Alger Hiss

Alger Hiss in Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary
(Photos courtesy of the Federal Bureau of Prisons)

Alger Hiss (November 11, 1904 – November 15, 1996) was a U.S. State Department official involved in the establishment of the United Nations. He was accused of being a Soviet spy in 1948 and convicted of perjury in connection with this charge in 1950. Although new evidence, most notably from the VENONA project, indicates that Hiss was a Soviet agent, his defenders have put forward various conspiracy theories and alternative interpretations of the evidence which they say points to his innocence.

Early life and career

Born in Baltimore, Maryland to Mary Lavinia Hughes and Charles Alger Hiss, Hiss was educated at Baltimore City College high school and Johns Hopkins University, where he was a member of Alpha Delta Phi fraternity. In 1929, he received his law degree from Harvard Law School, where he was a protégé of Felix Frankfurter, the future Supreme Court justice. Before joining a Boston law firm, he served for a year as clerk to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. That same year, Hiss married the former Mrs. Priscilla Hobson, a Quaker who later worked for the Library of Congress.

In 1933, he entered government service, working in several areas as an attorney in President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal, starting with the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA). Hiss worked for the Nye Committee, which investigated and documented wartime profiteering by military contractors during World War I. He served briefly in the Justice Department.

Both Alger Hiss and his brother Donald Hiss began working in the United States Department of State in 1936. Alger served as assistant to Francis B. Sayre, a son-in-law of Woodrow Wilson, and later as an assistant to United States Secretary of State, Edward Stettinius, Jr. Hiss became special assistant to the Director of the Office of Far Eastern Affairs and in 1944 became a special assistant to the Director of the Office of Special Political Affairs (OSPA), a policy-making office that concentrated on postwar planning for international organization. He later became the director of OSPA, and, as such, he was executive secretary at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference, which finalized plans for the organization that would become the United Nations.

In 1945, Hiss was a member of the U.S. delegation to the wartime Yalta conference, where the 'Big Three' (Franklin D. Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin, and Winston Churchill) met to coordinate strategy to defeat Hitler, draw the map of postwar Europe and continue with plans to set up the United Nations. Hiss's role at Yalta was limited to work on the United Nations. At one point Stalin made a request for 16 votes for the Soviet Union in the U.N. General Assembly and Hiss led the U.S. opposition to Stalin's request. In the final compromise, Stalin was given two additional votes, for Byelorussia (today's Belarus) and Ukraine. Hiss's opposition to Stalin's move has been cited by his supporters as evidence that Hiss was not a Soviet agent. 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 later became the full Director of the Office of Special Political Affairs.

Hiss left government service in 1946 and became president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he served until May 5, 1949.

Accusation of espionage

In 1948, Whittaker Chambers, a senior editor at Time magazine and a former Communist spy turned government informer, accused Alger Hiss of being a member of the Communist Party and a spy. According to Chambers, Hiss was a member of the Ware group, an "underground cell" of Communists that Chambers said had engaged in espionage for the Soviet Union. In August or September of 1934, Hiss met Chambers and allegedly started paying Communist Party dues. He allegedly began working with the GRU in 1935 with Chambers acting as courier. GRU Illegal Rezident (a Soviet spymaster who resides in the U.S. undercover, rather than as an embassy employee) Boris Bykov instructed Hiss in espionage procedures. These included bringing files home nightly and retyping them for later transfer to Chambers.

Hiss and his supporters pointed out that Chambers had asserted to government officials for ten years preceding 1948 that Hiss was neither a Communist nor a spy. Chambers admitted at the Hiss trials that he had previously committed perjury several times.

Alger Hiss voluntarily appeared before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) to deny Chambers's accusations. Some Committee members had misgivings at first about attacking Hiss, but Congressman Richard Nixon, acting on information he had been secretly receiving from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Roman Catholic priest John Francis Cronin, pressed the Committee to continue the investigation. After being asked to identify Chambers from a photograph, Hiss indicated that his face "might look familiar" and requested to see him in person. When he later confronted Chambers in a hotel room, with HUAC representatives present, Hiss claimed that he had known Chambers as "George Crosley," and had allowed him to live in his home when "Crosley" was destitute in the mid-1930s. Later, Hiss claimed that he had given "Crosley" an old car, which allegedly ended up in the hands of the American Communist party.

