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Alger Hiss

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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 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]

In 1934, Hiss was appointed General Counsel for the U.S. Senate's Nye committe,[32] which investigated charges of "warmongering" and "profiteering" by the munitions industry in World War I.[33] It was here that Hiss met Whittaker Chambers.[34]

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[35] (which ruled the AAA unconstitutional in 1936).[36]

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.[37]

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.[38]

Field would later defect 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 interrogation of Noel Field by Czech secret police after his 1948 defection (reported in 1990 by Karel Kaplan, former archivist of the Central Committee of the Czech Communist Party)[39]

Field would end up in Communist Hungary, where he would give Hungarian secret police a statement (transcripts published published in 1992 by Hungarian historian Maria Schmidt) reading 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.[40] ”

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.[41][42]

A 1936 memorandum by Massing, found in the NKVD archives by Weinstein and Vassiliev, 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.[43]

State Department

In 1936, 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.[44] Two years later, his younger brother Donald, who had followed Alger to Johns Hopkins, Harvard Law, and a clerkship for Judge Holmes, would join him there.[45]

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.[46]

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[47]

In 1938, French Premier Edouard Daladier informed Bullitt that two brothers named Hiss, both in the U.S. government, were Soviet agents,[48] but Bullitt “laughed it off as a tall tale, never having heard their names.”[49] The same year, Whittaker Chambers made his final break with the Communists,[50] asking his wife's nephew[51] to hide a packet of copies of documents, hand-written memos and microfilm of documents for him.[52]

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."[53]

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;[54] among its members he identified Lee Pressman, Nathan Witt, and the brothers Alger and Donald Hiss.[55]

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.”[56] 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... [57] ”

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.’”[58]

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.[59]

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."[60] Winchell's posthumously published memoir confirms Levine's story.[61]

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,[62] who, in a lecture before a KGB audience, identified Hiss as a Soviet agent during World War II.[63]

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,[64][65], with the notation appended, "Husband with State Department."[66] In 1941-42 the FBI conducted a Hatch Act investigation of Hiss, in the course of which one of Hiss' colleagues at the AAA told investigators that Hiss and his circle were fellow travelers, if not Communists. Hiss denied everything. In 1942, the FBI sent a report of this investigation to the Secretary of State.[67]

Also in 1942, the Bureau interviewed Chambers for the first time.[68] 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.[69] 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,[70] to NKVD chief of foreign intelligence Pavel Fitin (code-named "Victor")[71] 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."[72]

The following year, Hiss was promoted to become deputy director of the State Department's Office of Special Political Affairs,[73] a policy-making office for postwar planning and international organization.[74] In August 1944, he organized the Dumbarton Oaks Conference,[75] where he served as executive secretary,[76][77] presiding over the drafting of the proposed United Nations Charter.[78]

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

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."[79] 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.[80] ”

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.[81] 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.[82]

After the conference, Hiss went on to Moscow, where he was decorated with the Order of the Red Star[83] by Foreign Minister V.M. Molotov.[84]

Venona decrypt #1822 dated 30 March 1945 reads:

“ "Addendum to our telegram no.28 as a result of a conversation of “Pya” with Ales, it turns out:

1. Ales has been continuously working with the neighbors since 1935.

2. For a few years now he has been the director of a small group of probationers of the neighbors, for the most part drawn from his relatives.

3. The group and Ales himself are working on obtaining only military information, materials about “the Bank” – the neighbors allegedly are not very interested and he doesn’t pass it regularly.

4. In recent years, Ales has been working with Pol repeat Pol who also meets with other members of the group on occasion.

5. Recently Ales and his whole group were awarded Soviet medals.

6. 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.

Vadim[85]

”

Regarding "Ales," in its unanimous final report in 1997, the bipartisan Moynihan Commission on Government Secrecy concluded:

“ "This could only be Alger Hiss"[86] ”

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."[87]

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."[88]

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.[89]

The following month, Hiss presided as Secretary General over the United Nations Charter Conference in San Francisco, with Dalton Trumbo as his assistant. Secretary of State James F. Byrnes 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.[90] After the conference, Hiss was promoted to become Director of the State Department Office of Special Political Affairs.

