Last modified on May 30, 2008, at 20:22

Alger Hiss

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by FOIA (Talk | contribs) at 20:22, May 30, 2008. It may differ significantly from current revision.

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 to the founding charter conference of the United Nations. Following accusations that he spied on behalf of the Soviet Union, Hiss was convicted of perjury.

Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was instrumental in securing the release of the long-awaited FBI and the 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. [1] ”

Early life

Alger Hiss was born in Baltimore, Maryland, November 11, 1904,[2] to a financially comfortable upper-middle-class Presbyterian family.[3] When Alger was two years old, his father, an executive with a dry goods firm,[4] committed suicide by slashing his throat with his own razor.[5] When Alger was 25, his sister Mary Ann also committed suicide, by drinking a bottle of Lysol.[6] 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.[7]

As a boy, Alger Hiss was friends with Henry Collins.[8] After graduation from Baltimore City College and a year at Powder Point Academy, a private prep school in Duxbury, Massachusetts,[9] Hiss attended Baltimore's Johns Hopkins University.

As an undergraduate, Hiss' favorite instructors included the Socialist Broadus Mitchell[10] (a former Socialist Party candidate for Governor of Maryland)[11] and José Robles, a committed Stalinist.[12] Hiss apparently knew Robles well enough to spend time at his home.[13] Robles would go on to serve in the Spanish Civil War as interpreter for General Jānis Bērziņš, head of Soviet military intelligence,[14] but was never seen again[15] after Berzin was shot in a Stalinist purge in 1938.[16] Hiss would later say he too considered going to Spain to fight for the Soviet-backed Loyalist cause.[17]

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.[18] Hiss became the protégé of one instructor, future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter—whom former President of the United States William Howard Taft, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, said "seems to be closely in touch with every Bolshevist, Communist movement in this country."[19] When Hiss graduated from law school in 1929, Frankfurter got him a job as law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.[20] The same year, Hiss married the former Mrs. Priscilla Fansler Hobson.

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.[21] By 1932, Priscilla Hiss was an active member of American Labor Associates, and Hiss was becoming "radicalized,"[22] joining the International Juridical Association (IJA), along with his Harvard Law classmate Lee Pressman[23] and Nathan Witt.[24]

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”[25] 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.”[26]

New Deal

In 1933, Frankfurter sent Hiss a telegram urging him to join President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal under Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace as an attorney with the new Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA).[27] At AAA, Hiss reunited with his boyhood friend Henry Collins, Harvard Law School classmate Lee Pressman and IJA colleague Nathan Witt, and became acquainted with Harold Ware,[28] head of an underground apparatus of the Communist Party, according to confessed former Soviet courier Whittaker Chambers. Chambers would name Hiss, Pressman and Witt, among others, as members of the "Ware group,"[29] and name Collins as the group's treasurer.[30] Collins would refuse to answer whether he was a member of the Communist Party (citing grounds of potential self-incrimination),[31] as would Witt.[32] Pressman would eventually admit having been a Communist and member of the Ware group, identifying Witt, among others as a fellow member.[33] Rather than taking the Fifth Amendment, Hiss would deny membership, but Nathaniel Weyl, another confessed former member of the Ware group, would testify that he attended secret Communist meetings with Alger Hiss, and saw Hiss pay his party dues.[34]

In 1934, Hiss was appointed General Counsel for the U.S. Senate Nye committe,[35] which investigated charges of "warmongering" and "war profiteering" in the munitions industry in World War I.[36] The following year, Hiss transferred into the Justice Department as special assistant to the Solictor General, where he tried unsuccessfully to defend the Agricultural Adjustment Act before the United States Supreme Court[37] (which ruled the AAA unconstitutional in 1936).[38]

In 1936, together with his brother Donald, Alger 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.

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.[39]

Hiss later became assistant to Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, Jr.. Hiss became special assistant to the Director of the Office of Far Eastern Affairs, then in 1944 special assitant to the Director of the Office of Special Political Affairs (OSPA), a policy-making office that concentrated on postwar planning for international organization and later became its director. As such he was executive secretary at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference, which drafted plans for the organization that would become the United Nations.

