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Alger Hiss (November 11, 1904 – November 15, 1996) was an American government official accused in 1948 of having spied for the
Soviet Union The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen nationa ...
in the 1930s. Statutes of limitations had expired for espionage, but he was convicted of perjury in connection with this charge in 1950. Before the trial Hiss was involved in the establishment of the United Nations, both as a
U.S. State Department The United States Department of State (DOS), or State Department, is an executive department of the U.S. federal government responsible for the country's foreign policy and relations. Equivalent to the ministry of foreign affairs of other n ...
official and as a U.N. official. In later life he worked as a lecturer and author. On August 3, 1948,
Whittaker Chambers Whittaker Chambers (born Jay Vivian Chambers; April 1, 1901 – July 9, 1961) was an American writer-editor, who, after early years as a Workers Party of America, Communist Party member (1925) and Soviet Union, Soviet spy (1932–1938), defe ...
, a former U.S. Communist Party member, testified under subpoena before the
House Un-American Activities Committee The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA), popularly dubbed the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), was an investigative United States Congressional committee, committee of the United States House of Representatives, create ...
(HUAC) that Hiss had secretly been a communist while in federal service. Hiss categorically denied the charge and subsequently sued Chambers for
libel Defamation is the act of communicating to a third party false statements about a person, place or thing that results in damage to its reputation. It can be spoken (slander) or written (libel). It constitutes a tort or a crime. The legal defi ...
. During the pretrial discovery process of the libel case, Chambers produced new evidence allegedly indicating that he and Hiss had been involved in espionage. A federal
grand jury A grand jury is a jury—a group of citizens—empowered by law to conduct legal proceedings, investigate potential criminal conduct, and determine whether criminal charges should be brought. A grand jury may subpoena physical evidence or a p ...
indicted Hiss on two counts of perjury. After a mistrial due to a hung jury, Hiss was tried a second time, and in January 1950, he was found guilty and received two concurrent five-year sentences, of which he eventually served three and a half years. Arguments about the case and the validity of the verdict took center stage in broader debates about the
Cold War The Cold War is a term commonly used to refer to a period of geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies, the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc. The term '' cold war'' is used because t ...
,
McCarthyism McCarthyism is the practice of making false or unfounded accusations of subversion and treason, especially when related to anarchism, communism and socialism, and especially when done in a public and attention-grabbing manner. The term origin ...
, and the extent of
Soviet espionage in the United States As early as the 1920s, the Soviet Union, through its GRU, OGPU, NKVD, and KGB intelligence agencies, used Russian and foreign-born nationals ( resident spies), as well as Communists of American origin, to perform espionage activities in the ...
. Since Hiss' conviction, statements by involved parties and newly exposed evidence have added to the dispute. In the 1990s, two former senior Soviet military officers responsible for the Soviet Union's military intelligence archives stated, following a search of those archives, that the "Russian intelligence service has no documents proving that Alger Hiss cooperated with our service somewhere or anywhere," and that Hiss "never had any relationship with Soviet intelligence." The 1995 Venona Papers prompted more support for the theory that he was a Soviet spy, but were not yet deemed conclusive by many sources. Author Anthony Summers argued in 2000 that since many relevant files continue to be unavailable, the Hiss controversy will continue to be debated, with political divisions marking belief in Hiss' innocence or guilt. Hiss maintained his innocence until his death.


Early life and family

Alger Hiss was one of five children born in
Baltimore Baltimore ( , locally: or ) is the most populous city in the U.S. state of Maryland, fourth most populous city in the Mid-Atlantic, and the 30th most populous city in the United States with a population of 585,708 in 2020. Baltimore was ...
, Maryland, to Mary "Minnie" Lavinia (née Hughes) and Charles Alger Hiss. Both parents came from substantial Baltimore families who could trace their roots to the middle of the eighteenth century. Hiss's paternal great-great-grandfather had emigrated from Germany in 1729, married well, and changed his surname from "Hesse" to "Hiss". Minnie Hughes had attended teacher's college and was active in Baltimore society. Shortly after his marriage at age 24, Charles Hiss entered the business world and joined the dry goods importing firm Daniel Miller and Co. He did well, becoming an executive and stockholder. When Charles's brother John died suddenly at the age of 33, Charles assumed financial and emotional responsibility for his brother's widow and six children in addition to his own expanding family. Charles also helped his wife's favorite brother, Albert Hughes, find work at Daniel Miller. Hughes at first distinguished himself and was promoted to treasurer of the firm, but then he became involved in a complicated business deal and was unable to meet the financial obligation that was part of a joint agreement. As a matter of honor, Charles Hiss felt compelled to sell all his stocks to make good his brother-in-law's debts, as well as to resign from the firm. This was in 1907, the year of a great financial panic. After inconclusive attempts by relatives to find him a job, Charles fell into a serious depression and committed suicide, cutting his throat with a razor. Minnie, who had made the most of her former prosperity and social position, now had to rely on her inheritance and assistance from family members. Alger Hiss was two years old at the time of his father's death, and his brother Donald was two months old. As was customary in those days, they were not told of the circumstances of Charles Hiss's death. When Alger learned of it inadvertently years later from neighbors, he angrily confronted his older brother Bosley, who then told him the truth. Shocked, Hiss resolved to devote the rest of his life to restoring the family's "good name". Although shadowed by melancholy, Hiss's early childhood, spent in rough-and-tumble games with his siblings and cousins who lived close by, was not unhappy. Their Baltimore neighborhood was described by columnist Murray Kempton as one of "shabby gentility." Hiss, however, portrayed the economic circumstances of his childhood as "modest", but "not particularly shabby". (Two further tragedies occurred when Hiss was in his twenties: his elder brother Bosley died of Bright's disease and his sister Mary Ann committed suicide.) Hiss learned to compartmentalize and to seek out paternal surrogates. At school, he was popular and high performing. He attended high school at Baltimore City College and college at
Johns Hopkins University Johns Hopkins University (Johns Hopkins, Hopkins, or JHU) is a private research university in Baltimore, Maryland. Founded in 1876, Johns Hopkins is the oldest research university in the United States and in the western hemisphere. It consi ...
, where he was voted "most popular student" by his classmates and graduated
Phi Beta Kappa The Phi Beta Kappa Society () is the oldest academic honor society in the United States, and the most prestigious, due in part to its long history and academic selectivity. Phi Beta Kappa aims to promote and advocate excellence in the liberal ...
. In 1929, he received his law degree from
Harvard Law School Harvard Law School (Harvard Law or HLS) is the law school of Harvard University, a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1817, it is the oldest continuously operating law school in the United States. Each c ...
, where he was a protégé of Felix Frankfurter, the future U.S. Supreme Court justice. During his time at Harvard, the famous murder trial of anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti took place, ending in their conviction and execution. Like Frankfurter, who wrote a book about the case, and like many prominent liberals of the day, Hiss maintained that Sacco and Vanzetti were convicted unjustly. Hiss served for a year as clerk to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., before joining
Choate, Hall & Stewart Choate Hall & Stewart LLP, commonly referred to as "Choate", is a Boston-based law firm. The firm is known for having a one-office approach to its operations. Recognition In 2019, The Vault named Choate one of the top ten law firms to work fo ...
, a Boston law firm, and later the New York law firm then known as Cotton, Franklin, Wright & Gordon.


