Alger Hiss
Encyclopedia
Alger Hiss 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 U.N. 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 (HUAC) that Hiss had secretly been a communist while in federal service, contradicting his previous 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 three and a half years.
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 Hiss's 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."
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 biographer 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 fired in 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 any of them might make a separate peace with the Nazi regime. 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.
, 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 on the stand ever having used the alias Crosley, though he admitted to Hiss's lawyers in private testimony that it could have been one of his pen names. When Hiss and Chambers both appeared before a HUAC subcommittee on August 17, 1948, they had the following exchange:
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. In their previous testimony, both Chambers and Hiss had denied having committed espionage. By introducing the Baltimore documents, Chambers admitted he had previously lied, opening both Hiss and himself to perjury charges.
On December 2, 1948, Chambers produced the "pumpkin papers", five rolls of 35 mm film, two of which contained State Department documents. Chambers stated he had hidden the film in a hollowed-out pumpkin on his Maryland
farm the previous day.
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The grand jury charged Hiss with two counts of perjury
—it did not indict him for espionage
since the statute of limitations
had run out. Chambers was never charged with a crime. Hiss went to trial twice. The first trial started on May 31, 1949, and ended in a hung jury on July 7. Chambers was forced to admit on the witness stand that he had previously committed perjury several times while he was under oath. Chambers also was forced to admit that he needed to change key dates when confronted with contradictions in his story. Hiss's character witnesses at his first trial included such notables as future Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter
, and former Democratic presidential candidate John W. Davis
. President Truman famously called the trial "a red herring" 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. This time the jury found Hiss guilty by an eight-to-four vote on both perjury counts. "That, according to one of Hiss’s friends and lawyers, Helen Buttenweiser
, was the only time that she had ever seen Alger shocked – stunned by the fact that eight of his fellow citizens did not believe him." 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.
, 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 Howard K. Smith: News and Comment
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.
In 1988 Hiss wrote an autobiography, Recollections of a Life. He maintained his innocence and fought his perjury conviction until his death at age 92, when he died of emphysema
on November 15, 1996, at Lenox Hill Hospital
in New York City. His friends and family continue to insist on his innocence.
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.
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." Judge Goddard never entertained the possibility that the prosecution, or as some now suggest, Military Intelligence (the CIC
), not Chambers, might have planted the evidence.
In his 1976 memoir, former White House
counsel John Dean
states that President Nixon's chief counsel Charles Colson
told him that Nixon had admitted in a conversation that HUAC had fabricated a typewriter, saying, "We built one on the Hiss case."
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 John Dean
about forging a typewriter in the Hiss case. Fleming and others maintain that the indistinct phrase during a conversation with John Dean that sounded to certain transcribers like "we made a typewriter" is actually a reference to Hiss's legal team. Throughout the tapes Nixon stresses how he had tried Hiss in the press, not the law courts, because that's how these things were done:
, 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:
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 an informer on the Hiss defense team, a private detective named Horace W. Schmahl. Hired by the Hiss defense team, Schmahl reported on the Hiss defense strategy to the government.
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.
, 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:
, a Russian researcher who had been studying Soviet archives since the early 1990s, stated that Hiss' name was absent from Soviet archives. 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".
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".
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 sq, concluded that the codename "ALES" was "probably Alger Hiss". In 1997, Allen Weinstein
, in the second edition of his 1978 book Perjury: The Hiss–Chambers Case calls the Venona evidence "persuasive but not conclusive". The bipartisan Moynihan Commission on Government Secrecy, chaired by Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan
, however, stated in its findings that year: "The complicity of Alger Hiss of the State Department seems settled. As does that of Harry Dexter White
of the Treasury Department."
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, appears to indicate that ALES attended the February 4–11, 1945, Yalta conference and then went to Moscow. Hiss did attend Yalta and then traveled to Moscow with Secretary of State Stettinius.
Some, however, question whether Venona cable # 1822 constitutes definitive proof that ALES was Hiss. John Lowenthal pointed out the following:
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. The late Eduard Mark of the Center for Air Force History hotly disputed this analysis.
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:
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 in a coded transmission, since this was contrary to their usual practice.
At an April 2007 symposium, authors Kai Bird and Svetlana Chervonnaya postulated that, based on the movements of officials present at Yalta, Wilder Foote, a U.S. diplomat, not Hiss, was the best match for ALES.
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.
(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. Gordievsky's status as a reliable source was challenged in the British media.
), 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 conclude 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. According to Guttenplan, Boris Labusov, a press officer of the SVR, the successor to the KGB, has stated that Vassiliev could not in the course of his researches have possibly "met the name of Alger Hiss in the context of some cooperation with some special services of the Soviet Union." Guttenplan also points out that Vasiliev admitted under oath in 2003 that he'd never seen a single document linking Alger Hiss with the cover name "Ales."
Historian Jeff Kisseloff questions Haynes and Klehr's conclusion that Vassiliev's notes support Hede Massing's story about talking to Alger Hiss at a party in 1935 about recruiting their mutual friend and host Noel Field into the Communist underground. According to Kisseloff, "all that the files Vassiliev saw really indicate is that she was telling yet another version of her story in the 1930s. Haynes and Klehr never consider that, as an agent in Washington, D.C. who was having little success in the tasks assigned to her, she may have felt pressure back then to make up a few triumphs to reassure her superiors." 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
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.