Because Chambers's testimony was given in a congressional hearing, his statements were privileged against defamation suits. Hiss challenged him to repeat his charges in public without the benefit of such protection. After Chambers publicly reiterated his charge that Hiss was working for the Soviets on the radio program Meet the Press, Hiss instituted an eventually unsuccessful libel lawsuit against Chambers. Chambers, in his defense, presented the "Baltimore Documents", which were copies of a series of government documents that he had allegedly obtained from Hiss in the 1930s. Some of these were indeed classified (though of trivial trade regulations rather than military affairs). Both Chambers and Hiss had denied any act of espionage in their testimony to Congress. By introducing the "Baltimore Documents," Chambers opened both Hiss and himself to perjury charges. Chambers claimed that the government documents had first been re-typed by Hiss's wife, Priscilla, and that these copies were then photographed and passed on to the spy network.

Later, Chambers produced the so-called Pumpkin Papers: five rolls of microfilm, two of which contained State Department documents, which Chambers had hidden in a hollowed-out pumpkin on his Maryland farm and gave to Richard Nixon on December 2. One strip was about Japanese troop movements and another one was a "strictly confidential" message for Secretary Hull, both from 1938. Chambers also produced in November four handwritten notes about military and intelligence matters which Hiss acknowledged that he had written.

Perjury trials, conviction and after

Hiss was charged with two counts of perjury; the grand jury could not indict him for espionage since the statute of limitations had run out. Hiss went to trial twice. The first trial started on May 31, 1949, but ended in a hung jury on July 7, 1949. Hiss's character witnesses at his first trial included such notables as future Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, and former Democratic presidential candidate John W. Davis. The second trial lasted from November 17, 1949, to January 21, 1950.

At both trials, a key piece of evidence was a typewriter that was presented as one the Hisses had owned at the time of Hiss's alleged espionage work with Chambers. FBI experts testified that matching of the type established that this typewriter had been used to type the Baltimore Documents. This was in keeping with Chambers's testimony that Priscilla Hiss retyped stolen documents so the originals could be returned and the copies photographed later. In the second trial some slight corroboration of Chambers's account was given in the form testimony from Hede Massing, an American ex-Communist who recounted a meeting with Hiss in which they both spoke obliquely about their Communist activities. At the second trial, the jury found Hiss guilty on two counts of perjury.

The verdict was upheld by the Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court of the United States. Hiss was sentenced to five years imprisonment on January 25, 1950 and served 44 months at the Lewisburg Federal Prison before being released November 27, 1954.

The case heightened public concern about Soviet espionage penetration of the U.S. Government in the 1930s and 1940s. As a native-born, well-educated, and highly connected government official, Alger Hiss did not have the profile of a typical spy. Publicity surrounding the case also fed the early political career of Richard M. Nixon, helping him move from the House of Representatives to the United States Senate in 1950, and to the Vice Presidency of the United States in 1952.

While in prison, Hiss acted as a voluntary attorney, advisor and tutor for many of his fellow inmates. After his release, Hiss, who had been disbarred, worked as a salesman for a stationery company. In 1957 his book In the Court of Public Opinion was published. The book contained detailed arguments against the prosecution's case against him, with particular emphasis on the theory that the typewritten documents traced to his typewriter had been forged. He separated from his first wife Priscilla in 1959, though he did not remarry until after Priscilla's death in 1986. In 1988 he wrote an autobiography, Recollections of a Life. Hiss maintained his innocence and fought his perjury conviction until his death at age 92 on November 15, 1996.

Later evidence, pro and con

Testimony by Nathaniel Weyl

In February 1952, Nathaniel Weyl testified before the McCarran Committee that he had been a member of the Ware group in 1933 and that Alger Hiss was also a member at this time. His testimony corroborated that of Chambers, but Weyl had not testified at Hiss's trial, leaving Chambers as the only witness to testify at first hand that Hiss was a Communist or a spy. By 1952 Hiss had already been convicted, and thus, Weyl's belated testimony was moot. In 1950, after Hiss's conviction, Weyl wrote a book on the history of treason in America. In the chapter of this book that Weyl devoted to the Hiss case, he expressed doubt about Hiss's guilt and made no reference to the personal knowledge about the case that would later be the basis of his testimony before the McCarran Committee. This apparent discrepancy and his failure to come forward as a witness in the Hiss trials have never been explained by Weyl.