Defections and Investigation

On September 5, 1945, GRU code clerk Igor Gouzenko defected from the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa, telling the FBI that he had been told by one Lt. Kulakov in the office of the Soviet military attaché that "the Soviets had an agent in the United States in May 1945 who was an assistant to the then secretary of state, Edward R. Stettinius."[91] Stettinius' assistant at the time was Alger Hiss.[92]

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….” [93]

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.[94] 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."[95]

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.[96] 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 told her that the person who had done this “was named Hiss and that he was in the U.S. State Department.” She said she later clipped an article from the left-wing New York daily PM “in which Hiss was mentioned.” She said “It is my present recollection that this newspaper article stated Hiss’ full name was Eugene Hiss and that he was an adviser to Dean Acheson in the State Department.”[97] FBI investigation quickly closed in on Alger Hiss. [98]

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.[99] 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.”[100]

When Secretary of State James F. Byrnes put Hiss under surveillance at the State Department[101] 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." [102] 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.[103]

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.[104]

In January, 1947, Byrnes quietly eased Hiss out of the State Department.[105]

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.[106]

In 1948, Alexander Barmine, former Charge d'Affairs at the Soviet Embassy in Athens, Greece, who had defected in 1937, told FBI investigators "that he had heard Alger Hiss referred to as being an agent of Soviet military intelligence. A 1949 FBI report said, according to Barmine, his source was former GRU agent and Walter Krivitsky, who defected in Paris in 1938 and was found dead in his Washington hotel room in 1941.[107]

House Committee on Un-American Activities

In 1948, the House Committee on Un-American Activities called Whittaker Chambers. He testified that Alger Hiss, assisted by his wife Priscilla, had been a member of the underground apparatus of the Communist Party in the late 1930s, while he was a Federal official.[108] The purpose of the Ware Group, he testified, was to promote communist policies in U.S. government.When Chambers testified against Hiss, wrote Sudoplatov, "we considered this to be a setback for GRU intelligence activities in the United States."[109]

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 and dared Chambers to repeat the charge.

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).

That year, after reviewing Hiss’ FBI file, President Truman 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.”[110]

Shortly before the Hiss indictment in 1948, the New York bureau of the Christian Science Monitor teletyped this message to the home office in Boston:

“ 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. [111] ”

The Trials

In 1949, 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.[112] 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.[113] 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.[114]

The prosecution called Hede Massing, a confessed OGPU recruiter, 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.[115] To avoid testifying, Field fled to Czechoslovakia, ending up in Hungary.

In 1952, Bullitt testified before the Senate Internal Security subcommittee as to what French Premier Daladier had told him in 1938.[116],[117] Also at that hearing, Nathaniel Weyl, a confessed former member of the Ware group, testified that he attended secret Communist meetings with Alger Hiss, and saw Hiss pay his party dues.[118]

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. [119] 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

Former KGB officer Alexander Vassiliev’s handwritten notes on a 5 March 1945 cable by Anatoly Gorsky reveal that Ales had been at Yalta, went briefly to Moscow, then back to the U.S. but then immediately went to Mexico City for an inter-American conference of foreign ministers, known as the Chapultepec Conference (21 February 8 March 1945). Stettinius, Hiss, Mathews, and Foote went to Mexico City.[120]

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.[121]

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" [122] ("Advocate" [123] or "Advokat" [124] which was assigned during his brief time at the United States Department of Justice between 1935 and 1936, and "Ales" [125] in 1945. "Leonard" [126] 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.


Few serious historians still regard the matter of Hiss's guilt as unresolved. Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein, author of who had begun his research intending to prove Hiss innocent, 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."[127] 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.[128] 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.

