Alger Hiss

Name	Alger Hiss
Caption	Alger Hiss testifying
Birth date	November 11, 1904
Birth place	Baltimore, Maryland, United States
Death date	November 15, 1996
Death place	New York City, New York, United States
Education	Baltimore City College high schoolJohns Hopkins UniversityHarvard Law School (1929)
Spouse
Relatives	Bosley Hiss, brotherDonald Hiss, brotherAnna Hiss, sister
Parents	Mary Lavinia HughesCharles Alger Hiss

Alger Hiss (November 11, 1904 – November 15, 1996) was an American lawyer, government official, author, and lecturer. He was involved in the establishment of the United Nations both as a U.S. State Department and UN official. Hiss was accused of being a Soviet spy in 1948 and convicted of perjury in connection with this charge in 1950.

On August 3, 1948, Whittaker Chambers, a former Communist Party member, testified under subpoena before the House Committee on Un-American Activities that Hiss had secretly been a communist while in federal service, contradicting his prior testimony under oath that Hiss had never been a communist. Called before HUAC, Hiss categorically denied the charge. When Chambers repeated his claim on nationwide radio, Hiss filed a defamation lawsuit against him.

During the pretrial discovery process, Chambers produced new evidence indicating that he and Hiss had been involved in espionage, although both men had previously denied this under oath to HUAC. A federal grand jury indicted Hiss on two counts of perjury; Chambers admitted to the same offense, but, as a cooperating government witness, was never charged. Although Hiss's indictment stemmed from the alleged espionage, he could not be tried for that crime because the statute of limitations had expired. After a mistrial due to a hung jury, Hiss was tried a second time. In January 1950, he was found guilty on both counts of perjury and received two concurrent five-year sentences, of which he eventually served 44 months.

Arguments about the case and the validity of the verdict took center stage in broader debates about the Cold War, McCarthyism, and the extent of Soviet espionage in the United States. Since his conviction, statements by involved parties and newly exposed evidence have added to the dispute. Although the New York Times identified what it called a "growing consensus that Hiss, indeed, had most likely been a Soviet agent," in 1993 historian David Halberstam wrote, "Many other important files remained closed, including Soviet records, and ironically—even though the House Un-American Activities committee is long defunct—HUAC’s own documents. These were sealed in 1976 for an additional fifty years. Until we have full access, the Hiss controversy will continue to be debated."

Early life and career

Hiss was born in Baltimore, Maryland, to Mary Lavinia Hughes, who came from an old Maryland family, and Charles Alger Hiss, an executive in a wholesale dry goods company. When Alger was two years old, his father Charles committed suicide and his widow Mary was obliged to rely on her inheritance and assistance from family members in raising her five children. They lived in a Baltimore neighborhood that was described by writer G. Edward White as one of "shabby gentility". Though his childhood was shadowed by early loss, Alger became a high performing and popular student. (The family experienced two further tragedies when Alger was in his twenties: his elder brother Bosley died of Bright's disease and his sister Mary Ann committed suicide.) Hiss attended Baltimore City College (high school) and Johns Hopkins University, where he was voted "most popular student" by his classmates and graduated Phi Beta Kappa. In 1929, he received his law degree from Harvard Law School, where he had been a protégé of Felix Frankfurter, the future U.S. Supreme Court justice. Like Frankfurter, who wrote a book about the case, Hiss, in company with many other prominent liberals of the day, sustained that Sacco and Vanzetti had been unjustly convicted. In 1929, Hiss married Priscilla Fansler Hobson (1903–1987), a Bryn Mawr graduate and grade school teacher. Priscilla, previously married to Thayer Hobson, had a three-year-old son, Timothy. Hiss and Priscilla had known each other before her marriage to Hobson. Hiss served for a year as clerk to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., before joining Choate, Hall & Stewart, a Boston law firm.

In 1933, Hiss became an attorney for President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal, first briefly on the staff of the Justice Department and then as a temporary assistant on the Nye Committee, investigating cost overruns and alleged profiteering by military contractors during World War I. During this period, Hiss was also a member of the liberal legal team headed by Jerome Frank that defended the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) against challenges to its legitimacy. Because of intense opposition from agribusiness in Arkansas, Frank and his left-wing assistants, who included future labor lawyer Lee Pressman, were in fired 1935 in what came to be known as "the purge of liberals". Hiss was not fired, but allegations that during this period he was connected with radicals on the Department of Agriculture's legal team were to be the source of his future misfortunes.

In 1936, Alger Hiss and his younger brother Donald Hiss began working under Cordell Hull in the United States Department of State. Alger was an assistant to Assistant Secretary of State Francis B. Sayre (son-in-law of Woodrow Wilson) and then special assistant to the Director of the Office of Far Eastern Affairs. In 1944, as Special Assistant to the Director of the OSPA (Office of Special Political Affairs), a policy-making entity devoted to planning for post-war international organizations, Hiss served as Executive Secretary of the Dumbarton Oaks Conference, which drew up plans for the future United Nations. In November 1944, Hull, whose project the United Nations largely was, retired as Secretary of State due to poor health and was succeeded by Undersecretary of State Edward Stettinius.