United Nations
The United Nations is an international organization whose stated aims are facilitating cooperation in international law, international security, economic development, social progress, human rights, and achievement of world peace...
both as a U.S. State Department
United States Department of State
The United States Department of State , is the United States federal executive department responsible for international relations of the United States, equivalent to the foreign ministries of other countries...
and U.N. official. Hiss was accused of being a Soviet
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
spy in 1948 and convicted of perjury
Perjury
Perjury, also known as forswearing, is the willful act of swearing a false oath or affirmation to tell the truth, whether spoken or in writing, concerning matters material to a judicial proceeding. That is, the witness falsely promises to tell the truth about matters which affect the outcome of the...
in connection with this charge in 1950.
On August 3, 1948, Whittaker Chambers
Whittaker Chambers
Whittaker Chambers was born Jay Vivian Chambers and also known as David Whittaker Chambers , was an American writer and editor. After being a Communist Party USA member and Soviet spy, he later renounced communism and became an outspoken opponent later testifying in the perjury and espionage trial...
, a former Communist Party
Communist Party USA
The Communist Party USA is a Marxist political party in the United States, established in 1919. It has a long, complex history that is closely related to the histories of similar communist parties worldwide and the U.S. labor movement....
member, testified under subpoena before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) that Hiss had secretly been a communist while in federal service, contradicting his previous 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
Discovery (law)
In U.S.law, discovery is the pre-trial phase in a lawsuit in which each party, through the law of civil procedure, can obtain evidence from the opposing party by means of discovery devices including requests for answers to interrogatories, requests for production of documents, requests for...
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
Grand jury
A grand jury is a type of jury that determines whether a criminal indictment will issue. Currently, only the United States retains grand juries, although some other common law jurisdictions formerly employed them, and most other jurisdictions employ some other type of preliminary hearing...
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
Statute of limitations
A statute of limitations is an enactment in a common law legal system that sets the maximum time after an event that legal proceedings based on that event may be initiated...
had expired. After a mistrial due to a hung jury
Hung jury
A hung jury or deadlocked jury is a jury that cannot, by the required voting threshold, agree upon a verdict after an extended period of deliberation and is unable to change its votes due to severe differences of opinion.- England and Wales :...
, 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 three and a half years.
Arguments about the case and the validity of the verdict took center stage in broader debates about the Cold War
Cold War
The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...
, McCarthyism
McCarthyism
McCarthyism is the practice of making accusations of disloyalty, subversion, or treason without proper regard for evidence. The term has its origins in the period in the United States known as the Second Red Scare, lasting roughly from the late 1940s to the late 1950s and characterized by...
, and the extent of Soviet espionage in the United States.
Since Hiss's 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
David Halberstam
David Halberstam was an American Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author and historian, known for his early work on the Vietnam War, his work on politics, history, the Civil Rights Movement, business, media, American culture, and his later sports journalism.-Early life and education: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 suicideSuicide
Suicide is the act of intentionally causing one's own death. Suicide is often committed out of despair or attributed to some underlying mental disorder, such as depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, alcoholism, or drug abuse...
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 biographer 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
Bright's disease
Bright's disease is a historical classification of kidney diseases that would be described in modern medicine as acute or chronic nephritis. The term is no longer used, as diseases are now classified according to their more fully understood causes....
and his sister Mary Ann committed suicide.)
Hiss attended Baltimore City College
Baltimore City College
The Baltimore City College , also referred to as The Castle on the Hill, historically as The College, and most commonly City, is a public high school in Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.A. The City College curriculum includes the International Baccalaureate Programme and emphasizes study in the classics...
(high school
High school
High school is a term used in parts of the English speaking world to describe institutions which provide all or part of secondary education. The term is often incorporated into the name of such institutions....
) and
Johns Hopkins University
Johns Hopkins University
The Johns Hopkins University, commonly referred to as Johns Hopkins, JHU, or simply Hopkins, is a private research university based in Baltimore, Maryland, United States...
, 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
Harvard Law School
Harvard Law School is one of the professional graduate schools of Harvard University. Located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it is the oldest continually-operating law school in the United States and is home to the largest academic law library in the world. The school is routinely ranked by the U.S...
, where he had been a protégé of Felix Frankfurter
Felix Frankfurter
Felix Frankfurter was an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court.-Early life:Frankfurter was born into a Jewish family on November 15, 1882, in Vienna, Austria, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in Europe. He was the third of six children of Leopold and Emma Frankfurter...
, the future U.S. Supreme Court
Supreme Court of the United States
The Supreme Court of the United States is the highest court in the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all state and federal courts, and original jurisdiction over a small range of cases...
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
Sacco and Vanzetti
Ferdinando Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were anarchists who were convicted of murdering two men during a 1920 armed robbery in South Braintree, Massachusetts, United States...
had been unjustly convicted. In 1929, Hiss married Priscilla Fansler Hobson (1903–1987), a Bryn Mawr
Bryn Mawr College
Bryn Mawr College is a women's liberal arts college located in Bryn Mawr, a community in Lower Merion Township, Pennsylvania, ten miles west of Philadelphia. The name "Bryn Mawr" means "big hill" in Welsh....
graduate and grade school teacher. Priscilla, previously married to Thayer Hobson
Thayer Hobson
Francis Thayer Hobson was president and in 1958 he became chairman of the board of William Morrow and Company.-Biography:...
