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 has added a variety of information to the case, Hiss's guilt or innocence remains a controversial issue.

Early life and career

Born in Baltimore, Maryland, 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.

In 1936, Hiss and his brother Donald Hiss began working in the United States Department of State, where he 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 US 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.

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

Accusation of espionage

In 1948, Time magazine's managing editor Whittaker Chambers, 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 US 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 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 Chamber'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. This was seen as one of the weakest parts of the Chambers's story since the original documents could have been directly photographed, and retyping them could have generated errors. Hiss was linked to the Baltimore Documents by the matching of the type to the Hiss family's old typewriter. There has been much subsequent controversy about the correctness of this typewriter identification and the date of the typewriter's manufacture. Hiss supporters contend that the typewriter introduced as evidence could not have been the Hiss family typewriter because its serial number indicated it was manufactured after the date that Priscilla's father originally purchased it.

Later, Chambers produced the so-called Pumpkin Papers: four rolls of microfilm of State Department documents, which Chambers had hidden in a hollowed-out pumpkin on his Maryland farm and gave to Richard Nixon on December 2.

Perjury trials and conviction

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 this 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.

Alger his was debarred and after prison took a job as a salesman. 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.

The typewriter

The Woodstock typewriter was a key part of the prosecution's case against Hiss, as it appeared to physically link the Hiss family to the Baltimore documents in Chambers's possession. Ironically, the defense investigators had tracked the family's old typewriter on their own, believing that the machine would vindicate Alger Hiss from the allegations. An FBI typewriter expert testified that the documents must have originated from the Hiss typewriter.

In 1978 Hiss filed 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. He claimed that the Baltimore Documents that Chambers claimed that Hiss or his wife Priscilla had typed were forgeries. At the time of the trial, few people suspected that remanufacturing of typewriters was possible, and an FBI agent testified at the trial that it was impossible. 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 and document forgery.

Former White House counsel John Dean alleged in a 1976 memoir 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.

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 was completely blank and information on two more rolls were mostly unclassified and 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.

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 exoneration Hiss had sought.

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.

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". 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.

However, the Venona evidence on Alger Hiss is disputed by some. 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.

John Lowenthal, a Hiss lawyer and longtime supporter, has challenged the Hiss-ALES identification in Venona #1822 by the following:

• 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, he could not 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.

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."

"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

Hiss was also identified as ALES in 1988 by Oleg Gordievsky, a high ranking KGB agent who defected to the West in 1985. Gordievsky wrote that "a handful of the most important agents were run individually [and not through spy networks]. Among them was Alger Hiss (code-named ALES)....[whose] wartime controller was the leading NKVD illegal in the United States, Ishak Abdulovich Akhmerov." However, Gordievsky was speaking as an analyst rather than an actual witness. His cited source was Thomas Powell, a noted author who had contacted a U.S. counterintelligence agent who had seen the Venona transcript before it was made public in 1995

References and further reading

• Tanenhaus, Sam (1998). Whittaker Chambers: A Biography. Modern Library. ISBN 0-375-75145-9. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
• Managing Editor, Jeff Kisseloff (2003). "The Alger Hiss Story; Search for the Truth". Retrieved 2006-09-13. {{cite web}}: |author= has generic name (help); Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
• Gay, James Thomas (1998). "The Alger Hiss Spy Case". HistoryNet.com. Retrieved 2006-09-13.
• 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)
• 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)
• Weinstein, Allen (1997). Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case. Random House. ISBN 0-679-77338-X. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
• 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.
• Kisseloff, Jeff. "Distorted Reflections". Retrieved 2006-12-07. {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |month= (help) A detailed critique of the book Alger Hiss's Looking-Glass Wars
• Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Chairman (1997). "Report of the Commission On Protecting And Reducing Government Secrecy" (PDF). United States Government Printing Office. Retrieved 2006-09-13. {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameters: |coauthors= and |month= (help)

External links

• Navasky, Victor (1997). "Allen Weinstein's Docudrama". A review of Weinstein's "Perjury". The Nation.
• 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)
• Noe, Denise (2005). "The Alger Hiss Case". Crime Library. Courtroom Television Network. {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
• Kisseloff, Jeff Managing Editor (2006). "The Alger Hiss Story". {{cite web}}: |author= has generic name (help)
• Linder, Douglas (2003). "The Alger Hiss Trials: An Account". "Famous Trials". University Of Missouri-Kansas City School Of Law.
• Hermann, Donald H.J. (2005). "Deception And Betrayal: The Tragedy Of Alger Hiss". The Chicago Literary Club.
• Scott, Janny (1996). "Alger Hiss, 92, Central Figure in Long-Running Cold War Controversy". (Obituary). The New York Times.