Alger Hiss

Alger Hiss.
Photo courtesy U.S. Bureau of Prisons

Alger Hiss (November 11, 1904 - November 15, 1996) was a U.S. State Department official and Secretary General of the founding conference of the United Nations. Following accusations by Whittaker Chambers that he spied on behalf of the Soviet Union, Hiss was convicted of perjury.

Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D.-N.Y.), who was instrumental in securing the release of the long-awaited FBI and Venona project files, which had been classified for nearly 50 years, in his 1998 book, Secrecy: The American Experience, 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.

”

Early life

Alger Hiss was born in Baltimore, Maryland, November 11, 1904, to a financially comfortable upper-middle-class WASP family. When Alger was two years old, his father, an executive with a dry goods firm, committed suicide by slashing his throat with his own razor. When Alger was 25, his sister Mary Ann also committed suicide, by drinking a bottle of Lysol. Hiss’s older brother Bosley had died two and a half years before from Bright’s disease, a kidney disorder aggravated by his excessive alcohol consumption.

After graduation from Baltimore City College and a year at Powder Point Academy (a private prep school in Duxbury, Massachusetts) and the Maryland Institute of Art, Hiss attended Baltimore's Johns Hopkins University. As an undergraduate, Hiss' favorite instructors included the Socialist Broadus Mitchell (a former Socialist Party candidate for Governor of Maryland) and José Robles, a committed Stalinist. Hiss apparently knew Robles well enough to spend time at his home. Robles would go on to serve in the Spanish Civil War as interpreter for General Jānis Bērziņš, head of Soviet military intelligence, but was never seen again after Bērziņš was recalled to Moscow and shot in Stalin's Great Terror in 1938. Hiss would later say he too considered going to Spain to fight for the Soviet-backed Loyalist cause.

After graduating in 1926, Hiss went on to Harvard Law School, where he resumed his friendship with his boyhood friend Henry Collins (who was attending Harvard Business School) and served on the Harvard Law Review with his classmate Lee Pressman. Hiss became the protégé of one instructor, future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter—whom former U.S. President William Howard Taft, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, said "seems to be closely in touch with every Bolshevist, Communist movement in this country." When Hiss graduated from law school in 1929, Frankfurter got him a job as law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. The same year, Hiss married the former Mrs. Priscilla Fansler Hobson, a supporter of perennial Socialist Party presidential nominee Norman Thomas.

Hiss went on to a law firm in Boston, then to another in New York where, by 1930, his wife Priscilla had joined the Morningside Heights branch of the Socialist Party. By 1932, Priscilla Hiss was an active member of American Labor Associates, and Hiss was becoming "radicalized," joining the International Juridical Association (IJA) (which "consistently followed the Communist Party line") along with his Harvard Law classmate Lee Pressman and Nathan Witt.

During this period, Hiss' letters to his wife reflected his increasing radicalism. In 1930, he made a coy reference to the International Workers of the World, writing to Priscilla, "[D]id thee call thyself a Wobbly with an I.W.W. tongue in thy socialistic (I couldn't bring myself to write “Communistic”) cheek." Suggesting that an article questioning the legitimacy of the existing “capitalist order” did not go far enough, Hiss wrote to Priscilla in 1932, “Has thee seen Archibald MacLeish's article on capitalism in last week's Saturday Review? Felix [Frankfurter] says it is soft thinking after Wilson.”

New Deal

In 1933, Frankfurter sent Hiss a telegram urging him to join President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal as assistant general counsel to the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA). At the peak of Stalin's Terror Famine (during which the Soviets starved some three million Ukrainians to death through collectivization of agriculture), the AAA restricted U.S. farm production in order to drive up food prices in the depths of the Great Depression. The agency was the the brainchild of FDR's then-Secretary of Agriculture, Henry Wallace, who would finally recant his support for the Soviet Union in 1952.

In response to a query about hiring him, Hiss' Harvard Law School classmate Lee Pressman, already at AAA, wrote, "I have talked to Alger Hiss and Nat Witt who are considering" taking posts at AAA (Hiss would later deny under oath that he had discussed the position with Pressman). At AAA, Hiss reunited with Pressman, as well as his boyhood friend Henry Collins and IJA colleague Witt, and became acquainted with the Communist Harold Ware. Even before the FBI would learn of Whittaker Chambers' charges, one of Hiss' colleagues at the AAA would tip off FBI investigators that Hiss and his circle were fellow travelers, if not Communists. Pressman would eventually testify that he had been a Communist and a member of the Ware group. Another AAA official, Nathaniel Weyl, would later testify that he attended Communist cell meetings with Hiss and saw him pay his party dues.

In 1934, again with an assist from Lee Pressman (according to Gardner Jackson), Hiss became General Counsel for the U.S. Senate's Nye committee, which investigated people Chairman Gerald P. Nye (R.-N.D.) called Wall Street's "merchants of death," whom he accused of conspiracy to lead the U.S. into war with Germany. One scholar has dubbed this a "witch-hunt" for "subversive capitalists," in which Hiss was to Nye what Roy Cohn would later be to Senator Joe McCarthy (R.-Wisc.)

It was in this role that Hiss met Whittaker Chambers. They were introduced in 1934 by John Herrmann, an AAA official who was a member of the Ware group and courier for the Communist underground (subordinate to Chambers), according to Herrmann's then wife, the radical novelist Josephine Herbst. (Hiss would claim that Chambers had wandered into his office without introduction, as a free-lance writer looking for a story, and would later claim that he did not even know Herrmann—a "lie," according to Herbst's biographer.)

The following year, Hiss transferred into the Justice Department as special assistant to the Solictor General, where he unsuccessfully defended the Agricultural Adjustment Act before the United States Supreme Court (which ruled the AAA unconstitutional in 1936).

