Alger Hiss

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Alger Hiss

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. Twenty years after his conviction, government documents released through the Freedom of Information Act revealed massive government misconduct at the Hiss trial was used to convict Hiss. After these revelations, Hiss was readmitted to the bar in Massachusetts.

Early career and government service

Born in Baltimore, Maryland, he was educated at Baltimore City College high school and Johns Hopkins University. 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.. The same year Hiss married the former Mrs. Priscilla Hobson 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. Hiss worked for the Nye Committee, which investigated wartime profiteering by military contractors during World War I. It was at this time that Hiss was alleged to be a member of the Ware group of underground Communists, a sort of Marxist study group. In August or September of 1934, Hiss met Whittaker Chambers and according to Chambers started paying Communist Party dues. Evidence suggests he began working with the GRU in 1935 and Chambers acted as courier. This was later corroborated by Nathaniel Weyl who also worked in the AAA and was a member of the Ware group in testimony before the McCarran Committee.

In 1936, Hiss and his brother Donald began working in the State Department, where he served as assistant to Francis B. Sayre, a son-in-law of Woodrow Wilson, and later as an assistant to Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, Jr. In 1944 Hiss joined the State Department's Director of the Office of Special Political Affairs, a policy-making office that concentrated on postwar planning for international organization and later became its director. As such he was a staff member at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference, which drafted plans for the organization that would become the United Nations.

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President Harry Truman addresses the delegates at the United Nations Charter Conference 1945. Alger Hiss, Secretary General of the Conference, is seated bottom right next to Sec. of State Edward Stettinius, Jr.

In 1945 he went with the president to the meeting of Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill in Yalta, where he again worked on details for the yet to be named United Nations. (Some say he precipitated the Western betrayal of Eastern Europe, although Churchill and Stalin had previously made an agreement which divided Eastern Europe between the two, at a meeting without American participation.) At Yalta, Hiss opposed Stalin's request for 15 seats in the future United Nations General Assembly, and in a final compromise, an agreement was reached to give the Soviet Union two extra seats. (Some say, if Hiss had been Stalin's agent, he wasn't a very good one.) After the Yalta conference Hiss traveled with Secretary of State Stettinius to Moscow, 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. It should be pointed out that Venona never identified any of the code names. Some say that the name ALES is too close to Alger to have been used as a code name for Hiss.

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 was afterwards named Director of the Office of Special Political Affairs. Later, Hiss became president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Charges of Espionage

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 and a spy, despite the fact that Chambers had spent the previous ten years denying that Hiss was ever a Communist or a spy. Chambers was forced to testify at the Hiss trial that he consistently lied about Hiss prior to 1948, and that he had lied more than once under oath.

Some historians, such as James Thomas Gay, author of "The Alger Hiss Spy Case" (American History, May-June 1998), still regard the matter of Hiss's guilt as unresolved. Others, such as Allen Weinstein, author of "Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case," judge that the preponderance of evidence points to Hiss's guilt. Still others have charged that Hiss was framed in order to discredit the United Nations and the New Deal.

Hiss's case heightened public concern about Soviet espionage penetration of the US Government in the 1930s and 1940s and was a forerunner of the anti-Communism of McCarthyism in the next decade. McCarthy would make his famous Wheeling, West Virginia speech two weeks after Hiss was finally convicted for perjury in 1950.

Publicity surrounding the case fed the early political career of Richard Nixon, helping him move from the House of Representatives to the Senate in 1950 and to the Vice Presidency of the United States in 1952.

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 alleged to be a spy through the declassification of the VENONA project.

Hiss responds to allegations by Whittaker 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, covertly being fed information by the Catholic Church's secretive Communist hunter, Father John Cronin, and using materials which he had been secretly and illegally receiving 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, saying quite specifically "the name means nothing to me." After being asked to identify Chambers, whom he had not seen in at least a dozen years, from a photograph, Hiss indicated that his face "might look familiar." When he later confronted Chambers in a hotel room, with HUAC representatives present, Hiss identified him as a person he had known as "George Crosley", whom Hiss had allowed to live in his home when Chambers was destitute in the mid-1930s. Later, Hiss gave Chambers an old car, which Chambers claimed was for use in transporting documents.

