He answered, "Well, they were to be shunned." This was an emphatic reply to what was probably a very vague, general, unemphatic question. And he called them "a dormant flag-waving organization."
So that woke me up and I asked him what about American Communists, and he said—he was very emphatic here and again probably at more length than was in the notes—that only through reading literature and observing, but he wouldn't name what literature, American Communists "(I never saw an American Communist)" he said, and I put that in parentheses because I was that uninterested, really. I didn't make it anything but a parenthetical observation, but only through reading did he conclude it was best. In other words it was he who had tried to emphasize that there had not been people involved.
Retrospectively I see that this was important, that there may have been people involved.
Mr. Slawson. You say retrospectively you see that it was important. Do you mean by that that you see now it was very important to him that he establish to you that he had come only on his own?
Miss Johnson. Well, I saw then that it was important to him to establish this to me. My story reflects whatever importance I gave it at the time. But if I knew about him then a tenth of what I know now, I would have tried to pin him down even more on it, that he might have had coaching.
It is also the sort of thing that comes out more clearly when you look at your notes and you think about a person afterwards, just-how-did-he-get-here kind of a thing.
How does a boy like this who doesn't know his way around Moscow find his way here? But at the time I was talking to him, I had less interest really than in any help he may have had on the Soviet side.
Mr. Slawson. Trying to divorce what you now know from what you knew then, did he go into any detail at all about his life before he came to Russia, his life in the Marine Corps particularly?
Miss Johnson. The only details there were about his experience abroad. He said literally nothing about his experience in the Marine Corps in the United States except that he was studying Russian then. He did speak about his experience in the Marine Corps abroad in Japan, in the Philippines, and he indicated that he hated to be part of it, you know, "oppressing power." He said he had been part of an invasion of Indonesia in March 1958, that there was a Communist-inspired social turnover, that they had to sit off the coast in ships with enough ammunition to intervene. He was told that they might have had to go in in Suez in 1956.
He had been in Japan and the Philippines, and he hated to participate in what he viewed as American imperialism, but details of his life in the Marine Corps he didn't go into at all.