Freedom of Information Act evidence

As a result of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) suits by Hiss and others, Department of Justice documents became public in 1975 and revealed the following facts:

• That an FBI agent knowingly committed perjury at the Hiss trial, testifying it was impossible to forge a document by typewriter.
• With regard to the typewriter introduced as evidence at the trial, the FBI knew that there was an apparent inconsistency between its alleged manufacture date and its serial number but illegally withheld this information from Hiss.
• That the FBI had an informer on the Hiss defense team, a private detective named Horace W. Schmahl. Hired by the Hiss defense team, Schmahl reported on the Hiss defense strategy to the government.
• That the prosecution had illegally withheld from Hiss and his lawyers the information that the FBI had records of intensive surveillance of Hiss including phone taps and mail openings and that none of these showed any indication that Hiss was a spy or a Communist.
• The content of the "Pumpkin Papers," which showed that of the five rolls of microfilm that Nixon had described as evidence of the "most serious series of treasonable activities … in the history of America," one roll is completely blank and information on two more rolls are faintly legible copies of Navy Dept documents relating to such subjects as life rafts, parachutes and fire extinguishers, information which was easily obtainable at any time from the open shelves at the Bureau of Standards, and two other rolls are photographs of State Department documents which were introduced as evidence at Hiss's 2 trials in 1949 and 1950.

After the FOIA disclosures, Hiss was readmitted to the bar in Massachusetts in 1975 without the usual admission of guilt or expression of remorse, which is usually required when a disbarred lawyer is readmitted. The Supreme Court, which by this time contained several Nixon appointees, including Chief Justice Warren Burger, refused to nullify the Hiss perjury conviction, thus preventing the complete exoneration Hiss had sought.

Remanufactured typewriter theory

At both trials, FBI typewriter experts testified that the Baltimore Documents in Chambers's possession matched samples of typing done by Priscilla Hiss on the Hiss's home typewriter in the 1930s. The Woodstock typewriter that had been owned by the Hisses at this time was presented as evidence in the trials. Ironically, the defense investigators had tracked down the family's old typewriter on their own, hoping that examination of the actual machine would point up flaws in the FBI's matching of documents. This proved not to be the case, as tests with the typewriter only seemed to confirm the FBI's analysis.

Since the trials, several apparent discrepancies have been noted in the typewriter evidence presented by the prosecution. This includes expert testimony that the typewriter presented in evidence (as Exhibit #UUU) was not the same one that produced earlier typing samples from the Hiss household, expert testimony that Priscilla Hiss was not the typist of the Baltimore Documents, testimony by former Woodstock executives that the serial number of the Exhibit #UUU typewriter was inconsistent with the year when the Hiss typewriter was originally purchased, and expert testimony that the exhibit #UUU typewriter had been tampered with in a way not consistent with professional repair work. These points and others have lead some Hiss defenders to theorize that the Baltimore Documents were FBI-created forgeries, created by first remanufacturing a typewriter to match existing samples of typed papers from the Hiss household, then using this typewriter to type the Baltimore Documents. According to this theory, the remanufactured typewriter was then planted where Hiss's defense investigators would find it, and it became trial exhibit #UUU.

At the time of the trials, few people suspected that such "forgery by typewriter" was possible, and an FBI agent testified that it could not be done. In fact, during World War II, J. Edgar Hoover arranged for his own FBI agents to be trained at a British intelligence base where one of the specialties was the remanufacture of typewriters for document forgery. In a 1959 document obtained through an unrelated Freedom of Information Act application, J. Edgar Hoover noted that "To alter a typewriter to match a known model would require a large amount of typewriter specimens and weeks of laboratory work."

Other authors have counter-argued that if the Baltimore Documents were forgeries, it would be an unnecessary risk to arrange for the remanufactured typewriter to be found and introduced as evidence at the trials. The link between the Hiss's typewriter and the Baltimore Documents was testified to on the basis of matching the documents to old typing samples, so the actual typewriter wasn't needed. Professor Irving Younger wrote, "To leave the counterfeit Woodstock lying about for the defense to pick up and examine would serve only to expose the whole scheme to the risk of discovery--and for no reason."

In a 1976 memoir, former White House counsel John Dean alleged that President Nixon's chief counsel Charles Colson told him that Nixon had admitted in a conversation that HUAC had in fact fabricated a typewriter, saying, "We built one on the Hiss case." However, Colson subsequently denied the statement.

Soviet archives

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Alger Hiss petitioned General Dimitry Antonovich Volkogonov, who had become President Yeltsin's military advisor and the overseer of all the Soviet intelligence archives, to request the release of any Soviet files on the Hiss case. Interestingly, both former President Nixon and the director of his presidential library, John H. Taylor, wrote a similar letter, though the actual contents of those letters are not publicly available.