During the early and middle thirties, Hiss was a source of agent information for a Soviet spy ring in Washington, the Silvermaster group, according to a former GRU station chief in London and New York, as reported by Pavel Sudoplatov, former deputy director of Foreign Intelligence for the USSR.

At a 1935 dinner at the home of State Department official Noel Field, Hiss argued with OGPU recruiter Hede Massing that Field should work with Hiss' GRU group, rather than Massing's OGPU group, according to Massing.

Field would defect in 1948 to Communist Czechoslovakia, where he would tell his Czech interrogators that Hiss was a fellow Communist underground agent in the State Department during the mid-thirties, and that Field was defecting to avoid testifying in the Hiss trial, according to records of the Czechoslovak secret police (reported in 1990 by Karel Kaplan, former archivist of the Central Committee of the Czech Communist Party). A 1955 Czechoslovak secret police reinvestigation (obtained in 2000 by Czech human rights activist Karel Skrabek) states, "Noel Field said that … Hiss worked for the USSR as a spy." Field would end up in Communist Hungary, where in 1954 he would give Hungarian secret police a statement reading in part as follows:

“

We [Field and his wife] made friends with Alger Hiss—an official of the "New Deal" brought about by Roosevelt—and his wife. After a couple of meetings we mutually realized we were Communists. 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. Naturally I didn't say a word about the Massings.

”

The transcripts also record Field saying that he turned over State Department documents to Hede Massing in the 1930s. In other statements Field twice said that although Hiss knew that Field “was a Communist,” he strongly supported Field at the State Department and even tried to help him obtain a job as a State Department adviser in the Philippines in 1940. The dossier likewise records a statement by Field that he briefly visited Hiss in 1939 in America, where they agreed that if either's cover was ever blown, he would communicate to the other indirectly.

In a 1936 memorandum, found in the NKVD archives by former KGB agent Alexander Vassiliev, Massing complains to Moscow about Hiss (using his real name) talking to Field (whom she refers to by his code name "Ernst"): "Alger told him that he was a Communist," complains Massing—a serious breach of discipline—and asked Field to use his connections to help Hiss get into the State Department.

State Department

In 1936, Hiss joined the State Department as special assistant to Assistant Secretary of State for Trade Agreements Francis B. Sayre, son-in-law of Woodrow Wilson. Two years later, his younger brother Donald, who had followed Alger to Johns Hopkins, Harvard Law, and a clerkship for Justice Holmes, would join him there.

The year before, at the funeral of Marshal Jozsef Pilsudski in Warsaw, U.S. Ambassador to Moscow William C. Bullitt had confidentially assured the Polish government that the United States would stand by Poland in the event of a Nazi invasion. But when he reported back to the State Department that he had done so, someone there passed this information to the Kremlin, which in turn transmitted it to German intelligence (with which Soviet intelligence had maintained liaison since the time of Lenin). Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels exploited this information to portray the United States as a warmonger. According to reporter Ralph de Toledano, who covered the Hiss trial for Newsweek, the State Department source who passed this information to the NKVD was Alger Hiss.

By 1937, the peak of Stalin's Great Terror (whose victims would number over ten million), Hiss was delivering packets of documents to Whittaker Chambers at intervals of a week or ten days, according to Oleg Gordievsky, the KGB London station chief who defected in 1985.

In early 1938, in Paris, defecting former GRU chief in Europe Walter Krivitsky (who would be found shot dead in his Washington hotel room in 1941) told Alexander Barmine, former Charge d'Affairs at the Soviet Embassy in Athens, who had defected the year before, that Alger Hiss was an agent of Soviet military intelligence, according to Barmine.

The same year, French Premier Édouard Daladier informed Bullitt that two brothers named Hiss, both in the U.S. government, were Soviet agents. Bullitt “laughed it off as a tall tale, never having heard their names.” Also that year, Whittaker Chambers made his final break with the Communists, asking his wife's nephew to hide a packet of copies of documents, hand-written memos and microfilm of documents for him.

In 1939, Hiss became personal aide to Stanley Hornbeck, the State Department's adviser on Far Eastern Affairs. During the Hitler-Stalin pact, Communist Party official Roy Hudson and Soviet agent Robert Minor were discussing an attack on the Communist Party organ The Daily Worker at the National Headquarters of the Communist Party. Someone mentioned that Nathan Witt and Lee Pressman could not be of much help as they, too, were under attack at the time; Alger Hiss was then mentioned as a good Comrade who would be helpful, according to former CPUSA Politburo member Louis Budenz, editor of the Daily Worker.

When news of the Hitler-Stalin pact broke on August 23, 1939, Walter Krivitsky, former chief of Soviet military intelligence in Europe, who had defected in Paris two years earlier, warned his Saturday Evening Post ghostwriter, Isaac Don Levine, "Everything that went on in the [U.S.] embassy [in Moscow], especially the major communications between Washington and Bullitt, were quickly relayed to the Soviet secret police."

The year before, Whittaker Chambers confessed to Levine that he had been a courier for the Communist underground. On September 2, 1939, as the joint Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland was gearing up, Levine arranged a dinner with Chambers and Assistant Secretary of State for Security Adolf Berle, at which Chambers told Berle of an underground apparatus of the Communist Party for employees of the Federal government in Washington, D.C. Its organizer, said Chambers, was Harold Ware, its treasurer Henry Collins; among its members he identified Lee Pressman, Nathan Witt, and the brothers Alger and Donald Hiss.

