Regina was first brought to the attention of the FBI on 3 October 1942, when she was working as a student instructor at the U.S. Air Force’s Radio Instructors’ School at St. Louis University. She expected her second child the following March. Regina was financially desperate, so much so that, through a Jewish charity, she attempted to place her daughter, Joan, with another family.
The arrangement quickly collapsed, the foster mother asking Regina to take Joan back. The woman did not tell Regina that she had contacted the authorities. America was at war. She had discovered some “suspicious” items and documents among belongings Regina had left with Joan and considered that these posed a potential threat to the “national welfare.” The suspect possessions included several pages of scribbled “chemical formulas,” [sic] as well as a B-2 Cadet camera with a state-of-the-art lens and a collapsible umbrella. There was also a letter from a left-wing friend that included the sentence, “Washington is really a fascinating city, although right now it is getting too hot for comfort.” The woman considered it worthy of note that Regina owned “a heavy black rubber apron and two heavy rubber sheets.”
So began an operation lasting two decades and costing tens of thousands of U.S. government dollars, though there were perfectly plausible explanations for the items Regina left among Joan’s belongings. After returning to the United States, Regina had completed her BA degree at the University of Denver, where she majored in French, German, biology, and chemistry. The last would account for the “chemical formulas” and perhaps the rubber sheet and gloves. As for the camera and collapsible umbrella, her absent husband, Gerhardt, was a professional photographer.
Although the evidence was circumstantial, the FBI came to believe Gerhardt was something more sinister—that he was a Soviet agent. Why did he spend those years in Russia? Why did he have that mysterious Spanish passport? In Chile, had he not joined the Communist Party and fraternized with fellow left-wingers? But most significant of all, in the eyes of the FBI, was a letter also found among Regina’s belongings in 1942. It had been posted in June 1941 and was written in a stilted style; the FBI described it as “cryptic” (though English was not Gerhardt’s mother tongue). In the letter, Gerhardt explained how he had taken pictures of fishing boats and fishermen at the port of San Antonio about an hour and a half west of the capital, Santiago. The FBI observed that at the same time, three Germans, posing as fishermen at the port, were charged with transmitting espionage information by radio.
If Gerhardt was a Soviet agent, what about his wife? It made no difference to the FBI that Regina was granted a divorce from Gerhardt on 14 September 1945 on the grounds of willful neglect to provide for her and their two children—she had received no financial support since July 1942. (At the time, she was living in Moscow, Idaho. The local paper, the Daily Idahonian, had fun with the story—married in Moscow, divorced in Moscow.)
The FBI files contain half a dozen physical descriptions of Regina; one from this period states that she was five feet four, with dark brown hair, dark brown eyes, thick eyebrows, full lips, olive complexion, heavy legs, a low and heavy bust, and a “scruffy” appearance. Her nose features in another description—long and “a little crooked.”
According to an informer, in the same year that her divorce came through, Regina was recruited to the Communist Political Association (CPA) in Oregon. The CPA was described under Executive Order 9835 as a communist and subversive organization that sought to “alter the form of government of the United States by unconstitutional means” President Truman issued Executive Order 9835 on 22 March 1947, initiating a program to seek out any “infiltration of disloyal persons” in the U.S. government. By December 1952, over 6.6 million people had been secretly investigated—no case of espionage was uncovered.
Was Regina an active member of the CPA? The FBI believe she was expelled in 1950 for being “unfaithful.” But she was certainly politically engaged, at different times belonging to or associated with a variety of left-wing organizations and causes, from the International Workers Order to American Women for Peace and, much later, the Committee for Non-Violent Action. Over the years, the Bureau accumulated further “incriminating evidence” against her. On 15 May 1945, she contacted a Russian employee at the Soviet Government Purchasing Commission in Portland about the possibility of working as a translator. A plumber notified the FBI that he had once found Regina playing what he described as “communist records” and that she tried to influence him to become a member of the Communist Party. A source “with whom contact is insufficient to judge his reliability” told the FBI that Regina had taken her child (singular) to a communist summer camp. And in a judgment demonstrating the institutional politics of Hoover’s FBI, she was accused of exhibiting communist sympathies by picketing an apartment block near her home in a protest against the removal of “a colored family.”
The Bureau judged Regina bright and articulate, but also, in the words of one informer, a “real pain in the neck.” A source described her as “antagonistic” and “argumentative.” It was said that all the tenants in their Brooklyn block disliked the Fischers, and that Regina had a “suit complex,” often initiating legal action against the landlord for “imagined grievances.”
There was also a psychiatric report. Shortly after Bobby was born, Regina took advantage of a Chicago charity, going to stay in the Sarah Hackett Memorial Home for indigent single women with babies. When she wanted her daughter, Joan, to join her and Bobby—since Joan’s fostering had not worked—the charity told her there was no room and that in any event, Joan had a perfectly satisfactory home. (Joan was in St. Louis, perhaps with her grandfather.) Regina smuggled Joan in; the resulting dispute then escalated as Regina tried to rouse the other residents against the managers. She was eventually arrested for disturbing the peace. The judge found her not guilty but ordered a mental health examination. The Municipal Psychiatric Institute diagnosed her as a “stilted (paranoid) personality, querulent [sic] but not psychotic.” The report recommended, “If her small children should suffer because of her obstinacy, juvenile court intervention should be initiated.”
The FBI investigation was not limited to Regina. Special agents gathered information on Jacob, her father, also a left-winger, as well as her brother, Max, “a known Commie” who had moved to Detroit. Because Regina and Ethel, Jacob’s second wife, loathed each other, the FBI approached Ethel for information on her stepdaughter (this was many years after the two women had stopped speaking). On one occasion, in October 1953, the FBI even approached Regina directly—calculating that because she had abandoned the Communist Party, she might be willing to dish the dirt on former comrades. Regina, however, was “uncooperative” she was prepared to be interviewed, but only with a lawyer present.
In the mid-1950s, the file became relatively inactive. But when, in March 1957, Regina contacted the Soviet embassy about Bobby’s trip to Moscow, the case sprang back into life—and with a vengeance. On 21 May 1957, an agent wrote to the director of the FBI:
It is to be noted that subject is a well-educated, widely travelled intelligent woman who has for years been associated with communists and persons of pro-communist leanings. In view of the foregoing and in light of her recent contact of an official of the Soviet Embassy, it is desired that this case be re-opened and that investigation be instituted in an effort to determine if subject has in the past or may presently be engaged in activities inimical to the interest of the United States.