, 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
Choate, Hall & Stewart
Choate, Hall & Stewart LLP is a Boston-based law firm founded in 1899. It is currently one of the largest law firms in the Greater Boston market, and one of the old-line Boston Brahmin firms which has previously been described by The New York Times as having a reputation for being "stuffy." Legal...
, a Boston
Boston
Boston is the capital of and largest city in Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England" for its economic and cultural impact on the entire New England region. The city proper had...
law firm.
In 1933, Hiss became an attorney for President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal
New Deal
The New Deal was a series of economic programs implemented in the United States between 1933 and 1936. They were passed by the U.S. Congress during the first term of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The programs were Roosevelt's responses to the Great Depression, and focused on what historians call...
, first briefly on the staff of the Justice Department
United States Department of Justice
The United States Department of Justice , is the United States federal executive department responsible for the enforcement of the law and administration of justice, equivalent to the justice or interior ministries of other countries.The Department is led by the Attorney General, who is nominated...
and then as a temporary assistant on the Nye Committee
Nye Committee
The Nye Committee, officially known as the Special Committee on Investigation of the Munitions Industry, was a committee of the United States Senate which studied the causes of United States' involvement in World War I...
, 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
Lee Pressman
Lee Pressman was a labor attorney and a US government functionary publicly exposed in 1948 for having been a spy for the Soviet foreign intelligence network during the middle 1930s...
, were fired in 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
Donald Hiss
-Biography:Donald Hiss was born on December 15, 1906, in Baltimore, Maryland. He graduated from Johns Hopkins University and the Harvard Law School....
began working under Cordell Hull
Cordell Hull
Cordell Hull was an American politician from the U.S. state of Tennessee. He is best known as the longest-serving Secretary of State, holding the position for 11 years in the administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt during much of World War II...
in the United States Department of State
United States Department of State
The United States Department of State , is the United States federal executive department responsible for international relations of the United States, equivalent to the foreign ministries of other countries...
. Alger was an assistant to Assistant Secretary of State Francis B. Sayre
Francis B. Sayre
Francis Bowes Sayre was a professor at Harvard Law School and a son-in-law of President Woodrow Wilson.-Biography:He was born on April 30, 1885....
(son-in-law of Woodrow Wilson
Woodrow Wilson
Thomas Woodrow Wilson was the 28th President of the United States, from 1913 to 1921. A leader of the Progressive Movement, he served as President of Princeton University from 1902 to 1910, and then as the Governor of New Jersey from 1911 to 1913...
) 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
Dumbarton Oaks Conference
The Dumbarton Oaks Conference or, more formally, the Washington Conversations on International Peace and Security Organization was an international conference at which the United Nations was formulated and negotiated among international leaders...
, which drew up plans for the future United Nations
United Nations
The United Nations is an international organization whose stated aims are facilitating cooperation in international law, international security, economic development, social progress, human rights, and achievement of world peace...
. 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
Yalta Conference
The Yalta Conference, sometimes called the Crimea Conference and codenamed the Argonaut Conference, held February 4–11, 1945, was the wartime meeting of the heads of government of the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union, represented by President Franklin D...
, where the Big Three, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
, and Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, was a predominantly Conservative British politician and statesman known for his leadership of the United Kingdom during the Second World War. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest wartime leaders of the century and served as Prime Minister twice...
, met to coordinate strategy to defeat Hitler and consolidate their alliance to forestall any possibility, now that the Soviets had entered German territory, that any of them might make a separate peace with the Nazi regime. 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
Ukrainian SSR
The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic or in short, the Ukrainian SSR was a sovereign Soviet Socialist state and one of the fifteen constituent republics of the Soviet Union lasting from its inception in 1922 to the breakup in 1991...
, and the Byelorussian SSR
Byelorussian SSR
The Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic was one of fifteen constituent republics of the Soviet Union. It was one of the four original founding members of the Soviet Union in 1922, together with the Ukrainian SSR, the Transcaucasian SFSR and the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic...
.
Hiss was Secretary General of the San Francisco United Nations Conference on International Organization
United Nations Conference on International Organization
The United Nations Conference on International Organization was a convention of delegates from 50 Allied nations that took place from 25 April 1945 to 26 June 1945 in San Francisco, California. At this convention, the delegates reviewed and rewrote the Dumbarton Oaks agreements...
(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
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace is a foreign-policy think tank based in Washington, D.C. The organization describes itself as being dedicated to advancing cooperation between nations and promoting active international engagement by the United States...
, serving until May 5, 1949, when forced to step down.
Accusation of espionage
On August 3, 1948, Whittaker ChambersWhittaker Chambers
Whittaker Chambers was born Jay Vivian Chambers and also known as David Whittaker Chambers , was an American writer and editor. After being a Communist Party USA member and Soviet spy, he later renounced communism and became an outspoken opponent later testifying in the perjury and espionage trial...