After Chambers publicly reiterated his charge that Hiss was working for the Soviets on the radio program "Meet the Press," Hiss instituted a libel action against Chambers. Chambers, in response, presented the "Baltimore Documents", which were copies of a series of government documents that he claimed had been obtained from Hiss in the 1930s, although why Chambers did not give these documents to the authorities previously, especially when Hiss was working for the government, is a mystery. 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. Why the documents were not directly photographed is a mystery, since retyping them, a much more time intensive process, could lead to errors. Later Chambers produced microfilm evidence which was dramatically given to Nixon on Halloween, from a hollowed out pumpkin on his Maryland farm (the so-called “Pumpkin Papers.”). Some of the papers were dated later than the time when Hiss claimed to have ceased all contact with Chambers, AKA "Crosley". Chambers would change the date he initially gave as the date he ceased contact with Hiss, so that there would be no contradiction with the Baltimore documents.

Tried and convicted of 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 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 Adlai Stevenson, Justice Felix Frankfurter, and former Democratic presidential candidate John W. Davis. The second trial lasted from November 17, 1949 to January 21, 1950, and the jury found Hiss guilty on two counts of perjury. Some of the Baltimore Documents were indeed classified, and four handwritten notes were apparently in Hiss's own handwriting. 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.

Protestations of innocence

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

Disbarred, he became a salesman. But he continued for the rest of his life strenuously to protest his innocence, going so far as to file a petition of coram nobis, in which he presented his defense team's documented, putatively scientific evidence indicating that the typewriter used to convict him had been fabricated, that is, remanufactured, and that the so-called Baltimore Documents, papers which Chambers claimed that Hiss or his wife Priscilla had typed, were forgeries. At the time, few people suspected that remanufacturing of typewriters was possible, and an FBI agent testified at the Hiss trial that it was impossible. In fact, during WWII J. Edgar Hoover arranged for his own FBI agents to be trained at a British intelligence base called Camp X 100 miles east of Toronto, where one of the specialties was the remanufacture of typewriters and document forgery.

Years later John Dean, in his book Blind Ambition, asserted that he was informed that Nixon at one point in his Presidency told Charles Colson, "The typewriters are always the key. We built one in the Hiss case." Colson denied ever having such a conversation with Nixon.

Revelations of judicial misconduct

As a result of a Freedom of Information Act suit, government documents were released in 1975 which revealed:

1) an FBI agent knowingly committed perjury at the Hiss trial, testifying it was impossible to forge a document by typewriter,

2) the FBI knew that the typewriter introduced as evidence at the trial could not have been the Hiss typewriter, but withheld this information from Hiss, and

3) the FBI had an informer, Horace W. Schmahl, a private detective who had been hired by the Hiss defense team, who reported on the Hiss defense strategy to the government.

Other information which had been withheld from Hiss and his lawyers included the FBI's knowledge of Chambers' homosexuality and the intensive FBI surveillance of Hiss, which included phone taps and mail openings (none of which showed any indication that Hiss was a spy or a Communist.)

As for the "Pumpkin Papers," the five rolls of microfilm that Nixon had described as evidence of the "most serious series of treasonable activities … in the history of America," the FOIA releases showed one roll of microfilm was completely blank, and information on two rolls of microfilm were largely not only unclassified but were about topics such as life rafts and fire extinguishers, information which was easily obtainable at any time from the open shelves at the Bureau of Standards.

Hiss readmitted to the bar

Based on the revelation of the government's misconduct, Massachusetts readmitted Hiss to the bar in 1975, without the usual admission of guilt or expression of regret. The Supreme Court, which by this time contained several Nixon appointments, including Chief Justice Warren Burger, refused to nullify the Hiss perjury conviction, despite the proof of flagrant government misconduct.

Evidence from Soviet archives

Hiss claimed he was finally vindicated when in 1992 Russian General Dmitri Volkogonov, acting on a request from John Lowenthal to help clear Hiss's name, stated that a search of Soviet archives revealed nothing. However, when questioned, 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. …John Lowenthal pushed me to say things of which I was not fully convinced."

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

Alger Hiss’s known cryptonyms were "Lawyer" ("Advocate" or "Advokat") in the mid-1930s and "Ales" in 1945. "Leonard" did not occur as a cover name in the World War II deciphered Venona traffic and may be a later (or possibly earlier) cryptonym.

References

• 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)
• Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, Secrecy: The American Experience, New Haven: Yale University Press 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

External links

• Crime Library
• The Alger Hiss Trials: An Account
• Cold War Counterintelligence
• VENONA Files and the Alger Hiss Case