Career

During the era of President
Franklin Delano Roosevelt Franklin Delano Roosevelt (; ; January 30, 1882April 12, 1945), often referred to by his initials FDR, was an American politician and attorney who served as the 32nd president of the United States from 1933 until his death in 1945. As the ...
's
New Deal The New Deal was a series of programs, public work projects, financial reforms, and regulations enacted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States between 1933 and 1939. Major federal programs agencies included the Civilian Con ...
, Hiss became a government attorney. In 1933, he served briefly at the
Justice Department A justice ministry, ministry of justice, or department of justice is a ministry or other government agency in charge of the administration of justice. The ministry or department is often headed by a minister of justice (minister for justice in a ...
and then became a temporary assistant on the Senate's Nye Committee, investigating cost overruns and alleged profiteering by military contractors during World War I. During this period, Hiss was also a member of the liberal legal team headed by Jerome Frank that defended the
Agricultural Adjustment Administration The Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) was a United States federal law of the New Deal era designed to boost agricultural prices by reducing surpluses. The government bought livestock for slaughter and paid farmers subsidies not to plant on part o ...
(AAA) against challenges to its legitimacy. Because of intense opposition from agribusiness in Arkansas, Frank and his left-wing assistants, who included future labor lawyer
Lee Pressman Lee Pressman (July 1, 1906 – November 20, 1969) was a labor attorney and earlier a US government functionary, publicly alleged in 1948 to have been a spy for Soviet intelligence during the mid-1930s (as a member of the Ware Group), following hi ...
, were fired in 1935 in what came to be known as "the purge of liberals". Hiss was not fired, but allegations that during this period he was connected with radicals on the
Agriculture Department An agriculture ministry (also called an) agriculture department, agriculture board, agriculture council, or agriculture agency, or ministry of rural development) is a ministry charged with agriculture. The ministry is often headed by a minister ...
's legal team were to be the source of future controversy. In the meantime, Hiss also served initially as "investigator" and then "legal assistant" (counsel) to the Nye Committee from July 1934 to August 1935. He "badgered" DuPont officials and questioned and cross-examined
Bernard Baruch Bernard Mannes Baruch (August 19, 1870 – June 20, 1965) was an American financier and statesman. After amassing a fortune on the New York Stock Exchange, he impressed President Woodrow Wilson by managing the nation's economic mobilization in W ...
on March 29, 1935. In 1947, Baruch and Hiss both attended the burial of Nicholas Murray Butler. In 1988, he called Baruch a "vain and overrated
Polonius Polonius is a character in William Shakespeare's play ''Hamlet''. He is chief counsellor of the play's ultimate villain, Claudius, and the father of Laertes and Ophelia. Generally regarded as wrong in every judgment he makes over the course of ...
much given to trite pronouncements about the nation". In 1936, Alger Hiss and his younger brother
Donald Hiss Donald Hiss (December 15, 1906 – May 18, 1989), also known as "Donie" and "Donnie", was the younger brother of Alger Hiss. Donald Hiss's name was mentioned during the 1948 hearings wherein his more famous and older brother, Alger, was a ...
began working under Cordell Hull in the
State Department The United States Department of State (DOS), or State Department, is an executive department of the U.S. federal government responsible for the country's foreign policy and relations. Equivalent to the ministry of foreign affairs of other na ...
. Alger was an assistant to Assistant Secretary of State Francis B. Sayre (son-in-law of
Woodrow Wilson Thomas Woodrow Wilson (December 28, 1856February 3, 1924) was an American politician and academic who served as the 28th president of the United States from 1913 to 1921. A member of the Democratic Party, Wilson served as the president of ...
) and then special assistant to the director of the Office of Far Eastern Affairs. From 1939 to 1944, Hiss was an assistant to Stanley Hornbeck, a special adviser to Cordell Hull on Far Eastern affairs. In 1944, Hiss was named Director of the Office of Special Political Affairs, a policy-making entity devoted to planning for post-war international organizations. Hiss served as executive secretary of the
Dumbarton Oaks Conference The Dumbarton Oaks Conference, or, more formally, the Washington Conversations on International Peace and Security Organization, was an international conference at which proposals for the establishment of a "general international organization", w ...
, which drew up plans for the future United Nations. In November 1944, Hull, who had led the United Nations project, retired as Secretary of State due to poor health and was succeeded by Undersecretary of State Edward Stettinius. In February 1945, as a member of the U.S. delegation headed by Stettinius, Hiss attended the
Yalta Conference The Yalta Conference (codenamed Argonaut), also known as the Crimea Conference, held 4–11 February 1945, was the World War II meeting of the heads of government of the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union to discuss the post ...
, where the Big Three, Franklin D. Roosevelt,
Joseph Stalin Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili; – 5 March 1953) was a Georgian revolutionary and Soviet Union, Soviet political leader who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. He held power as Ge ...
, and
Winston Churchill Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill (30 November 187424 January 1965) was a British statesman, soldier, and writer who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom twice, from 1940 to 1945 during the Second World War, and again from ...
, met to consolidate their alliance to forestall any possibility, now that the Soviets had entered German territory, that any of them might make a separate peace with the Nazi regime. Negotiations addressed the postwar division of Europe and configuration of its borders; reparations and de-Nazification; and the still unfinished plans, carried over from Dumbarton Oaks, for the United Nations. Before the conference took place, Hiss participated in the meetings where the American draft of the "Declaration of Liberated Europe" was created. The Declaration concerned the political future of Eastern Europe and critics on the right later charged that it made damaging concessions to the Soviets. Hiss stated that he was responsible for assembling background papers and documentation for the conference "and any general matters that might come up relating to the Far East or the Near East." Hiss drafted a memorandum arguing against Stalin's proposal (made at Dumbarton Oaks) to give one vote to each of the sixteen Soviet republics in the
United Nations General Assembly The United Nations General Assembly (UNGA or GA; french: link=no, Assemblée générale, AG) is one of the six principal organs of the United Nations (UN), serving as the main deliberative, policymaking, and representative organ of the UN. Curr ...
. Fearing isolation, Stalin hoped thus to counterbalance the votes of the many countries of the British Empire, who he anticipated would vote with Britain, and those of Latin America, who could be expected to vote in lockstep with the United States. In the final compromise offered by Roosevelt and Stettinius and accepted by Stalin, the Soviets obtained three votes: one each for the Soviet Union itself, the
Ukrainian SSR The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic ( uk, Украї́нська Радя́нська Соціалісти́чна Респу́бліка, ; russian: Украи́нская Сове́тская Социалисти́ческая Респ ...
, and the Belorussian SSR. Hiss was Secretary-General of the
United Nations Conference on International Organization The United Nations Conference on International Organization (UNCIO), commonly known as the San Francisco Conference, was a convention of delegates from 50 Allied nations that took place from 25 April 1945 to 26 June 1945 in San Francisco, Calif ...
(the convention that created the UN Charter), which was held in San Francisco from April 25, 1945 to June 26, 1945. Allen Weinstein wrote that Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet delegate to the conference, praised Hiss to his superior Stettinus for his "impartiality and fairness". Hiss later became full Director of the State Department's Office of Special Political Affairs. In late 1946, Hiss left government service to become president of the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP) is a nonpartisan international affairs think tank headquartered in Washington D.C. with operations in Europe, South and East Asia, and the Middle East as well as the United States. Founded i ...
, where he served until May 5, 1949, the end of the presidential term to which he had been elected, when he was forced to step down.


