A Spy Reveals Mysterious, Dull Life

Herbert Philbrick joined the Cambridge Youth Council in 1940 and the Young Communist League in 1942. He got his Communist Party card in 1944. In 1949 Philbrick walked in the back door of the U.S. District Court in New York's Foley Square to tell how he had spent his nine years with the practicing Left as an informant for the FBI. This book is the story of those nine years, and of what Philbrick calls his three lives: his life as a respectable advertising man, as a communist, and as an FBI spy. All three lives fall to be particularly interesting.

Philbrick's FBI work consisted largely of smuggling voluminous reports and bundles of Communist publications to Federal agents. He did his job well; by the time he took the stand at Foley Square he had collected the FBI a roomful.

He did organizational odd jobs for numerous Communist and Communist-front groups, became known as a handy and trustworthy man with a mimeograph, and wound up in "Pro-4," as select and apparently as important a lot of plotters as over thumbed a copy of "Value, Price, and Profit."

He dealt, with a dreary procession of dreary people setting up steering committees, policy committees to show the steering committees, and planning committees to steer the policy committee. Philbrick dutifully recorded everything that happened. The result is a last that has that soggy impact of a Gromyke speech.

Philbrick and the people who helped him whip up his story late book form have tried to jazz up this unkempt new of material. Regrettably they menage only to give Philbrick's work an air of musical-comedy intrigue which pretty well befogs anything serious he has to say. His woman co-Communists are all drawn in the image of Max Shulman's Yetts Samovar; they are bright, sophisticated, stringy-haired, and wear sensible flat shoes as they go about their nefarious work. His men meet conspiratorially in darkened alleys. His Communist cells are all "mystery" groups thinking up "mystery" plans. Philbrick constantly adopts the label of "counterspy." The only person the book pictures as capable of spying out anything more covert than as Elks meeting is Philbrick himself.

Philbrick has little to say shout what made his associates tick, why they were communists or what they were trying to accomplish. He does not talk much about their links with results nor about their espionage activities, nor about any of the other factors which make Communism far more dangerous than a group of office-girls sitting around and reading the "Masifesto." Philbrick's look at Commssion only scratches at the top layer of a problem which gets far too much superficial handling as it is.