, 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
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
magazine who had written a scathingly satirical editorial critical of the Yalta
Yalta Conference
The Yalta Conference, sometimes called the Crimea Conference and codenamed the Argonaut Conference, held February 4–11, 1945, was the wartime meeting of the heads of government of the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union, represented by President Franklin D...
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
Communist Party USA
The Communist Party USA is a Marxist political party in the United States, established in 1919. It has a long, complex history that is closely related to the histories of similar communist parties worldwide and the U.S. labor movement....
" in the 1930s.
The group, which he called the "Ware Group", had been run by the late agriculturalist Harold Ware
Harold Ware
Harold Maskell "Hal" Ware was an American Marxist regarded as one of the Communist Party's top experts on agriculture....
, 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
Adolf A. Berle
Adolf Augustus Berle, Jr. was a lawyer, educator, author, and U.S. diplomat. He was the author of The Modern Corporation and Private Property, a groundbreaking work on corporate governance, and an important member of U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt's "Brain Trust".-Childhood, Education, and...
, 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
Federal Bureau of Investigation
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is an agency of the United States Department of Justice that serves as both a federal criminal investigative body and an internal intelligence agency . The FBI has investigative jurisdiction over violations of more than 200 categories of federal crime...
. In 1945 two other sources appeared to implicate Hiss: Elizabeth Bentley
Elizabeth Bentley
Elizabeth Terrill Bentley was an American spy for the Soviet Union from 1938 until 1945. In 1945 she defected from the Communist Party and Soviet intelligence and became an informer for the U.S. She exposed two networks of spies, ultimately naming over 80 Americans who had engaged in espionage for...
, 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
Igor Gouzenko
Igor Sergeyevich Gouzenko was a cipher clerk for the Soviet Embassy to Canada in Ottawa, Ontario. He defected on September 5, 1945, with 109 documents on Soviet espionage activities in the West...
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
United States Secretary of State
The United States Secretary of State is the head of the United States Department of State, concerned with foreign affairs. The Secretary is a member of the Cabinet and the highest-ranking cabinet secretary both in line of succession and order of precedence...
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
Richard Nixon
Richard Milhous Nixon was the 37th President of the United States, serving from 1969 to 1974. The only president to resign the office, Nixon had previously served as a US representative and senator from California and as the 36th Vice President of the United States from 1953 to 1961 under...
, 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
John Francis Cronin
Father John Francis Cronin, S.S. was a Catholic priest and a vocal opponent of Communism during the McCarthy era.Cronin was born in Glens Falls, New York. He attended college at College of the Holy Cross and seminary at the Sulpician seminary of The Catholic University of America.He taught...
, 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 on the stand ever having used the alias Crosley, though he admitted to Hiss's lawyers in private testimony that it could have been one of his pen names. 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
Meet the Press
Meet the Press is a weekly American television news/interview program produced by NBC. It is the longest-running television series in American broadcasting history, despite bearing little resemblance to the original format of the program seen in its television debut on November 6, 1947. It has been...
, 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. In their previous testimony, both Chambers and Hiss had denied having committed espionage. By introducing the Baltimore documents, Chambers admitted he had previously lied, opening both Hiss and himself to perjury charges.
On December 2, 1948, Chambers produced the "pumpkin papers", five rolls of 35 mm film, two of which contained State Department documents. Chambers stated he had hidden the film in a hollowed-out pumpkin on his Maryland
Maryland
Maryland is a U.S. state located in the Mid Atlantic region of the United States, bordering Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia to its south and west; Pennsylvania to its north; and Delaware to its east...
farm the previous day.
Perjury trials and conviction
Perjury
Perjury, also known as forswearing, is the willful act of swearing a false oath or affirmation to tell the truth, whether spoken or in writing, concerning matters material to a judicial proceeding. That is, the witness falsely promises to tell the truth about matters which affect the outcome of the...
—it did not indict him for espionage
Espionage
Espionage or spying involves an individual obtaining information that is considered secret or confidential without the permission of the holder of the information. Espionage is inherently clandestine, lest the legitimate holder of the information change plans or take other countermeasures once it...
since the statute of limitations
Statute of limitations
A statute of limitations is an enactment in a common law legal system that sets the maximum time after an event that legal proceedings based on that event may be initiated...
had run out. Chambers was never charged with a crime. Hiss went to trial twice. The first trial started on May 31, 1949, and ended in a hung jury on July 7. Chambers was forced to admit on the witness stand that he had previously committed perjury several times while he was under oath. Chambers also was forced to admit that he needed to change key dates when confronted with contradictions in his story. Hiss's character witnesses at his first trial included such notables as future Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter
Felix Frankfurter
Felix Frankfurter was an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court.-Early life:Frankfurter was born into a Jewish family on November 15, 1882, in Vienna, Austria, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in Europe. He was the third of six children of Leopold and Emma Frankfurter...
, and former Democratic presidential candidate John W. Davis
John W. Davis
John William Davis was an American politician, diplomat and lawyer. He served as a United States Representative from West Virginia , then as Solicitor General of the United States and US Ambassador to the UK under President Woodrow Wilson...
. President Truman famously called the trial "a red herring" 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
Hede Massing
Hede Massing, née "Hedwig Tune" was an Austrian actress in Vienna and Berlin, communist, and Soviet intelligence operative in Europe and the United States during the 1930s and 1940s. After the World War II, she defected from the Soviet underground...