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. ↑ Murray Friedman, The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) ISBN 0521836565), p. 62
  5. ↑ Janny Scott, "Alger Hiss, 92, Central Figure in Long-Running Cold War Controversy," New York Times, November 16, 1996
  6. ↑ Lance Morrow, "Fred Astaire Meets the Sad-Sack Dostoevskian Pudge," Time, November 25, 1996
  7. ↑ 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
  8. ↑ Denise Noe, "The Alger Hiss Case," TruTV Crime Library
  9. ↑ Testimony of Alger Hiss before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (August 5, 1948)
  10. ↑ Ivan Chen, "Alger Hiss, 1926-1929," p. 3 (PDF p. 4)
  11. ↑ 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)
  12. ↑ Matthew Richer, "The ongoing campaign of Alger Hiss: the sins of the father," Modern Age, Fall, 2004
  13. ↑ Jason Powell, "Review: The Breaking Point: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and the Murder of Jose Robles," eHistory (Ohio State University), January 2006
  14. ↑ Tony Hiss, Laughing Last: Alger Hiss by Tony Hiss (Boston: Haughton Mifflin, 1977), ISBN 039524899X, pp. 37-38
  15. ↑ Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994) ISBN 0671758764, pp. 705-706
  16. ↑ George Packer, "The Spanish Prisoner," The New Yorker, October 31, 2005
  17. ↑ 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
  18. ↑ 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
  19. ↑ John Chabot Smith, Alger Hiss: The True Story (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1976), ISBN 0030137764, p. 104
  20. ↑ Testimony of Alger Hiss before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (August 5, 1948)
  21. ↑ "Felix Frankfurter," Time, September 7, 1962
  22. ↑ "Your Witness, Mr. Murphy," Time, July 4, 1949
  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. ↑ 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)
  25. ↑ "Report on the National Lawyers Guild, legal bulwark of the Communist Party," United States Congress. House Committee on Un-American Activities (1950), p. 12
  26. ↑ 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
  27. ↑ Martin Dies, The Trojan Horse in America (New York: Arno Press, 1977) ISBN 0405099452, p. 92
  28. ↑ Archibald MacLeish, “To the Young Men of Wall Street,” Saturday Review, January 16, 1932
  29. ↑ Tony Hiss, The View From Alger's Window (New York: Vintage Books, 2000) ISBN 0375701281, pp. 140-141
  30. ↑ Dan Cryer, "We're a long way from the end of this," Salon.com, June 1, 1999
  31. ↑ Testimony of Alger Hiss before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (August 5, 1948)
  32. ↑ Biographical Sketch. Alger Hiss Collection, 1934-1979 (Maryland Historical Society)
  33. ↑ Special Committee Investigating the Munitions Industry (April 12, 1934). Guide to the Records of the U.S. Senate at the National Archives
  34. ↑ William Fitzgibbon, "The Hiss-Chambers Case: A Chronology Since 1934," The New York Times, June 12, 1949
  35. ↑ Testimony of Alger Hiss before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (August 5, 1948)
  36. ↑ United States v. Butler, 297 U.S. 1 (1936)
  37. ↑ Anatoli Sudoplatov, Pavel Sudoplatov, Leona P. Schecter and Jerrold L. Schecter, Special Tasks (New York: Back Bay Books, 1995) ISBN 0316821152, p. 227-228
  38. ↑ Hede Massing, This Deception (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1951), p. 335
  39. ↑ [Karel Kaplan, Report on the Murder of the General Secretary (London: I.B. Taurus & Co. Ltd., 1990), ISBN 1-85043-211-2, pp. 19-25]
  40. ↑ Maria Schmidt, "The Hiss Dossier: A Historian's Report," The New Republic, November 8, 1993, pp. 17-20
  41. ↑ Sam Tanenhaus, “Hiss: Guilty as Charged,” Commentary, April 1993
  42. ↑ Sam Tanenhaus, "Hiss Case 'Smoing Gun'?" New York Times, October 15, 1993; Sam Tanenhaus, "New Reasons to Doubt Hiss," Wall Street Journal, November 18, 1993
  43. ↑ G. Edward White, Alger Hiss's Looking-glass Wars: The Covert Life of a Soviet Spy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) ISBN 0195182553, p. 228
  44. ↑ Francis Bowes Sayre (April 30, 1885 -- March 29, 1972), Woodrow Wilson House
  45. ↑ Glenn Fowler, "Donald Hiss, 82, Ex-U.S. Official And Lawyer in Washington Firm," The New York Times, May 20, 1989
  46. ↑ Ralph de Toledano, “Embarrassment aided and abetted the Top Soviet spy - Alger Hiss,” Insight on the News, January 27, 1997
