Miss Johnson. No; he didn't tell me that he had any specific information, that he offered it, that he had told them, or that he would tell them. It was not that explicit. It was something like if his experience as a radar operator would be of any use to them, perhaps they would let him work as a radar operator. It was a little more pointed than that, because I realized that he was going to make available his radar experience, and that he did want to use it as a come-on.
It was a tiny bit, a little bit more pointed than that, but it was more in that category. If anything he learned as a radar operator in the Marines would be useful to them, he would give it to them, and he hoped to continue his training, something like that.
But it is not in my notes. It is memory, and it is the most negative recollection of him I had.
Mr. Slawson. Did he make any comments to you about having been interviewed by any Soviet newspaper reporters or radio reporters or anything of that type?
Miss Johnson. Well, of course that is an obvious question I ought to have asked him, since a visiting foreigner very quickly does get that kind of attention, but I didn't ask him.
Mr. Slawson. You did, I think, according to the statements you have made in these exhibits, ask him whether he had had any contacts with American Communists or other Communists before he came to the Soviet Union?
Miss Johnson. I wasn't as suspicious about this as I had been on the Soviet police angle, but he awakened my suspicions by his reticence. He seemed to have something to hide, and once again I didn't know whether he had something to hide or whether he was just very secretive, because I asked him what books he had read, and he wouldn't say. Yet he was certainly trying to give me the impression that he was a book-learned boy, and this comes about page 11 of my notes. We were talking about books, and we were talking about his contact with American Socialists or Communists about the same time.
So perhaps the way that the conversation led from one to the other gave me the impression that he wasn't naming books because he didn't want to hurt authors by suggesting that they had had anything to do—he was taking full responsibility—that they had had anything to do with his defection. But you would think he would have mentioned books because he was giving the impression that he was a boy who paid a lot of attention and he really read books.
Then Socialists and Communists, I wasn't too suspicious although I should have been. How did he get there? It wasn't easy at all for him to do. I was more impressed, awed by it, than I was inquisitive about where he might have been coached.
But he awakened me to the point that I should be inquisitive because of the very fact that he eluded, naming names, specified that he had no contacts with American Communists, going out of his way to stress it. I am sure that this part of our conversation was quite a bit longer than came out in my notes. Again you know I had no idea that he was going to ever be at all important. But it was he who put the emphasis on lack of contacts with American Communists. He said American Socialists were to be shunned by anybody with an interest in progressive ideology. I probably brought them up rather than the Communists first, just as his interest in Socialist literature.