I fell into the Bohemian life of the Vienna cafes with great ease. And I had soon chosen the Café Herrenhof as my headquarters, so to speak. I had acquired a stammtisch and I could order on the cuff, which for one of my financial status was of great importance. Yet it had even a more important significance; it meant that one was recognized as trustworthy even by the waiters in the Café Herrenhof, who were of a very suspicious species. In short, I had begun to be an individual, away from the realm of my family.

This whole setup, the conservatory and life in Café Herrenhof with no family to supervise me, was partly a war phenomenon and not entirely my own doing. I also acquired a circle of admiring young men. And though there was quite a turnover among them, I usually managed to keep three or four believing at the same time that I was in love with them. My hectic compulsion to be recognized as a lovable person, to be reassured continuously that though my family did not love me, there were others who did, was being generously helped along.

The few young men who made up my steady entourage were, significantly enough, odd people in one way or another. There was Graf Karl Mienzl, a professed homosexual. He was one of my most gifted colleagues at the conservatory. A strange, lonely, handsome boy, he was the only son of a professional soldier and had grown up under the most terrible disciplinary measures of his father. I was the first girl he had ever loved. This was purely intellectual and because I "looked like a boy." My other steady admirer was still Victor Stadler. He remained an intimate and reliable friend for years, looking upon every new boy friend of mine with a wistful and knowing air, convinced that "they all will pass and I will remain." He stuck by me through all the ups and downs - serious illnesses, exams, debts, recitals, and the like. Only two or three times did he ask me up to visit his family. Today, I understand that I was not considered the "appropriate" companion for him and I can guess that he must have been a most unhappy and tortured young man. When he finally had made up his mind to marry me in spite of his family, I had just met Gerhart Eisler and his new world. Victor and Karl and Gyula and Richard and Jenoe and the rest faded out in the face of this young man who knew what he wanted.

The only competition Gerhart Eisler faced, and I must say he faced it with great calm and an obvious conviction of final victory, was Jenoe Kolb. Jenoe was the most intellectual of all my young men. He had been dreadfully wounded during the war and was mended together so that he was always somewhat bent to one side and could speak only slowly. He was also the most passionate of my friends. It was he who first discussed with me the revaluation of our bourgeois standards and conceptions; he who discussed with me the failure of our society and who ridiculed marriage. He studied architecture, but was known in Hungary for the first translation of Rilke. I guess that I was in love with Jenoe. We wrote to each other every day.

His letters were so beautiful that I kept them for many years. He came from an upper middle-class Hungarian family and had gone to expensive private schools. He was far more sophisticated than most of the people of my own circle. I found that I could talk to him about the sadness and complete loneliness of my childhood.

When I met Gerhart, it was as though I had met a whirlwind and was hopelessly and helplessly tangled and engulfed. It was only Jenoe with whom I had to settle.

Gerhart did this with a vigor and success prophetic of his Stalinist days. When I told him that I had a previous engagement for the second evening he wanted to see me, he asked with whom and where. To my great amazement and annoyance, for I had planned to tell Jenoe rather slowly about Gerhart, Gerhart himself appeared.

At the Café Museum, which was my retreat for private meetings, I sat across from Jenoe and looked into his lovely, brown, melting eyes. As I listened to a description of something he had done or read, I had pretty much forgotten the little, impetuous man who seemed to know the answer to everything. Jenoe's slow, deliberate, almost caressing manner of speech was so good to listen to that I wanted to postpone as long as possible the news of Gerhart. But we were hardly a half-hour or so together when the determined little man stood before us and asked, "Mind if I join you?"

I introduced them and had just caught my breath when Gerhart started talking in the manner which I was to learn later in my Communist career to classify as the "frontal attack," interpreted as "don't give the other fellow a chance." Since I had not had time to prepare Jenoe for anything that might happen during the course of the evening, he paid little attention to the intruder, supposing that he would be leaving us after a little while. But as Gerhart went on to contradict him on almost every point according to a plan he had apparently mapped out for himself, Jenoe retreated more and more, and finally, in alarm and distress, got up and said good-bye to Gerhart.

I followed him out of the café, my heart heavy because of the unkind beating he had taken. I was eager to reassure him of my devotion, but somehow I couldn't. We walked along the Ring, slowly, until Jenoe turned to me and said, "Hede, that is the man you will go with. Let's say good-bye right now. All you feel for me now is pity, and I cannot bear that. I watched you while he talked and though you disliked his unfairness to me, you are completely under his spell. Go to him, right now. He is waiting for you at the cafe."