While Chambers talked, Berle took notes. Under the heading “Underground Espionage Agent,” he listed several names, including “Alger Hiss,” with the notation, “Ass’t. to Sayre—CP—1937,” and “Member of the Underground Com.—Active.” In Berle's diary, the first entry after his visit with Levine and Chambers reads:

“

Saturday night [September 2] ... Isaac Don Levine ... brought a Mr. X around to my house ... Through a long evening, I slowly manipulated Mr. X to a point where he had told some of the ramifications hereabout; and it becomes necessary to take a few simple measures. I expect more of this kind of thing, later. A good deal of the Russian espionage was carried on by Jews; we know now that they are exchanging information with Berlin; and the Jewish units are furious to find out they are, in substance, working for the Gestapo...

”

After Berle relayed this information to President Franklin Roosevelt, Levine asked Berle how FDR responded. In his 1973 memoir, Levine wrote, “To the best of my recollection, the President dismissed the matter rather brusquely with an expletive remark on this order: ‘Oh, forget it, Adolf.’”

In 1940, after Levine informed Bullitt of what Chambers had told him about Hiss, Bullitt relayed to Hiss' superior, Stanley Hornbeck, what Daladier had told him. Bullitt advised Alice Roosevelt Longworth and de Toledano that he also took this information directly to FDR.

Levine also told David Dubinsky, president of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, about Chambers' revelations. Dubinsky, wrote Levine, "took up the Chambers matter with the President at the first opportunity and was brushed off with an amiable slap on the back." Levine wrote that he also told fellow journalist Walter Winchell of "a ring of six Soviet agents operating within the State Department alone. In his broadcast of December 12, Winchell announced that he had carried my information to President Roosevelt. Still there was no action." Winchell's posthumously published memoir confirms Levine's story.

Hiss was now among a handful of the Soviets' most important agents, who were run individually and not through spy networks, according to Oleg Gordievsky. Hiss' wartime controller, wrote Gordievsky, was the leading NKVD illegal in the United States, Iskhak Abdulovich Akhmerov, who, in a lecture before a KGB audience, identified Hiss as a Soviet agent during World War II.

In 1941, the Dies committee obtained the membership list of the Washington Committee for Democratic Action, which would eventually be listed on Attorney General Tom Clark's list of subversive organizations as a Communist front, per President Truman's executive order 9835. Included was the name of Priscilla Hiss, with the notation appended, "Husband with State Department." In 1941-42 the FBI conducted a Hatch Act investigation of Hiss, in the course of which one of Hiss' former colleagues at the AAA told investigators that Hiss and his circle were fellow travelers, if not Communists. Hiss denied everything, although he said he thought his wife might have been a member of the League of Women Shoppers, a Popular Front group identified as a Communist front by the committee in 1939. In 1942, the FBI sent a report of this investigation to the Secretary of State.

Also in 1942, the Bureau interviewed Chambers for the first time. He repeated his identification of Hiss, among others, as a Communist. In 1943, the FBI obtained the notes Berle had taken during his dinner four years earlier with Chambers and Levine. That year, an encrypted cable (decrypted in the Venona project and released in 1995) from Pavel B. Mikhailov (code-named "Mol'er"), who (under cover as Soviet Vice Consul in New York) was controller of military intelligence for the NKVD, to NKVD chief of foreign intelligence Pavel Fitin (code-named "Viktor") in Moscow, identifying the real names and code names of several agents in the U.S., said the GRU (code-named "Neighbors") reported someone "from the State Department by the name of Hiss."

The following year, Hiss was promoted to become deputy director of the State Department's Office of Special Political Affairs, a policy-making office for postwar planning and international organization. In August 1944, he organized the Dumbarton Oaks Conference, where he served as executive secretary, presiding over the drafting of the proposed United Nations Charter.

Yalta

President Truman at the rostrum of the United Nations Charter Meeting with Secretary General of the Conference Alger Hiss seated second from Truman's left.

In February 1945, Hiss was selected to accompany FDR to his meeting with Stalin and Churchill at Yalta, as aide to Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, Jr.

According to Sudoplatov, "One of the officials [at Yalta] we had established confidential relations with was Alger Hiss," who was "highly sympathetic to the interests of the Soviet Union." He added:

“

In conversation, Hiss disclosed to Oumansky, and then Litvinov, official U.S. attitudes and plans; he was also very close to our sources who were cooperating with Soviet intelligence and to our active intelligence operators in the United States. Within this framework of exchange of confidential information were references to Hiss as the source who told us the Americans were prepared to make a deal in Europe.

”

At the conference, the U.S. ceded hegemony over Eastern Europe to Stalin and made a secret agreement giving the Soviet Union three votes in the UN to one for the U.S. According to confidential GRU sources, during the conference, Hiss gave daily briefings to General Mikhail Abramovich Milshtein, a military adviser to Stalin and the deputy director of the GRU, revealing not only the American negotiating strategy but insights into the attitudes of the American negotiators.

After the conference, Hiss went on to Moscow, where he was decorated with the Order of the Red Star by Foreign Minister V.M. Molotov. On April 25, 1945, Pavel Fitin, head of NKVD foreign intelligence, reported to NKVD Chief Vsevolod Merkulov that Harold Glasser, a Soviet agent in the U.S. Treasury code-named "Ruble," learned about this from his friend, code-named "Ales" (pronounced "Alles"), a Soviet military intelligence agent:

“

According to data from Vadim the group of agents of the "military" neighbors whose part Ruble was earlier, recently was decorated with orders of the USSR. Ruble learned about this fact from his friend Ales, who is the head of the mentioned group."

”

This memo apparently refers to Venona decrypt 1822, dated March 30, 1945, in which "Vadim" (Anatoly Gorsky, chief of Soviet intelligence in the U.S.) reports, following up on a conversation with "Ales," that "Ales has been continuously working with the neighbors since 1935;" that for "a few years now he has been the director of a small group of probationers [agents] of the neighbors, for the most part drawn from his relatives;" that they were "working on obtaining only military information," since Soviet military intelligence "allegedly are not very interested" in "materials about the Bank"; that recently, "Ales and his whole group were awarded Soviet medals"; and that after "the Yalta conference, back in Moscow, one very high-ranking Soviet worker allegedly had contact with Ales (Ales implied that it was Comrade Vyshinskii) and at the request of the military neighbors he conveyed to him their thanks, etc."

