News of the Soviet purges and rumors of the disappearances of disillusioned party members led Chambers to reconsider his loyalties. Sometime between 1937 and 1938 he deserted his post. He hid with his family in nondescript hotels and slept with a gun by his side, fearful that Soviet thugs would assault him at any moment. He had been led astray by the promises of a Communist utopia, he decided. He had betrayed his country, and in doing so, had abandoned the promise of democratic freedom.
The goon squad never showed up, and Chambers eventually settled on a farm in Maryland, traveling by train to New York City for appointments with his new bosses, the editors at Time magazine. He wrote about foreign affairs, but his submissions returned to the moral necessity of preserving democracy in a world tending toward authoritarianism. Everything hung in the balance, he warned his readers. And God was watching.
By the time Chambers sat before camera crews in a packed Congressional chamber in 1948, the humid August air leaving sweat stains on the back of his rumpled suit, he wanted to come clean in part because he had experienced a religious conversion. As he subsequently wrote in his memoir, Witness (1952), it was not only fear of Soviet agents but a revelation of God’s role in creation that inspired him to abandon the materialist philosophy of Communism. In the book, Chambers explained how awareness of God’s presence in human creation led him to see the lie of materialism. (He was baptized in the Episcopal Church but soon joined a meeting of the Society of Friends.)
Yet much like so many other former Soviet spies who went on to testify before Congress, Chambers laid most of the blame at the feet of other people. While Chambers testified to his own involvement in an “apparatus” that pilfered documents from federal agencies, he more consequentially said that Alger Hiss, a highly regarded State Department official, had belonged to that Washington, DC spy ring. When Hiss categorically denied even knowing who Chambers was, Hiss was charged with perjury. The “Hiss-Chambers” trials helped launch the home front of the American Cold War, in which the fear of Communist infiltration in every branch of government and private industry spurred furious attempts to root them out and expose anyone associated with Communism.
