Hal Ware was one of a Communist dynasty. His half-brother, Carl Reeve, was at one time a district organizer of the Communist Party, and, during my time, was once briefly attached to the Daily Worker staff. Hal's wife was Jessica Smith (now Mrs. John Abt and the sister-in-law of Marion Bachrach). For many years, Comrade Smith has been editor of Soviet Russia Today (now called New World Review), a magazine of facts and figures (impartially taken from Soviet sources) and adding up to a paean of Soviet progress, beamed monthly toward the unthinkingly enlightened American middle class.

Hal's sister, Helen Ware, in 1934 operated a violin studio on Connecticut Avenue in Washington. It will play a brief obbligato later on in this narrative.

Harold Ware was a frustrated farmer. The soil was in his pores. Unlike most American Communists, who managed to pass from one big city to another without seeing anything in the intervening spaces, Ware was absorbed in the land and its problems. He held that, with the deepening of the agrarian crisis, which had preceded the world financial and industrial crisis, and with the rapid mechanization of agriculture, the time had come for revolutionary organization among farmers.

But first he decided to do a little farming himself. In the early 1920's he set out with a group of American radicals for the Soviet Union to develop a collective farm, the so-called Kuzbas colony. Later, Hal Ware returned to the United States. He did not return empty-handed. The Communist International was also convinced that the time was ripe for organizing the American farmer. Harold Ware himself told me that, for that purpose, he brought back from Moscow $25,000 in American money secreted in a money belt-such a belt as I was soon to wear to San Francisco for another purpose.

Around 1925, Ware hired himself to the Department of Agriculture as a dollar-a-year man. Later on, he set up in Washington a small fact-finding and information bureau called Farm Research. In that enterprise he associated with him two congenial young men. One was the brother of a man named by Elizabeth Bentley as one of her contacts, and a close friend of Harry Dexter White, then with the United States Treasury Department, and also one of Elizabeth Bentley's contacts. The other, later an expert on labor relations at a United States consulate in Australia, was, until rather recently, an employee of the State Department.

Seldom has $25,000 bought so much history. But Ware did not invest all (or perhaps even much of his nest egg) in Washington. To my knowledge, he maintained close ties with the Communist Party's underground sharecroppers' union at Camp Hill, Alabama, and no doubt with other undergrounds in the West and South.

It was not necessary to invest heavily in Washington. Once the New Deal was in full swing, Hal Ware was like a man who has bought a farm sight unseen only to discover that the crops are all in and ready to harvest. All that he had to do was to hustle them into the barn. The barn in this case was the Communist Party. In the A.A.A., Hal found a bumper crop of incipient or registered Communists. On its legal staff were Lee Pressman, Alger Hiss and John Abt (later named by Elizabeth Bentley as one of her contacts). There was Charles Krivitsky, a former physicist at New York University, then or shortly afterwards to be known as Charles Kramer (also, later on, one of Elizabeth Bentley's contacts). Abraham George Silverman (another of Elizabeth Bentley's future contacts) was sitting with a little cluster of Communists over at the Railroad Retirement Board. In the Agriculture Department (after a flier in the N.R.A. ) there was Henry H. Collins, Jr., now the head of the American-Russian Institute, cited as subversive by the Attorney General. Collins was the son of a Philadelphia manufacturer, a schoolboy friend of Alger Hiss, and a college friend of the late Laurence Duggan (who was later to be one of Hede Massing's underground contacts). There was Nathan Witt in the National Labor Relations Board. There was John Abt's sister, Marion Bachrach. In the N.R.A., then or later, was Victor Perlo (also one of Elizabeth Bentley's contacts). Widening vistas opened into the United States Government. Somewhat breathlessly, Harold Ware reported to J. Peters, the head of the underground section of the American Communist Party, with whom Hal was in close touch, that the possibilities for Communist organization in Washington went far beyond farming.