Regarding "Ales," in its unanimous final report in 1997, the bipartisan Moynihan Commission on Government Secrecy concluded, "This could only be Alger Hiss" Analysts at the National Security Agency have also gone on record that Ales could only have been Alger Hiss. Former NSA analyst John R. Schindler, professor of strategy at the Naval War College, concurs that "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."

In 1945, Communist Party General Secretary Eugene Dennis told Communist Party National Committee member Jack Stachel that State Department liaison Andrew Roth of the Office of Naval Intelligence (who had been arrested in the Amerasia spy case) suggested that Alger Hiss might be used to quash the case, according to Louis Budenz.

In March 1945, State Department security officer Raymond Murphy interviewed Chambers. Murphy's notes record that Chambers reiterated his identification of Hiss as a member of the Communist Party underground apparatus, but added that he was the leader of a cell within the Ware group, the members of which, said Chambers, were not merely Communists, but espionage agents who disclosed "much confidential material," as well as agents of influence who sought to shape U.S. policy "in keeping with the desires of the Communist Party."

On March 24, FBI agent E.A. Tamm, assistant to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, alerted Robert Lynch, Special Assistant to the Secretary of State, to Chambers' allegations that Hiss had been a member of the underground organization of the Communist Party, and to Hiss' links to Nathan Witt and Lee Pressman. Three days later, FBI official D.M. Ladd furnished Frederick B. Lyon, Chief of the Division of Foreign Activity Correlation of the Department of State, a summary memorandum outlining this information.

United Nations

The following month, Hiss was promoted to become Director of the State Department Office of Special Political Affairs. Former KGB agent Alexander Vassiliev's notes on a cable of the era, (Vadim to Moscow Center, 5 March 1945, which Vassiliev discovered in the Soviet archives) report that "Vadim" (Anatoly Gorsky), then chief of Soviet intelligence in the U.S., wanted to meet with "Ales" at the upcoming founding conference of the United Nations. It also notes that "Ales" had worked with "Ruble" (Harold Glasser) as a member of a group run by "Karl" (Whittaker Chambers). According to Vassiliev's notes, the cable adds that "'Ruble' gives 'Ales' an exceptionally good political reference as a member of the Comparty.... completely aware that he is Communist in an illegal position, with all the ensuing consequences," and recommends (according to the notes) that he be approached at the UN conference by "Sergey" (NKVD agent Vladimir Pravdin, then under cover as head of Soviet TASS news agency) or Gorsky, "alluding either to the password, or to 'Ruble', or simply to 'Ales's' progressive attitudes."

Shortly thereafter, Hiss presided as Secretary General over the United Nations Charter Conference in San Francisco. James F. Byrnes, who became Secretary of State during the conference, said that despite his categorical instructions not to recommend any U.S. citizen for posts in the UN secretariat, Hiss recommended several dozen federal employees—members of Communist cells in the government, whose jobs were at risk under a tightened security program.

In April 1945, during the San Francisco conference, Soviet UN Ambassador Andrei Gromyko nominated Hiss to be temporary secretary general of the United Nations. As one scholar notes, "It was astonishing for a Soviet diplomat to propose an American for what was then the UN's highest and most sensitive diplomatic post." In London that September, Gromyko repeated to Stettinius, now the new U.S. Ambassador to the UN, that he "would be very happy to see Alger Hiss appointed temporary secretary general." As Weinstein notes, "The endorsement of a leading American official by the Russians remains practically unique in the annals of Soviet-American diplomacy at this time." The same day Gromyko reiterated his endorsement of Hiss to Stettinius in London, Hiss proposed that the State Department create a new post, that of "special assistant for military affairs," linked to his Office of Special Political Affairs.

Defections and Investigation

Two days before Hiss made that proposal, GRU code clerk Igor Gouzenko had defected from the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa, telling the FBI that one Lt. Kulakov in the office of the Soviet military attaché told him that he had learned in Moscow prior to his departure in May 1945 that an assistant to then U.S. Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius was a Soviet spy. Gouzenko suggested that the Bureau might identify the agent by determining who had advised Stettinius that the U.S. should turn over its atomic bomb to the UN Security Council. Stettinius' aide at the time was Alger Hiss. Following up on Gouzenko's revelations, Raymond Murphy of the State Department again interviewed Chambers, who repeated that Hiss' assignment was "to mess up policy."

Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King wrote that acting under-secretary of state for external affairs Robertson told him that Gouzenko’s documents disclosed that “everything was much worse than we would have believed…. Stettinius [had] been surrounded by spies, etc….”

On November 27, 1945, the FBI disseminated a secret report to the State Department, the Attorney General, and the Truman White House, reporting Chambers' identification of Hiss as a secret member of the Communist underground apparatus in contact with the Ware group. Three days later, defecting Soviet courier Elizabeth Bentley advised FBI investigators that Victor Perlo told her that Harold Glasser had been taken away from the “Perlo Group” and turned over to a Russian “by some American in some governmental agency in Washington.” She said that Charles Kramer (who would be identified by both Lee Pressman and Nathaniel Weyl as a member of the Ware group) told her that the person who had done this “was named Hiss and that he was in the U.S. State Department.”

Bentley's unlikely account was corroborated by an 25 April 1945 memo from Pavel Fitin, head of NKVD foreign intelligence, to NKVD Chief Vsevolod Merkulov, noting that Glasser had worked for both the NKVD and GRU:

“

Our agent RUBLE, drawn to work for the Soviet Union in May 1937, passed initially through the military "neighbors" and then through our station (NKVD) valuable information on political and economic issues.... To our work RUBLE gives much attention and energy and is devoted and disciplined agent.