In February 1945, as a member of the U.S. delegation and assistant to Stettinius, Hiss attended the Yalta Conference, where the Big Three, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin, and Winston Churchill, met to coordinate strategy to defeat Hitler and consolidate their alliance to forestall any possibility, now that the Soviets had entered German territory, that of any of them might make a separate peace with Nazi Germany. Negotiations addressed the postwar division of Europe and configuration of its borders; reparations and de-Nazification; and the still unfinished plans, carried over from Dumbarton Oaks, for the United Nations. Hiss, whose work at Yalta was limited to the United Nations, drafted a memorandum arguing against Stalin's proposal (made at Dumbarton Oaks) to give one vote to each of the 16 Soviet Republics in the UN General Assembly. Fearing isolation, Stalin hoped thus to counterbalance the votes of the many countries of the British Empire, whom he anticipated would vote with Britain, and those of Latin America, who could be expected to vote in lockstep with the United States. In the final compromise offered by Roosevelt and Stettinius and accepted by Stalin, the Soviets obtained three votes: one each for the Soviet Union itself, the Ukrainian SSR, and the Byelorussian SSR.

Hiss was Secretary General of the San Francisco United Nations Conference on International Organization (the United Nations Charter Conference), which began on April 25, 1945, and then became the full Director of the OSPA. In 1946, he left government service to become president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, serving until May 5, 1949, when forced to step down.

Accusation of espionage

On August 3, 1948, Whittaker Chambers, a former Communist Party member who had become fervently anti-Communist, appeared before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) to denounce Alger Hiss. A senior editor at Time magazine who had written a scathingly satirical editorial critical of the Yalta agreements, Chambers asserted that he had known Hiss as a member of a "Marxist discussion group" that he called "an underground organization of the United States Communist Party" in the 1930s. The group, which he called the "Ware Group", had been run by the late agriculturalist Harold Ware, an American Communist intent on organizing black and white tenant farmers in the American South against exploitation and debt peonage by the cotton industry (Ware had died in 1935). According to Chambers, the group aimed at promoting unspecified communistic policies in the U.S. government. In this initial testimony, he did not mention espionage.

Chambers gave varying dates for his own break with Communism, an important point in his subsequent accusations against Hiss. For nine years, between September 1, 1939, and November 17, 1948, he claimed to have quit the Party in 1937. The 1938 Party-leaving date only emerged on November 17, 1948, when Chambers produced copies of State Department documents that he claimed Hiss had given him; the documents were dated 1938. Rumors had circulated about Hiss since 1939, when Chambers went to Assistant Secretary of State Adolf A. Berle, Jr. and accused Hiss of having belonged to an underground Communist cell at the Department of Agriculture. In 1942, Chambers repeated this allegation to the FBI. In 1945 two other sources appeared to implicate Hiss: Elizabeth Bentley, an American woman who said she had been a courier between Communist groups, told the FBI that a State Department employee, whom she identified as "Eugene Hiss", had belonged to an underground Communist group. The same year, a Belorussian code clerk named Igor Gouzenko defected from the Soviet Union to Canada. Gouzenko reported that an unnamed assistant (or more precisely an "assistant to an assistant") to U.S. Secretary of State Stettinius was a Soviet agent. In both cases, the FBI decided that Alger Hiss was the likely match.

In response to Chambers's accusations, Hiss protested his innocence and insisted on appearing before HUAC to clear himself. Testifying on August 5, 1948, he denied having ever been a Communist or having personally met Chambers. Under fire from President Truman and the press, the Committee was reluctant to proceed with its investigation against so eminent a man. Committee member Richard Nixon, however, a Congressman from California, professed to find Hiss's demeanor "condescending" and "insulting in the extreme" and wanted to press on. Nixon had received secret information about the FBI's suspicions from John Francis Cronin, a Roman Catholic priest who had infiltrated labor unions in Baltimore during World War II to report on Communist activities and had been given access to FBI files. With some reluctance, the Committee voted to make Nixon chair of a subcommittee that would seek to determine who was lying, Hiss or Chambers, at least on the question of whether they knew one another.