I do not know how many of those young men and women were already Communists when Ware met them and how many joined the Communist Party because of him. His influence over them was personal and powerful. But about the time that Ulrich and Charlie were initiating me into The Gallery and invisible ink, Harold Ware and J. Peters were organizing the Washington prospects into the secret Communist group now known by Ware's name-the Ware Group.
Under oath, before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Lee Pressman, in 1951, testified that he, Witt, Abt and Kramer had been Communists and members of this group. He also gave an account of its organization which may well bear a sketchy resemblance to its first formative stage. But, by 1934, the Ware Group had developed into a tightly organized underground, managed by a directory of seven men. In time it included a number of secret sub-cells whose total membership I can only estimate probably about seventy-five Communists. Sometimes they were visited officially by J. Peters who lectured them on Communist organization and Leninist theory and advised them on general policy and specific problems. For several of them were so placed in the New Deal agencies (notably Alger Hiss, Nathan Witt, John Abt and Lee Pressman) that they were in a position to influence policy at several levels.
They were so well-placed that the thought had occurred to Comrade Peters, and no doubt to others, that such human material could be used more effectively, and, moreover, that it was poor organization to leave so many promising Communists in one large group where everybody knew everybody else. Peters proposed to separate the most likely ones (an almost invariable underground practice) and place them in another distinct underground-a parallel apparatus-much more rigorously segregated and subdivided. When advisable, other Communists would be added to this special apparatus from other undergrounds in Washington. For the Ware Group was not the only Communist underground in the capital. This task Peters assigned to me....

The relationship of the leading committee to the secret cells was much like that of the Central Committee to the units of the open Communist Party. The Group was headed, when I first knew it, by Harold Ware himself. After Ware's death in 1935, Nathan Witt became the leader of the Group. Later, John Abt, for reasons not known to me, became its leader.

An effort has been made to describe the Ware Group as merely a "Marxist study group." That is not true. The Ware Group was an integral (and highly important) unit of the underground section of the American Communist Party. Until his death, it was under the constant direction of Harold Ware. It was always under the personal supervision of J. Peters, whose visits to it were at least monthly, and sometimes more frequent. On trade-union questions, and much of its activity had to do with trade-union and other labor problems, at least one of its members sometimes consulted in New York with Jack Stachel, one of the party's top men in trade-union work.

In 1931 Ware left the Soviet Union and returned to the United States to organize American farmers and add "an agrarian wing to the proletarian movement." He penetrated the Farmers' Holiday Association, a radical non-Communist group,' and then went to Washington, D.C., where the New Deal portended a thorough revamping of federal government.

Ware had a long-standing connection to the Department of Agriculture (DOA), having been on its list of dollar-a-year consultants all through the 1920s, when he had furnished statistics on Soviet farm experiments." He decided to renew the connection. First he established a base, forming a small think tank, Farm Research, Inc., which published a monthly journal, Facts for Farmers, crammed with agricultural statistics. In those heady first months of the New Deal it won a following in "left-wing agricultural circles." The journal was "extremely well-written.... and the analysis made sense," recalled Alger Hiss, a young lawyer then working in the DOA. Discreetly Ware downplayed Facts for Farmers's Communist backing, though its articles were reissued in the Party's Labor Fact Book.

Ware supplemented this open, educative work with a clandestine program. In 1933 he began canvassing government agencies for Party recruits.' The blitz of New Deal programs created many new government positions, staffed mainly by young policy intellectuals, trained in the law, economics, the burgeoning fields of social science. Many shared "a common vision of government -a vision of capable, committed administrators who would seize command of state institutions, invigorate them, expand their powers when necessary, and make them permanent forces in the workings of the marketplace.

No New Deal agency was more exciting than the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), a new wing of the DOA, with a staff of five thousand, formed by FDR to solve the farm crisis. Its chief counsel, Jerome Frank, had skimmed talent from Wall Street firms and Ivy League faculties to create "the greatest law firm in the country." Adlai Stevenson, Abe Fortas, Thurman Arnold, Telford Taylor joined Frank at the dawn of their distinguished careers. So did others as gifted or nearly so: John Abt, Lee Pressman, Nathan Witt, Alger Hiss.

As a group these "New Deal lawyers" knew little, if anything, about farming or farmers. They did not have to. They were brought in as legal technicians, as drafters of bills and writers of memos.'' Their job was to build the machinery by which the New Deal would hoist the country from the wreckage of the Depression and at the same time repair the structural defects of an economy sorely in need of regulation. The AAA, in the words of its preeminent historian, "ushered in the New Deal."

But from the outset the Triple A was divided into warring factions. One, composed of old-time "farm men," favored policies geared to helping landowners and big growers. The second, the reform wing led by Jerome Frank, wanted to improve the lot of sharecroppers and tenant farmers, among the worst casualties of the Depression. Agriculture Secretary Henry Wallace, a Republican, tried to appease both camps, siding with neither."