Russian archivists and researchers responded by reviewing their files, and in the fall of 1992 reported back that they had found no evidence that Alger Hiss had ever engaged in espionage for the Soviet Union or any evidence that Hiss was a member of the Communist Party. However, Volkogonov subsequently revealed that he had spent only two days on his search and had mainly relied on the word of KGB archivists. He stated, "What I saw gave me no basis to claim a full clarification. [Hiss attorney] John Lowenthal pushed me to say things of which I was not fully convinced."

General-Lieutenant Vitaly Pavlov, who ran Soviet intelligence work in North America in the late 1930s and early 1940s, provided some corroboration of Volkogonov in his memoirs, stating that Hiss never worked for the USSR as one of his agents.

In 2007, further testimonial of the absence of Hiss's name in Soviet archives was given by Russian researcher Svetlana A. Chervonnaya, who had been conducting research since the early 1990s.

Noel Field

In 1992, records were found in Hungarian Interior Ministry archives that mentioned Alger Hiss as a Communist spy. These were transcripts of interrogations of Noel Field that had taken place between 1949 and 1954. Field was an American who had spied for the Soviet Union, but had been arrested while traveling through Eastern Europe on charges that he was actually spying for American intelligence. During his five-year imprisonment in Hungary he referred to Hiss as a fellow Communist and spy four times, including relating the following: "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."

Field was released by the Hungarian secret police in 1954 but remained in Hungary until his death in 1970. Upon his release, he wrote a letter to the Communist Party's Central Committee in Moscow complaining that he had been tortured in prison and that this had caused him to "confess more and more lies as truth." Hiss's defenders argue that Field's implication of Hiss may have been one of these lies and that Field was trying to show his veracity as a Communist by connecting his activities to the well-known Hiss. In 1957, Field wrote a letter to Hiss in which he expressed his belief in Hiss's innocence and spoke of personal knowledge of Hede Massing's "outrageous lie" when she testified at Hiss's second trial.

Venona and "ALES"

In 1995, the existence of the so-called Venona project was revealed. This project had resulted in the decryption or partial decryption of thousands of telegrams sent to the Soviet Union from its U.S. operatives in the years 1942 to 1945. FBI Special Agent Robert Lamphere identified the Soviet spy known by the codename "ALES" in some decoded cables as "probably Alger Hiss".

The full text of the cable 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 [Soviet GRU] 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” [State Department] – 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

Point number 6 is of special interest because it narrows down the pool of candidates to four choices: Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, Freeman Mathews (DOS European specialist), Alger Hiss, and Wilder Foote (Stenttinius’s press aide). These individuals all went to Moscow after attending the 1945 Yalta conference.

In 1997, the bipartisan Moynihan Commission on Government Secrecy, chaired by Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, stated in its findings: "The complicity of Alger Hiss of the State Department seems settled. As does that of Harry Dexter White of the Treasury Department." In his 1998 book Secrecy: The American Experience, Moynihan 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." In addition to Moynihan, the identification of Hiss as ALES has been accepted by many other authors, including Allen Weinstein, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr.

The Venona transcript with the most relevance to the Hiss case is #1822, sent March 30, 1945, from the Soviet's Washington station chief to Moscow. This transcript indicates that ALES attended the Yalta conference and then went to Moscow. Hiss attended Yalta and then traveled to Moscow in his capacity as adviser to Secretary of State Edward Stettinius.

However, the Venona evidence on Alger Hiss is disputed by some. John Lowenthal, a Hiss lawyer and longtime supporter, has challenged the Hiss-ALES identification in Venona #1822 by the following now discredited arguements:

• ALES was said to be the leader of a small group of espionage agents; Hiss was accused of having acted alone, aside from his wife as a typist and Chambers as courier.
• ALES was a GRU (military intelligence) agent who obtained military intelligence, and only rarely provided State Department material; Alger Hiss in his trial was accused of obtaining only non-military information and the papers used against him were non-military State Department materials that he allegedly produced on a regular basis.
• Even if Hiss was the spy he was accused of being, it's unlikely he would have continued being so after 1938 as ALES did, because in that year Hiss would have become too great a risk for any Soviet agency to use. In that year, Whittaker Chambers broke with the Communist Party and then went into hiding, telling his Communist Party colleagues he would denounce them if they did not follow suit. At this point therefore, ALES's cover would be in extreme jeopardy if he were Alger Hiss.
• Other recent information places ALES in Mexico City at the same time when Hiss was known to be in Washington.