Shown a photograph of Chambers, Hiss conceded that the face "might look familiar" and asked to see Chambers in person. Confronted with him in person in a hotel elevator with HUAC representatives present, Hiss admitted that he had indeed known Chambers, but under the name "George Crosley", a man who represented himself as a freelance writer. Hiss said that in the mid-1930s he had sublet his apartment to this "Crosley" and had given him an old car. Chambers, for his part, denied ever having used the alias Crosley, though it later came out that he had published poetry under that name. When Hiss and Chambers both appeared before a HUAC subcommittee on August 17, 1948, they had the following exchange:

:HISS. Did you ever go under the name of George Crosley? :CHAMBERS. Not to my knowledge. :HISS. Did you ever sublet an apartment on Twenty-ninth Street from me? :CHAMBERS. No; I did not. :HISS. You did not? :CHAMBERS. No. :HISS. Did you ever spend any time with your wife and child in an apartment on Twenty-ninth Street in Washington when I was not there because I and my family were living on P Street? :CHAMBERS. I most certainly did. :HISS. You did or did not? :CHAMBERS. I did. :HISS. Would you tell me how you reconcile your negative answers with this affirmative answer? :CHAMBERS. Very easily, Alger. I was a Communist and you were a Communist. Chambers's statements, because they were made in a congressional hearing, were privileged against defamation suits; Hiss challenged Chambers to repeat them without benefit of such protection. When, on the national radio program Meet the Press, Chambers publicly called Hiss a Communist, Hiss instituted a libel lawsuit against him.

Chambers retaliated by claiming Hiss was not merely a Communist but also a spy, a charge he had not made earlier; and, on November 17, 1948, he produced, to support his explosive allegations, physical evidence consisting of sixty-five pages of re-typed State Department documents plus four in Hiss's own handwriting of copied State Department cables. These became known as the "Baltimore Documents." He claimed Hiss had given them to him in 1938 and that Priscilla had retyped them on the Hisses' Woodstock typewriter to pass along to the Soviets. The second trial, under a new judge, lasted from November 17, 1949, to January 21, 1950.

At both trials, a key to the prosecution case was testimony from expert witnesses stating that identifying characteristics of the typed Baltimore documents matched samples typed on a typewriter owned by the Hisses at the time of his alleged espionage work with Chambers. The prosecution also presented as evidence the typewriter itself. Given away years earlier, it had been located by defense investigators.

In the second trial, Hede Massing, an Austrian-born confessed Soviet spy who was being threatened with deportation, and whom the first judge had not permitted to testify, provided some slight corroboration of Chambers's story. She recounted meeting Hiss at a party in 1935, and recalled that they had spoken obliquely about their Communist activities. According to Anthony Summers, "Hiss spoke only two sentences in court after he had been found guilty. The first was to thank the judge. The second was to assert that one day in the future it would be disclosed how forgery by typewriter had been committed." On January 25, 1950, he was sentenced to five years imprisonment.

At a subsequent press conference, Secretary of State Dean Acheson reacted emotionally, affirming, "I do not intend to turn my back on Alger Hiss”; Acheson quoted Jesus in the Bible: “I was a Stranger and ye took me in: Naked, and ye clothed me; I was sick and ye visited me, I was in prison and ye came unto me." Acheson's remarks enraged Nixon, who accused him of blasphemy." The verdict was upheld by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit (case citation 185 F.2d 822) and the Supreme Court of the United States denied a writ of certiorari (340 U.S. 948). Hiss served 44 months at the Lewisburg Federal Prison and was released on November 27, 1954. While in prison, Hiss acted as a voluntary attorney, advisor, and tutor for many of his fellow inmates.

The case heightened public concern about Soviet espionage penetration of the U.S. government in the 1930s and 1940s. As a well-educated and highly connected government official from an old American family, Alger Hiss did not fit the profile of a typical spy. Publicity surrounding the case thrust Richard M. Nixon into the public spotlight, helping him move from the U.S. House of Representatives to the U.S. Senate in 1950, and to the vice presidency of the United States in 1952. Senator Joseph McCarthy made his famous Wheeling, West Virginia, speech two weeks after the Hiss verdict, launching his career as the nation's most visible anti-communist.

Post-incarceration

After his release in 1954, Hiss, who had been disbarred, worked as a salesman for a stationery company. In 1957 he published In the Court of Public Opinion, a book challenging in detail the prosecution's case against him, and maintaining the typewritten documents traced to his typewriter had been forged. Hiss separated from his first wife, Priscilla, in 1959, though he did not remarry until after Priscilla's death in 1986.