Accusation of espionage

On August 3, 1948,
Whittaker Chambers Whittaker Chambers (born Jay Vivian Chambers; April 1, 1901 – July 9, 1961) was an American writer-editor, who, after early years as a Workers Party of America, Communist Party member (1925) and Soviet Union, Soviet spy (1932–1938), defe ...
, a former Communist Party member, appeared before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) to denounce Alger Hiss. A senior editor at ''
Time Time is the continued sequence of existence and event (philosophy), events that occurs in an apparently irreversible process, irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future. It is a component quantity of various me ...
'' magazine, Chambers had written a scathingly satirical editorial critical of the
Yalta Yalta (: Я́лта) is a resort city on the south coast of the Crimean Peninsula surrounded by the Black Sea. It serves as the administrative center of Yalta Municipality, one of the regions within Crimea. Yalta, along with the rest of Cri ...
agreements. Chambers asserted that he had known Hiss as a member of "an underground organization of the United States
Communist Party A communist party is a political party that seeks to realize the socio-economic goals of communism. The term ''communist party'' was popularized by the title of '' The Manifesto of the Communist Party'' (1848) by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engel ...
" in the 1930s. pp. 5: pp. 316–317: pp 7: pp. 37, 46–47: pp. 153–157: pp. 163–170: pp. 499: pp. 502: pp. 519: pp. 512 The group, which Chambers called the " Ware Group", had been organized by agriculturalist Harold Ware, an American communist intent on organizing black and white tenant farmers in the American South against exploitation and debt peonage by the cotton industry (Ware had died in 1935). According to Chambers, "the purpose of this group at that time was not primarily espionage. Its original purpose was the communist infiltration of the American government. But espionage was certainly one of its eventual objectives." As journalist and author Tim Weiner points out, "This was a crucial point. Infiltration and invisible political influence were immoral, but arguably not illegal. Espionage was treason, traditionally punishable by death. The distinction was not lost on the cleverest member of HUAC, Congressman Richard Nixon.... He had been studying the FBI's files for five months, courtesy of
J. Edgar Hoover John Edgar Hoover (January 1, 1895 – May 2, 1972) was an American law enforcement administrator who served as the first Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). He was appointed director of the Bureau of Investigation  ...
. Nixon launched his political career in hot pursuit of Hiss and the alleged secret Communists of the New Deal." Rumors had circulated about Hiss since 1939, when Chambers, at the urging of anti-Stalinist Isaac Don Levine, had gone to Assistant Secretary of State
Adolf A. Berle Adolf Augustus Berle Jr. (; January 29, 1895 – February 17, 1971) was an American lawyer, educator, writer, and diplomat. He was the author of ''The Modern Corporation and Private Property'', a groundbreaking work on corporate governance, a pro ...
, Jr. and accused Hiss of having belonged to an underground communist cell at the Department of Agriculture. In 1942, Chambers repeated this allegation to the FBI. In 1945 two other sources appeared to implicate Hiss. In September 1945, Igor Gouzenko, a 26-year-old Ukrainian whose three-year tour as a cipher clerk stationed at the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa was coming to an end, defected from the Soviet Union and remained in Canada. In exchange for asylum, Gouzenko offered to Canadian authorities evidence about a Soviet espionage network actively working to acquire information about nuclear weapons, along with information that an unnamed assistant (or more precisely an "assistant to an assistant") to U.S. Secretary of State Stettinius was a Soviet agent. When informed of this, Hoover assumed Gouzenko was referring to Alger Hiss. Three months later (in December 1945),
Elizabeth Bentley Elizabeth Terrill Bentley (January 1, 1908 – December 3, 1963) was an American spy and member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). She served the Soviet Union from 1938 to 1945 until she defected from the Communist Party and Soviet intellige ...
, an American spy for the Soviet Union, who served also as a courier between communist groups, told the FBI, as documented in the FBI Silvermaster File that "At this time Kramer told me that the person who had originally taken Glasser away from Perlo's group was named Hiss and that he was in the U.S. State Department." Bentley also said that the man in question, whom she called "Eugene Hiss" worked in the State Department and was an adviser to Dean Acheson. In both cases (Gouzenko and Bentley), the FBI decided that Alger Hiss was the likely match. Hoover put a wiretap on Hiss's home phone and had him and his wife investigated and tailed for the next two years. In response to Chambers's accusations, Hiss protested his innocence and insisted on appearing before HUAC to clear himself. Testifying on August 5, 1948, he denied having ever been a communist or having personally met Chambers. Under fire from President Truman and the press, the Committee was reluctant to proceed with its investigation against so eminent a man. Congressman
Richard Nixon Richard Milhous Nixon (January 9, 1913April 22, 1994) was the 37th president of the United States, serving from 1969 to 1974. A member of the Republican Party, he previously served as a representative and senator from California and was ...
, however, who later described Hiss's demeanor that day as, "insolent", "condescending", and "insulting in the extreme", wanted to press on. Nixon had received secret information about the FBI's suspicions from
John Francis Cronin John Francis Cronin (1908–1994) was a Catholic priest of the Society of Saint Sulpice, who was an early advisor on anticommunism to freshman U.S. Representative Richard M. Nixon. Early life He was born October 4, 1908, in Glens Falls, New Y ...
, a
Roman Catholic Roman or Romans most often refers to: * Rome, the capital city of Italy *Ancient Rome, Roman civilization from 8th century BC to 5th century AD * Roman people, the people of ancient Rome *'' Epistle to the Romans'', shortened to ''Romans'', a let ...
priest who had infiltrated labor unions in Baltimore during World War II to report on communist activities and had been given access to FBI files. Writing in a paper titled "The Problem of American Communism In 1945", Cronin wrote, "In the State Department, the most influential Communist has been Alger Hiss." With some reluctance, the Committee voted to make Nixon chair of a subcommittee that would seek to determine who was lying, Hiss or Chambers, at least on the question of whether they knew one another. Shown a photograph of Chambers, Hiss conceded that the face "might look familiar" and asked to see Chambers in person. Confronted with him in person in a New York hotel where HUAC was holding session, Hiss admitted that he had indeed known Chambers, but under the name "George Crosley", a man who represented himself as a freelance writer. Hiss said that in the mid-1930s he had sublet his apartment to this "Crosley" and had given him an old car. Chambers, for his part, denied on the stand ever having used the alias Crosley, though he admitted to Hiss's lawyers in private testimony that it could have been one of his pen names. When Hiss and Chambers both appeared before a HUAC subcommittee on August 17, 1948, they had the following exchange: :HISS. Did you ever go under the name of George Crosley? :CHAMBERS. Not to my knowledge. :HISS. Did you ever sublet an apartment on Twenty-ninth Street from me? :CHAMBERS. No; I did not. :HISS. You did not? :CHAMBERS. No. :HISS. Did you ever spend any time with your wife and child in an apartment on Twenty-ninth Street in Washington when I was not there because I and my family were living on P Street? :CHAMBERS. I most certainly did. :HISS. You did or did not? :CHAMBERS. I did. :HISS. Would you tell me how you reconcile your negative answers with this affirmative answer? :CHAMBERS. Very easily, Alger. I was a Communist and you were a Communist. Chambers's statements, because they were made in a Congressional hearing, were privileged against defamation suits; Hiss challenged Chambers to repeat them without benefit of such protection. When, on the national radio program ''
Meet the Press ''Meet the Press'' is a weekly American television Sunday morning talk shows, news/interview program broadcast on NBC. It is the List of longest-running television shows by category, longest-running program on American television, though the curr ...
'', Chambers publicly called Hiss a communist, Hiss had attorney
William L. Marbury Jr. William Luke Marbury Jr. (September 12, 1901 – March 5, 1988) was a prominent 20th-century American lawyer who practiced with his family's law firm of Marbury, Miller & Evans (later Piper & Marbury, Piper Marbury Rudnick & Wolfe, Piper Rudnick ...
file a
libel Defamation is the act of communicating to a third party false statements about a person, place or thing that results in damage to its reputation. It can be spoken (slander) or written (libel). It constitutes a tort or a crime. The legal defi ...
lawsuit against him. Chambers retaliated by claiming Hiss was not merely a communist, but also a spy, a charge he had not made earlier; and, on November 17, 1948, to support his explosive allegations he produced physical evidence consisting of sixty-five pages of re-typed State Department documents, the last of which was dated April 1, 1938, plus four notes in Hiss's handwriting summarizing the contents of State Department cables. These became known as the "Baltimore documents". Chambers claimed Hiss had given them to him in 1938 and that Priscilla had retyped them (Hiss could not type) on the Hisses' Woodstock typewriter for Chambers to pass along to the Soviets. One of the handwritten notes copied the contents of a telegram (received January 28, 1938) related to the November and December 1937 arrest and disappearance in Moscow of a Latvian-born man and his wife, an American citizen. Under questioning, neither Hiss nor his superior, Francis Sayre, recollected the incident. Hiss initially denied writing the note, but experts confirmed it was his handwriting. Interrogated in 1949, Sayre stated that the telegram was unrelated to Hiss's duties, which concerned trade matters and told his questioners, "He could not understand why he was on the distribution list for this cable nor why the note would be made on it or especially why an exact copy should be made." In their previous testimony, both Chambers and Hiss had denied having committed espionage. By introducing the Baltimore documents, Chambers admitted he had previously lied, opening both Hiss and himself to perjury charges. Chambers also gave a new date for his own break with the Communist Party, an important point in his accusations against Hiss. For over nine years, beginning September 1, 1939, he had claimed to have quit the Party in 1937. Chambers now began to claim the actual date was sometime in early March 1938, the year of the "Baltimore documents", before finally settling during the trial, on April 15, 1938. On December 2, Chambers led HUAC investigators to a pumpkin patch on his
Maryland Maryland ( ) is a state in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. It shares borders with Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia to its south and west; Pennsylvania to its north; and Delaware and the Atlantic Ocean t ...
farm; from a hollowed-out pumpkin in which he had hidden them the previous day, he produced five rolls of 35 mm film that he said came from Hiss in 1938, as well. While some of the film was undeveloped and some contained images of trivial content such as publicly available Navy documents concerning the painting of fire extinguishers, there were also images of State Department documents that were classified at the time. As a consequence of the revelation's dramatic staging, both the film and the Baltimore documents soon became known collectively as the "
Pumpkin Papers The Pumpkin Papers are a set of typewritten, handwritten, and microfilmed documents, stolen from the US federal government (thus information leaks) by members of the Ware Group and other Soviet spy networks in Washington, DC, during 1937-1938, wi ...
".


