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[[Image:Hiss2.png|thumb|241px|right|Alger Hiss.<br>''Photo courtesy U.S. Bureau of Prisons'']]

Senator [[Daniel Patrick Moynihan]] (Dem.-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:

Alger Hiss was born in Baltimore, Maryland, November 11, 1904,<ref>[http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/hiss/8-5testimony.html Testimony of Alger Hiss before the House Committee on Un-American Activities] (August 5, 1948)</ref> to a financially comfortable upper-middle-class<ref>Denise Noe, "[http://www.crimelibrary.com/terrorists_spies/spies/hiss/ The Alger Hiss Case]," TruTV Crime Library</ref> WASP family.<ref>Murray Friedman, ''The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) ISBN 0521836565), p. 62</ref> When Alger was two years old, his father, an executive with a dry goods firm,<ref>Janny Scott, "[http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/09/reviews/hiss-obit.html Alger Hiss, 92, Central Figure in Long-Running Cold War Controversy]," ''New York Times'', November 16, 1996</ref> committed suicide by slashing his throat with his own razor.<ref>Lance Morrow, "[http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,985608,00.html Fred Astaire Meets the Sad-Sack Dostoevskian Pudge]," ''Time'', November 25, 1996</ref> When Alger was 25, his sister Mary Ann also committed suicide, by drinking a bottle of Lysol.<ref>G. Edward White, ''Alger Hiss's Looking-glass Wars: The Covert Life of a Soviet Spy'' (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) ISBN 0195182553, p. 5</ref> 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.<ref>Denise Noe, "[http://www.crimelibrary.com/terrorists_spies/spies/hiss/ The Alger Hiss Case]," TruTV Crime Library</ref>

Medvedev, ''Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism'' (tr. George

After graduating in 1926, Hiss went on to Harvard Law School, where he resumed his friendship with [[Henry Collins]] (who was attending Harvard Business School) and served on the ''Harvard Law Review'' with his classmate [[Lee Pressman]].<ref>[http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/hiss/8-5testimony.html Testimony of Alger Hiss before the House Committee on Un-American Activities] (August 5, 1948)</ref> Hiss became the protégé of one instructor, future [[Supreme Court of the United States|Supreme Court]] Justice [[Felix Frankfurter]]—whom former [[President of the United States|U.S. President]] [[William Howard Taft]], Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, said "seems to be closely in touch with every [[Bolshevik|Bolshevist]], [[Communist]] movement in this country."<ref>"[http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,870087.html Felix Frankfurter]," ''Time'', September 7, 1962</ref> When Hiss graduated from law school in 1929, Frankfurter got him a job as law clerk to Supreme Court Justice [[Oliver Wendell Holmes]].<ref>"[http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,888531,00.html Your Witness, Mr. Murphy]," ''Time,'' July 4, 1949</ref> The same year, Hiss married the former Mrs. Priscilla Fansler Hobson.

==New Deal==

In 1934, Hiss became General Counsel for the [[U.S. Senate]]'s [[Special Committee Investigating the Munitions Industry|Nye committe]],<ref>[http://www.mdhs.org/library/Mss/ms002504.html Biographical Sketch. Alger Hiss Collection, 1934-1979] (Maryland Historical Society)</ref> which investigated people Chairman [[Gerald P. Nye]] (Rep.-N.D.) called [[Wall Street]]'s "merchants of death,"<ref>[http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/merchants_of_death.htm 1921-1940: September 4, 1934, "Merchants of Death"]</ref> whom he accused of conspiracy to lead the U.S. into war. 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]] (Rep.-Wisc.)<ref>Peter Viereck, ''Unadjusted Man in the Age of Overadjustment: Where History and Literature Intersect'' (Edison, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2004) ISBN:0765808064, pp. 156-157</ref> It was in this role that Hiss met [[Whittaker Chambers]].<ref>William Fitzgibbon, "[http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/09/reviews/chambers-chronology.html The Hiss-Chambers Case: A Chronology Since 1934]," ''The New York Times'', June 12, 1949</ref>

At a 1935 Communist cell meeting at the home of State Department official [[Noel Field]], Alger Hiss argued with [[OGPU]] recruiter [[Hede Massing]] that Field should work with Hiss' [[GRU]] group, rather than Massing's OGPU group, according to Massing.<ref>Hede Massing, ''This Deception'' (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1951), p. 335</ref>