On November 11, 1962, following Richard Nixon's failed 1962 bid for governor of California, Hiss appeared in a segment titled (prematurely) "The Political Obituary of Richard M. Nixon" on the show on ABC television. His appearance led sponsors to withdraw from Smith's program when viewers bombarded ABC with complaints about letting a convicted perjurer appear on the air. Smith's show was cancelled in June 1963. The five rolls of 35 mm film known as the "pumpkin papers" had been characterized as highly classified and too sensitive to reveal and were thought until late 1974 to be locked in HUAC files. In 1975, independent researcher Stephen W. Salant, an economist at the University of Michigan, sued the U.S. Justice Department when it denied his request for access to them under the Freedom of Information Act. On July 31, 1975, as a result of this lawsuit and follow-on suits filed by Peter Irons and by Alger Hiss and William Reuben, the Justice Department released copies of the "pumpkin papers" that had been used to implicate Hiss. One roll of film turned out to be totally blank due to overexposure, two others are faintly legible copies of nonclassified Navy Department documents relating to such subjects as life rafts and fire extinguishers, and the remaining two are photographs of the State Department documents that had been introduced at the two Hiss trials. A few days after the release of the Pumpkin Papers, on August 5, 1975, Hiss was readmitted to the Massachusetts bar. The state's Supreme Judicial Court overruled its Committee of Bar Overseers and stated in a unanimous decision that, despite his conviction, Hiss had demonstrated the "moral and intellectual fitness" required to be an attorney. Hiss was the first lawyer ever readmitted to the Massachusetts bar after a major criminal conviction. His friends and family continue to insist on his innocence.

Later evidence, for and against

Testimony by Bullitt and Weyl

In 1952, former US Ambassador to France William C. Bullitt testified before the McCarran Committee (the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee) that in 1939, Premier Édouard Daladier had advised him of French intelligence reports that two State Department officials named Hiss were Soviet agents. Daladier, however, when asked about it the next day, denied this. Economist Nathaniel Weyl, a former Communist Party member "at large" who had worked for the Department of Agriculture during the early days of the New Deal and who later became staunchly anti-Communist, also appeared before the McCarran Committee. Weyl testified that in 1933 he had belonged to a secret Communist Party unit along with Harold Ware and Lee Pressman, and he confirmed that Alger Hiss had also attended meetings. Weyl's is thus the only testimony appearing to corroborate some of Chambers' allegations. Two years earlier (in 1950), however, Weyl had written an anti-Communist book, Treason: The Story of Disloyalty and Betrayal in American History, that did not mention the Ware Group. Moreover, in this book, published shortly after Hiss's conviction, Weyl expressed doubt that Alger Hiss was guilty of espionage.

Questions raised about the typewriter in the motion for a new trial

At both trials FBI typewriter experts testified that the Baltimore documents in Chambers's possession matched samples of typing done in the 1930s by Priscilla Hiss on the Hisses' home typewriter, a Woodstock brand. As early as December 1948 the chief investigator for the Hiss defense, Horace W. Schmahl, set off a race to find Hiss's typewriter. The FBI, with superior resources was also searching for the typewriter, which the Hiss family had discarded some years earlier. Nevertheless, Schmahl, was able to track it down first, and the Hiss defense introduced it with the intention of showing that its typeface would not be a match for that on the FBI's documents. Surprisingly, however, the typefaces proved to be an excellent match and seemed to confirm the FBI's evidence. Schmall subsequently changed sides and went to work for the prosecution.

After Hiss had gone to prison, his lawyer, Chester T. Lane, acting on a tip he had received from someone who had worked with Schmahl that Hiss might have been framed, filed a motion in January 1952 for a new trial. Lane sought to show that (1) forgery by typewriter was feasible and (2) such forgery had occurred in the Hiss case. Unaware that the feasibility of such forgeries had already been established throughout the War by the military intelligence services which engaged in such practices, the Hiss defense sought to establish feasibility directly by hiring a civilian typewriter expert, Martin Tytell, to create a typewriter that would be indistinguishable from the one the Hisses owned. Tytell spent two years creating a facsimile Woodstock typewriter whose print characteristics would match the peculiarities of the Hiss typewriter. To demonstrate that forgery by typewriter was no mere a theoretical possibility but had actually occurred in the Hiss case, the defense sought to show that Exhibit #UUU was not Hiss's old machine but a newer one altered to type like it. According to former Woodstock executives, the production date of a machine could be inferred from the machine's serial number. The serial number on the Exhibit #UUU typewriter indicated that it would have been manufactured after the man who sold the Hiss machine had retired from the company and the salesman insisted that he sold no typewriters after his retirement. Decades later, when FBI files were disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act, it turned out that the FBI had also doubted that the trial exhibit was Hiss's machine and for exactly the same reasons; although the FBI expressed these concerns internally as the first trial was about to begin, the public did not learn about the FBI's doubts until the mid-1970s. To explain why typing from Exhibit #UUU seemed indistinguishable from the typing on Hiss's old machine, Lane assembled experts prepared to testify that Exhibit #UUU had been tampered with in a way inconsistent with professional repair work to make it type like Hiss's old typewriter. In addition, experts were prepared to testify that Priscilla Hiss was not the typist of the Baltimore documents. In summarizing the conclusions of the forensic experts he had assembled in his motion for a new trial, Lane told the court, "I no longer just question the authenticity of Woodstock N230099. I now say to the Court that Woodstock N230099 — the typewriter in evidence at the trials — is a fake machine. I present in affidavit form, and will be able to produce at the hearing, expert testimony that this machine is a deliberately fabricated job, a new type face on an old body. This being so, it can only have been planted on the defense by or on behalf of Whittaker Chambers as part of his plot for the false incrimination of Alger Hiss." In July, 1952 Judge Goddard — expressing great skepticism that Chambers had the resources and know-how to commit forgery by typewriter and would have known where to plant such a fake machine so it would be found — denied Hiss's motion for a new trial. Professor Irving Younger wrote, "To leave the counterfeit Woodstock lying about for the defense to pick up and examine would serve only to expose the whole scheme to the risk of discovery—and for no reason." According to author Anthony Summers, "When Dean’s book was published, Colson protested that he had 'no recollection of Nixon’s having said the typewriter was "phonied",' and Nixon himself characterized the claim as 'totally false.' Dean, however, insisted that his contemporary notes confirmed that Colson had quoted the president as he indicated and seemed serious when he did so." Summers and others suggest that Dean's version of events is plausible: "'Had Nixon asked the FBI to manufacture evidence to prove his case against Hiss,' opined former FBI Assistant Director Sullivan, 'Hoover would actually been only too glad to oblige'. As to whether Nixon would actually have gone as far as to frame Hiss," Summers notes that, "the later record includes disquieting instances of forgery or planting false information." Cold War historian John V. Fleming disagrees, arguing that on the White House tapes Nixon never says anything that would have corroborated Colson's statement to Dean about forging a typewriter in the Hiss case. Fleming maintains that what sounds some to "Hissite" transcribers like "we made a typewriter" was likely instead, "we had typewriter. On the other hand, in the tapes Nixon did stress he had tried Hiss in the press, not in the law courts, because that's how these things were done:

We won the Hiss case in the papers. We did. I had to lead stuff all over the place. Because the Justice Department would not prosecute it. Hoover didn’t even cooperate. . . It was won in the papers….I leaked out the papers. . . . I leaked out the testimony. I had Hiss convicted before he ever got to the grand jury. . . . Go back and read the chapter on the Hiss case [his book] in Six Crises and you’ll see how it was done. It wasn’t done waiting for the goddam courts or the attorney general or the FBI.

According to Anthony Summers:

The one substantive piece of information indicating typewriter forgery features the OSS and its chief, William Donovan. In late 1948, when the Hiss defense and the FBI began hunting for the Woodstock typewriter, a man named Horace Schmahl jointed the defense team as an investigator. Schmahl had worked for either the OSS or army intelligence during the war, then joined the Central Intelligence Group, which operated between the closedown of the OSS and the inception of the CIA. After his stint for the Hiss side, Schmahl defected to the prosecution team..

Evidence of government misconduct

Based on Justice Department documents released in 1976, the Hiss defense filed a petition in federal court in July 1978 for a writ of coram nobis, asking that the guilty verdict be overturned due to prosecutorial misconduct. In 1982, the Federal Court denied the petition, and in 1983 the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal. In the writ, Hiss's attorneys argued the following:

The FBI illegally withheld important evidence from the Hiss defense team, specifically that typewritten documents could be forged. Unknown to the defense, military intelligence operatives in World War II, a decade before the trials, "could reproduce faultlessly the imprint of any typewriter on earth." With regard to the Woodstock No. 230099 typewriter introduced as Exhibit #UUU by the defense at the trial, the FBI knew there was an inconsistency between its serial number and the manufacture date of Hiss's machine but illegally withheld this information from Hiss. That the FBI had conducted illegal surveillance of Hiss before and during the trials, including phone taps and mail openings. Also that the prosecution had withheld from Hiss and his lawyers the records of this surveillance, none of which provided any evidence that Hiss was a spy or a Communist. Federal Judge Owen, In denying Hiss's coram nobis petition, quoted verbatim two points made by Judge Goddard in denying Hiss's appeal for a a new trial 30 years earlier, namely that "there is not a trace of any evidence that Chambers had the mechanical skills, tools, equipment or material for such a difficult task [as typewriter forgery]", moreover, "If Chambers had constructed a duplicate machine how would he have known where to plant it so that it would be found by Hiss?"