, 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. This time the jury found Hiss guilty by an eight-to-four vote on both perjury counts. "That, according to one of Hiss’s friends and lawyers, Helen Buttenweiser
Helen Lehman Buttenweiser
Helen Lehman Buttenwieser was an American lawyer and philanthropist.A member of the Lehman family of New York, she graduated from Connecticut College and New York University Law School...
, was the only time that she had ever seen Alger shocked – stunned by the fact that eight of his fellow citizens did not believe him." 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
Dean Acheson
Dean Gooderham Acheson was an American statesman and lawyer. As United States Secretary of State in the administration of President Harry S. Truman from 1949 to 1953, he played a central role in defining American foreign policy during the Cold War...
reacted emotionally, affirming, "I do not intend to turn my back on Alger Hiss”; Acheson quoted Jesus in the Bible
Bible
The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...
: “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
United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit
The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit is one of the thirteen United States Courts of Appeals...
(case citation
Case citation
Case citation is the system used in many countries to identify the decisions in past court cases, either in special series of books called reporters or law reports, or in a 'neutral' form which will identify a decision wherever it was reported...
185 F.2d 822) and the Supreme Court of the United States
Supreme Court of the United States
The Supreme Court of the United States is the highest court in the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all state and federal courts, and original jurisdiction over a small range of cases...
denied a writ of certiorari (340 U.S. 948). Hiss served 44 months at the Lewisburg Federal Prison
Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary
The United States Penitentiary in Lewisburg is a male inmate high security federal penitentiary and satellite minimum security prison camp housing some 1,000 and 500 respectively, just outside Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. The Lewisburg Penitentiary was opened in 1932...
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
United States House of Representatives
The United States House of Representatives is one of the two Houses of the United States Congress, the bicameral legislature which also includes the Senate.The composition and powers of the House are established in Article One of the Constitution...
to the U.S. Senate
United States Senate
The United States Senate is the upper house of the bicameral legislature of the United States, and together with the United States House of Representatives comprises the United States Congress. The composition and powers of the Senate are established in Article One of the U.S. Constitution. Each...
in 1950, and to the vice presidency of the United States in 1952. Senator Joseph McCarthy
Joseph McCarthy
Joseph Raymond "Joe" McCarthy was an American politician who served as a Republican U.S. Senator from the state of Wisconsin from 1947 until his death in 1957...
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 disbarredDisbarment
Disbarment is the removal of a lawyer from a bar association or the practice of law, thus revoking his or her law license or admission to practice law...
, 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 Howard K. Smith: News and Comment
Howard K. Smith: News and Comment
Howard K. Smith: News and Comment was a half-hour ABC news and documentary program hosted by commentator Howard K. Smith , which aired from February 14, 1962, to June 16, 1963...
show on ABC
American Broadcasting Company
The American Broadcasting Company is an American commercial broadcasting television network. Created in 1943 from the former NBC Blue radio network, ABC is owned by The Walt Disney Company and is part of Disney-ABC Television Group. Its first broadcast on television was in 1948...
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
Admission to the bar
An admission to practice law, also called admission to the bar, is acquired when a lawyer receives a license to practice law. Becoming a lawyer is a widely varied process around the world. Common to all jurisdictions are requirements of age and competence; some jurisdictions also require citizenship...
. 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.
In 1988 Hiss wrote an autobiography, Recollections of a Life. He maintained his innocence and fought his perjury conviction until his death at age 92, when he died of emphysema
Emphysema
Emphysema is a long-term, progressive disease of the lungs that primarily causes shortness of breath. In people with emphysema, the tissues necessary to support the physical shape and function of the lungs are destroyed. It is included in a group of diseases called chronic obstructive pulmonary...
on November 15, 1996, at Lenox Hill Hospital
Lenox Hill Hospital
Lenox Hill Hospital, on Manhattan's Upper East Side in New York City, is a 652-bed, acute care hospital and a major teaching affiliate of New York University Medical Center. Founded in 1857 as the German Dispensary, today's 10-building Lenox Hill Hospital complex has occupied its present site since...
in New York City. His friends and family continue to insist on his innocence.
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 DaladierÉdouard Daladier
Édouard Daladier was a French Radical politician and the Prime Minister of France at the start of the Second World War.-Career:Daladier was born in Carpentras, Vaucluse. Later, he would become known to many as "the bull of Vaucluse" because of his thick neck and large shoulders and determined...
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
Nathaniel Weyl
Nathaniel Weyl was an American economist and author who wrote on a variety of social issues. A member of the Communist Party of the United States from 1933 until 1939, after leaving the party he became a conservative and avowed anti-communist...
, a former Communist Party member "at large" who had worked for the Department of Agriculture during the early days of the New Deal
New Deal
The New Deal was a series of economic programs implemented in the United States between 1933 and 1936. They were passed by the U.S. Congress during the first term of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The programs were Roosevelt's responses to the Great Depression, and focused on what historians call...
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
Lee Pressman
Lee Pressman was a labor attorney and a US government functionary publicly exposed in 1948 for having been a spy for the Soviet foreign intelligence network during the middle 1930s...