”

Bentley said after "Jack" (Soviet agent Joseph Katz) asked her who Hiss was, she clipped an article from the New York daily PM (whose Washington correspondent, I.F. Stone, was a Soviet intelligence source designated in encrypted Soviet cables by the code name "Blin") “in which Hiss was mentioned.” She said “It is my present recollection that this newspaper article stated Hiss’ full name was Eugene [sic] Hiss and that he was an adviser to Dean Acheson in the State Department.” FBI investigation quickly closed in on Alger Hiss.

Anatoly Gorsky, chief of Soviet intelligence in the U.S. during World War II, would author an internal Soviet secret police memorandum three years later, in which he would list 43 Soviet sources and intelligence officers likely to have been identified to U.S. authorities by Bentley after her defection. Included on the list was Alger Hiss.

In 1946, the FBI again interviewed Hiss. Hiss denied ever being a Communist, and denied knowledge of any of his friends being Communists. He did, however, add that he had heard it said that Lee Pressman was either a Party member or followed the Party line. That year, British intelligence supplied its order of battle against Soviet-led guerrillas in Greece to the Pentagon. Shortly thereafter, this top-secret information appeared in the column of Drew Pearson (whose reporter, David Carr, was a "competent KGB source"), forcing the British army to withdraw, a move that would have delivered Greece to the Kremlin had not the U.S. intervened. According to de Toledano, “Deputy Assistant Secretary of State J. Anthony Panuch, in charge of security, tracked down the source of the leak. He discovered that Hiss had asked the Pentagon for this information, though it had nothing to do with his work as director of the Office of Special Political Affairs.”

When Secretary of State James F. Byrnes put Hiss under surveillance at the State Department that year it was discovered he had obtained top secret reports "on atomic energy ... and other matters relating to military intelligence" that were outside the scope of his Office of Special Political Affairs, which dealt largely with United Nations diplomacy." Shortly thereafter, a State Department internal security probe (made public in 1993) revealed that Alger Hiss had purloined several highly classified documents on matters of national security, including China policy and atomic energy—documents Hiss was not authorized to access, which were unrelated to his official duties at State, but of obvious interest to Soviet intelligence.

In November 1946, the FBI disseminated to the State Department, Attorney General and Truman White House a second secret report, this time reporting Bentley's allegations regarding "Eugene Hiss," suggesting that this might actually be a reference to Alger Hiss.

The New York bureau of the Christian Science Monitor would later send a teletype to the home office in Boston, reading:

“

From a thoroughly reliable contact [Arnold Beichman, then publicity director for New York's Liberal Party, of which former Assistant Secretary of State Berle was chairman]: According to this informant Berle has said privately that classified material which Hiss was handling was reaching the Russians. It was coded stuff. Berle took the handling out of Hiss' hands and the leaks stopped.

”

In January, 1947, Byrnes quietly eased Hiss out of the State Department.. Hiss became president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, serving also as a trustee on the Institute of Pacific Relations.

House Committee on Un-American Activities

On August 3, 1948, the House Committee on Un-American Activities called Whittaker Chambers. He repeated under oath what he had been telling State Department officials Berle and Murphy, and the FBI, about the Ware group, starting in 1939.When Chambers testified against Hiss, wrote Sudoplatov, "we considered this to be a setback for GRU intelligence activities in the United States."

Two days later, Hiss testified, denying that he ever even knew Chambers, in a statement Secretary of State Dean Acheson helped write. That day, President Truman reviewed Hiss’ FBI file and pronounced Hiss “guilty as hell,” telling White House Special Counsel Samuel Rosenman, “We shouldn't just indict this son of a bitch. We should hang him.” Five minutes later, Truman blustered to a press conference that the Hiss case was just an election-year “red herring.” When Rosenman later asked why he had lied, Truman explained, “You don't understand. The Republicans aren't after Alger Hiss. They're after me. I had to take the political view.”

So strong was Hiss' denial that the committee wanted to drop the investigation. But one member, freshman Congressman Richard M. Nixon (R-Calif.) insisted that either Chambers or Hiss was lying about whether they had known one another, and he asked the committee to appoint him to head a subcommittee to find out which one.

On August 16, Chambers offered to take a lie-detector test. Hiss refused (a refusal he kept up for the rest of his life), but he dared Chambers to repeat his charges outside of the immunity afforded in congressional hearings, so Hiss could sue him. In her newspaper column that day, Eleanor Roosevelt set the tone of respectable opinion, writing, "Smearing good people like Lauchlin Currie, Alger Hiss and others is, I think, unforgivable .... Anyone knowing Mr. Currie or Mr. Hiss, who are the two people whom I happen to know fairly well, would not need any denial on their part to know they are not Communists. Their records prove it." (Currie was the NKVD agent in the White House who tipped the Kremlin off in 1944 that the U.S. was on the verge of breaking the Soviet code.)

The next day, Truman aide George Elsie wrote to White House Counsel Clark Clifford, "Justice should make every effort to ascertain if Whittaker Chambers is guilty of perjury." No suggestion was made that Justice make any effort at all to ascertain if Hiss might be guilty of perjury, but a handwritten insertion advised "Investigation of Chambers' confinement in a mental institution." Again, there was no suggestion that Hiss' mental health might be subject to investigation.

On August 27, on NBC's Meet the Press, Chambers called Hiss' bluff, saying, "Alger Hiss was a Communist and may be now." Embarrassment mounted among Hiss' supporters as a month dragged by and still no suit was filed. Even the Washington Post began to have doubts. Finally, on September 28, Hiss filed his long-threatened slander suit against Chambers.