Nye Committee

Hiss, now an agent of Soviet Military Intelligence (GRU), on the recommendation Lee Pressman was appointment General Counsel for the U.S. Senate Special Committee Investigating the Munitions Industry, or Nye Committe as it came to be known.

Yalta and the United Nations

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 1945 he went with the president to the meeting of Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill in Yalta, which precipitated the Western betrayal of Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union and its client states behind the Iron Curtain. At Yalta, Hiss negotiated the final agreement to give the Soviet Union three seats in the United Nations. [40] After the Yalta conference Hiss traveled on to Moscow with Secretary of State Stettinius, Venona project transcript #1822 dated 30 March 1945 reads in part

"For some years past he has been the leader of a small group of probatiners (STAZhERY), for the most part consisting of his relations.
"After the Yalta Conference, when he had gone on to MOSCOW, a Soviet personage in a very responsible position (ALES gave to understand that it was Comrade VYShINSKIJ) allegedly got in touch with ALES and at the behest of the Military NEIGHBORS passed on to him their gratitude and so on. [1]

The 1997 Moynihan Commission on Government Secrecy, empowered by statute, wrote in its final report,

"This could only be Alger Hiss" [2]

Hiss served as the secretary-general of the United Nations Conference on International Organization (the United Nations Charter Conference) in San Francisco in 1945. Hiss afterwards became the full Director of the Office of Special Political Affairs. On 7 September 1945, 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. When Hiss was investigated in 1946 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." [41]

In 1946 Hiss became president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and served until May 5, 1949. Hiss also served as a trustee on the Institute of Pacific Relations. [42]

House Committee on Un-American Activities

The public controversy was brought to light in 1948 over Whittaker Chambers's accusation that Alger Hiss, assisted by his wife Priscilla, had been a member of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) and a spy.

Few serious historians still regard the matter of Hiss's guilt as unresolved, given the overwhelming evidence of his guilt compiled by, among others, Allen Weinstein, author of "Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case," who had begun his research intending to prove Hiss innocent before coming to the opposite conclusion as the facts mounted. More recently G. Edward White slammed the door on any serious question of Hiss's guilt with his meticulously researched "Alger Hiss's Looking Glass Wars: The Covert Life of a Soviet Spy," published in 2004.

Hiss's case heightened public concern about Soviet espionage penetration of the US Government in the 1930s and 1940s. Congressman Richard Nixon was instrumental in securing a perjury conviction for the rising star of the Democratic party, a fact that was to later play an important role in a political vendetta against Nixon. Publicity surrounding the case fed Nixon's career, helping him move from the House of Representatives to the Senate in 1950 to the Vice Presidency of the United States in 1952, and ultimatley the Presidency in 1968.

In February 1952 Nathaniel Weyl testified before the McCarran Committee that in 1933 he and Alger Hiss were in the Ware group, a group that operated within the Agricultural Adjustment Administration. The testimony corroborated Whittaker Chambers, although why Weyl didn't testify at the Hiss trial is a mystery. Hiss was later proven to be a spy through the declassification of the VENONA project.

Hiss and Chambers

After Time magazine managing editor Whittaker Chambers charged him as being a Communist, Alger Hiss voluntarily appeared before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Some Committee members had misgivings at first about attacking Hiss, but Congressman Richard Nixon, who was fed information by the Catholic Church's secretive Communist hunter, Father John Cronin, and using materials from the FBI, claimed to have sensed that Hiss was hiding something and pressed the Committee to act. Initially, Hiss denied having ever known Chambers.

After Chambers publicly reiterated his charge that Hiss was working for the Soviets on the radio program "Meet the Press," Hiss instituted an unsuccessful slander lawsuit against Chambers, but only after several of his supporters began to publicly question his curious reluctance to file an action. Chambers, in response, presented the "Baltimore Documents", which were copies of a series of government documents that he had obtained from Hiss in the 1930s. The government documents had first been re-typed by Hiss's wife, Priscilla, and these copies were then photographed and passed on to the spy network. Later Chambers produced highly incriminating microfilm evidence which was given to Nixon on December 2nd, from a hollowed-out pumpkin on his Maryland farm (the so-called Pumpkin Papers).