, 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. Schmahl 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
Martin Tytell
Martin Kenneth Tytell was an expert in manual typewriters described by The New York Times as having an "unmatched knowledge of typewriters". The postal service would deliver to his store letters addressed simply to "Mr. Typewriter, New York"...
, 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
Irving Younger
Irving Younger was an American lawyer, law professor, judge, and writer. He is well known among lawyers and law students for his exciting talks on effective trial advocacy and legal history....
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." Judge Goddard never entertained the possibility that the prosecution, or as some now suggest, Military Intelligence (the CIC
Counter Intelligence Corps
The Counter Intelligence Corps was a World War II and early Cold War intelligence agency within the United States Army. Its role was taken over by the U.S. Army Intelligence Corps in 1961 and, in 1967, by the U.S. Army Intelligence Agency...
), not Chambers, might have planted the evidence.
In his 1976 memoir, former White House
White House
The White House is the official residence and principal workplace of the president of the United States. Located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C., the house was designed by Irish-born James Hoban, and built between 1792 and 1800 of white-painted Aquia sandstone in the Neoclassical...
counsel John Dean
John Dean
John Wesley Dean III is an American lawyer who served as White House Counsel to United States President Richard Nixon from July 1970 until April 1973. In this position, he became deeply involved in events leading up to the Watergate burglaries and the subsequent Watergate scandal cover-up...
states that President Nixon's chief counsel Charles Colson
Charles Colson
Charles Wendell "Chuck" Colson is a Christian leader, cultural commentator, and former Special Counsel for President Richard Nixon from 1969 to 1973....
told him that Nixon had admitted in a conversation that HUAC had fabricated a typewriter, saying, "We built one on the Hiss case."
According to author Anthony Summers
Anthony Summers
Anthony Bruce Summers is the non-fiction author of seven best-selling investigative books. He is an Irish citizen, and has been working for some twenty years with Robbyn Swan, who is now his co-author and fifth wife...
, "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 John Dean
John Dean
John Wesley Dean III is an American lawyer who served as White House Counsel to United States President Richard Nixon from July 1970 until April 1973. In this position, he became deeply involved in events leading up to the Watergate burglaries and the subsequent Watergate scandal cover-up...
about forging a typewriter in the Hiss case. Fleming and others maintain that the indistinct phrase during a conversation with John Dean that sounded to certain transcribers like "we made a typewriter" is actually a reference to Hiss's legal team. Throughout the tapes Nixon stresses how he had tried Hiss in the press, not 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 in [his book] Six Crises and you’ll see how it was done. It wasn’t done waiting for the goddamn 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 DonovanWilliam Joseph DonovanWilliam Joseph Donovan was a United States soldier, lawyer and intelligence officer, best remembered as the wartime head of the Office of Strategic Services...
. 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 nobisCoram nobis
Coram nobis or coram vobis also known as error coram nobis or error coram vobis is a legal writ issued by a court to correct a previous error "of...
, 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."
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)
Counter Intelligence Corps
The Counter Intelligence Corps was a World War II and early Cold War intelligence agency within the United States Army. Its role was taken over by the U.S. Army Intelligence Corps in 1961 and, in 1967, by the U.S. Army Intelligence Agency...
. 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
Fort Ritchie
Fort Ritchie was a military installation south of Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania in the area of South Mountain . The installations's closure under the 1995 Base Realignment and Closure was nearly complete by 1998: "Out the Gate, by 98" .-History:In 1815, the Buena Vista Ice Company constructed two...
, 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
Vincent Reno
Franklin Vincent Reno was a mathematician and civilian employee at the United States Army Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland in the 1930s. Reno was a member of the "Karl group" of Soviet spies which was being handled by Whittaker Chambers up until 1938...
, a civilian employed at the Aberdeen Proving Ground
Aberdeen Proving Ground
Aberdeen Proving Ground is a United States Army facility located near Aberdeen, Maryland, . Part of the facility is a census-designated place , which had a population of 3,116 at the 2000 census.- History :...
, 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 VolkogonovDmitri Volkogonov
Dmitri Antonovich Volkogonov was a Russian historian and officer.-Biography:...
, who had become President Yeltsin's
Boris Yeltsin
Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin was the first President of the Russian Federation, serving from 1991 to 1999.Originally a supporter of Mikhail Gorbachev, Yeltsin emerged under the perestroika reforms as one of Gorbachev's most powerful political opponents. On 29 May 1990 he was elected the chairman of...
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
KGB
The KGB was the commonly used acronym for the . It was the national security agency of the Soviet Union from 1954 until 1991, and was the premier internal security, intelligence, and secret police organization during that time.The State Security Agency of the Republic of Belarus currently uses the...
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 2007, Svetlana Chervonnaya
Svetlana Chervonnaya
Svetlana Alexandrovna Chervonnaya is a historian living in Russia specializing in the political history of the Cold War period and Soviet espionage activities in the United States of America. Along with Ellen Schrecker, Chervonnaya is known as one of the leading scholarly voices arguing against...
, a Russian researcher who had been studying Soviet archives since the early 1990s, stated that Hiss' name was absent from Soviet archives. In May 2009, at a conference hosted by the Wilson Center, Mark Kramer, director of Cold War Studies at Harvard University
Cold War Studies at Harvard University
The stated function of the Harvard Project on Cold War Studies is to further the progress of, and actively encourage the ongoing primary research of archival, Cold War documents in the former Eastern-bloc nations. These documents have only become available since the collapse of the Soviet Union in...
at the John F. Kennedy School of Government
John F. Kennedy School of Government
The John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University is a public policy and public administration school, and one of Harvard's graduate and professional schools...