I went. And Gerhart was waiting for me right outside of the Café Museum. With a slightly embarrassed smile, he said, "Nice young man, your Mr. Kolb, but still wet behind the ears, Ein Kaschkind!"

I have never fully understood what it was that made me follow Gerhart. It's true, his was a most unusual manner of wooing. It's also true that he had a slight glory and reputation. But as I remember it, I did not want him in any way as much as I wanted Jenoe. I really knew so little about Gerhart. He was neither dashing nor handsome in the eyes of a young girl, and yet there seemed nothing for me to do but follow him.

Gerhart had been an Oberleutnant in World War I and had been demoted for carrying on socialist propaganda at the front. I had known this before I met him because it was talked about in Café Herrenhof, and he had a slight aura of heroism around him even at that time. It didn't mean a thing to me because I was not aware of the meaning of socialism, and, frankly, I wasn't very interested. But he was considered bright and outstanding. I had met a young Pole in the café who was a deserter from the Austrian Army (and very proud of it), and it was he who first told me about Gerhart. He spoke of him glowingly and always stressed the fact that Gerhart was the first Austrian Communist. That the word "Communist" was to play so great a role in my later life I could not have imagined!

It began one evening, when tall, handsome Stachek came to my table in the cafe with a short, but appealing young man and introduced him, proudly, as the famous Gerhart. Of course, I had imagined him very differently. I probably thought him tall and dashing but instead he was small, squat and had a slight lisp which irritated at first, but which I later came to think of as something exquisitely charming. This slight imperfection softened his otherwise complete, undeniable perfection. He did have very beautiful eyes. Even in later years, when he had become a tough politician, his eyes contrasted sharply with his whole personality. They were large blue eyes, with heavy eyebrows and long, curving dark eyelashes.

Gerhart spoke to me very little the first evening. When he took out his cigarette case, a tiny, white ivory elephant fell out of it. I picked it up and admired it, and said that I would like to have it. He couldn't give it to me, he explained, because it was his good luck charm. It was a noncommittal conversation. He didn't make a date with me and so I did not think that I would ever see him again. When I came to the café the next evening, the waiter brought me a little package containing some cigarettes, the little white elephant, and a note saying, "I want to see you, alone." I was very pleased with the tiny elephant. I still have it today.

When I walked home with Gerhart that evening, he asked me to tell him all about myself and he added, "But the real truth-everything. I would like to be your friend. I know this is rushing things, but I have no time for courtship. I am a very busy man. I have great aims in life. I am going to make this world a better world to live in, and I'm looking for a woman to live with me, understand me and help me. I like you, Hede, and I want to know what sort of a person you are. I must know everything about you. Tell me."

During the first week I knew Gerhart I saw him every single day. He said to me one evening, "Hede, I am going to tell you something quite different from what all the other young men around you have told you. I love you; I want you to share my life. It is not going to be a soft and easy one. I am a revolutionary. I have dedicated my life to a great idea, the greatest, in fact, the idea of socialism. When you understand more about it, you will know that there will be little time for anything but this one great cause! I will take you away from your home right now. I shall take you to my family and you will stay with them until we can set up house for ourselves, wherever that may be." There was a slight pause, and then he asked, "How do you feel about that?"

It was hard for me to say how I felt. I was pleased and happy that Gerhart loved me. But the thing that was much more important and that still stands out as the important gesture of a Communist, even in retrospect, was that he wanted to take me away from the misery and unhappiness of my own family and bring me to his sweet and gentle mother, as he said, and his shy and professorial father. They were to give me the feeling of a family , that I had missed so deeply.

He was a plump, balding, kindly looking little man. He seemed dumfounded one day last October to find reporters outside his $35-a-month apartment in Queens. Was he Gerhart Eisler?

Yes, yes, he was. Well - he had just been accused of being the No. 1 U.S. Communist, the Brain, the big tap on the wire to Moscow. How about it? Eisler acted as though he did not understand. Who had said this? A man who knew him - Louis Francis Budenz, ex-managing editor of Manhattan's Daily Worker. Eisler peered through his horn rimmed spectacles with a gentle smile and asked the gentlemen in.