Stephen Salant, whose FOIA requests had revealed to the public the contents of the "pumpkin papers", has documented that Schmahl was a trained Army "spy-catcher" (as they called themselves), a special agent in the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC). While on the payroll of the Hiss defense and searching for Hiss's typewriter, Schmahl confided to the FBI that his "present employment" in December 1948 was with Military Intelligence; his claim has not yet been independently verified. At the Military Intelligence Training Center, CIC agents learned the rudiments of forgery how to detect it through the matching of typed samples to the typewriter that produced them, etc. During the 1940s the CIC's domestic surveillance of civilians was extensive but so covert that it usually escaped notice. When detected, undercover CIC agents were often mistaken for FBI agents, since only the Bureau was authorized to investigate civilians. During the 1930s Army counterintelligence monitored another suspected Communist connected to Chambers, Franklin Vincent Reno, a civilian employed at the Aberdeen Proving Ground, who shortly afterwards passed information about Army weapons to Chambers. It is not known if Army counterintelligence monitored Chambers’ other associates, but when Hiss presided over the UN Charter Conference, more than a hundred undercover CIC agents were in attendance. Unlike the FBI, Military Intelligence had extensive experience forging typed documents, since every agent behind enemy lines during World War II required phony documentation to support his cover story. Moreover, with its special agent initiating the search for Hiss's typewriter while disguised as Chief Investigator for the Hiss defense, Military Intelligence could have planted forged evidence without arousing suspicion. Thus, the judges' reasons for disregarding forensic evidence of forgery do not apply to Military Intelligence. In the future, some of the misconduct previously attributed to the FBI by Hiss and his defenders may turn out to have been the work of Army counterintelligence.

Soviet archives

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Alger Hiss petitioned General Dmitry Antonovich Volkogonov, who had become President Yeltsin's military advisor and the overseer of all the Soviet intelligence archives, to request the release of any Soviet files on the Hiss case. Both former President Nixon and the director of his presidential library, John H. Taylor, wrote similar letters, though their full contents are not yet publicly available.

Russian archivists responded by reviewing their files, and in late 1992 reported back that they had found no evidence Hiss ever engaged in espionage for the Soviet Union nor that he was a member of the Communist Party. However, Volkogonov subsequently stated he spent only two days on the search and had mainly relied on the word of KGB archivists. "What I saw gave me no basis to claim a full clarification", he said. Referring to Hiss's lawyer, he added, "John Lowenthal pushed me to say things of which I was not fully convinced." General-Lieutenant Vitaly Pavlov, who ran Soviet intelligence work in North America in the late 1930s and early 1940s for the NKVD, provided some corroboration of the initial report in his memoirs, stating that Hiss never worked for the USSR as one of his agents. In 2003, retired Russian intelligence official General Julius Kobyakov disclosed that it was he who had actually searched the files for Volkogonov. Kobyakov stated:

After carefull study of every reference to Mr. A.Hiss in the SVR(KGB-NKVD)archives, and querring sister services, I prepared an answer to Mr. J.Lowenthal that in essence stated that Mr. A.Hiss had never had any relationship with the SVR or its predecessors. In May 2009, at a conference hosted by the Wilson Center, Mark Kramer, director of Cold War Studies at Harvard University at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, stated that he did not "trust a word [Kobyakov] says," At the same conference, historian Ronald Radosh reported that while researching the papers of Marshal Voroshilov's in Moscow, he and Mary Habeck had encountered two GRU (Soviet military intelligence) files that referring to Alger Hiss as "our agent".

Noel Field

In 1992, records were found in Hungarian Interior Ministry archives in which Noel Field named Alger Hiss as a Communist spy. Field was an American who had spied for the Soviet Union but had been arrested while traveling through Eastern Europe in 1949 and imprisoned for five years in Hungary on charges of being a double agent. Field was often interrogated, and in the transcripts of these interrogations he refers four times to Hiss as a fellow Communist and spy, for example: "Around the summer of 1935 Alger Hiss tried to induce me to do service for the Soviets. I was indiscreet enough to tell him he had come too late." This agreed with what Hede Massing told US authorities when she defected in 1947, namely that when she attempted to recruit Noel Field for one Soviet spy network (the OGPU), Field replied that he already worked for another (the GRU). Massing had claimed during Hiss's second trial that at a party at Noel Field's house in 1935 she had obliquely joked with Hiss about recruiting Noel Field. In 1954 the Hungarian secret police released Field (who remained in Hungary until his death in 1970). Upon his release, Field wrote to the Communist Party's Central Committee in Moscow complaining that he had been tortured in prison and that this had caused him to "confess more and more lies as truth." Hiss's defenders argue that Field's implication of Hiss may have been one of these lies. In 1957, Field personally wrote Hiss affirming his belief in Hiss's innocence and calling Hede Massing testimony an "outrageous lie".

Venona and "ALES"