Conviction on perjury

Hiss was charged with two counts of perjury; the grand jury could not indict him for espionage, as the statute of limitations had run out. Hiss went to trial twice. The first trial ended in a hung jury. Hiss's character witnesses at his first trial included such notables as Adlai Stevenson, Justice Felix Frankfurter, and former Democratic presidential candidate John W. Davis. The second trial Hiss was found guilty on two counts of perjury. Some of the Baltimore Documents were classified, and four handwritten notes were in Hiss's own handwriting. 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. [43] The verdict was upheld at the Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court. Hiss was sentenced to five years on Jan. 25 and served 44 months in Lewisburg Federal Prison before being released in November 1954.

Disbarred, he 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

An 25 April 1945 memo from KGB General Pavel Fitin, head of foreign intelligence, to Vsevolod Merkulov, overall head of the KGB, explained that Harold Glasser moved back and forth, sometimes working for the KGB, but at times also the GRU. Glasser learned from his friend Hiss that the latter's group had been decorated with honors. Glasser felt slighted, as the others in Hiss's group were decorated, but Glasser himself was not.

After the exposure of several Soviet espionage networks in the United States, Stalin created the KI, a centralized bureaucracy, modelled on the CIA, to funnel information from both KGB and GRU to intelligence users. During the KI's short existence (1947 - 1951), Anatoly Gorsky, who served in the United States and Great Britain, wrote a memorandum on Compromised American Sources and Networks. This memo incontrovertibly identifies Alger Hiss as a longtime Soviet agent who worked in the U.S. State Department.

In 1996 the United States government released the Venona papers, decoded Russian intelligence intercepts dating from the mid-1940s. These documents reference a Soviet spy at the State Department, code-named "Ales", whose biographical details matched those of Hiss.

Alger Hiss's known cryptonyms were "Lawyer" [44] ("Advocate" [45] or "Advokat" [46] which was assigned during his brief time at the United States Department of Justice between 1935 and 1936, and "Ales" [47] in 1945. "Leonard" [48] did not occur as a cover name in the World War II deciphered KGB Venona traffic and may be a later (or possibly earlier) cryptonym, or a GRU covername.