, stated that he did not "trust a word [Kobyakov] says," At the same conference, historian Ronald Radosh
Ronald Radosh
Ronald Radosh is an American writer, professor, historian, former Marxist, and neoconservative. He is known for his work on the Cold War espionage case of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and his advocacy of the state of Israel....
reported that while researching the papers of Marshal Voroshilov
Kliment Voroshilov
Kliment Yefremovich Voroshilov , popularly known as Klim Voroshilov was a Soviet military officer, politician, and statesman...
's in Moscow, he and Mary Habeck
Mary R. Habeck
Mary R. Habeck is an American scholar of international relations. She received her PhD from Yale University and is currently Associate Professor of Strategic Studies at the Johns Hopkins University.Fluent in Russian, she has collaborated with Ronald Radosh....
had encountered two GRU
GRU
GRU or Glavnoye Razvedyvatel'noye Upravleniye is the foreign military intelligence directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation...
(Soviet military intelligence) files that referring to Alger Hiss as "our agent".
Noel Field
In 1992, records were found in HungarianHungary
Hungary , officially the Republic of Hungary , is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It is situated in the Carpathian Basin and is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine and Romania to the east, Serbia and Croatia to the south, Slovenia to the southwest and Austria to the west. The...
Interior Ministry archives in which Noel Field
Noel Field
Noel Field , was an American citizen. While employed at the United States Department of State in the 1930s, he was a Soviet spy...
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
Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe is the eastern part of Europe. The term has widely disparate geopolitical, geographical, cultural and socioeconomic readings, which makes it highly context-dependent and even volatile, and there are "almost as many definitions of Eastern Europe as there are scholars of the region"...
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
Hede Massing
Hede Massing, née "Hedwig Tune" was an Austrian actress in Vienna and Berlin, communist, and Soviet intelligence operative in Europe and the United States during the 1930s and 1940s. After the World War II, she defected from the Soviet underground...
told US authorities when she defected in 1947, namely that when she attempted to recruit Noel Field for one Soviet spy network (the OGPU
State Political Directorate
The State Political Directorate was the secret police of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and the Soviet Union from 1922 until 1934...
), Field replied that he already worked for another (the GRU
GRU
GRU or Glavnoye Razvedyvatel'noye Upravleniye is the foreign military intelligence directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation...
). 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
Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
The Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union , abbreviated in Russian as ЦК, "Tse-ka", earlier was also called as the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party ...
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 NSANational Security Agency
The National Security Agency/Central Security Service is a cryptologic intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the collection and analysis of foreign communications and foreign signals intelligence, as well as protecting U.S...
for the first time made public the existence of the World War II Venona project
Venona project
The VENONA project was a long-running secret collaboration of the United States and United Kingdom intelligence agencies involving cryptanalysis of messages sent by intelligence agencies of the Soviet Union, the majority during World War II...
, 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 sq, concluded that the codename "ALES" was "probably Alger Hiss". In 1997, Allen Weinstein
Allen Weinstein
Allen Weinstein is an American historian, educator, and federal official who has served in several different offices. He served as the Archivist of the United States from February 16, 2005 until his resignation on December 19, 2008...
, in the second edition of his 1978 book Perjury: The Hiss–Chambers Case calls the Venona evidence "persuasive but not conclusive". The bipartisan Moynihan Commission on Government Secrecy, chaired by Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Daniel Patrick "Pat" Moynihan was an American politician and sociologist. A member of the Democratic Party, he was first elected to the United States Senate for New York in 1976, and was re-elected three times . He declined to run for re-election in 2000...
, however, stated in its findings that year: "The complicity of Alger Hiss of the State Department seems settled. As does that of Harry Dexter White
Harry Dexter White
Harry Dexter White was an American economist, and senior U.S. Treasury department official, participating in the Bretton Woods conference...
of the Treasury Department."
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
Harvey Klehr
Harvey E. Klehr is a professor of politics and history at Emory University; he is known for his books on the subject of the American Communist movement, and on Soviet espionage in America ....
, professor of political science at Emory University, and John Earl Haynes
John Earl Haynes
John Earl Haynes is an American historian who is a specialist in 20th century political history in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress...
, 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
National Security Agency
The National Security Agency/Central Security Service is a cryptologic intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the collection and analysis of foreign communications and foreign signals intelligence, as well as protecting U.S...
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, appears to indicate that ALES attended the February 4–11, 1945, Yalta conference and then went to Moscow. Hiss did attend Yalta and then traveled to Moscow with Secretary of State Stettinius.
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 GRUGRUGRU or Glavnoye Razvedyvatel'noye Upravleniye is the foreign military intelligence directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation...
(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 CityMexico CityMexico City is the Federal District , capital of Mexico and seat of the federal powers of the Mexican Union. It is a federal entity within Mexico which is not part of any one of the 31 Mexican states but belongs to the federation as a whole...
