however, only visited Hiss about once a week, since his practice was to round up documents from his sources, have them photocopied and returned, and take the photocopies to New York only at weekly intervals. In order to continue this practice, but protect Hiss, Bykov instructed Hiss to type copies of the documents himself and retain them for Chambers." (9)

Whittaker Chambers, later admitted in Witness (1952): "It was Alger Hiss's custom to bring home documents from the State Department approximately once a week or once in ten days. He would bring out only the documents that happened to cross his desk on that day, and a few that on one pretext or another he had been able to retain on his desk. Bykov wanted more complete coverage. He proposed that the (Lawyer - the Soviets's code name for Hiss at the time) should bring home a briefcase of documents every night." (10)

Whittaker Chambers breaks with Boris Bykov

One day Chambers asked Boris Bykov what had happened to Juliet Poyntz. He replied: "Gone with the wind". Chambers commented: "Brutality stirred something in him that at its mere mention came loping to the surface like a dog to a whistle. It was as close to pleasure as I ever saw him come. Otherwise, instead of showing pleasure, he gloated. He was incapable of joy, but he had moments of mean exultation. He was just as incapable of sorrow, though he felt disappointed and chagrin. He was vengeful and malicious. He would bribe or bargain, but spontaneous kindness or generosity seemed never to cross his mind. They were beyond the range of his feeling. In others he despised them as weaknesses." (11). As a result of this conversation, Chambers decided to stop working for the Communist Party of the United States.

Boris Bukov returned to the Soviet Union in 1939 where he became a lecturer at the Higher Special School of the Red Army Staff. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 (Operation Barbarossa), Bukov headed the chair of foreign countries study of the Second Moscow State Pedagogical Institute of Foreign Languages.

Primary Sources

(1) Sam Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers: A Biography (1997)

Bykov, about forty years old and Chambers's own height, was turned out neatly in a worsted suit. He wore a hat, in part to cover his hair, which was memorably red. He gave in fact an overall impression of redness. His lashes were ginger-colored, his eyes an odd red-brown, and his complexion was ruddy. He had as yet little English and spoke German with a guttural Yiddish inflection that Chambers strained to decipher. More than once, in the months ahead, Chambers's struggle with his new boss's accent sent the Russian into fits of rage.

After briskly introducing Chambers to the new reziderit, Peters left. The Russian instantly grew panicky. He told Chambers they must get away. The two executed the usual series of tedious maneuvers so as to elude any possible surveillance. Bykov, suspicious even of Chambers, refused to divulge either his phone number or address, though he grudgingly gave out an alias, Peter, by which Chambers knew the Russian for the duration of their uneasy partnership, the most difficult of Chambers's underground career.

Cowardice was only one of Bykov's unpleasant traits. He also was subject to violent mood swings, switching from ferocious tantrums to grating fits of false jollity. And he was habitually distrustful. Time and again he questioned Chambers sharply on his ideological views and about his previous underground activities.

(2) Whittaker Chambers, Witness (1952)

When I was with Colonel Bykov, I was not master of my movements. Most of our meetings took place in New York City. We always prearranged them a week or ten days ahead. As a rule, we first met in a movie house. I would go in and stand at the back. Bykov, who nearly always had arrived first, would get up from the audience at the agreed time and join me. We would go out together. Bykov, not I, would decide what route we should then take in our ramblings (we usually walked several miles about the city). We would wander at night, far out in Brooklyn or the Bronx, in lonely stretches of park or on streets where we were the only people. As we walked and talked, I would think: "Does he know anything? Is there anything in my manner that could make him suspicious? Where is he taking me?"

I always assumed that one member of the Washington underground acted for Bykov as a pair of eyes and ears to observe and report my conduct. This is routine Communist practice. I never knew to whom those eyes and ears belonged. I also had reason to believe that the Soviet counter-intelligence had me under routine surveillance.

Thus, my practical problem was to organize my flight and the safe removal of my family under eyes which could see me but which I could not see, while I took the calculated risk of nightly meetings with men and women who seemed perfectly unsuspicious. On the other hand, they might be suspicious and therefore operating against me with the same calculation with which I was operating against them....

For defense, I bought a long sheath knife. I bought it chiefly with my lonely walks with Bykov and my automobile rides with other Communists in mind. It was a poor weapon, but the most easily procured and concealed, and therefore the only equalizer I risked carrying at that time. I wore it belted around my undershirt, and kept the strap across the handle and the shirt under my vest unbuttoned so that I could reach it more easily in a fight. About the time I began to carry a knife, Colonel Bykov developed a curious habit. He would crowd close to me when we sat together in a street car or subway train and repeatedly lurched against me when we walked on the street. He had never done this before. I instantly suspected that he was trying to feel if I was armed. I still think this must have been his purpose, not because he suspected that I was breaking, but because, by coincidence, it occurred to him at that time to find out if I was armed. And, by coincidence, he was right, though he did not find out....