Gerhart Eisler had nothing to hide. Budenz, he said, as if the explanation were unnecessary to people of intelligence, was obviously mistaken. It was true that he had once been a Communist in Germany but that had been many years ago. He had come to the U.S. in 1941, a poor refugee, hounded by the Nazis. Did he look like a spy? All he wanted to do was go back to Germany, but the U.S. State Department would not allow it.

Last week, when Gerhart Eisler was brought to Washington to be questioned by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, he was a changed man. He rose before the committee pale with anger. "I am not a spy," he sputtered. "I am not the boss of all the Reds...."

When the committee chairman, New Jersey's Congressman J. Parnell Thomas, directed him to desist and be sworn, he refused. Thomas warned: "Remember, you are a guest of the country."

This was too much. Eisler began beating on the table and yelling, "I am an anti-Fascist. I am not a guest of the country. I am a political prisoner."

But after two burly Department of Justice agents had led him from the room, a different picture of Gerhart Eisler began to take shape. He had indeed been a top Soviet agent, a "C.I. Rep." as U.S. comrades call the obscure and mysterious representatives of the Communist International. As "a man from Moscow" he had lived in a world where honor, friendship, even family ties meant nothing. One of the witnesses who denounced him was his sister, sharp-chinned, black-haired ex-German Communist Ruth Fischer, the person who hates him most.

In the beginning, as children of a poverty-stricken Viennese scholar, they had adored each other. Ruth, the older, became a Communist first. Gerhart, who won five decorations as an officer of the Austrian Army in World War I, joined the party in the fevered days of 1918. They worked together. When Ruth, then a bundle of sex appeal and intellectual fire, went to Berlin, Gerhart followed. She became a leader of the German Communist Party, and a member of the Reichstag.

But Gerhart took a different ideological tack, began to covet power for himself. He applauded when Ruth was banished from the party by the Stalinist clique. Then he tried to undermine Ernst Thaelmann, Stalin's favorite in Germany. He failed, was summoned to Moscow. He escaped liquidation by denouncing friends who were out of favor. He turned up in China, charged with purging the party of spies and dissidents, sent so many men to their deaths that he was known as "The Executioner." He first came to the U.S., according to the FBI, in 1933, as chief liaison man between the party and the Comintern. An obscure figure known only as Edwards, he was seldom seen by the party rank & file. He moved in & out of the country freely. (The House Committee held a passport application which demonstrated how the trick was turned. It was dated Aug. 31, 1934, bore the name of a Communist writer, Samuel Liptzen. It was filled out in the handwriting of a left-wing lawyer, one Leon Josephson. Clipped to it was Eisler's photograph.)

Eisler appeared in Moscow to attend a Comintern school, in Spain as commissar of German Loyalist troops. In 1939, during the days of the Russo-German pact, he was in France. He was thrown into a concentration camp, kept there until 1941. Released, he assumed the role of a harmless refugee, headed for the U.S. again.

In many ways, Gerhart Eisler's life as a Queens apartment dweller was as quiet as he indicated. Although he had a Viennese wife - his second - in Stockholm, he settled down comfortably with a slim Polish girl named Brunhilda, who had accompanied him across the Atlantic. (Eisler maintains that he got a Mexican divorce from his Stockholm wife in 1942, married Brunhilda in Norwalk, Conn, the same year.) He became an air raid warden, contributed to a blood bank, nodded pleasantly to his neighbors.

Gerhart Eisler, a small, balding, bespectacled man of forty-eight who looked like a bookkeeper. With his young wife, Brunhilda, he lived in a thirty-five-dollar-a-month third-floor walk-up in Long Island City. He spoke with a German accent, as did many of his neighbors, and like many of them also, he had contributed blood during the war. He had also been an air-raid warden.

You could set your watch by him. He'd leave his apartment early in the morning and walk in a distinctive, unhurried way to a news-stand, buy the New York Times and catch the IRT subway into Manhattan. To the casual observer he might have seemed ordinary, but on close examination one could notice in his manner a hint of arrogance and a quiet confidence. For Gerhart Eisler was not an innocuous commuter; ever since he had gotten off the boat in New York in 1941, the FBI had been tracking him because he was an agent of the Comintern.

The Communist International, or Comintern, was devoted to furthering the revolution in countries other than Russia, and to keeping foreign Communist movements in line and subservient to Moscow. Stalin had nominally dissolved the Comintern in 1943, but its people were still doing the same jobs, all over the world.

