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A Communist settled confidently into the witness chair in Manhattan's federal courtroom last week and started his familiar spiel. Witness Anthony Krchmarek, a minor Communist functionary from Ohio, had come to lend his assurance that the party would not harm even a flea, much less overthrow a Government. He soon found himself talking into the teeth of some expert testimony from a fellow Ohioan: William Cummings, a Toledo auto worker who had spent six years among the Communists as an undercover agent for the FBI.
This was getting to be a familiar experience for defense witnesses in the trial of the eleven top U.S. Communist leaders. U.S. Attorney John F. X. McGohey had kept another witness, Daily Worker Editor John Gates, squirming for six grueling days on that same stand.
After spinning a fine story of what a dedicated idealist he was, Communist Gates had been asked a few pertinent questions. He had testified, had he not, that he was born in New York? Yes. Then McGohey produced a relief application that Gates had once filled out in Youngstown, Ohio, giving Lakewood, N.J. as his birthplace. Had Gates been using that name since 1932? Yes. McGohey fished out a 1937 passport application in which he gave his name as Isriel Ragenstrich. Had Gates not gone to jail twice? Yes. McGohey confronted him with a previous sworn statement, declaring he had never been convicted of a crime.
Expendable Informer. The ordeal of defendant after defendant had become almost a ritual. Backed by the FBI's own underground and the bales of reports which the FBI had been collecting since before World" War II, Prosecutor McGohey often seemed to know more about the Communists and their allies than the 'Reds themselves.
How many more FBI agents were there in the Communist underground? That was left to the U.S. to guess at—and the Communists to worry about. Said an FBI agent last week: "You can be sure that the sources which were revealed at the Communist trial were those chosen because we could best dispense with future information from them."
But the U.S. had already become aware of a recurring national phenomenon. Like the trial of Alger Hiss for perjury and the trial and conviction of Judith Coplon for espionage, the Government's case in Foley Square hinged directly on the searching investigation of thousands of U.S. citizens made by the FBI under its director, J. Edgar Hoover.
Birds & Banks. There were few areas of the U.S. which did not come under G-man Hoover's watchful eye last week. In Georgia and Alabama, his agents scoured the wool-hat country, quizzing suspects and witnesses in the latest outbreak of the South's hooded raiders. In Chicago, other agents dug into the murder of two bank messengers and plugged away at the Government's fraud case against Automaker Preston Tucker (TIME, June 20). The FBI was also relentlessly at work on a backlog of continuing cases, including the nation's only two unsolved—and long-forgotten—kidnapings.* They were seeking 1,367 fugitives and 2,462 armed-forces deserters as well.