Hiss' suit against Chambers

In a pre-trial "discovery" deposition for the suit, Hiss's attorneys told Chambers to produce "any correspondence, either typewritten or in handwriting" from Hiss. Chambers retrieved the packet he had given his wife's nephew in 1938, which had been hidden in a dumbwaiter shaft. Three days later, Chambers turned over to Hiss' attorneys 65 pages of typewritten documents and five handwritten pages of notes. Hiss said the 65 typewritten pages appeared to be copies of authentic State Department documents, and four of the handwritten pages appeared to be in his handwriting.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas J. Donegan told the FBI that Assistant Attorney General Alexander M. Campbell, head of the Criminal Division at Truman Justice, “now wants to institute perjury charges against Chambers” for not revealing the documents before this. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's handwritten addendum comments, “I wonder why they don't move against Hiss also.”

On December 2, in response to a subpoena, Chambers led HUAC investigators to highly incriminating microfilm evidence, which he had secreted in a hollowed-out pumpkin on his Maryland farm (the so-called Pumpkin Papers). The same day, on an FBI memorandum detailing the investigation of Chambers for perjury ordered by Truman Justice, Hoover penned, "I can't understand why such effort is being made to indict Chambers to the exclusion of Hiss." As late as December 6, the day the grand jury was convened, Truman Justice was still contemplating "bringing an indictment against Chambers for perjury."

On December 15, Hiss testified before a grand jury. Hiss suggested a theory that someone (perhaps Chambers) had sneaked into the State Department and stolen the documents from his desk then, having somehow obtained access to Hiss' typewriter, typed some of the documents on it and microfilmed others, and then sneaked back into the State Department and replaced the originals, all in an elaborate plot to frame Hiss a decade later. Even Hiss admitted that his theory was "fantastic," stating, "Until the day I die, I shall wonder how Whittaker Chambers got into my house to use my typewriter," a statement provoking outright laughter among jurors.

Hiss testified that he never gave any documents to Whittaker Chambers, and that he had no contact with Chambers after January 1, 1937. The grand jury indicted Hiss on two counts of perjury, charging that he lied under oath in both these statements. Because the statute of limitations had expired, the grand jury could not consider espionage charges.

Since Chambers had gained the upper hand by voluntary waiving immunity from slander, the columnist Walter Lippman (whose secretary, Mary Price, was a Soviet agent designated "Dir" [Dear] and "probably" "Arena") suggested that Hiss turn the tables by waiving the statute of limitations on espionage. Hiss never took him up on that suggestion.

The Trials

At trial, Hiss provided an all-star cast of character witnesses, including such notables as Adlai Stevenson, Justice Felix Frankfurter, and former Democratic presidential candidate John W. Davis. However, both Under Secretary Welles and Sayre testified that delivering the classifed documents to a foreign power would enable them break America's most secret codes.

At Hiss’ first perjury trial, Hornbeck testified that an unnamed friend had warned him that Hiss was a Communist fellow-traveler, but he disregarded the warning. At the second trial, Hornbeck testified that on at least two occasions he was warned that Hiss was a Communist, and named Bullitt as his source. John Foster Dulles, who had recommended Hiss for the Carnegie Endowment, likewise testified at that trial that various people had warned him subsequently that Hiss was a Communist.

The prosecution called Hede Massing, but at the first trial Judge Samuel H. Kaufman ruled that her testimony was irrelevant. At the second trial, Judge Henry W. Goddard allowed her to testify about Hiss' 1935 attempt to get Noel Field to transfer from her OGPU group to Hiss' GRU group. To avoid testifying, Field fled to the East bloc.

Conviction

The first trial ended in a hung jury, with eight for conviction and four against. The second trial produced a unanimous verdict: Guilty on both counts. Hiss was sentenced to five years in federal prison. Secretary of State Dean Acheson provoked outrage by commenting, ""Whatever the outcome of any appeal which Mr. Hiss or his lawyer may take, I do not intend to turn my back on Alger Hiss." Eleanor Roosevelt added to the furor with her comment, "It seems rather horrible to condemn someone on the word of someone else who admits to guilt." Time magazine commented that she "obviously had not been paying much attention," being "unaware of, or determined to ignore, the corroborating evidence introduced by the Government."

Hiss appealed, but his conviction was affirmed by the Court of Appeals and denied certiorari the Supreme Court. Hiss served 44 months of his five-year sentence in Lewisburg Federal Prison before being released in 1954.

Disbarred, Hiss became a salesman. But, despite the mountains of evidence against him that only increased as Soviet bloc incriminatory documents came to light following the collapse of Communism, Hiss continued for the rest of his life to claim innocence.

Corroboration from Soviet archives

According to Library of Congress Cold War historian John Earl Haynes, Alger Hiss’s known cryptonyms were "Lawyer" ("Advocate" or "Advokat"), during his time at the United States Department of Justice (1935-36), "Ales" in 1945, and "Leonard" in the "Gorsky memo."

The Volkogonov affair

After the fall of Soviet Communism in 1991, former President Nixon and the director of his presidential library, John H. Taylor, asked the new Russian President Boris Yeltsin to open the former Soviet archives relating to the Hiss-Chambers case. Meanwhile Hiss and his lawyer Faxed similar appeals to retired Soviet Army General Dmitri Volkogonov and the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), asking for confirmation that Lowenthal's "client, Alger Hiss," had never been "an agent of the NKVD." (This despite the fact that the evidence implicates Hiss as an agent of the GRU, not the NKVD.)

Volkogonov, as apparatchik in charge of Soviet military history under the Communists had written with official blessing a 1988 biography of Stalin in which he defended Stalin's claim that a majority in the Baltics favored incorporation into the Soviet Union in August 1940, described Stalin's invasion of Poland as "largely justified," blamed the West for the Cold War, and accepted the claim that Stalin's purges were provoked by Trotskyist and Nazi agents.