References

  1. ↑ Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, Secrecy: The American Experience, New Haven: Yale University Press (1998), pg. 146.
  2. ↑ Testimony of Alger Hiss before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (August 5, 1948)
  3. ↑ Denise Noe, "The Alger Hiss Case," TruTV Crime Library
  4. ↑ Janny Scott, "Alger Hiss, 92, Central Figure in Long-Running Cold War Controversy," New York Times, November 16, 1996
  5. ↑ Lance Morrow, "Fred Astaire Meets the Sad-Sack Dostoevskian Pudge," Time, November 25, 1996
  6. ↑ 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
  7. ↑ Denise Noe, "The Alger Hiss Case," TruTV Crime Library
  8. ↑ Testimony of Alger Hiss before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (August 5, 1948)
  9. ↑ Ivan Chen, "Alger Hiss, 1926-1929," p. 3 (PDF p. 4)
  10. ↑ Alger Hiss, Draft of a Chapter Written By Alger Hiss on the Foundations For His Liberalism (unpublished manuscript, on file with the Harvard Law School Special Collections)
  11. ↑ Matthew Richer, "The ongoing campaign of Alger Hiss: the sins of the father," Modern Age, Fall, 2004
  12. ↑ Jason Powell, "Review: The Breaking Point: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and the Murder of Jose Robles," eHistory (Ohio State University), January 2006
  13. ↑ Tony Hiss, Laughing Last: Alger Hiss by Tony Hiss (Boston: Haughton Mifflin, 1977), ISBN 039524899X, pp. 37-38
  14. ↑ Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994) ISBN 06717587641961, pp. 705-706
  15. ↑ George Packer, "The Spanish Prisoner," The New Yorker, October 31, 2005
  16. ↑ David J. Nordlander, "Origins of a Gulag Capital: Magadan and Stalinist Control in the Early 1930s," Slavic Review, Vol. 57, No. 4 (Winter, 1998), pp. 791-812
  17. ↑ John Chabot Smith, Alger Hiss: The True Story (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1976), ISBN 0030137764, p. 104
  18. ↑ Testimony of Alger Hiss before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (August 5, 1948)
  19. ↑ "Felix Frankfurter," Time, September 7, 1962
  20. ↑ "Your Witness, Mr. Murphy," Time, July 4, 1949
  21. ↑ G. Edward White, Alger Hiss's Looking-glass Wars: The Covert Life of a Soviet Spy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) ISBN 0195182553, p. 27
  22. ↑ Douglas Linder, The Trials of Alger Hiss: A Chronology, Famous Trials: The Alger Hiss Trials, 1949-50 (University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law, 2003)
  23. ↑ G. Edward White, Alger Hiss's Looking-glass Wars: The Covert Life of a Soviet Spy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) ISBN 0195182553, p. 27
  24. ↑ Martin Dies, The Trojan Horse in America (New York: Arno Press, 1977) ISBN:0405099452, p. 92
  25. ↑ Archibald MacLeish, “To the Young Men of Wall Street,” Saturday Review, January 16, 1932
  26. ↑ Tony Hiss, The View From Alger's Window (New York: Vintage Books, 2000) ISBN 0375701281, pp. 140-141
  27. ↑ Dan Cryer, "We're a long way from the end of this," Salon.com, June 1, 1999
  28. ↑ Testimony of Alger Hiss before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (August 5, 1948)
  29. ↑ "[http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,811892,00.html The Case of Alger Hiss," Time, February 13, 1950
  30. ↑ Testimony of Whittaker Chambers before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (August 3, 1948)
  31. ↑ Hearings of the Senate Internal Security subcommittee, October 8, 1957, pp. 1855-56
  32. ↑ "Mr. Smith Went to Washington," Time, June 1, 1953
  33. ↑ "The Road Back," Time, September 4, 1950
  34. ↑ “Another Witness,” Time, March 3, 1952
  35. ↑ Biographical Sketch. Alger Hiss Collection, 1934-1979 (Maryland Historical Society)
  36. ↑ http://www.archives.gov/legislative/guide/senate/chapter-18-1921-1946.html#18D-4 Special Committee Investigating the Munitions Industry (April 12, 1934). Guide to the Records of the U.S. Senate at the National Archives
  37. ↑ Testimony of Alger Hiss before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (August 5, 1948)
  38. ↑ http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct-cgi/get-us-cite?297+1 United States v. Butler, 297 U.S. 1 (1936)
  39. ↑ Ralph de Toledano, “Embarrassment aided and abetted the Top Soviet spy - Alger Hiss,” Insight on the News, January 27, 1997
  40. ↑ Ralph de Toledano and Victor Lasky, Seeds of Treason, (NY: Funk and Wagnalls, 1950), pgs. 107-109.
  41. ↑ Sam Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers: A Biography, New York : Modern Library, (1998), p. 519; Allen Weinstein, Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case, New York: Random House, (ed. 1997), pgs. 321-322.
  42. ↑ Interlocking Subversion in Government Departments, SISS report (July 30, 1953), pp. 8-10.
  43. ↑ Ralph de Toledano and Victor Lasky, Seeds of Treason, of Treason, (NY: Funk and Wagnalls, 1950), pgs. 221-223.
  44. ↑ Whittaker Chambers, Witness New York: Random House, (1952); Allen Weinstein, Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case, New York: Random House, (ed. 1997); "Lawyer" in 1936, Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America�the Stalin Era, New York: Random House, (1999), pg. 43.
  45. ↑ Allen Weinstein, Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case, New York: Random House, (ed. 1997)
  46. ↑ Whittaker Chambers, Witness, New York: Random House, (1952).
  47. ↑ Venona; Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America�the Stalin Era, New York: Random House, (1999); Eduard Mark, Who Was Venona's Ales? Cryptanalysis and the Hiss Case, Intelligence and National Security 18, no. 3 (Autumn 2003).
  48. ↑ KGB file 43173 vol.2 (v) pp. 49-55, The Gorsky Memo, 1948.

Further reading

External links