In 1995, the CIA and the NSA for the first time made public the existence of the World War II Venona project, which, beginning in 1948, had decrypted or partially decrypted thousands of telegrams sent from 1942 to 1945 to the Soviet Union by its U.S. operatives. Although known to the FBI, VENONA had been kept secret even from President Truman. One cable, Venona # 1822, mentioned a Soviet spy codenamed "ALES" who worked with a group of "Neighbors". FBI Special agent, Robert Lamphere, who supervised the FBI's spy chasing squad, concluded that the codename "ALES" was "probably Alger Hiss". In 1997, Allen Weinstein, in the second edition of his 1978 book calls the Venona evidence "persuasive but not conclusive". In his 1998 book Secrecy: The American Experience, Moynihan wrote, "Belief in the guilt or innocence of Alger Hiss became a defining issue in American intellectual life. Parts of the American government had conclusive evidence of his guilt, but they never told." In their numerous books, Harvey Klehr, professor of political science at Emory University, and John Earl Haynes, historian of twentieth-century politics at the Library of Congress, have mounted an energetic defense of Lamphere's conclusion that ALES indeed referred to Alger Hiss. National Security Agency analysts have also gone on record asserting that ALES could only have been Alger Hiss. The Venona transcript # 1822, sent March 30, 1945, from the Soviets' Washington station chief to Moscow, Some, however, question whether Venona cable # 1822 constitutes definitive proof that ALES was Hiss. John Lowenthal pointed out the following: ALES was said to be the leader of a small group of espionage agents but, apart from using his wife as a typist and Chambers as courier, Hiss was alleged by the prosecution to have acted alone.

ALES was a GRU (military intelligence) agent who obtained military intelligence and only rarely provided State Department material. In contrast, during his trial, Alger Hiss, an employee of the State Department, was accused having obtained only non-military information, and the papers he was accused of having passed to the Soviets on a regular basis were non-military, State Department documents.

Even had Hiss been a spy as alleged, after 1938 he would have been unlikely to have continued espionage activities as ALES did, since in 1938 Whittaker Chambers had broken with the Communist Party and gone into hiding, threatening to denounce his Communist Party colleagues unless they followed suit. Had Hiss been ALES, his cover would thus have been in extreme jeopardy and it would have been too risky for any Soviet agency to continue using him.

Recent information provided by Alexander Vassiliev places ALES in Mexico City at a time when Hiss was known to have been in Washington. Lowenthal suggests that ALES was not at the Yalta conference at all and that the cable instead was directed to Soviet deputy foreign minister Andrey Vyshinsky. According to Lowenthal, in paragraph six of Venona # 1822, the GRU asks Vyshinsky to get in touch with ALES to convey thanks from the GRU for a job well done — which would have been unnecessary if ALES had actually gone to Moscow, because the GRU could have thanked him there in person. In 2005 NSA released the original Russian of the Venona texts. At a symposium held at the Center for Cryptologic History that year, intelligence historian John R. Schindler concluded that the Russian text of Venona # 1822, shows that ALES was indeed at Yalta: "the identification of ALES as Alger Hiss, made by the U.S. Government more than a half-century ago, seems exceptionally solid, based on the evidence now available; message 1822 is only one piece of that evidence, yet a compelling one." Rebutting Lowenthal, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr argued that:

None of the evidence presented at the Hiss trial precludes the possibility that Hiss could have been an espionage agent after 1938 or that he had only passed State Department documents after 1938.

Chambers's charges were not seriously investigated until 1945 when Elizabeth Bentley defected, so the Soviets could in theory have considered it an acceptable risk for him continue his espionage work even after Chambers's 1938 defection.

Vyshinsky was not in the U.S. between Yalta and the time of the Venona message, and the message is from the Washington KGB station reporting on a talk with ALES in the U.S., rendering Lowenthal's analysis impossible. An earlier Venona document, # 1579, had actually mentioned "HISS" by name. This partially decrypted cable consists of fragments of a 1943 message from the GRU chief in New York to headquarters in Moscow and reads: "from the State Department by name of HISS" (with "HISS" "spelled out in the Latin alphabet", according to a footnote by the cryptanalysts). "HISS" could refer either to Alger or Donald Hiss, both State Department officials at that time. Lowenthal argued that had Alger Hiss really been a spy the GRU would not have mentioned his real name They note Foote was in Mexico City when a Soviet cable placed ALES there, whereas Hiss had left several days earlier for Washington (see above). In response, Haynes and Klehr point out that Foote doesn't fit other aspects of the description of ALES and suggest that the cable came from someone who managed KGB assets (rather than GRU assets like ALES) and may have been mistaken when he stated that ALES was still in Mexico City.

Oleg Gordievsky

In 1985, a high ranking KGB agent, Oleg Gordievsky (b. 1938), in reality a British double agent, defected and wrote a series of memoirs, in one of which, The KGB (1990), he recalled attending a lecture given before a KGB audience by Iskhak Abdulovich Akhmerov, who identified Hiss as a World War II Soviet agent. Gordievsky went further and claimed that Hiss had the codename identity of "ALES". Appearing before the Venona cables were made public, this at first appeared to be independent corroboration of the codename, but it was later revealed that Gordievsky's source for the ALES identity was an article by journalist Thomas Powell, who had seen National Security Agency documents on Venona years before their release, and some have questioned Gordievsky's reliability as a historian.