• Lowenthal also suggests an interpretation of the transcript that differs from Lamphere's reading. Lowenthal's reading puts ALES not at the conference but "a Soviet personage in a very responsible position," Comrade Vyshinski, the deputy foreign minister. Vyshinski was at Yalta and did go on to Moscow as did Alger Hiss. According to Lowenthal, the entire point of paragraph 6 (#1822), that the GRU asked Vyshinski to get in touch with ALES to convey thanks from the GRU for a job well done, would have been moot if ALES had actually been in Moscow, for once there, the GRU could have easily contacted ALES with no need of Vyshinski. Others, notably Eduard Mark, dispute Lowenthal's analysis.

In a rebuttal to Lowenthal, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr noted the following:

• None of the evidence presented at the Hiss trial precludes the possibility that Hiss had been an espionage agent after 1938 or that he had only passed State Department documents after 1938.
• Chambers's charges were not seriously investigated until after the revelations made by the defection of Elizabeth Bentley in 1945, so Hiss and the Soviets could in theory have considered it an acceptable risk for him continue espionage work, even after Chambers's defection.
• Vyshinski was not in the U.S. between Yalta and the time of the Venona message and the message is from the Washington KGB station reporting on a talk with Ales in the U.S., thus making Lowenthal's analysis impossible.

Lowenthal's arguement was further discredited when the original Russian text was revealed and "leaves no doubt that ALES met with this person in Moscow after Yalta, and that it was ALES who implied that he met with Soviet Foreign Minister Vyshinskii."

There is one Venona cable, #1579, that includes the name "Hiss." It consists mostly of fragments of a 1943 message from the GRU chief in New York to GRU headquarters in Moscow. The reference reads: ". . . from the State Department by name of HISS . . ." The name "Hiss" was not translated by the Venona cryptanalysts, but rather appeared just that way in the original—"Spelled out in the Latin alphabet" according to footnote iv. In the cable, "Hiss" goes without a first name, so it could possibly refer to either Alger or Donald, since both were at the State Department in 1943. For the GRU to name Hiss openly, not by a codename, would be radically unorthodox for Soviet espionage protocols if he was, indeed, a spy. Both the NSA and the FBI have insisted that once a codename was assigned it was used to the exclusion of the real name.

In a paper presented at the 2005 Center for Cryptologic History Symposium, former NSA analyst John R. Schindler states 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."

At an April, 2007 symposium, authors Kai Bird and Svetlana Chervonnaya presented evidence that a U.S. diplomat named Wilder Foote was the best match to ALES, based on the movements of all the officials present at the U.S.-Soviet Yalta conference.

They presented a Soviet cable dated March 5, 1945 which stated that ALES was in Mexico City, whereas Alger Hiss had returned from Mexico City in February and made a radio broadcast in the U.S. on March 3. Based on this evidence they have argued that Foote, who was in Mexico City on March 5, was ALES. However, skeptics believe that the Soviets may have been unaware of Hiss's return and demonstrated that the details of the VENONA message more closely describe Hiss than Foote.

"The Haunted Wood"

In 1999, historian Allen Weinstein and KGB agent turned journalist Alexander Vassiliev released The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America--The Stalin Era. The book is largely based on exclusive access to several Soviet intelligence files that Weinstein and Vassiliev gained by paying ex-KGB agents a total reported to be in excess of 1 million dollars (provided by their publisher, Random House). Haunted Wood includes a long narrative of the Hiss-Chambers case, and affirms Hiss's guilt. However, in fact Weinstein and Vassiliev found little evidence regarding Hiss during their research. In a footnote it is stated "we have been able to further clarify Alger Hiss's role as a Soviet agent only through his occasional appearance in NKVD/NKGB archives." These "occasional appearances" in turn, are based on what author Athan Theoharis calls "a series of questionable speculative conclusions:" that Hiss had the codename "ALES," that KGB agents sometimes forgot his codename when they sent reports to Moscow, and that Hiss was sometimes also identified by the codename "Lawyer."

Haunted Wood has also come under criticism over the fact that the memos on which it is based were discovered in Soviet Archives on a lucrative "cash-for-documents" access rights basis. All other historians were denied access to the same archives, making it impossible for others to check Weinstein's and Vassiliev's work.

Allen Weinstein has also been accused of misquoting, misrepresenting, or misconstruing some of his interview subjects for his earlier book Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case. One of his sources, Samuel Krieger, sued Weinstein for libel in 1979. Weinstein settled out of court by issuing a public apology and paying Krieger an undisclosed sum for his error.