Perjury trials and conviction

The grand jury charged Hiss with two counts of perjury—it did not indict him for espionage since the period of limitations had run out. Chambers was never charged with a crime. Hiss went to trial twice. The first trial, presided over by Judge Samuel Kaufman, started on May 31, 1949, and ended in a hung jury on July 7. Chambers admitted on the witness stand that he had previously committed perjury several times while he was under oath, including deliberately falsifying key dates in his story. Hiss's character witnesses at his first trial included such notables as future Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, Supreme Court Justices Felix Frankfurter, and Stanley Reed, and former Democratic presidential candidate John W. Davis. President Truman famously called the investigation "a red herring". The second trial, presided over by Judge Henry W. Goddard, lasted from November 17, 1949, to January 21, 1950. At both trials, a key to the prosecution's case was testimony from expert witnesses, stating that identifying characteristics of the typed Baltimore documents matched samples typed on a typewriter owned by the Hisses at the time of his alleged espionage work with Chambers. The prosecution also presented as evidence the typewriter itself. Given away years earlier, it had been located by defense investigators. This trial resulted in an eight-to-four deadlocked jury. "That, according to one of Hiss's friends and lawyers, Helen Buttenweiser, was the only time that she had ever seen Alger shocked—stunned by the fact that eight of his fellow citizens did not believe him." In the second trial,
Hede Massing Hede Tune Massing, née "Hedwig Tune" (also "Hede Eisler," "Hede Gumperz," and "Redhead") (6 January 1900 – 8 March 1981), was an Austrian actress in Vienna and Berlin, communist, and Soviet intelligence operative in Europe and the United Sta ...
, an Austrian-born confessed Soviet spy who was being threatened with deportation, and whom the first judge had not permitted to testify, provided some slight corroboration of Chambers's story. She recounted meeting Hiss at a party in 1935. Massing also described how Hiss had tried to recruit Noel Field, another Soviet spy at State, to switch from Massing's ring to his own. This time the jury found Hiss guilty. According to Anthony Summers, "Hiss spoke only two sentences in court after he had been found guilty. The first was to thank the judge. The second was to assert that one day in the future it would be disclosed how forgery by typewriter had been committed." On January 25, 1950, Judge Goddard sentenced Hiss to five years' imprisonment on each of the two counts, to run concurrently. At a subsequent press conference, Secretary of State
Dean Acheson Dean Gooderham Acheson (pronounced ; April 11, 1893October 12, 1971) was an American statesman and lawyer. As the 51st U.S. Secretary of State, he set the foreign policy of the Harry S. Truman administration from 1949 to 1953. He was also Truma ...
reacted emotionally, affirming, "I do not intend to turn my back on Alger Hiss." Acheson quoted Jesus in the Bible: "I was a Stranger and ye took me in; Naked, and ye clothed me; I was sick and ye visited me; I was in prison and ye came unto me." Acheson's remarks enraged Nixon, who called Acheson's words sacrilege. The verdict was upheld by the
United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit (in case citations, 2d Cir.) is one of the thirteen United States Courts of Appeals. Its territory comprises the states of Connecticut, New York and Vermont. The court has appellate ju ...
, and the
Supreme Court of the United States The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is the highest court in the federal judiciary of the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all U.S. Federal tribunals in the United States, federal court cases, and over Stat ...
denied a writ of certiorari. The case heightened public concern about Soviet espionage penetration of the U.S. government in the 1930s and 1940s. As a well-educated and highly connected government official from an old American family, Alger Hiss did not fit the profile of a typical spy. Publicity surrounding the case thrust Richard M. Nixon into the public spotlight, helping him move from the U.S. House of Representatives to the U.S. Senate in 1950, to the vice-presidency of the United States in 1952, and finally to the presidency in 1968. Senator
Joseph McCarthy Joseph Raymond McCarthy (November 14, 1908 – May 2, 1957) was an American politician who served as a Republican United States Senate, U.S. Senator from the state of Wisconsin from 1947 until his death in 1957. Beginning in 1950, McCarth ...
made his famous speech at Wheeling, West Virginia, two weeks after the Hiss verdict, launching his career as the nation's most visible anti-communist.


Incarceration

On 22 March 1951, Alger Hiss was sent to a maximum security federal facility. Although he had been sentenced to five years' imprisonment, Hiss served only three years and eight months in Lewisburg Federal Prison. He was released from prison on November 27, 1954. While in prison, Hiss acted as a volunteer attorney, adviser, and tutor for many of his fellow inmates.


Post-incarceration

After his release in 1954 at age 50, Hiss, who had been
disbarred Disbarment, also known as striking off, is the removal of a lawyer from a bar association or the practice of law, thus revoking their law license or admission to practice law. Disbarment is usually a punishment for unethical or criminal conduc ...
, worked as a salesman for the stationery company S. Novick & Sons located in the Puck Building, 295 Lafayette St. in New York City. From 1958-1960 he worked as an administrative assistant to R. Andrew Smith, a comb manufacturer, earning $20,000/year. In 1957, he published ''In the Court of Public Opinion'', a book challenging in detail the prosecution's case against him, and maintaining the typewritten documents traced to his typewriter had been forged. Hiss separated from his first wife, Priscilla, in 1959, though they remained married until her death in 1984. In 1985 he married Isabel Johnson, who had been living with him since soon after they met in 1960. On November 11, 1962, following Richard Nixon's failed 1962 bid for governor of California, Hiss appeared in a segment titled "The Political Obituary of Richard M. Nixon" on the '' Howard K. Smith: News and Comment'' show on ABC television. (The ''Chicago Tribune'' reported targets of Hiss's "invective" and whom he "denounced as conspirators in a monstrous plot to convict him on concocted evidence" included: the presiding judge at his second trial, the three appellate court judges who rejected his appeal, J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, assistant attorney general Alexander M. Campbell, federal prosecutor Thomas F. Murphy, members of the New York grand jury who indicted him, jury members in his two trials who convicted him, and HUAC members and particularly Richard Nixon and
Karl Mundt Karl Earl Mundt (June 3, 1900August 16, 1974) was an American educator and a Republican member of the United States Congress, representing South Dakota in the United States House of Representatives (1939–48) and in the United States Senate (1 ...
".) His appearance led sponsors to withdraw from Smith's program when viewers bombarded ABC with complaints about letting a convicted perjurer appear on the air. Smith's show was cancelled in June 1963. The five rolls of 35 mm film known as the "pumpkin papers" had been characterized as highly classified and too sensitive to reveal and were thought until late 1974 to be locked in HUAC files. In 1975, independent researcher Stephen W. Salant, an economist at the University of Michigan, sued the U.S. Justice Department when it denied his request for access to them under the
Freedom of Information Act Freedom of Information Act may refer to the following legislations in different jurisdictions which mandate the national government to disclose certain data to the general public upon request: * Freedom of Information Act 1982, the Australian act * ...
. On July 31, 1975, as a result of this lawsuit and follow-on suits filed by Peter Irons and by Alger Hiss and
William A. Reuben William A. Reuben (1915 or 1916 – May 31, 2004) was an American journalist and writer who focused on the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Rosenberg and Alger Hiss, Hiss cases. Background Reuben was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1915 or 1916. He st ...
, the Justice Department released copies of the "pumpkin papers" that had been used to implicate Hiss. One roll of film turned out to be totally blank due to overexposure, two others are faintly legible copies of non-classified Navy Department documents relating to such subjects as life rafts and fire extinguishers, and the remaining two are photographs of the State Department documents that had been introduced at the two Hiss trials. A few days after the release of the Pumpkin Papers, on August 5, 1975, Hiss was readmitted to the Massachusetts
bar Bar or BAR may refer to: Food and drink * Bar (establishment), selling alcoholic beverages * Candy bar * Chocolate bar Science and technology * Bar (river morphology), a deposit of sediment * Bar (tropical cyclone), a layer of cloud * Bar ( ...
. The state's Supreme Judicial Court overruled its Committee of Bar Overseers and stated in a unanimous decision that, despite his conviction, Hiss had demonstrated the "moral and intellectual fitness" required to be an attorney. Hiss was the first lawyer ever readmitted to the Massachusetts bar after a major criminal conviction. In 1988 Hiss wrote an autobiography, ''Recollections of a Life'', in which he maintained his innocence. He fought his perjury conviction until his death from
emphysema Emphysema, or pulmonary emphysema, is a lower respiratory tract disease, characterised by air-filled spaces ( pneumatoses) in the lungs, that can vary in size and may be very large. The spaces are caused by the breakdown of the walls of the alv ...
on November 15, 1996, at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, four days after his 92nd birthday. His friends and family continue to insist on his innocence.


Personal life

In 1929, Hiss married Priscilla Fansler Hobson, a Bryn Mawr graduate and grade school teacher. Priscilla, previously married to Thayer Hobson, had a three-year-old son, Timothy Hobson (September 19, 1926 – January 8, 2018). Hiss and Priscilla had a son, Tony Hiss. The couple separated in 1959 after 30 years of marriage, five years after his incarceration. In the 1960's Hiss was introduced to Isabel (Dowden) Johnson, a model, freelance writer and editor. Though Hiss asked Priscilla for a divorce so they could marry, she did not grant him one. Johnson had a previous relationship with Communist writer Howard Fast, recipient of the Stalin Peace Prize, and had briefly married Communist screenwriter Lester Cole, of the Hollywood Ten. After Priscilla’s death in 1984, Hiss and Johnson married in 1986. Hiss was an Episcopalian.