  47. ↑ 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
  48. ↑ Ralph de Toledano, “Embarrassment aided and abetted the Top Soviet spy - Alger Hiss,” Insight on the News, January 27, 1997
  49. ↑ Ralph De Toledano, “The Last Word,” Insight on the News, December 17, 2001
  50. ↑ Whittaker Chambers, Witness (Regnery Publishing, 1952) ISBN 0-89526-789-6, p. 25
  51. ↑ Allen Weinstein, Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), ISBN 0394495462, p. 319
  52. ↑ Whittaker Chambers, Witness (Regnery Publishing, 1952) ISBN 0-89526-789-6, p. 40-41
  53. ↑ 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
  54. ↑ Testimony of Whittaker Chambers before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (August 3, 1948)
  55. ↑ "The Case of Alger Hiss," Time, February 13, 1950
  56. ↑ Adolf Berle’s Notes on his Meeting with Whittaker Chambers
  57. ↑ 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)
  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
  59. ↑ Ralph De Toledano, “The Last Word,” Insight on the News, December 17, 2001
  60. ↑ 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
  61. ↑ Allen Weinstein, Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), ISBN 0394495462, p. 331
  62. ↑ 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)
  63. ↑ 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
  64. ↑ Allen Weinstein, Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), ISBN 0394495462, p. 329
  65. ↑ 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
  66. ↑ FBI Report: Underground Soviet Espionage Organization (NKVD) in Agencies of the United States Government, p. 109 (PDF p. 120)
  67. ↑ FBI memorandum: Ladd to Hoover, January 28, 1949, p. 2 (FBI file: Hiss-Chambers, Vol. 44)
  68. ↑ 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)
  69. ↑ John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999) ISBN 0300077718, p. 92
  70. ↑ Kai Bird and Svetlana Chervonnaya, "The Mystery of Ales," The American Scholar, Summer 2007
  71. ↑ Venona 195 New York to Moscow 9th February 1944
  72. ↑ [http://www.nsa.gov/venona/releases/28_Sept_1943_R4_m1_p1.gif Venona 1579 New York to Moscow, 28 September 1943
  73. ↑ Report of the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy (Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1997), Appendix A
  74. ↑ 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)
  75. ↑ Douglas O. 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)
  76. ↑ Robert G. Whalen, "Hiss and Chambers: Strange Story of Two Men," The New York Times, December 12, 1948
  77. ↑ "The Case of Alger Hiss," Time, February 13, 1950
  78. ↑ History of the Charter of the United Nations: Dumbarton Oaks and Yalta
  79. ↑ Anatoli Sudoplatov, Pavel Sudoplatov, Leona P. Schecter and Jerrold L. Schecter, Special Tasks (New York: Back Bay Books, 1995) ISBN 0316821152, p. , p. 227
  80. ↑ Anatoli Sudoplatov, Pavel Sudoplatov, Leona P. Schecter and Jerrold L. Schecter, Special Tasks (New York: Back Bay Books, 1995) ISBN 0316821152, p. , p. 227
  81. ↑ 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.
  82. ↑ Jerrold and Leona Schecter, Sacred Secrets: How Soviet Intelligence Operations Changed American History(Washington: Potomac Books Inc., 2002) ISBN 1574883275, p. 130
  83. ↑ Jerrold and Leona Schecter, Sacred Secrets: How Soviet Intelligence Operations Changed American History(Washington: Potomac Books Inc., 2002) ISBN 1574883275, p. 131
  84. ↑ Ralph De Toledano, “The Last Word,” Insight on the News, December 17, 2001
  85. ↑ Douglas 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, 2003)
  86. ↑ Report of the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy (Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1997), Appendix A, p. A-34 (PDF p. 36)
  87. ↑ John R. Schindler, "Hiss in VENONA: The Continuing Controversy," Center for Cryptologic History Symposium, 27 October 2005
  88. ↑ Memorandum of Conversation, Tuesday, March 20, 1945, Westminster, Md.
  89. ↑ FBI memorandum: Ladd to Hoover, January 28, 1949 (FBI file: Hiss Chambers, Vol. 44)
  90. ↑ Ralph de Toledano, “Embarrassment aided and abetted the Top Soviet spy - Alger Hiss,” Insight on the News, January 27, 1997
  91. ↑ Amy W. Knight, How the Cold War Began: The Igor Gouzenko Affair and the Hunt for Soviet Spies (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2006) ISBN 0786718161, p. 33