At a 1992 press conference, Lowenthal released to the media a statement from Volkogonov claiming that "Alger Hiss was never an agent of the intelligence services of the Soviet Union." Hiss dubbed this a "final verdict," adding, "I can't imagine a more authoritative source than the files of the old Soviet Union." Lowenthal said Volkogonov was apparently "willing to stake his reputation as a general, historian and politician" on this statement.

The CBS Morning News reported that Hiss was "apparently exonerated." On NBC's Today, co-host Scott Simon said, "This week's revelations about Alger Hiss may help us remember how vulnerable something as real as a reputation may be...So Mr. Hiss may have lived long enough to feel vindicated, but no one lives so long that they have years to give away to suspicions and mistakes." CNN's Gary Tuchman asked why "Hiss's own government has not exonerated him." The New Yorker ran a seven-page essay by Tony Hiss on "My Father's Honor."

But when questioned Volkogonov admitted that he spent only "two days" in the Foreign Intelligence Archive, and that he had not actually examined any archives. Instead, he had asked Yevgeny Primakov, head of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (formerly the KGB), to provide him with the information. Volkogonov said that Primakov said that employees of the foreign intelligence archive said that "A. Hiss was not registered in the documents as a recruited agent."

“The Ministry of Defense also has an intelligence service, which is totally different,” admitted Volkogonov. He admitted that he had "not seen anything from the GRU archive" and that without going through the files there, there was "no basis for saying anything that would shed greater light on the question of Hiss.” “I looked only through what the KGB had,” said Volkogonov. “There's no guarantee…that it was not in other channels….”

Asked if he had examined the files of the Comintern, Volkogonov admitted, “I have not had the opportunity to see these documents.” In addition, even in the KGB archive, “many documents have been destroyed,” admitted Volkogonov. “There's no guarantee that [Hiss’ file] was not destroyed.”

“What I saw gives no basis to claim a full clarification,” concluded Volkogonov. “[Hiss’] attorney, Lowenthal, pushed me hard to say things of which I was not fully convinced,” he said. Volkogonov added that he felt he had been ‘deceived’ by Lowenthal.

Finally, after almost a month, The New York Times, which had devoted half a page to Volkogonov's alleged "vindication" of Hiss, gave one column to his retraction.

Four years later, on November 15, 1996, Alger Hiss died. His original Associated Press obituary said that Hiss proclaimed vindication "when a Russian general in charge of Soviet intelligence archives declared that Hiss had never been a spy, but rather a victim of Cold War hysteria and the McCarthy Red-hunting era." That night, NBC's Tom Brokaw said, "Hiss considered vindication a declaration by a Russian General, who controlled the KGB archives, saying that Hiss had never been a spy." ABC's Peter Jennings said Hiss "protested his innocence until the very end and last year we reported that the Russian President Boris Yeltsin said that KGB files had supported Mr. Hiss's claim." MSNBC anchor Brigitte Quinn said, "In 1987 [sic], a Russian general declared that Hiss was never a spy, but a victim of Cold War hysteria." None of these stories mentioned Volkogonov's retraction. Three days passed before Brokaw corrected the record; four days for Jennings (who belatedly admitted that the source was not Yeltsin, but Volkogonov).

Meanwhile, the U.S. government had released the Venona project files, Mária Schmidt had published the Hungarian files, the Russian government shut down research access to Soviet-era files, Volkogonov died and retired KGB General Julius N. Kobyakov (whom Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes write "insists that Hiss was not a spy, while nostalgically applauding the greatness of the KGB and lamenting the fall of the USSR") had claimed that it was not Volkogonov but he who had actually searched the Soviet files.

Like Volkogonov, Kobyakov admitted that he had not even seen the GRU files ("No, I did not examine Soviet military archives"); instead, he took the GRU's word for their contents ("I wrote a letter to the GRU and received the relevant answer"). What was that answer? Kobyakov isn't telling: "That of course was, and, I believe, still is a classified correspondence." Why correspondence about 60- or 70-year-old files of a regime that no longer exists is classified, he did not say—although he did mention that he "strongly disapprove[d]" of allowing Weinstein and Vassiliev access to the archives, saying, "fortunately they had no access to the files I worked with."

Kobyakov also claimed that former KGB General-Lieutenant Vitaly Pavlov, who ran Soviet intelligence work in North America in the late 1930s and early 1940s for the NKVD, claimed that Hiss never worked for the USSR as one of his agents. That is hardly surprising, say critics, since the evidence implicates Hiss as an agent of the GRU, not the NKVD.

After the Volkogonov fiasco, Russian officials stripped Soviet archives of all files regarding Hiss and Chambers, reported the editor of the New York Times Book Review. In an interview with PBS Nova, aired in 2002, former KGB agent Alexander Vassiliev said, "The Rosenbergs, Theodore Hall and Alger Hiss did spy for the Soviets, and I saw their real names in the documents, their code names, a lot of documents about that. How you judge them is up to you. To me they're heroes."

Legacy

Few serious scholars still regard the matter of Hiss's guilt as unresolved. Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein, who began believing Hiss innocent, and had the cooperation of Hiss and access to his attorneys' files in his research, concluded, "the body of available evidence proves that Hiss perjured himself when describing his secret dealings with Chambers, so that the jury in his second trial made no mistake in finding Alger Hiss guilty as charged." The bipartisan Moynihan commission went further—not just on perjury, but on espionage—the commission's unanimous Final Report concluding, "The complicity of Alger Hiss of the State Department seems settled." Writing in American History magazine, James Gray of West Georgia College agreed, "the preponderance of evidence does weigh heavily against Hiss." Even Yeshiva University Professor Ellen Schrecker (infamous for her argument that the Rosenbergs were guilty only of "nontraditional patriotism")now concedes, "There is now too much evidence from too many different sources for anyone but the most die-hard loyalists to argue convincingly for the innocence of Hiss…." Referring to Hiss in a review of The Haunted Wood, Hamilton College history professor Maurice Isserman, probably the best regarded of the left-wing scholars of Communism, wrote, "Let's face it, the debate just ended."