Later evidence, for and against


Testimony by Bullitt and Weyl

In 1952, former US Ambassador to France
William C. Bullitt William Christian Bullitt Jr. (January 25, 1891 – February 15, 1967) was an American diplomat, journalist, and novelist. He is known for his special mission to negotiate with Lenin on behalf of the Paris Peace Conference, often recalled as a mi ...
testified before the McCarran Committee (the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee) that in 1939, Premier Édouard Daladier had advised him of French intelligence reports that two State Department officials named Hiss were Soviet agents. When asked about it the next day, Daladier, then 68 years old, told reporters that he did not recall this conversation from 13 years previously. Also called to testify before the McCarran committee was economist Nathaniel Weyl, a former Communist Party member "at large" who had worked for the Department of Agriculture during the early days of the
New Deal The New Deal was a series of programs, public work projects, financial reforms, and regulations enacted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States between 1933 and 1939. Major federal programs agencies included the Civilian Con ...
and had become disillusioned with what he considered the underhanded methods of the Communist Party. In 1950 Weyl had been interviewed by the FBI and had told them that in 1933 he had belonged to a secret Communist Party unit along with Harold Ware and
Lee Pressman Lee Pressman (July 1, 1906 – November 20, 1969) was a labor attorney and earlier a US government functionary, publicly alleged in 1948 to have been a spy for Soviet intelligence during the mid-1930s (as a member of the Ware Group), following hi ...
and confirmed that Alger Hiss had been present at some meetings held at Ware's sister's violin studio. In 1950 Weyl, however, had published an anti-communist book, ''Treason: The Story of Disloyalty and Betrayal in American History'' (1950) that made no mention of the so-called "Ware Group". Moreover, in this book, which came out shortly after Hiss's conviction, Weyl expressed doubt that Alger Hiss had been guilty of espionage.


Forgery by typewriter hypothesis

At both trials, FBI typewriter experts testified that the Baltimore documents in Chambers's possession matched samples of typing done in the 1930s by Priscilla Hiss on the Hisses' home typewriter, a Woodstock brand. At both trials, the testimony was directed to comparing two sets of typed documents and not to the typewriter eventually submitted into evidence. As early as December 1948 the chief investigator for the Hiss defense, Horace W. Schmahl, set off a race to find Hiss's typewriter. The FBI, with superior resources, was also searching for the typewriter, which the Hiss family had discarded some years earlier. Nevertheless, Schmahl was able to track it down first, and the Hiss defense introduced it with the intention of showing that its typeface would not be a match for that on the FBI's documents. Surprisingly, however, the typefaces proved to be an excellent match and confirmed the FBI's evidence. Schmahl subsequently changed sides and went to work for the prosecution. After Hiss had gone to prison, his lawyer, Chester T. Lane, acting on a tip he had received from someone who had worked with Schmahl that Hiss might have been framed, filed a motion in January 1952 for a new trial. Lane sought to show that (1) forgery by typewriter was feasible and (2) such forgery had occurred in the Hiss case and the forgery was responsible for the spy papers. Unaware that the feasibility of such forgeries had already been established throughout the War by the military intelligence services that engaged in such practices, the Hiss defense sought to establish feasibility directly by hiring a civilian typewriter expert,
Martin Tytell Martin Kenneth Tytell (December 20, 1913 – September 11, 2008) was an expert in manual typewriters described by '' The New York Times'' as having an "unmatched knowledge of typewriters". The postal service would deliver to his store lette ...
, to create a typewriter that would be indistinguishable from the one the Hisses owned. Tytell spent two years creating a facsimile Woodstock typewriter whose print characteristics would match the peculiarities of the Hiss typewriter. To demonstrate that forgery by typewriter was not merely a theoretical possibility but had actually occurred in the Hiss case, the defense sought to show that Exhibit #UUU was not Hiss's old machine but a newer one altered to type like it. According to former Woodstock executives, the production date of a machine could be inferred from the machine's serial number. The serial number on the Exhibit #UUU typewriter indicated that it would have been ''manufactured'' after the man who sold the Hiss machine had retired from the company and the salesman insisted that he did not sell any typewriters after his retirement. Decades later, when FBI files were disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act, it turned out that the FBI had also doubted that the trial exhibit was Hiss's machine and for exactly the same reasons; although the FBI expressed these concerns internally as the first trial was about to begin, the public did not learn about the FBI's doubts until the mid-1970s. To explain why typing from Exhibit #UUU seemed indistinguishable from the typing on Hiss's old machine, Lane assembled experts prepared to testify that Exhibit #UUU had been tampered with in a way inconsistent with professional repair work to make it type like Hiss's old typewriter. In addition, experts were prepared to testify that Priscilla Hiss was not the typist of the Baltimore documents. In summarizing the conclusions of the forensic experts he had assembled in his motion for a new trial, Lane told the court, "I no longer just question the authenticity of Woodstock N230099. I now say to the Court that Woodstock N230099—the typewriter in evidence at the trials—is a fake machine. I present in affidavit form, and will be able to produce at the hearing, expert testimony that this machine is a deliberately fabricated job, a new type face on an old body. This being so, it can only have been planted on the defense by or on behalf of Whittaker Chambers as part of his plot for the false incrimination of Alger Hiss." In July 1952 Judge Goddard denied Hiss's motion for a new trial, expressing great skepticism that Chambers had the resources, knew how to commit forgery by typewriter, and would have known where to plant such a fake machine so it would be found. In his decision, Goddard did not address the possibility, raised by Hiss's defenders, that someone other than Chambers, namely Horace Schmahl and/or his associates on the prosecution side, might have been involved in faking the typewriter. In 1976, Hiss called ex-FBI official
William C. Sullivan William Cornelius Sullivan (May 12, 1912 – November 9, 1977) was a Federal Bureau of Investigation official who directed the agency's domestic intelligence operations from 1961 to 1971. Sullivan was forced out of the FBI at the end of Septembe ...
, who recounted in his 1979 memoir:
In 1976, five years after I left the FBI, I got a telephone call at my home in New Hampshire from Alger Hiss. Still working on his case, he wanted me to tell him whether the typewriter that helped convict him of a perjury charge was a fake which had been put together at the FBI Laboratory.
Although I never worked on the Hiss case myself, I knew that we were giving Richard Nixon, who was in charge of the investigation, every possible assistance. Had Nixon asked the FBI to manufacture evidence to provide his case against Hiss, Hoover would have been only too glad to oblige. I told Hiss that the typewriter was not made in the FBI Lab. What I didn't tell him was that even if we had wanted to, we simply wouldn't have been capable of it.
Based on Justice Department documents released in 1976, the Hiss defense filed a petition in federal court in July 1978 for a writ of '' coram nobis'', asking that the guilty verdict be overturned due to prosecutorial misconduct. In 1982, the Federal Court denied the petition, and in 1983 the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal. In the writ, Hiss's attorneys argued the following: * The FBI illegally withheld important evidence from the Hiss defense team, specifically that typewritten documents could be forged. Unbeknownst to the defense, military intelligence operatives in World War II, a decade before the trials, "could reproduce faultlessly the imprint of any typewriter on earth". * With regard to the Woodstock No. 230099 typewriter introduced as Exhibit #UUU by the defense at the trial, the FBI knew there was an inconsistency between its serial number and the manufacture date of Hiss's machine 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 FBI had conducted illegal surveillance of Hiss before and during the trials, including phone taps and mail openings. Also that the prosecution had withheld from Hiss and his lawyers the records of this surveillance, none of which provided any evidence that Hiss was a spy or a communist. Federal Judge Owen, in denying Hiss's ''coram nobis'' petition, quoted verbatim two points made by Judge Goddard in denying Hiss's appeal for a new trial 30 years earlier, namely, that "there is not a trace of any evidence that Chambers had the mechanical skills, tools, equipment or material for such a difficult task s typewriter forgery" and that "If Chambers had constructed a duplicate machine, how would he have known where to plant it so that it would be found by Hiss?" Stephen Salant, whose FOIA requests had revealed to the public the contents of the "pumpkin papers", has documented that Schmahl was a trained Army "spy-catcher" (as they called themselves), a special agent in the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC). While on the payroll of the Hiss defense and searching for Hiss's typewriter, Schmahl confided to the FBI that his "present employment" in December 1948 was with Military Intelligence; his claim has not yet been independently verified. At the Military Intelligence Training Center, CIC agents learned the rudiments of forgery and how to detect it through matching of typed samples with the typewriter that produced them. During the 1940s the CIC's domestic surveillance of civilians was extensive but so covert that it usually escaped notice. When detected, undercover CIC agents were often mistaken for FBI agents, since only the Bureau was authorized to investigate civilians. During the 1930s Army counterintelligence monitored another suspected communist connected to Chambers, Franklin Vincent Reno, a civilian employed at the Aberdeen Proving Ground, who shortly afterwards passed information about U.S. Army weapons to Chambers. It is not known if U.S. Army counterintelligence monitored Chambers' other associates, but when Hiss presided over the UN Charter Conference, more than a hundred undercover CIC agents were in attendance. In his 1976 memoir, former
White House The White House is the official residence and workplace of the president of the United States. It is located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C., and has been the residence of every U.S. president since John Adams in ...
counsel John Dean states that President Nixon's chief counsel Charles Colson told him that Nixon had admitted in a conversation that HUAC had fabricated a typewriter, saying, "We built one on the Hiss case." According to Anthony Summers, "When Dean's book was published, Colson protested that he had 'no recollection of Nixon's having said the typewriter was 'phonied,'" and Nixon himself characterized the claim as 'totally false.' Dean, however, insisted that his contemporaneous notes confirmed that Colson had quoted the President as he indicated and seemed serious when he did so." Summers and others suggest that Dean's version of events is plausible: "'Had Nixon asked the FBI to manufacture evidence to prove his case against Hiss,' opined former FBI Assistant Director Sullivan, 'Hoover would actually been only too glad to oblige.'" As to whether Nixon would actually have gone as far as to frame Hiss, Summers notes, "the later record includes disquieting instances of forgery or planting false information." Cold War historian John V. Fleming disagrees, arguing that on the White House tapes Nixon never says anything that would have corroborated Colson's statement to John Dean about forging a typewriter in the Hiss case. Fleming and others maintain that the indistinct phrase during a conversation with John Dean that sounded to certain transcribers like "we made a typewriter" is actually a reference to Hiss's legal team. Throughout the tapes Nixon stresses how he had tried Hiss in the press, not the law courts, because that's how these things were done:
We won the Hiss case in the papers. We did. I had to leak stuff all over the place. Because the Justice Department would not prosecute it. Hoover didn't even cooperate.... It was won in the papers. I leaked out the papers.... I leaked out the testimony. I had Hiss convicted before he ever got to the grand jury.... Go back and read the chapter on the Hiss case in ''
Six Crises 6 is a number, numeral, and glyph. 6 or six may also refer to: * AD 6, the sixth year of the AD era * 6 BC, the sixth year before the AD era * The month of June Science * Carbon, the element with atomic number 6 * 6 Hebe, an asteroid People ...
'' and you'll see how it was done. It wasn't done waiting for the goddamn courts or the attorney general or the FBI.
According to Anthony Summers:
The one substantive piece of information indicating typewriter forgery features the OSS and its chief, William Donovan. In late 1948, when the Hiss defense and the FBI began hunting for the Woodstock typewriter, a man named Horace Schmahl joined the defense team as an investigator. Schmahl had worked for either the OSS or army intelligence during the war, then joined the Central Intelligence Group, which operated between the closedown of the OSS and the inception of the CIA. After his stint for the Hiss side, Schmahl defected to the prosecution team.
Against the forged typewriter theory Allen Weinstein writes:
there existed any persons with the means, motive, and opportunity to "substitute" a different Woodstock for the Hiss machine in the months after Hiss's indictment, the evidence ... indicates the possible conspirators, Mike Catlett and Donald Hiss, who for two months withheld knowledge from Alger's lawyers that the typewriter had been traced to Ira Lockey.