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
Andrey Vyshinsky
Andrey Januaryevich Vyshinsky – 22 November 1954) was a Soviet politician, jurist and diplomat.He is known as a state prosecutor of Joseph Stalin's Moscow trials and in the Nuremberg trials. He was the Soviet Foreign Minister from 1949 to 1953, after having served as Deputy Foreign...
. 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. The late Eduard Mark of the Center for Air Force History hotly disputed this analysis.
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 in a coded transmission, since this was contrary to their usual practice.
At an April 2007 symposium, authors Kai Bird and Svetlana Chervonnaya postulated that, based on the movements of officials present at Yalta, Wilder Foote, a U.S. diplomat, not Hiss, was the best match for ALES.
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
KGB
The KGB was the commonly used acronym for the . It was the national security agency of the Soviet Union from 1954 until 1991, and was the premier internal security, intelligence, and secret police organization during that time.The State Security Agency of the Republic of Belarus currently uses the...
assets (rather than GRU
GRU
GRU or Glavnoye Razvedyvatel'noye Upravleniye is the foreign military intelligence directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation...
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 GordievskyOleg Gordievsky
Oleg Antonovich Gordievsky , CMG , is a former Colonel of the KGB and KGB Resident-designate and bureau chief in London, who was a secret agent of the British Secret Intelligence Service from 1974 to 1985.-Early career:Oleg Gordievsky attended the Moscow State Institute of International...
(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
Iskhak Akhmerov
Iskhak Abdulovich Akhmerov was a Soviet spy of Tatar ethnicity who joined the Bolshevik Party in 1919. Akhmerov attended the Communist University of Toilers of the East and the First State University, where he graduated from the School of International Relations in 1930...
, 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. Gordievsky's status as a reliable source was challenged in the British media.
Haynes, Klehr, and Vassiliev
In 2009 Haynes, Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev published Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (Yale University PressYale University Press
Yale University Press is a book publisher founded in 1908 by George Parmly Day. It became an official department of Yale University in 1961, but remains financially and operationally autonomous....
), 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 conclude 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
Journal of Cold War Studies
The Journal of Cold War Studies is a peer-reviewed academic journal on the history of the Cold War. It was established in 1999 and is published by MIT Press for the Harvard Project on Cold War Studies. The journal is issued also under the auspices of the Davis Center for Russian 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
Newsweek
Newsweek is an American weekly news magazine published in New York City. It is distributed throughout the United States and internationally. It is the second-largest news weekly magazine in the U.S., having trailed Time in circulation and advertising revenue for most of its existence...
magazine reported that civil rights historian David Garrow
David Garrow
David J. Garrow is an American historian and author of the book Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. He is also the author of Liberty and Sexuality, a history of the legal struggles over...
, author of a Pulitzer Prize
Pulitzer Prize
The Pulitzer Prize is a U.S. award for achievements in newspaper and online journalism, literature and musical composition. It was established by American publisher Joseph Pulitzer and is administered by Columbia University in New York City...
-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. According to Guttenplan, Boris Labusov, a press officer of the SVR, the successor to the KGB, has stated that Vassiliev could not in the course of his researches have possibly "met the name of Alger Hiss in the context of some cooperation with some special services of the Soviet Union." Guttenplan also points out that Vasiliev admitted under oath in 2003 that he'd never seen a single document linking Alger Hiss with the cover name "Ales."
Historian Jeff Kisseloff questions Haynes and Klehr's conclusion that Vassiliev's notes support Hede Massing's story about talking to Alger Hiss at a party in 1935 about recruiting their mutual friend and host Noel Field into the Communist underground. According to Kisseloff, "all that the files Vassiliev saw really indicate is that she was telling yet another version of her story in the 1930s. Haynes and Klehr never consider that, as an agent in Washington, D.C. who was having little success in the tasks assigned to her, she may have felt pressure back then to make up a few triumphs to reassure her superiors." Kisseloff also disputes Haynes and Klehr's linking of Hiss with former Treasury Department official Harold Glasser
Harold Glasser
Harold Glasser , was an economist in the United States Department of the Treasury and spokesman on the affairs of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration 'throughout its whole life' and he had a 'predominant voice' in determining which countries should receive aid...
, 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
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
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.
Further reading
- Cook, Fred JFred J. CookFred James Cook was an investigative journalist whose prime years of reporting spanned from the 1950s to the late 1970s...
(1957). The Unfinished Story of Alger Hiss. New York: William Morrow. - Gentry, CurtCurt GentryCurt Gentry is an American writer. He is best known for co-writing the book Helter Skelter with Vincent Bugliosi , which detailed the Charles Manson murders...
. 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.
- Moore, William Howard. (1987) Two Foolish Men: The True Story of the Friendship Between Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers. Moorup
- Smith, John Chalbot (1976). Alger Hiss: The True Story. New York, Holt Reinhart Winston.
- Summers, AnthonyAnthony SummersAnthony Bruce Summers is the non-fiction author of seven best-selling investigative books. He is an Irish citizen, and has been working for some twenty years with Robbyn Swan, who is now his co-author and fifth wife...
(2000). The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon. Penguin-Putnam Inc. ISBN 0-670-87151-6.
External links
- Kai Bird and Svetlana Chervonnaya, "The Mystery of Ales (expanded version)," The American Scholar, Summer 2007.
- 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. 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.