The Purge struck me in a personal way too. Like every Communist in the world, I felt its backlash, for the Purge also swept through the Soviet secret apparatuses. I underwent long hours of grilling by Colonel Bykov in which he tried, without the flamboyance, but with much of the insinuating skill of Lloyd Paul Stryker, the defense lawyer in the first Hiss trial, to prove that I had been guilty of Communist heresies in the past, that I was secretly a Trotskyist, that I was not loyal to Comrade Stalin. I emerged unharmed from those interrogations, in part because I was guiltless, but more importantly, because Colonel Bykov had begun to regard me as indispensable to his underground career, so that toward the end of his grillings he would sometimes squeeze my arm in his demonstrative Russian way and repeat a line from a popular song that had caught his fancy: "Bei mir bist du schon:"

Actually, Bykov's cynicism was harder to bear than his grillings. He was much too acute to suppose that I was sound about the Purge, and he took a special delight in letting me know it. Sometimes, after the purgees had been sentenced to be shot, there would be no official announcement of their execution, as if to emphasize playfully that this official silence was part of the silence of death. "Where is Bukharin?" Bykov asked me slyly some weeks after the Communist Party's leading theoretician had been sentenced to death for high treason, while his death had not been announced.

"Dead," I answered rudely. "You are right," said Bykov in a cooing voice, "you are right. You can be absolutely sure that our Bukharin is dead."

The human horror of the Purge was too close for me to grasp clearly its historical meaning. I could not have said then, what I knew shortly afterwards, that, as Communists, Stalin and the Stalinists were absolutely justified in making the Purge. From the Communist viewpoint, Stalin could have taken no other course, so long as he believed he was right. The Purge, like the Communist-Nazi pact later on, was the true measure of Stalin as a revolutionary statesman. That was the horror of the Purge - that acting as a Communist, Stalin had acted rightly. In that fact lay the evidence that Communism is absolutely evil. The human horror was not evil, it was the sad consequence of evil. It was Communism that was evil, and the more truly a man acted in its spirit and interest, the more certainly he perpetuated evil.

But, at the time, I saw the Purge as the expression of a crisis within the group - the Communist Party - which I served in the belief that it alone could solve the crisis of the modern world. The Purge caused me to re-examine the meaning of Communism and the nature of the world's crisis.

I had always known, of course, that there were books critical of Communism and of the Soviet Union. There were surprisingly few of them (publishers did not publish them because readers did not read them). But they did exist. I had never read them because I knew that the party did not want me to read them. I was then entirely in agreement with the European Communist who said recently, about the same subject: "A man does not sip a bottle of cyanide just to find out what it tastes like." I was a man of average intelligence who had read much of what is great in human thought. But even if I had read such books, I should not have believed them. I should probably have put them down without finishing them. I would have known that, in the war between capitalism and Communism, books are weapons, and, like all serviceable weapons, loaded. I should have considered them as more or less artfully contrived propaganda.

(3) G. Edward White, Alger Hiss's Looking-Glass Wars (2004)

Bykov's arrival, and the new procedures he instituted for photographing stolen government documents, coincided with Hiss's occupying a position that would expand his opportunities for espionage. Before long Hiss's brief case was "well filled," as Chambers put it, with documents he thought of interest to the Soviets. Hiss was so productive in bringing home documents that he precipitated a further change in the Soviets's methods for obtaining them...

Chambers, however, only visited Hiss about once a week, since his practice was to round up documents from his sources, have them photocopied and returned, and take the photocopies to New York only at weekly intervals. In order to continue this practice, but protect Hiss, Bykov instructed Hiss to type copies of the documents himself and retain them for Chambers. "When I next visited him," Chambers noted, "Alger would turn over to me the typed copies, covering a week's documents, as well as the briefcase of original documents that he had brought home that night. The original documents would be photographed and returned to Alger Hiss. The typed copies would be photographed and then returned to me... I would destroy them."

In recollecting his espionage activities Chambers gave no indication that the procedure employed for documents Hiss supplied was replicated by any other of his sources. Hiss may have been the only agent who produced enough documents to merit bringing them home on a daily basis, or he may have been the only one whose household was capable of supplying typed copies. One thing remains clear: when Whittaker Chambers broke with the Soviets, virtually all the copies of stolen government documents that he retained were documents that had been typed on a typewriter from the household of Alger Hiss. This may have been an entirely fortuitous choice on Chambers's part. The Hiss documents might have been the only typed copies Chambers had available to him to use as part of a "life preserver" he was seeking to create against the possibility of reprisals once the Soviets learned of his defection. In any event, the decision on Alger Hiss's part to acquiesce in Bykov's new procedure, and to supply typed copies as well as originals to Chambers, would change Hiss's life.

References

(1) Sam Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers: A Biography (1997) page 108

(2) Whittaker Chambers, Witness (1952) page 37

(3) Whittaker Chambers, Witness (1952) page 76-77

(4) Allen Weinstein, The Hunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America (1999) page 43

(5) House of Un-American Activities Committee (6th December, 1948)

(6) Sam Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers: A Biography (1997) page 108

(7) Julian Wadleigh, Why I Spied for the Communists, New York Post (14th July, 1949)

(8) Sam Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers: A Biography (1997) page 111

(9) G. Edward White, Alger Hiss's Looking-Glass Wars (2004) page 42

(10) Whittaker Chambers, Witness (1952) page 425-429

(11) Whittaker Chambers, Witness (1952) page 439



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