Noel Field

In 1992, records were found in Hungarian Interior Ministry archives in which self-confessed Soviet spy Noel Field named Alger Hiss as a fellow agent. An American citizen from a Quaker family who had grown up in Switzerland, Field attended Harvard and worked in the US Foreign Service from 1929 until 1936, when he left the State Department for a job at the League of Nations in Geneva, helping refugees from the Spanish Civil War. During World War II, Field, who never concealed he was a communist, headed a Unitarian Services organization to aid displaced persons in Marseilles, before fleeing to Geneva, where he collaborated with Allen Dulles of the OSS (who was based in Bern). In 1948, when the Hiss trials started, Field and his German wife were still living in Switzerland. By 1949 Field was broke, having been fired from the U.S.-based Unitarian Service Committee for his communist associations. Wishing to avoid returning to the United States and possibly having to testify before Congress, Field traveled to
Prague Prague ( ; cs, Praha ; german: Prag, ; la, Praga) is the capital and largest city in the Czech Republic, and the historical capital of Bohemia. On the Vltava river, Prague is home to about 1.3 million people. The city has a temperate ...
, hoping to be hired as a lecturer at the
Charles University ) , image_name = Carolinum_Logo.svg , image_size = 200px , established = , type = Public, Ancient , budget = 8.9 billion CZK , rector = Milena Králíčková , faculty = 4,057 , administrative_staff = 4,026 , students = 51,438 , under ...
. Instead, he was seized by Stalinist security services from Poland and Czechoslovakia and secretly imprisoned in Hungary. Field was accused of having organized an anti-communist resistance network in Eastern Europe for the OSS during the war and later for the new CIA and was held for five years in solitary confinement. Repeatedly interrogated under rigorous torture, Field broke down and confessed to being "head of the U.S. Secret Service", under his controller, Allen Dulles, "the famous pro-Nazi OSS spymaster". While being "rehabilitated" after the torture had ceased, Field referred four times to Hiss as a Soviet agent, for example: "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." This agreed with
Hede Massing Hede Tune Massing, née "Hedwig Tune" (also "Hede Eisler," "Hede Gumperz," and "Redhead") (6 January 1900 – 8 March 1981), was an Austrian actress in Vienna and Berlin, communist, and Soviet intelligence operative in Europe and the United Sta ...
's assertion to US authorities in 1947 that when she attempted to recruit Noel Field for one Soviet spy network (the
OGPU The Joint State Political Directorate (OGPU; russian: Объединённое государственное политическое управление) was the intelligence and state security service and secret police of the Soviet Union f ...
), Field had replied that he already worked for another (the GRU). (Massing repeated this story at Hiss's second trial when she testified that at a party at Noel Field's house in 1935 she had obliquely joked with Hiss about recruiting Noel Field.) In 1954, the Hungarian secret police released Field, exonerating him. He then formally wrote to the Communist Party's Central Committee in Moscow stating for the record that the tortures he had undergone in captivity had made him "confess more and more lies as truth". Hiss's defenders argue that Field's implications of Hiss may well have been among those lies. Field remained in communist Hungary until his death in 1970. In public, Field continued to maintain Hiss was innocent and, in 1957, wrote Hiss a letter calling Hede Massing's dinner party story "the false testimony of a perjured witness" and an "outrageous lie". note #76 and pg. 119,


Venona and "ALES"

