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 (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,
| “ | 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[3] WASP family.[4] When Alger was two years old, his father, an executive with a dry goods firm,[5] committed suicide by slashing his throat with his own razor.[6] When Alger was 25, his sister Mary Ann also committed suicide, by drinking a bottle of Lysol.[7] 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.[8]
As a boy, Alger Hiss was friends with Henry Collins.[9] After graduation from Baltimore City College and a year at Powder Point Academy, a private prep school in Duxbury, Massachusetts,[10] Hiss attended Baltimore's Johns Hopkins University.
As an undergraduate, Hiss' favorite instructors included the Socialist Broadus Mitchell[11] (a former Socialist Party candidate for Governor of Maryland)[12] and José Robles, a committed Stalinist.[13] Hiss apparently knew Robles well enough to spend time at his home.[14] Robles would go on to serve in the Spanish Civil War as interpreter for General Jānis Bērziņš, head of Soviet military intelligence,[15] but was never seen again[16] after Bērziņš was recalled[17] and shot in a Stalinist purge in 1938.[18] Hiss would later say he too considered going to Spain to fight for the Soviet-backed Loyalist cause.[19]
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.[20] 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."[21] When Hiss graduated from law school in 1929, Frankfurter got him a job as law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.[22] 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.[23] By 1932, Priscilla Hiss was an active member of American Labor Associates, and Hiss was becoming "radicalized,"[24] joining the International Juridical Association (IJA) (which "consistently followed the Communist Party line"[25]), along with his Harvard Law classmate Lee Pressman[26] and Nathan Witt.[27]
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”[28] 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.”[29]
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).[30] 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.[31]
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 rezident in London and New York, as reported by Pavel Sudoplatov, former deputy director of Foreign Intelligence for the USSR.[32]
In 1934, Hiss was appointed General Counsel for the U.S. Senate's Nye committe,[33] which investigated charges of "warmongering" and "profiteering" by the munitions industry in World War I.[34] It was here that Hiss met Whittaker Chambers.[35]
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[36] (which ruled the AAA unconstitutional in 1936).[37]
State Department
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.[38]
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]
By 1937, Hiss was delivering packets of documents to Whittaker Chambers at intervals of a week or ten days, according to Oleg Gordievsky, the KGB London rezident who defected in 1985[40]
In 1938, French Premier Edouard Daladier informed Bullitt that two brothers named Hiss, both in the U.S. government, were Soviet agents,[41] but Bullitt “laughed it off as a tall tale, never having heard their names.”[42]
The following year, Hiss became personal aide to Stanley Hornbeck, the State Department's adviser on Far Eastern Affairs. When news of the Hitler-Stalin pact broke on August 23, 1939, NKVD defector Walter Krivitsky 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."[43]
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 his story. 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.”[44]
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... [45] | ” |
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.’”[46]
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.[47]
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 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."[48] Winchell's posthumously published memoir confirms Levine's story.[49]
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.[50]
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.[51][52] In 1942, the FBI interviewed Alger Hiss, per the Hatch Act. Hiss denied all knowledge of the group.[53]
The same year, the Bureau interviewed Chambers for the first time.[54], who 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.[55]
The following year, Hiss was promoted to become deputy director of the State Department's Office of Special Political Affairs,[56] a policy-making office for postwar planning and international organization.[57] In August 1944, he organized the Dumbarton Oaks Conference,[58] where he served as executive secretary[59][60], presiding over the drafting of the proposed United Nations Charter.[61]
Yalta and the United Nations
In 1945, with the backing of Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, Jr., Hiss was appointed a Presidential adviser, in which capacity accompanied FDR to his meeting with 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.[62] 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." [63]
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. [64]
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. [65] 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" [66] ("Advocate" [67] or "Advokat" [68] which was assigned during his brief time at the United States Department of Justice between 1935 and 1936, and "Ales" [69] in 1945. "Leonard" [70] 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
- ↑ Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, Secrecy: The American Experience, New Haven: Yale University Press (1998), pg. 146.
- ↑ Testimony of Alger Hiss before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (August 5, 1948)
- ↑ Denise Noe, "The Alger Hiss Case," TruTV Crime Library
- ↑ Murray Friedman, The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) ISBN 0521836565), p. 62
- ↑ Janny Scott, "Alger Hiss, 92, Central Figure in Long-Running Cold War Controversy," New York Times, November 16, 1996
- ↑ Lance Morrow, "Fred Astaire Meets the Sad-Sack Dostoevskian Pudge," Time, November 25, 1996
- ↑ 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
- ↑ Denise Noe, "The Alger Hiss Case," TruTV Crime Library
- ↑ Testimony of Alger Hiss before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (August 5, 1948)
- ↑ Ivan Chen, "Alger Hiss, 1926-1929," p. 3 (PDF p. 4)
- ↑ 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)