David Lowenthal furthermore discovered that a considerable amount of scholarly friction existed between the two coauthors. Vassiliev stated, "I never saw a document where Hiss would be called ALES or ALES may be called Hiss. I made a point of that to Allen." Weinstein was "sloppy almost every time he quoted documents relating to Alger Hiss." However, in a 2002 episode of PBS's NOVA, Vassiliev said, "The Rosenbergs, Theodore Hall and Alger Hiss did spy for the Soviets, and I saw their real names in the documents, their code names, a lot of documents about that. How you judge them is up to you. To me, they're heroes."

Oleg Gordievsky

In 1985, Oleg Gordievsky, a high ranking KGB agent, defected to the West. In his 1990 book Gordievsky reported attending a lecture before a KGB audience in which Iskhak Abdulovich Akhmerov identified Hiss, apparently as one of the Soviet Union's U.S. agents during World War II.

Although his reminiscence of the Akhmerov lecture remains unchallenged, Gordievsky went further and claimed that Hiss had the codename identity of "ALES". This at first appeared to be an independent corroboration of the codename, as it appeared before the Venona cables were revealed to the public. However, it was later revealed that Gordievsky's source for the ALES identity was an article by journalist Thomas Powell, who had seen National Security Agency documents on Venona years before their release.

References and further reading

• Cooke, Alistair (1950). A Generation on Trial: USA v. Alger Hiss. Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-313-23373-X.
• Hiss, Alger (1957). In the Court of Public Opinion. Harper Collins. ISBN 0-06-090293-0.
• Theoharis, Athan (Editor) (1982). Beyond the Hiss Case: The FBI, Congress, and the Cold War. Temple University Press. ISBN 0-87722-241-X. {{cite book}}: |first= has generic name (help)
• Hiss, Alger (1988). Recollections of a Life. Little Brown & Co. ISBN 1559700246.
• Weinstein, Allen (1997). Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case. Random House. ISBN 0-679-77338-X. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
• Tanenhaus, Sam (1998). Whittaker Chambers: A Biography. Modern Library. ISBN 0-375-75145-9. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
• Weinstein, Allen and Vassiliev, Alexander (1999). The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America--The Stalin Era. Modern Library. ISBN 0-375-75536-5. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
• Hiss, Tony (1999). The View from Alger's Window: A Son's Memoir. Alfred E. Knopf. ISBN 0-375-40127-X.
• Swan, Patrick (Editor) (2003). Alger Hiss, Whittaker Chambers, and the Schism in the American Soul. ISI Books. ISBN 1-882926-91-9. {{cite book}}: |first= has generic name (help)

External links

• Gay, James Thomas (1998). "The Alger Hiss Spy Case". HistoryNet.com. Retrieved 2006-09-13.
• Hermann, Donald H. J. (2005). "Deception And Betrayal: The Tragedy Of Alger Hiss". The Chicago Literary Club.
• Kisseloff, jeff (Managing Editor) (2003). "The Alger Hiss Story; Search for the Truth". Retrieved 2006-09-13. {{cite web}}: |first= has generic name (help); Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
• Kisseloff, Jeff. "Distorted Reflections". Retrieved 2006-12-07. A detailed critique of the book Alger Hiss's Looking-Glass Wars
• Linder, Douglas (2003). "The Alger Hiss Trials: An Account". "Famous Trials". University Of Missouri-Kansas City School Of Law.
• Lowenthal, John (Autumn 2000). "Venona and Alger Hiss" (PDF). Intelligence and National Security. Retrieved 2006-09-13. {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
• Moynihan, Daniel Patrick (Chairman) (1997). "Report of the Commission On Protecting And Reducing Government Secrecy" (PDF). United States Government Printing Office. Retrieved 2006-09-13.
• Navasky, Victor (1997). "Allen Weinstein's Docudrama". A review of Weinstein's "Perjury". The Nation.
• Noe, Denise (2005). "The Alger Hiss Case". Crime Library. Courtroom Television Network. {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
• Schrecker, Ellen (1999). "The Spies Who Loved Us?". A discussion of Weinstein and "The Haunted Wood". The Nation. {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
• Scott, Janny (1996). "Alger Hiss, 92, Central Figure in Long-Running Cold War Controversy". (Obituary). The New York Times.
• White, G. Edward (2005). Alger Hiss's Looking-Glass Wars: The Covert Life of a Soviet Spy. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-518255-3.
• Martin, David (2007). "FDR Winked at Soviet Espionage". Earliest Chambers allegation of espionage by Hiss et al. (referencing 1973 book by Isaac Don Levine). {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)