The unending hustle and bustle of everyday Party activity ceased. As she sat in a lonely room or stood on a dark street corner waiting for an underground meeting, she now had time to think. Suddenly all the doubts that had been slowly accumulating came together. At the same time the restraining influences of Party discipline became weaker. A more rapid disillusionment on my part took place when I left the active Communist Party upon leaving Seattle to enter the Communist Party underground movement. Without direct day to day pressure, with less reading of Marxist-Leninist works and with increased reading of other material, and through coming into contact with average people my mental processes were hastened. The culmination of this process was my decision to leave the Communist Party and to live my own life. She became convinced that the Communist Party was an evil; that it did not represent a way to better social or economic conditions; that it was a fraud and a deception. I never realized that this discipline and this mental and physical domination of the Communist Party over its members is necessary to it in order to continue its double life of posing as one thing and being another. I had never before realized that the many unsolved problems I had noted while still a Communist Party member were products of this double existence. It was one thing, however, to break intellectually with the Party, another to break openly. That was now to be Barbara Hartle’s anguish and the anguish of so many members still in the Party today. Barbara was living in a no-man’s land: she had broken with the world of tyranny yet was held by the power that had robbed her of freedom. The indecision began to tear her apart. She was spiritually sick. At first she kept saying to herself and the Party, “I’ll be all right. Just give me a little time. I’ll work this out.” She just couldn’t realize that these doubts were permanent signs of a new life, not temporary confusions in an old allegiance. Merely to drift away quietly wasn’t possible. The Party wouldn’t allow that. The only way was to redeem herself by walking boldly forward. This she did in March, 1954. And here is what a sympathetic citizen can do to help. Mr. Traynor Hansen, a reporter for the Seattle _Post-Intelligencer_, had covered the 1953 Seattle Smith Act trial. He noticed, as did others, that Barbara Hartle lacked the fiery disposition of the other defendants. Later, while on bond, she had long visits with him. It was his counsel that she go to the FBI since it would have been improper under the circumstances for us to go to her.