- ↑ Matthew Richer, "The ongoing campaign of Alger Hiss: the sins of the father," Modern Age, Fall, 2004
- ↑ Jason Powell, "Review: The Breaking Point: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and the Murder of Jose Robles," eHistory (Ohio State University), January 2006
- ↑ Tony Hiss, Laughing Last: Alger Hiss by Tony Hiss (Boston: Haughton Mifflin, 1977), ISBN 039524899X, pp. 37-38
- ↑ Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994) ISBN 0671758764, pp. 705-706
- ↑ George Packer, "The Spanish Prisoner," The New Yorker, October 31, 2005
- ↑ Roy Aleksandrovich Medvedev, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism (tr. George Shriver) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989) ISBN 0231063504, p. p428
- ↑ 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
- ↑ John Chabot Smith, Alger Hiss: The True Story (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1976), ISBN 0030137764, p. 104
- ↑ Testimony of Alger Hiss before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (August 5, 1948)
- ↑ "Felix Frankfurter," Time, September 7, 1962
- ↑ "Your Witness, Mr. Murphy," Time, July 4, 1949
- ↑ 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
- ↑ 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)
- ↑ "Report on the National Lawyers Guild, legal bulwark of the Communist Party," United States Congress. House Committee on Un-American Activities (1950), p. 12
- ↑ 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
- ↑ Martin Dies, The Trojan Horse in America (New York: Arno Press, 1977) ISBN 0405099452, p. 92
- ↑ Archibald MacLeish, “To the Young Men of Wall Street,” Saturday Review, January 16, 1932
- ↑ Tony Hiss, The View From Alger's Window (New York: Vintage Books, 2000) ISBN 0375701281, pp. 140-141
- ↑ Dan Cryer, "We're a long way from the end of this," Salon.com, June 1, 1999
- ↑ Testimony of Alger Hiss before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (August 5, 1948)
- ↑ Anatoli Sudoplatov, Pavel Sudoplatov, Leona P. Schecter and Jerrold L. Schecter, Special Tasks (New York: Back Bay Books, 1995) ISBN 0316821152, p. 228
- ↑ Biographical Sketch. Alger Hiss Collection, 1934-1979 (Maryland Historical Society)
- ↑ Special Committee Investigating the Munitions Industry (April 12, 1934). Guide to the Records of the U.S. Senate at the National Archives
- ↑ William Fitzgibbon, "The Hiss-Chambers Case: A Chronology Since 1934," The New York Times, June 12, 1949
- ↑ Testimony of Alger Hiss before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (August 5, 1948)
- ↑ United States v. Butler, 297 U.S. 1 (1936)
- ↑ Francis Bowes Sayre (April 30, 1885 -- March 29, 1972), Woodrow Wilson House
- ↑ Ralph de Toledano, “Embarrassment aided and abetted the Top Soviet spy - Alger Hiss,” Insight on the News, January 27, 1997
- ↑ Peter B. Niblo, " Influence: The Soviet Task Leading to Pearl Harbor, the Iron Curtain, and the Cold War (Oakland, OR: Elderberry Press, 2002) ISBN 1930859147, p. 65
- ↑ Ralph de Toledano, “Embarrassment aided and abetted the Top Soviet spy - Alger Hiss,” Insight on the News, January 27, 1997
- ↑ Ralph De Toledano, “The Last Word,” Insight on the News, December 17, 2001
- ↑ Isaac Don Levine, Eyewitness To History: Memoirs and Reflections of a Foreign Correspondent for Half a Century (Stroud, Glos.: Hawthorn Books, 1973) ASIN B000ONBAW0, p. 191
- ↑ Adolf Berle’s Notes on his Meeting with Whittaker Chambers
- ↑ Isaac Don Levine, Eyewitness To History: Memoirs and Reflections of a Foreign Correspondent for Half a Century (Stroud, Glos.: Hawthorn Books, 1973) ASIN B000ONBAW0, pp. 55-58)
- ↑ Isaac Don Levine, Eyewitness To History: Memoirs and Reflections of a Foreign Correspondent for Half a Century (Stroud, Glos.: Hawthorn Books, 1973) ASIN B000ONBAW0, pp. 197-8
- ↑ Ralph De Toledano, “The Last Word,” Insight on the News, December 17, 2001
- ↑ Isaac Don Levine, Eyewitness To History: Memoirs and Reflections of a Foreign Correspondent for Half a Century (Stroud, Glos.: Hawthorn Books, 1973) ASIN B000ONBAW0, pp. 197-9
- ↑ Allan Weinstein, Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), ISBN 0394495462, p. 331
- ↑ Douglas O. Linder, The VENONA Files and the Alger Hiss Case," Famous Trials: The Alger Hiss Trials, 1949-50 (University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law)
- ↑ Allen Weinstein, Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), ISBN 0394495462, p. 329
- ↑ G. Edward White, Alger Hiss's Looking-glass Wars: The Covert Life of a Soviet Spy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) ISBN 0195182553, p. 48
- ↑ Testimony of Alger Hiss before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (August 16, 1948)
- ↑ 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)
- ↑ John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999) ISBN 0300077718, p. 92
- ↑ Report of the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy (Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1997), Appendix A
- ↑ 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)
- ↑ Doug Linder, The Trials of Alger Hiss: A Commentary], Famous Trials: The Alger Hiss Trials, 1949-50 (University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law, 2003)
- ↑ Robert G. Whalen, "Hiss and Chambers: Strange Story of Two Men," The New York Times, December 12, 1948
- ↑ "The Case of Alger Hiss," Time, February 13, 1950
- ↑ History of the Charter of the United Nations: Dumbarton Oaks and Yalta
- ↑ Ralph de Toledano and Victor Lasky, Seeds of Treason: The True Story of the Hiss-Chambers Tragedy, (NY: Funk and Wagnalls, 1950), ASIN B0007DS43A pp. 107-109.
- ↑ 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.
- ↑ Interlocking Subversion in Government Departments, SISS report (July 30, 1953), pp. 8-10.
- ↑ Ralph de Toledano and Victor Lasky, Seeds of Treason, (NY: Funk and Wagnalls, 1950), pgs. 221-223.
- ↑ 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.
- ↑ Allen Weinstein, Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case, New York: Random House, (ed. 1997)
- ↑ Whittaker Chambers, Witness, New York: Random House, (1952).
- ↑ 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).
- ↑ KGB file 43173 vol.2 (v) pp. 49-55, The Gorsky Memo, 1948.
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.
- 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) [3]
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 GRU sources are named. Milton Schwartz needs a loan to pay off debts. KGB (or perhaps Naval 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.