Real interest in Eisler had picked up in 1943 as a result of another, entirely separate investigation in which the FBI overheard important conversations in San Francisco between an American Communist and a Soviet vice-consul. Steve Nelson, the American, told Soviet Vice-Consul Gregory Kheiffets about his efforts to recruit scientists at the Manhattan Project, and also spoke of the dissolution of the Comintern. In effect, Nelson offered a "Comintern apparatus" then functioning on both the East and the West coasts, through Kheiffets, to his superior Vassili Zubilin, the man whom we believed to be the KGB resident for the United States.

Historically, there had been some direct transfers from the Comintern to the KGB and the GRU, and so the FBI opened a series of investigations. Some concerned Nelson and led us to other veterans of the International Brigades, which had been put together by the Communists to fight in the Spanish Civil War. An organization called the joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee was deeply tied in to these veterans; it raised money for several hundred thousand survivors of the partisan groups from that war. The FBI knew the JAFRC to be a Communist front, and Gerhart Eisler, who went to its offices in Manhattan every morning like clockwork, to be a Comintern man. Eisler didn't appear to do much for the JAFRC, yet received from it a monthly check for $150, made out to "Julius Eisman."

When not at the JAFRC, Eisler met with some of the foreign Communists who swarmed the city, just waiting for the end of the war in Europe so they could catch a boat and get back to their own countries. He even turned up when we weren't expecting him. One day a colleague and I were watching two important Italian Communists who were believed to have Comintern connections, and Eisler met them on a street corner; the three men talked long enough for us to call an FBI photographer to come and record the scene. We wondered what language they were using and what subjects they were discussing. Another time I thought Eisler was going to have a clandestine meeting, and followed him to the Eisenhower victory parade; but he was only meeting his wife, Brunhilda, and I ended up watching the parade virtually over their shoulders.

We became convinced that Eisler was not involved in Soviet intelligence, but believed he was still a major Comintern "rep," active in political affairs. In mid-1946 we received word that the Eislers were making plans to go to the Soviet Zone of Germany, and had applied for and secured the exit visa required before a temporary resident alien could leave the U.S. Many questions were raised by Eisler's answers on the application. He wrote that he'd first entered the country in 1941 - but we knew he'd been here illegally in the 1930s. He swore that he'd never been a Communist; that, too, was a lie.

I would have been perfectly happy to have Eisler disappear behind the Iron Curtain. However, I decided not to let him go without a personal interview, an action in line with the more aggressive moves that Emory Gregg and I longed to have the FBI take in such cases. After obtaining permission for an interview, I telephoned Eisler at his apartment in Queens and suggested that it would be a good idea if he came in to see me. When he said he was preparing to leave the United States, I told him I was well aware of his travel plans. Apparently deciding that if he avoided me, the FBI might interfere with his departure, he agreed to come in.

Eisler showed up in a nondescript gray suit, a dark shirt with a collar that was too large for him, and a quiet demeanor. I asked Frank Plant to sit in on the interview. After a few gentle questions from me, Eisler started to portray himself as an anti-Nazi German who had merely been a refugee in this country during the war and who sought nothing more than to go home again. I let him run, waiting to see how much he'd tell me before I weighed in with tougher questions. He spoke of his father - Austrian, Jewish, a philosophy professor who'd written thirty books. Three Eisler children were born in Vienna before the war: Gerhart in 1897, his sister, Elfriede, a few years earlier, and his brother, Hanns, a half-dozen years later. Eisler traced his schooling, his service in the Austrian Army during World War I, and his work as a journalist after it. He didn't say he'd been a Communist, but that he'd been "much in sympathy" with the Party in Austria and in Germany. From 1922 to 1927 he'd traveled in Europe, and was in China from 1927 to 1929 - a wanderer who became so openly anti-Nazi that the Third Reich put his picture and short biography into an anti-Semitic book. He had been to Spain as a propagandist for the Republican troops, then had been captured and sent to a French refugee camp. He'd come to the United States in 1941, he claimed, only because the war had blocked his through-passage to Mexico. While here he had worked with a German-language newspaper, had received money from Hanns (who was now a Hollywood composer), had worked odd jobs including writing part of a book, The Lessons of Germany.

This has been more than a trial: it has been the dissection of the rotting tissues of American society today. Here, petty spies and pretentious informers have been manipulated as the puppets of ambitious district attorneys working with the FBI chiefs, who in turn are the bought agents of respectable steel magnates and coal barons.