In 1995, the CIA and the
NSA The National Security Agency (NSA) is a national-level intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense, under the authority of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). The NSA is responsible for global monitoring, collec ...
for the first time made public the existence of the World War II
Venona project The Venona project was a United States counterintelligence program initiated during World War II by the United States Army's Signal Intelligence Service (later absorbed by the National Security Agency), which ran from February 1, 1943, until Oc ...
, which, beginning in 1943, had decrypted or partially decrypted thousands of telegrams sent from 1940 to 1948 to the primary Soviet foreign intelligence agency—for most of that period, the
NKVD The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (russian: Наро́дный комиссариа́т вну́тренних дел, Naródnyy komissariát vnútrennikh del, ), abbreviated NKVD ( ), was the interior ministry of the Soviet Union. ...
—by its U.S. operatives. Although known to the FBI, Venona had been kept secret even from President Truman. One cable, Venona #1822, mentioned a Soviet spy codenamed "ALES" who worked with a group of "Neighbors"—members of another Soviet intelligence organization, such as the military's GRU. FBI Special Agent Robert J. Lamphere, who supervised the FBI's spy chasing squad, concluded that the codename "ALES" was "probably Alger Hiss". In 1997, Allen Weinstein, in the second edition of his 1978 book '' Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case'', calls the Venona evidence "persuasive but not conclusive". The bipartisan Moynihan Commission on Government Secrecy, chaired by Democratic Senator
Daniel Patrick Moynihan Daniel Patrick Moynihan (March 16, 1927 – March 26, 2003) was an American politician, diplomat and sociologist. A member of the Democratic Party, he represented New York in the United States Senate from 1977 until 2001 and served as a ...
, however, stated in its findings that year: "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 their numerous books, Harvey Klehr, professor of political science at Emory University, and John Earl Haynes, historian of twentieth-century politics at the Library of Congress, have mounted an energetic defense of Lamphere's conclusion that ALES indeed referred to Alger Hiss. For an assessment of Haynes and Klehr's perspective on the role of the American Communist Party in the 1930s, se
James T. Patterson, "The Enemy Within"
''The Atlantic Monthly'' (October 1998).
National Security Agency The National Security Agency (NSA) is a national-level intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense, under the authority of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). The NSA is responsible for global monitoring, collecti ...
analysts have also gone on record asserting that ALES could only have been Alger Hiss. Th
Venona transcript # 1822
sent March 30, 1945, from the Soviets' Washington station chief to Moscow, appears to indicate that ALES attended the February 4–11, 1945, Yalta conference and then went to Moscow. Hiss did attend Yalta and then traveled to Moscow with Secretary of State Stettinius. Some, however, question whether Venona #1822 constitutes definitive proof that ALES was Hiss. Hiss's lawyer, John Lowenthal argued: * ALES was said to be the leader of a small group of espionage agents but, apart from using his wife as a typist and Chambers as courier, Hiss was alleged by the prosecution to have acted alone. The CIA, however, concluded the "small group" comprised Alger, his wife Priscilla, and brother Donald. * ALES was a GRU (military intelligence) agent who obtained military intelligence and only rarely provided State Department material. In contrast, during his trial, Alger Hiss, an employee of the State Department, was accused of having obtained only non-military information, and the papers he was accused of having passed to the Soviets on a regular basis were non-military, State Department documents. * Even had Hiss been a spy as alleged, after 1938 he would have been unlikely to have continued espionage activities as ALES did, since in 1938 Whittaker Chambers had broken with the Communist Party and gone into hiding, threatening to denounce his Communist Party colleagues unless they followed suit. Had Hiss been ALES, his cover would thus have been in extreme jeopardy and it would have been too risky for any Soviet agency to continue using him. *Lowenthal suggests that ALES was not at the Yalta conference at all and that the cable instead was directed to Soviet deputy foreign minister Andrey Vyshinsky. According to Lowenthal, in paragraph six of Venona #1822, the GRU asks Vyshinsky to get in touch with ALES to convey thanks from the GRU for a job well done—which would have been unnecessary if ALES had actually gone to Moscow, because the GRU could have thanked him there in person. Eduard Mark of the Center for Air Force History hotly disputed this analysis. In 2005, NSA released the original Russian of the Venona texts. At a symposium held at the Center for Cryptologic History that year, intelligence historian John R. Schindler concluded that the Russian text of Venona #1822 made clear that ALES was indeed at Yalta: "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." Rebutting Lowenthal's other points, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr argued that: * None of the evidence presented at the Hiss trial precludes the possibility that Hiss could have 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 1945 when Elizabeth Bentley defected, so the Soviets could in theory have considered it an acceptable risk for him continue his espionage work even after Chambers's 1938 defection. * Vyshinsky 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., rendering Lowenthal's analysis impossible. An earlier Venona document, #1579, had actually mentioned "HISS" by name. This partially decrypted cable consists of fragments of a 1943 message from the GRU chief in New York to headquarters in Moscow and reads: "from the State Department by name of HISS" (with "HISS" "spelled out in the Latin alphabet", according to a footnote by the cryptanalysts). "HISS" could refer either to Alger or Donald Hiss, both State Department officials at that time. Lowenthal argued that had Alger Hiss really been a spy, the GRU would not have mentioned his real name in a coded transmission, since this was contrary to their usual practice. At an April 2007 symposium, authors Kai Bird and Svetlana Chervonnaya postulated that, based on the movements of officials present at Yalta, Wilder Foote, a U.S. diplomat, not Hiss, was the best match for ALES. They note Foote was in Mexico City when a Soviet cable placed ALES there, whereas Hiss had left several days earlier for Washington (see above). In response, Haynes and Klehr point out that Foote doesn't fit other aspects of the description of ALES (Foote was publishing newspapers in Vermont at the time when ALES was said to have been working for Soviet military intelligence) and suggest that the cable came from someone who managed KGB assets (rather than GRU assets like ALES) and may have been mistaken when he stated that ALES was still in Mexico City. Mark also disputes that Foote was ALES, arguing that Foote was never shown to be associated with the communists or any foreign intelligence services; Hiss was the "one possible candidate" who could have been ALES, Mark contends.


Oleg Gordievsky

In 1985, a high-ranking KGB agent, Oleg Gordievsky (b. 1938), who was recruited in 1974 as a British double agent, defected and wrote a series of memoirs, in one of which, ''The KGB'' (1990), he recalled attending a lecture given before a KGB audience by Iskhak Abdulovich Akhmerov, who identified Hiss as a World War II Soviet agent. Gordievsky went further and claimed that Hiss had the codename identity of "ALES". Appearing before the Venona cables were made public, this at first appeared to be independent corroboration of the codename, but 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. Gordievsky's status as a reliable source was challenged in sections of the British media.


Aleksandr Feklisov

According to Serguei Kostine in the introduction to Alexandr Feklisov's book ''The Man Behind the Rosenbergs'' (2001), Hiss was guilty: "Like Alger Hiss, who went to his death pretending innocence, Morton Sobell has spent his entire life honoring the lie..."