{{cquote|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.<ref>Maria Schmidt, "The Hiss Dossier: A Historian's Report," ''The New Republic'', November 8, 1993, pp. 17-20</ref>}}

==State Department==

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.<ref>[http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1571/is_n3_v13/ai_19048238 Ralph de Toledano, “Embarrassment aided and abetted the Top Soviet spy - Alger Hiss,” ''Insight on the News'', January 27, 1997]</ref>

In 1938, French Premier [[Edouard Daladier]] informed Bullitt that two brothers named Hiss, both in the U.S. government, were Soviet agents,<ref>[http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1571/is_n3_v13/ai_19048238 Ralph de Toledano, “Embarrassment aided and abetted the Top Soviet spy - Alger Hiss,” ''Insight on the News'', January 27, 1997]</ref> but Bullitt “laughed it off as a tall tale, never having heard their names.”<ref>Ralph De Toledano, “The Last Word,” ''Insight on the News'', December 17, 2001</ref> The same year, [[Whittaker Chambers]] made his final break with the Communists,<ref>Whittaker Chambers, ''Witness'' (Regnery Publishing, 1952) ISBN 0-89526-789-6, p. 25</ref> asking his wife's nephew<ref>Allen Weinstein, ''Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), ISBN 0394495462, p. 319</ref> to hide a packet of copies of documents, hand-written memos and microfilm of documents for him.<ref>Whittaker Chambers, ''Witness'' (Regnery Publishing, 1952) ISBN 0-89526-789-6, p. 40-41</ref>

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]],<ref>Douglas O. Linder, [http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/hiss/hissvenona.html The VENONA Files and the Alger Hiss Case]," Famous Trials: The Alger Hiss Trials, 1949-50 (University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law)</ref> who, in a lecture before a [[KGB]] audience, identified Hiss as a Soviet agent during World War II.<ref>Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, ''KGB: The Inside Story of Its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev'' (New York: Harpercollins, 1990) ISBN 0060166053, p. 287</ref>

Also in 1942, the Bureau interviewed Chambers for the first time.<ref>Douglas Linder, [http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/hiss/hisschronology.html The Trials of Alger Hiss: A Chronology], Famous Trials: The Alger Hiss Trials, 1949-50 (University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law, 2003)</ref> 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.<ref>John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, ''Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America'' (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999) ISBN 0300077718, p. 92</ref> 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]],<ref>Kai Bird and Svetlana Chervonnaya, "[http://www.theamericanscholar.org/su07/ales-birdlong.html The Mystery of Ales]," ''The American Scholar'', Summer 2007</ref> to [[NKVD]] chief of foreign intelligence [[Pavel Fitin]] (code-named "Victor")<ref>[http://www.nsa.gov/venona/releases/09_Feb_1944_R1_p2.gif Venona 195 New York to Moscow 9th February 1944]</ref> 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."<ref>[http://www.nsa.gov/venona/releases/28_Sept_1943_R4_m1_p1.gif Venona 1579 New York to Moscow, 28 September 1943</ref>

==Yalta and the United Nations==

[[Venona project|Venona]] decrypt #1822 dated 30 March 1945 reads:

1. Ales has been continuously working with the [[GRU|neighbors]] since 1935.

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.<ref>FBI memorandum: Ladd to Hoover, January 28, 1949 (FBI file: Hiss Chambers, Vol. 44)</ref>

==Defections and Investigation==

Two days after Gouzenko's defection, 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.<ref>Sam Tanenhaus, ''Whittaker Chambers: A Biography'' (New York: Random House, 1997) ISBN 0375751459, p. 519</ref> Following up on Gouzeno's revelations, Raymond Murphy of the State Department again interviewed Chambers, who repeated that Hiss' assignment was "to mess up policy."<ref>Allen Weinstein, ''Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), ISBN 0394495462, p. 366</ref>

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.<ref>http://ultra-secret.info/PDFs/splitfiles/splitprocessed/Silvermaster082_Folder/Silvermaster082_page121.pdf FBI Report: Underground Soviet Espionage Organization (NKVD) in Agencies of the United States Government, p. 110 (PDF p. 121)</ref> 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 [[Drew Pearson]]’s column, 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.”<ref>[http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1571/is_n3_v13/ai_19048238 Ralph de Toledano, “Embarrassment aided and abetted the Top Soviet spy - Alger Hiss,” Insight on the News, January 27, 1997]</ref>