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"During those two months, I had more freedom than I had in all the 21 years in the party. I felt, for the first time in my adult life, that if I had an opinion about something I could express it any way I wanted without fear of reproof from someone higher up." She believes that she would have made no open break if the party had not stubbornly attempted to force her back into the Communist routine. "I was beset on all sides."
Sensing her despair, a young Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporter named Traynor Hansen suggested that she should go to the FBI, tell what she knew, and make an open break with the party. She debated with herself for three days, finally called him. He took her to the FBI, and for two weeks she talked—she named names, told about underground operations, party finances and channels of command, verified the Government's suspicion that the party membership in Washington State had fallen from 800 to 400 hard-bitten members.
"Barbara Hartle, stoolpigeon," responded the Northwest's Daily People's World, ". . . has destroyed herself forever . . . has joined the ranks of the atom maniacs, the Hitlerites, the persecutors and inquisitors of every honest and Democratic element in American life."
Longtime Communist Ben Gold, 55, president of the Fur & Leather Workers Union, was found guilty by a Federal Court jury in Washington last week of making false statements to a Government agency. His crime: filing a Taft-Hartley law non-Communist affidavit on Aug. 30, 1950, a few days after "fraudulently" announcing his resignation from the party.