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Burdett blamed the Russians for instigating the murder shortly afterward of his first wife, Lea Schiavi, an anti-Fascist Italian journalist, while visiting the Soviet-occupied Iranian province of Azerbaijan. Kurdish gunmen stopped her car, singled her out and shot her. "She knew too much," said Burdett.
The Harder Decision. Burdett, who had wanted to be a foreign correspondent, was hired full-time by CBS in 1941 while still a Commie, but said nothing about his Communist or spy career until CBS sent all staff members a loyalty questionnaire in 1951. He filled in the truth, with an explanatory letter. CBS accepted his explanation, and Burdett told his story to the FBI. "It was not," he said, "a hard decision to make." This year he came to a harder decision: to quit CBS and tell his story publicly. He had, it seemed, lived too long with the secret.
New York Municipal Judge Robert Morris, onetime chief counsel to the Senate subcommittee, advised him to testify, and helped to make the arrangements. CBS wanted Burdett to resign first, but Morris persuaded the network officials that recanting Communists should be encouraged rather than penalized for making public confessions. Last week both CBS and the subcommittee extravagantly praised Burdett's "strong sense of duty."
Burdett named some two dozen persons whom he knew or strongly suspected to have been Communists. He disclosed the existence of a prewar Communist cell in the editorial offices of the Brooklyn Eagle. He confirmed the Communist Party membership of the men who controlled the American Newspaper Guild until 1941 and the New York Guild, the largest local, until 1947.
Milton Kaufman, once the executive vice president of the American Newspaper Guild, now an outdoor salesman, invoked the Fifth Amendment's protection. Monroe Stern, onetime Hearst writer and president of the New York Guild local, who became pressagent for the Yugoslav embassy, told the committee he never was a party member. Jack Ryan, a commissar of the New York Guild local until 1947, said he was now a self-employed "horticultural researcher"; he, like others, invoked the Fifth Amendment.
Nat Einhorn, once an Eagle reporter and active Guild official, was named by Burdett as the man who first tapped him for Soviet espionage. Einhorn, now a public-relations man for the Communist Polish embassy, blandly replied on the stand that he had merely suggested sending Burdett to Finland as an "objective" reporter for the Communist New Masses or Daily Worker. He refused, under the Fifth Amendment, to answer questions about past party membership.
The Senate subcommittee got very little response from most of the twelve subpoenaed witnesses, all named by Burdett. One man called, however, was Charles Grutzner, 51, since 1941 a reporter for the New York Times. By chance, Grutzner was presented on a CBS Omnibus TV program as a typical Times reporter. Burdett named him as a member of the prewar Brooklyn Eagle Communist unit. Times executives, tipped off to Grutzner's Communist background, questioned Grutzner in May. He quickly admitted party membership from 1937 to 1940. He had been recruited by Nat Einhorn, he testified, over a cup of coffee. "I considered it a closed chapter," said Grutzner, explaining his previous silence. "I just forgot about it."