The most radical members of Frank's team, repeatedly stymied by the "farm men," grew restless once it became clear the New Deal would do everything "necessary to preserve the social system but would certainly not dismantle it," in the words of the AAA lawyer John Abt. Some of these "young hotheads," it was rumored, had begun referring to Roosevelt derisively as "the Kerensky of the U.S.A.," a liberal figurehead who would be expelled when, not if, the revolution occurred. For the time being, only committed radicals seemed to be offering concrete solutions. As The New Republic editorialized, "The only groups in the country that have given serious attention to the plight of the tenant farmer are the Socialists and the Communists."

Enter Hal Ware. Though no longer affiliated with the DOA, he became a familiar figure at the AAA, camped out in the lunchroom, locked in friendly dialogue with the voting reformers, persuasively reciting statistics from the latest issue of Facts For Farniers. The case he made was reasonable, untouched by fanaticism and enlivened by "a flow of colorful talk and stories." His voice was "always easy sounding, unlike the staccato of most Party men," remembered Hope Hale Davis, a young employee in the AAA's Consumers Council. Davis found something familiar and reassuring in Ware's "tanned lean face, his rolled-up blue shirt sleeves showing the muscles in his forearms," so reminiscent of the Iowa farmers she had grown up among.

Between 1933 and the early part of 1934, Harold Ware (1890-1935) was standing up Washington's first covert Communist Party cell. Whittaker Chambers wrote that Ware organized within the United States government one of the most threatening fifth columns in American history. Ware was a member of the Communist Party; in the early 1920s he set out for the Soviet Union with a group of radicals to develop a collective farm, the so-called Kuzbas colony in Kemerovo Oblast, in the Altai Mountains.' He had worked in the Soviet Union organizing collective farms at Lenin's invitation.

Ware returned to Washington at Moscow's direction to organize farmworkers. In 1933, at the onset of the Roosevelt administration, Ware began recruiting young New Dealers for the Communist Party. Communists who were recruited into the Ware Group had to end their public party activities if they had any, and go "underground"' as covert operatives. Moscow saw the need to keep intelligence-gathering and party organizational work separate. For example, when Soviet military intelligence, the GRU (then called "the Fourth Department" of the Red Army's General Staff), decided to recruit Whittaker Chambers, who was at the time an open party member and editor of the Communist journal the New Masses, for underground work "running" the Ware Group, Chambers had to dissolve all public connections to the open Communist Party and end his career as a journalist.

According to Chambers, the Soviet espionage apparatus in Washington, D.C., was in constant contact with the national underground of the CPUSA, in the person of its chief, a Hungarian Communist called J. Peters. J. Peters was an "illegal" - in the United States under false documentation, totally separated from any official diplomatic presence. Chambers claimed that during his entire six years in the Soviet underground, Peters had been the official secret contact man between a succession of Soviet apparatuses and the CPUSA.

The Ware Group originally was identified by some as being a Marxist study group that discussed theory, Communist literature, and major economic issues of the day, and where party dues were collected. This view was held by Nathaniel Weyl, a charter member of the Ware Group, and Josephine Herbst, ex-wife of John Herrmann, Ware's chief assistant in the underground from 1933 to 1935. An investigator during the Hiss trial said the Group engaged in "low-grade espionage work" and some sort of information gathering took place. The Group did hold discussions on Marxism-Leninism and read party literature. J. Peters occasionally gave a lecture on the theory of Leninism and dues were collected. However, Chambers said that its primary function was not as a study group; its primary mission was to infiltrate the U.S. government in the interests of the Communist Party.' The purpose of the Group was not primarily espionage at the time, but certainly it was one of its eventual objectives, according to Chambers.

J. Peters introduced Chambers to Harold Ware in New York City in the spring of 1934 as "Karl," his underground name. During the meeting, Alger Hiss's name came up, as "an exceptional Communist and a member of the Ware Group for whom Peters had a high regard." Then, in midsummer 1934, Chambers met with Hiss for the first time, along with Peters and Ware, in Washington, D.C. It was a brief introduction, allowing Chambers to make contact with Hiss, since he was about to take over "running" him. Following this initial meeting, "Karl" made several calls at Hiss's home, where he also met Priscilla. Hiss was highly intelligent but without real Communist experience, Chambers observed; Alger was "gracious in the way which is his peculiar talent." In a development not favored in the underground, Chambers gradually formed a close friendship with Alger Hiss and it extended to their families.