  92. ↑ G. Edward White, Alger Hiss's Looking-Glass War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) , p. 49
  93. ↑ http://hrsbstaff.ednet.ns.ca/smileymi/Global%20History%2012/a_short_essay_on_the_cold_war.htm William Lyon Mackenzie King, diary entry for September 7, 1945
  94. ↑ Sam Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1997) ISBN 0375751459, p. 519
  95. ↑ Allen Weinstein, Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), ISBN 0394495462, p. 366
  96. ↑ FBI Report: Soviet Espionage Activities in the United States Between World War I and World War II, November 27, 1945
  97. ↑ Silvermaster file, Vol. 6, p. 105 (PDF p. 106)
  98. ↑ http://ultra-secret.info/PDFs/splitfiles/splitprocessed/Silvermaster082_Folder/Silvermaster082_page119.pdf FBI Report: Underground Soviet Espionage Organization (NKVD) in Agencies of the United States Government, p. 108 (PDF p. 119)
  99. ↑ 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)
  100. ↑ Ralph de Toledano, “Embarrassment aided and abetted the Top Soviet spy - Alger Hiss,” Insight on the News, January 27, 1997
  101. ↑ Ron Capshaw, "Alger Hiss: The Left's Religious Icon," FrontPageMagazine.com, May 4, 2007
  102. ↑ Allen Weinstein, Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case, New York: Random House, (ed. 1997), pgs. 321-322.
  103. ↑ Sam Tanenhaus, "New Reasons to Doubt Hiss," Wall Street Journal, November 18, 1993
  104. ↑ FBI Report: Underground Soviet Espionage Organization (NKVD) in Agencies of the United States Government, November 21, 1946, p. 109 (PDF p. 120)
  105. ↑ Ron Capshaw, "Alger Hiss: The Left's Religious Icon," FrontPageMagazine.com, May 4, 2007
  106. ↑ Interlocking Subversion in Government Departments, SISS report (July 30, 1953), pp. 8-10.
  107. ↑ FBI Report: Alger Hiss, February 4, 1949
  108. ↑ Testimony of Whittaker Chambers before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (August 3, 1948)
  109. ↑ Anatoli Sudoplatov, Pavel Sudoplatov, Leona P. Schecter and Jerrold L. Schecter, Special Tasks (New York: Back Bay Books, 1995) ISBN 0316821152, p. 228
  110. ↑ Ralph de Toledano, “Embarrassment aided and abetted the Top Soviet spy - Alger Hiss,” Insight on the News, January 27, 1997
  111. ↑ Ralph de Toledano, “Embarrassment aided and abetted the Top Soviet spy - Alger Hiss,” Insight on the News, January 27, 1997
  112. ↑ Ralph de Toledano and Victor Lasky, Seeds of Treason: The True Story of the Hiss-Chambers Tragedy, (NY: Funk and Wagnalls, 1950), ASIN B0007DS43A, p. 235
  113. ↑ Ralph de Toledano and Victor Lasky, Seeds of Treason: The True Story of the Hiss-Chambers Tragedy, (NY: Funk and Wagnalls, 1950), ASIN B0007DS43A, p. 258-259
  114. ↑ "The Alger Hiss Issue," Time, November 3, 1952
  115. ↑ "Woman with a Past," Time, December 19, 1949
  116. ↑ Testimony of Ambassador William Bullitt, April 8, 1952, “Communist influence on U.S. policies in the Far East,” Hearings Before the Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and other Internal Security Laws of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, Eighty-Second Congress, Second Session. Hearings: March 13, 1951 to June 20, 1952; Report: July 2, 1952
  117. ↑ Jim Caldwell, “Korea - 50 years ago this week, April 4 - 10, 1952,” Army News Service, April 1, 2002]
  118. ↑ “Another Witness,” Time, March 3, 1952]
  119. ↑ Ralph de Toledano and Victor Lasky, Seeds of Treason, (NY: Funk and Wagnalls, 1950), pgs. 221-223.
  120. ↑ John Earl Haynes, "Ales: Hiss, Foote, Stettinius?," June 7, 2007]
  121. ↑ Allan Weinstein, Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997 ed.), ISBN 067977338X, pp. 326–27.
  122. ↑ 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.
  123. ↑ Allen Weinstein, Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case, New York: Random House, (ed. 1997)
  124. ↑ Whittaker Chambers, Witness, New York: Random House, (1952).
  125. ↑ 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).
  126. ↑ KGB file 43173 vol.2 (v) pp. 49-55, The Gorsky Memo, 1948.
  127. ↑ Allen Weinstein, Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), ISBN 0394495462, p. 513
  128. ↑ "Report of the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy (Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1997), Appendix A, p. A-37 (PDF p. 39)

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