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.

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.

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.