There are plenty of FBI men in the courtroom here at the trial of Gerhart Eisler. They are easy to spot as they sit on the polished benches and smile in the cool hallways. But the real presence and guiding role of the FBI in this case is very open and unashamed. Alongside the U.S. attorney, William Hitz, there has been sitting all during these weeks the special FBI agent Robert Lamphere, who's had more to do with this fantastic frame-up than any other man.
Baby-faced, but hard-lipped, this character has behaved as the government's special counsel, leaning over to prime the prosecutor, fishing into his black bag for papers and notes, and his red neck visibly flushes as the defense counsel unravels the whole abysmal story of what the United States government tried to do with Eisler.

Three days at sea, the 16,000-ton Polish motorship Batory radioed a routine passenger count back to New York. It ended, ". . . additional, one stowaway, first-class passage paid." As required by law, the Gdynia America Line, operators of the vessel, forwarded the message to U.S. Immigration officials.

Immigration wanted more information on the stowaway. It got a hair-raising reply: "Re telegram 10th. Stowaway Gerhart Eisler, German, disembarking Gdynia." Was it the Gerhart Eisler—the chubby little Comintern agent who had been called the No. 1 U.S. Communist?

FBI agents rushed to the Manhattan apartment in which Eisler had been living while appealing two jail sentences—one for contempt of Congress, another for falsifying an application for an exit permit. Eisler was gone. The Department of Justice was not only red-faced, but flabbergasted. The little man had been trying to get back to Germany ever since publicity had ruined his effectiveness in the U.S. in 1946. (The U.S. preferred to jail him rather than let him loose to raise trouble in Berlin.)

Once he had got away, why had he given the ship's purser his right name? If he were being smuggled out by Communists in the vessel's crew, why had he even been reported as a stowaway?

It soon began to look as though Gerhart was operating strictly under his own steam and was perhaps a victim of his own ego. Carol King, his attorney and a longtime defender of Communists, almost exploded when she heard that he had jumped his $23,500 bail—money that had been put up by Communist-front groups. Cried she: "Reprehensible!"

Meanwhile Gerhart politely told a fellow passenger, a free-lance reporter named Richard Yaffe, just how his one-man escape act had been worked. He had simply gone to Manhattan's Pier 88, bought a 25¢ visitor's ticket to the Batory, and gone aboard. When the ship got past Ambrose Light, he reported to the purser and paid for passage. "I gave the U.S. authorities a chance to correct their uncivilized attitude toward my person, and to stop using me as a bogey man," said Gerhart. "But [they] did not take the chance. I have another purpose in life than to be watched by the FBI."

But as he spoke the U.S. Government was still watching him. It urgently asked Great Britain to hold him for extradition. When the Batory dropped anchor off Southampton a tender bearing a Scotland Yard inspector, a covey of beefy British plainclothesmen, two indignant Polish diplomats and a scattering of U.S. officials chugged out to meet her.

The Batory's master, Captain Jan Cwiklinski, refused to surrender his passenger. His argument: Eisler a) had paid for his passage, b) had broken no British laws, c) was under the protection of the Polish flag, and d) had been assured the right of asylum when the ship reached Communist-dominated Poland. Faced with these arguments, the boarding party retreated. Three hours later it was back., This time the Scotland Yard man not only had a warrant for Eisler's arrest but also a tough cablegram from the U.S. State Department. Its gist: the U.S. might seize the vessel, and kick the Gdynia America Line out of New York if the captain didn't listen to reason.

The captain gave in. Gerhart was arrested, and led quietly out on deck. But then he saw an amazing spectacle: 100 newsmen were circling the ship in rented craft, cameras and notebooks poised. Gerhart Eisler threw himself on the deck and yelled as though he were having lighted cigarettes pushed into his eyes. The plainclothesmen picked him up by arms & legs and lugged him down the gangway, while cameras clicked.

Gerhart was docile as a dove as the tender reached for the dock, and he was polite and pleasant after being installed in Southampton jail. But the Polish embassy in Britain issued a statement for him: "I am the first prisoner of the North Atlantic pact, this unholy alliance of reaction . . . Down with the American gendarmes ... I am being kidnaped by the British authorities . . ."

By the time Gerhart walked into Bow Street Police Court this week he was - in an international sort of way - hotter than a sheriff's pistol. He was ordered to show cause why he should not be extradited to the U.S., and put in jail without bail for the eight days until the hearing begins.