The Ware Group initially consisted of young lawyers and economists hired by the AAA, an agency that reported to the secretary of agriculture but was independent of the Department of Agriculture bureaucracy. Chambers maintained that when he first made contact with the Ware Group in 1934 he did not know how many of the members of the Group already had been Communists or how many were recruited by Ware.lhe Ware Group consisted of a leading committee of seven members (1934-35) who met weekly or fortnightly. Meetings at first were held at Ware's wife's music studio, and subsequently at the apartment of Henry Collins, a Ware Group member, at 1213 St. Matthews Court in northwest Washington, D.C.-a mews between M and N streets, NW, just off Connecticut Avenue. It remained the Group's headquarters until sometime in 1936-37, when it then moved to the house of John Abt, who by then had become head of the Ware Group and was an assistant to the attorney general of the United States."' After Ware died in 1935 in an automobile collision, the Group's leader was Nathan Witt, then John Abt.

All the members of the Ware Group were dues-paying members of the Communist Party and J. Peters considered this group (along with his Hollywood underground network) as one of his major sources of income." Ware Group members regularly paid 10 per cent of their salaries to the Communist Party. J. Peters emphasized to the Group that "since its members were intellectuals without Party experience, it was extremely important to their feeling of Communist solidarity that they make exceptional money sacrifices for the Communist Party." Moreover, Lenin had stressed the importance of dues as a test and a binder of party loyalty."

The Ware Group initially was not a spy ring in the technical sense. Its functions did include recruiting new members into the underground; staffing of government agencies with Communist Party members; and most importantly, influencing, from the most strategic positions, the policies of the U.S. government. Chambers was the first person to disclose the existence of the Ware Group. He identified its organization and membership to the assistant secretary of state in charge of security, Adolf A. Berle, as early as September 2, 1939, during a private meeting at Berle's home.

At the time of the congressional hearings and Hiss trials (1948-50), Chambers testified publicly about the existence of this covert apparatus supporting Soviet intelligence in the U.S. government and identified eight officials who belonged to it when he was introduced to its members: Lee Pressman, Nathan Witt, John Abt, Charles Kramer (born Krivitsky), Henry Collins, Victor Perlo, Donald Hiss, and Alger Hiss. Alger Hiss was a leading member of the Ware Group.
Another Ware Group member, Nathaniel Weyl, came forward in 1950 and stated that in 1934 he had been a Communist and was part of the Ware Group. Weyl now corroborated Chambers's account of the existence of the Group. Weyl left the Group shortly before Chambers took it over, sometime in mid to late 1934. Subsequently, in 1951, Lee Pressman, a charter member of the Ware Group," testified under oath before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) that he, Nathan Witt, John Abt, and Charles Kramer had been Communists and members of the Ware Group, thus also corroborating Chambers's testimony on the existence of such a group, but only identifying four of the eight members cited by Chambers.

While Chambers was being trained in underground tradecraft, Ware and J. Peters were organizing individuals into this secret Communist group. Ware found a large number of incipient or registered Communists already in the AAA. However, J. Peters wanted to position some of them in other agencies, where they could influence foreign policy. In time, probably as many as seventy-five Communists were recruited into the Ware Group and in a number of its subcells. It was Chambers's task to move career Communists into the old-line agencies, particularly the Department of State. Some former Ware Group members moved into Elizabeth Bentley's KGB espionage network.

Chambers was instructed by J. Peters to set up a "parallel apparatus" with the Ware Group, and Hiss was to be the first man in his new apparatus. The new cell was organized as a spin-off of the Ware Group. Among other new agents who entered Chambers's GRU network in 1935-36 were Treasury Department official Harry Dexter White, George Silverman (a government statistician later employed in the War Department)," and State Department official Julian Wadleigh. The objective, emphasized by Colonel Boris Bykov, whom Chambers knew as "Peter" (a GRU officer operating out of New York who was Chambers's superior), was to penetrate U.S. government agencies that were in a position to make foreign policy."

Harold Ware, son of the famous Communist leader, Mother Bloor, was also helpful in widening my capitol contacts. I did not know until many years later that he was the key operator in a Soviet network extending from the Department of Agriculture, where he worked, into the Treasury, State Department and the other government branches. Looking back, I feel sure that he guessed why I was so eager to meet important people and did his best to comply.