In the marbled corridor off the pressroom one morning last week, newsmen surrounded blocky Frank Gordon, the assistant U.S. attorney. For 9½ days in Manhattan's federal court, Witness Louis Budenz, the backslid Red, had made out the case against eleven top U.S. Communists charged with conspiring to advocate forcible overthrow of the U.S. Government. Now, the reporters asked, who would the prosecution's next witness be?
Good-naturedly, Gordon fended off questions, held himself to one sententious answer: "All I can tell you is that it's going to be a man." The reason for this strategic evasion was soon understandable: the Government was ready with a real surprise.
When young (33), studious-looking Herbert A. Philbrick of Melrose, Mass. took the witness stand that afternoon, he was still a secret, dues-paying, in-good-standing member of the Massachusetts Communist Party. He was secure in its confidence and even a minor functionary in the underground apparatus.
The Switch. In a strong, confident voice, Witness Philbrick matter-of-factly explained something that he and the Government had hidden well. "During the entire nine years of my activities," he said, "I have been continuously in touch with the FBI." The Government had reversed, with spectacular success, the old Red tactic of infiltration.
As the wire-service reporters raced out of the courtroom for the telephones, the defendants and their lawyers sat stunned for a moment. Then the lawyers hopped to their feet in an attempt to head off the testimony of the unperturbed man in the witness chair.
"Unfair surprise," sputtered stooped, balding Abraham Isserman, and "Outside the scope of the indictment." Pint-sized Harry Sacher barked similar objections. Judge Harold Medina, bitingly suave, then and later gave short shrift to their objections.
What manner of man was this curly-haired, spectacled witness who looked more like a peaceful, carefully dressed clerk than a secret Government agent? For nine years he had led a double life. To his wife, blonde, blue-eyed Eva, Herb Philbrick was a good husband & father (they have four little daughters). To his employers, a Boston motion-picture theater chain, he was a go-getting assistant advertising manager, who knew how to turn out cute promotion pieces and ingratiate himself at newspaper drama desks. To his pastor, the Rev. Ralph Bertholf, he was a pillar of suburban Wakefield's First Baptist Church, a well-favored Sunday-school teacher and editor of the church's paper, Tall Spire. To everyone else, he was a friendly guy who looked much younger than his years, liked a drink now & then, foisted neither his religion nor his politics (whatever they were) on anybody.
The Line. In 1940, Witness Philbrick, who had been getting a flood of Communist-front literature in the course of his church work, helped to organize a group known as the Cambridge Youth Council. Almost at once, he spotted Reds in the fold. He took his suspicions to the FBI, was asked to stick with it and keep the FBI informed. Two years later, he was a member of the Young Communist League, from 1944 on a member of the Communist Party. The FBI paid his expenses: party dues, the cost of renting a recording machine on which he dictated some of his regular reports.