A wide variety of scholars—across the political spectrum—now agree that the historical consensus is that Hiss was guilty. "'ALES' is assumed by most scholars to be Alger Hiss," observes Douglas O. Linder of the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law. "In the end, the publication of the Venona intercepts... settled the matter—to all but the truest of believers," writes Stanley Kutler of the University of Wisconsin Law School. In light of recent scholarship, notes Hayden Peake, curator of CIA’s Historical Intelligence Collection, "it is hard to see how even the most frequently made counterargument—that there was no Communist involvement in espionage—can be sustained…. The same is true when it comes to specific cases, but supporters of Alger Hiss … will no doubt persist." "Hiss’ defenders stubbornly tried to rebut each revelation, but eventually they were overwhelmed," recounts foreign affairs analyst John Ehrman of the United States Directorate of Intelligence, writing in the journal Studies in Intelligence. He concludes that Nation publisher Victor Navasky is "now virtually alone in his rejection of the case against Hiss." "Outside the ranks of Nation readers and a dwindling coterie of academic leftists, there are few people still willing to claim that Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White were not Soviet agents," agrees Harvey Klehr, Andrew Mellon professor of politics and history at Emory University. Ronald Radosh, emeritus professor of history at the City College of New York, concurs, "Except for a dwindling group—mostly Nation magazine readers and editors …. the consensus has solidified: Hiss was undoubtedly a Soviet spy." Nation contributor Athan Theoharis concedes that the "conventional assessment" is that Hiss was "an unreconstructed Soviet spy." Berkeley professor J. Bradford DeLong, a former Clinton official, writes, "Was Alger Hiss at some time a spy for the Soviet Union? Probably." Even Kai Bird, a contributing editor at The Nation, and his coauthor, Svetlana Chervonnaya of the Russian Academy of Sciences, admit, "Most historians have conceded the argument to Weinstein," (Chervonnaya has since suggested that this consensus amounts to an orthodoxy, writing of her "hope of dethroning the autocracy of cold war historical scholarship on the matter of Alger Hiss," describing her motive as "to overthrow the regime.")

This academic consensus has even begun to seep into the popular press. By 1991, even the New York Times was reporting that "a handful of Hiss supporters continues to doubt his guilt, but for most historians it is all but certain." Two years later, the paper reiterated that "the trend of scholarship on the Hiss case in the 1990's [reflects] a growing consensus that Hiss, indeed, had most likely been a Soviet agent." In 2004, the Times' former executive editor, Pulitzer-prize winner Max Frankel, wrote that "most historians" now "accept Hiss's guilt." "The sum and substance of this growing body of material is that.... Alger Hiss, a darling of the establishment was guilty," wrote liberal columnist Nicholas Von Hoffman. That Hiss “brought home stolen State Department documents for handoff to a fellow Communist and spy named Whittaker Chambers” is “the commonly accepted story line,” agrees the Washington Post. Time magazine concurs that "the weight of historical evidence indicates that Hiss was... a member of the communist underground and a Soviet spy." London's Independant reports that "some of the individuals defended by the 1950s left and savaged by McCarthy were actually Soviet spies. The most prominent is the left's old cause célèbre, Alger Hiss." Slate.com adds that "even many on the left—including younger historians such as Rick Perlstein" have become convinced "that Hiss was guilty, although old-school loyalists like Navasky remained skeptical," and, in another article (arguing that liberals should moderate certain of their their historical views) says, "if we paleo-libs continue in our ancient rancors, we'll start looking like those troglodytes who still plump for Alger Hiss' innocence."

Further reading

• Interlocking Subversion in Government Departments, Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security (SISS report July 30, 1953),
• The Alger Hiss Story: Search for the Truth
• Gay, James Thomas. "The Alger Hiss Spy Case." American History (May-June 1998)
• Eduard Mark, �Who Was �Venona�s� �Ales?� Cryptanalysis and the Hiss Case,� Intelligence and National Security 18, no. 3 (Autumn 2003).
• Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America--the Stalin Era (New York: Random House, 1999).
• Weinstein, Allen "Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case" (Random House, 1997) ISBN 0394495462.
• [http://www.johnearlhaynes.org/page44.html#_ftnref5 Alexander Vassiliev�s Notes on Anatoly Gorsky�s December 1948 Memo on Compromised American Sources and Networks (Annotated)]
• Nathaniel Weyl testimony corroborating Alger Hiss as member of CPUSA secret apparatus, 23 February 1953
• Fitin to Merkulov 25 April 1945, File #43072, Vol. 1, pp. 96-97, KGB Archives.
• Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy. Secrecy: Report of the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy. VI. Appendices: A. Secrecy: A Brief Account of the American Experience. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1997, pgs. 36, 39. (PDF 746K) [2]

External links

• Crime Library
• The Alger Hiss Trials: An Account
• Cold War Counterintelligence
• VENONA Files and the Alger Hiss Case
• 1579 New York to Moscow 29 September 1943 Five NKVD sources are named. Milton Schwartz needs a loan to pay off debts. GRU has mentioned a person from State Department named Hiss.
• Memoranda on interview of Alger Hiss with Secretary of State James Byrnes, Hiss’ response to allegations, FBI Silvermaster file, Vol. 32, pgs. 121 - 124 pdf, March 25, 1946.
• Memo E.E. Conroy to the Director on Hiss based on Whittaker Chambers allegations, FBI Silvermaster file, Vol. 31, pgs. 50 - 54 pdf, March 28, 1946.

• The Hiss-Chambers Case, New York Times, 12 June 1949