Haynes, Klehr, and Vassiliev

In 2009 Haynes, Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev published Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (Yale University Press), based on KGB documents reportedly hand-copied by Vassiliev, a former KGB agent. The authors attempted to show definitively that Alger Hiss had indeed been a Soviet spy and argue that KGB documents prove not only that Hiss was the elusive ALES, but that he also went by the codenames "Jurist" and "Leonard" and worked for the GRU (Soviet military intelligence). Some documentation brought back by Vassiliev also refers to Hiss by his actual name, leaving no room, in the authors' opinion, for doubt about his guilt. Calling this the "massive weight of accumulated evidence", Haynes and Klehr conclud that "to serious students of history continued claims for Hiss's innocence are akin to a terminal case of ideological blindness." In a 2009 review published in Journal of Cold War Studies, military historian Eduard Mark heartily concurred, stating that the documents "conclusively show that Hiss was, as Whittaker Chambers charged more than six decades ago, an agent of Soviet military intelligence (GRU) in the 1930s." Newsweek magazine reported that civil rights historian David Garrow, author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Martin Luther King, also concluded that, in his opinion, with respect to Alger Hiss, Haynes and Klehr's Spies, "provides irrefutable confirmation of guilt."

Other historians, such as D. D. Guttenplan, Jeff Kisseloff, and Amy Knight, however, assert that Haynes and Klehr's conclusion were not borne out by the evidence and accused them of engaging in "shoddy" research. Guttenplan stresses that Haynes and Klehr never saw and cannot even prove the existence of the documents that supposedly convict Hiss and others of espionage, but rather relied exclusively on handwritten notebooks authored by Vassiliev during the time he was given access to the Soviet archives in the 1990s while collaborating with Weinstein. According to Guttenplan, Vassiliev could never explain how he managed, despite being required to leave his files and notebooks in a safe at the KGB press office at the end of each day, to smuggle out the notebooks with his extensive transcriptions of documents.

Guttenplan also suggested, moreover, that Vassiliev might have omitted relevant facts and selectively replaced covernames with his own notion of the real names of various persons. Kisseloff also disputes Haynes and Klehr's linking of Hiss with former Treasury Department official Harold Glasser, whom they allege was a Soviet agent. Finally, Kisseloff states that some of the evidence compiled by Haynes and Klehr actually tends to exonerate rather than convict Hiss. For example, their book cites a KGB report from 1938 in which Iskhak Akhmerov, New York station chief, writes, "I don't know for sure who Hiss is connected with." Haynes and Klehr also claim that Hiss was the agent who used the cover name "Doctor." According to Soviet sources, however, "Doctor" was a middle-aged Bessarabian Jew who was educated in Vienna.

Other historians felt that Haynes and Klehr's information was suspect because their publisher, Crown (a division of Random House), obtained temporary and limited access to KGB files through a payment of money (amount unspecified) to a pension fund for retired KGB agents, of whom Vassiliev, along with KGB archivist Volkogonov, was one. Other historians had not been permitted to verify Vassiliev's data. In 2002 Vassiliev sued John Lowenthal for libel in a court of British law for publishing a journal article questioning his conclusions. Vassiliev lost the case before a jury and was further reprimanded by the Times of London for trying to exert a "chilling effect" on scholarship by resorting to the law courts. Vassiliev has since also unsuccessfully sued Amazon.com for publishing a customer review critical of his work. In 1978, Victor Navasky interviewed six people Weinstein had quoted in his book Perjury, who all claimed to have been misquoted by Weinstein. One, Sam Krieger, won a cash payment from Weinstein, who issued an apology and promised to correct future editions of his book and to release his interview transcripts, which he subsequently failed to do.

Footnotes

Further reading

Cook, Fred J (1957). The Unfinished Story of Alger Hiss. New York: William Morrow.

Gentry, Curt. J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and The Secrets. New York: W. W. Norton, 1991. Pp. 360–61; and p. 716.

Jacoby, Susan (2009). Alger Hiss and the Battle for History. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Smith, John Chalbot (1976). Alger Hiss: The True Story. New York, Holt Reinhart Winston.

Summers, Anthony (2000). The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon. Penguin-Putnam Inc. ISBN 0-670-87151-6.

External links

Interview footage with Alger Hiss

A review of the 1976 edition of Weinstein's Perjury A detailed critique of the book Alger Hiss's Looking-Glass Wars A critique of the chapter of Coulter's book that deals with Hiss

Levin, David (1976). "In the Court of Historical Criticism: Alger Hiss’s Narrative", Virginia Quarterly Review Online, Winter, 1976, 41pp.‐71.

Levin, David (1978). "Perjury, History, and Unreliable Witnesses", Virginia Quarterly Review Online, Autumn, 1978, pp. 725–32.

Lowenthal, David. (2005) "Did Allen Weinstein Get the Hiss Story Wrong?" History News Network

A review of Weinstein's "Perjury"

Weinberg, Robert L. Champion Magazine: Published by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers May/June 2008, Page 18">Guilty as Charged: A Revised Verdict for Alger Hiss". Champion Magazine: Published by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers May/June 2008, Page 18.

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