Soviet archives

After the
dissolution of the Soviet Union The dissolution of the Soviet Union, also negatively connoted as rus, Разва́л Сове́тского Сою́за, r=Razvál Sovétskogo Soyúza, ''Ruining of the Soviet Union''. was the process of internal disintegration within the Sov ...
in 1991, Alger Hiss petitioned General Dmitry 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. Both former President Nixon and the director of his presidential library, John H. Taylor, wrote similar letters, though their full contents are not yet publicly available. Russian archivists responded by reviewing their files, and in late 1992 reported back that they had found no evidence Hiss ever engaged in espionage for the Soviet Union nor that he was a member of the Communist Party. However, Volkogonov subsequently stated he spent only two days on the search and had mainly relied on the word of KGB archivists. "What I saw gave me no basis to claim a full clarification", he said. Referring to Hiss's lawyer, he added, "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 for the NKVD said that Hiss never worked for the USSR as one of his agents.; and:
In 2003, retired Russian intelligence official General Julius Kobyakov disclosed that it was he who had actually searched the files for Volkogonov. Kobyakov stated that Hiss did not have a relationship with SVR predecessor organizations, although Hiss was accused of being with the GRU, a military intelligence organization separate from SVR predecessors. In 2007, Svetlana Chervonnaya, a Russian researcher who had been studying Soviet archives since the early 1990s, argued that based on documents she reviewed, Hiss was not implicated in spying. In May 2009, at a conference hosted by the Wilson Center, Mark Kramer, director of
Cold War Studies at Harvard University The stated function of the Harvard Project on Cold War Studies (HPWCS) is to further the progress of, and actively encourage the ongoing primary research of archival, Cold War documents in the former Eastern-bloc nations. These documents have only ...
at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, stated that he did not "trust a word obyakovsays", At the same conference, historian
Ronald Radosh Ronald Radosh ( ; born 1937) is an American writer, professor, historian, and former Marxist. As he described in his memoirs, Radosh was, like his parents, a member of the Communist Party of the United States of America until the Khrushchev Thaw ...
reported that while researching the papers of Marshal Voroshilov in Moscow, he and Mary Habeck had encountered two GRU (Soviet military intelligence) files referring to Alger Hiss as "our agent". In 2009, Haynes, Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev published ''Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America'', based on KGB documents reportedly hand-copied by Vassiliev, a former KGB agent, during the 1990s. The authors attempted to show definitively that Alger Hiss had indeed been a Soviet spy and argue that KGB documents prove not only that Hiss was the elusive ALES, but that he also went by the codenames "Jurist" and "Leonard" while working for the GRU. Some documentation brought back by Vassiliev also refers to Hiss by his actual name, leaving no room, in the authors' opinion, for doubt about his guilt. Calling this the "massive weight of accumulated evidence", Haynes and Klehr conclude, "to serious students of history continued claims for Hiss's innocence are akin to a terminal case of ideological blindness." In a review published in the '' Journal of Cold War Studies'', military historian Eduard Mark heartily concurred, stating that the documents "conclusively show that Hiss was, as Whittaker Chambers charged more than six decades ago, an agent of Soviet military intelligence (GRU) in the 1930s". ''
Newsweek ''Newsweek'' is an American weekly online news magazine co-owned 50 percent each by Dev Pragad, its president and CEO, and Johnathan Davis (businessman), Johnathan Davis, who has no operational role at ''Newsweek''. Founded as a weekly print m ...
'' magazine reported that
Civil Rights Movement The civil rights movement was a nonviolent social and political movement and campaign from 1954 to 1968 in the United States to abolish legalized institutional racial segregation, discrimination, and disenfranchisement throughout the Unite ...
historian David Garrow also concluded that, in his opinion, ''Spies'' "provides irrefutable confirmation of iss'sguilt". Other historians, such as D. D. Guttenplan, Jeff Kisseloff, and Amy Knight, however, assert that ''Spies'' conclusions were not borne out by the evidence and accused its authors of engaging in "shoddy" research. Guttenplan stresses that Haynes and Klehr never saw and cannot even prove the existence of the documents that supposedly convict Hiss and others of espionage, but rather relied exclusively on handwritten notebooks authored by Vassiliev during the time he was given access to the Soviet archives in the 1990s while he collaborated with Weinstein. According to Guttenplan, Vassiliev could never explain how he managed, despite being required to leave his files and notebooks in a safe at the KGB press office at the end of each day, to smuggle out the notebooks with his extensive transcriptions of documents.Guttenplan, ''Red Harvest''. Haynes and Klehr respond that the material was examined by historians, archivists, and intelligence professionals who unanimously agreed that the material was genuine.Comment on Amy Knight's review of Spies in the Times Literary Supplement
by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr
Guttenplan also suggested, moreover, that Vassiliev might have omitted relevant facts and selectively replaced cover names with his own notion of the real names of various persons. According to Guttenplan, Boris Labusov, a press officer of the SVR, the successor to the KGB, has stated that Vassiliev could not in the course of his research have possibly "met the name of Alger Hiss in the context of some cooperation with some special services of the Soviet Union". Guttenplan also points out that Vasiliev admitted under oath in 2003 that he'd never seen a single document linking Hiss with the cover name "Ales". However, Haynes and Klehr also cite a 1950 memo indicating that a GRU agent, described as a senior State Department official, had recently been convicted in an American court. "The only senior American diplomat convicted of an espionage-related crime in 1950 was Alger Hiss." Historian Jeff Kisseloff questions Haynes and Klehr's conclusion that Vassiliev's notes support Hede Massing's story about talking to Hiss at a party in 1935 about recruiting their mutual friend and host Noel Field into the communist underground. According to Kisseloff, "all that the files Vassiliev saw really indicate is that she was telling yet another version of her story in the 1930s. Haynes and Klehr never consider that, as an agent in Washington, D.C., who was having little success in the tasks assigned to her, she may have felt pressure back then to make up a few triumphs to reassure her superiors." Kisseloff also disputes Haynes and Klehr's linking of Hiss with former Treasury Department official Harold Glasser, who they allege was a Soviet agent. Finally, Kisseloff states that some of the evidence compiled by Haynes and Klehr actually tends to exonerate rather than convict Hiss. For example, their book cites a KGB report from 1938 in which Iskhak Akhmerov, New York station chief, writes, "I don't know for sure who Hiss is connected with." Haynes and Klehr also claim that Hiss was the agent who used the cover name "Doctor". According to Soviet sources, however, "Doctor" was a middle-aged Bessarabian Jew who was educated in Vienna. Other historians felt that Haynes and Klehr's information was suspect because their publisher, Crown (a division of Random House), obtained temporary and limited access to KGB files through a payment of money (amount unspecified) to a pension fund for retired KGB agents, of whom Vassiliev was one, as was KGB archivist Volkogonov. Other historians had not been permitted to verify Vassiliev's data. In 2002, Vassiliev sued John Lowenthal for libel in a British court of law for publishing a journal article questioning his conclusions. Vassiliev lost the case before a jury and was further reprimanded by ''
The Times ''The Times'' is a British daily national newspaper based in London. It began in 1785 under the title ''The Daily Universal Register'', adopting its current name on 1 January 1788. ''The Times'' and its sister paper '' The Sunday Times'' ( ...
'' for trying to exert a "chilling effect" on scholarship by resorting to the law courts. Vassiliev has since also unsuccessfully sued Amazon.com for publishing a customer review critical of his work. In 1978, Victor Navasky interviewed six people Weinstein had quoted in his book ''Perjury'', who all claimed to have been misquoted by Weinstein. One, Sam Krieger, won a cash payment from Weinstein, who issued an apology and promised to correct future editions of his book and to release his interview transcripts, which he subsequently failed to do.Se
"Costly Error for Hiss Historian: Weinstein Pays for Mistake", ''New York Magazine'' (May 21, 1979), 61
For more on Weinstein, see also Jon Wiener, "Alger Hiss, the Archives, and Allen Weinstein", pp. 31–57, Chapter Two, in ''Historians in Trouble: Plagiarism, Fraud, and Politics in the Ivory Tower'' (New York: New Press, 2004, (Paperback 2007).


See also

* List of law clerks of the Supreme Court of the United States (Seat 2) *
Priscilla Hiss Priscilla Hiss (October 13, 1903 – October 14, 1984), born Priscilla Fansler and first married as Priscilla Hobson, was a 20th-century American teacher and book editor, best known as the wife of Alger Hiss, an alleged Communist and former Stat ...
*
Donald Hiss Donald Hiss (December 15, 1906 – May 18, 1989), also known as "Donie" and "Donnie", was the younger brother of Alger Hiss. Donald Hiss's name was mentioned during the 1948 hearings wherein his more famous and older brother, Alger, was a ...
* John Abt *
Elizabeth Bentley Elizabeth Terrill Bentley (January 1, 1908 – December 3, 1963) was an American spy and member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). She served the Soviet Union from 1938 to 1945 until she defected from the Communist Party and Soviet intellige ...
*
Whittaker Chambers Whittaker Chambers (born Jay Vivian Chambers; April 1, 1901 – July 9, 1961) was an American writer-editor, who, after early years as a Workers Party of America, Communist Party member (1925) and Soviet Union, Soviet spy (1932–1938), defe ...
* Noel Field * Harold Glasser *
John Herrmann John Theodore Herrmann (November 9, 1900 – April 9, 1959) was a writer in the 1920s and 1930s and is alleged to have introduced Whittaker Chambers to Alger Hiss. Biography Herrmann was born in Lansing, Michigan in 1900. He lived in Paris i ...
* Victor Perlo *
J. Peters J. Peters (born Sándor Goldberger; 11 August 1894 – 1990) was the most commonly known pseudonym of a man who last went by the name "Alexander Stevens" in 1949. Peters was a journalist, political activist, and accused Soviet spy who was a leadin ...
* Ward Pigman *
Lee Pressman Lee Pressman (July 1, 1906 – November 20, 1969) was a labor attorney and earlier a US government functionary, publicly alleged in 1948 to have been a spy for Soviet intelligence during the mid-1930s (as a member of the Ware Group), following hi ...
* Vincent Reno * Julian Wadleigh * Harold Ware * Nathaniel Weyl * Harry Dexter White *
Nathan Witt Nathan Witt (February 11, 1903 – February 16, 1982), born Nathan Wittowsky, was an American lawyer who is best known as being the Secretary of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) from 1937 to 1940. He resigned from the NLRB after his commu ...


References


Further reading


Books

* Brady, Joan (2015). ''America's Dreyfus: The Case Nixon Rigged''. London: Skyscraper Publications. * * Cook, Fred J (1957). '' The Unfinished Story of Alger Hiss''. New York: William Morrow. * * Gentry, Curt. ''J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and The Secrets''. New York: W. W. Norton, 1991. * Hartshorn, Lewis. ''Alger Hiss, Whittaker Chambers and the Case That Ignited McCarthyism''. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2013. * * * * * Jacoby, Susan (2009). ''Alger Hiss and the Battle for History''. New Haven: Yale University Press. * *Levitt, Morton and Michael Levitt (1979). ''A Tissue Of Lies: Nixon Vs. Hiss''. New York: McGraw Hill. *Lowenthal, David. "Academic Freedom: The Hiss Case Yields a Noteworthy Victory". ''American Historical Association Perspectives'' (May 2004): 23–26. * Moore, William Howard. (1987) ''Two Foolish Men: The True Story of the Friendship Between Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers''. Moorup * Smith, John Chalbot (1976). ''Alger Hiss: The True Story''. New York, Holt Rinehart Winston. * Summers, Anthony (2000). ''The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon''. Penguin-Putnam Inc. . * * * * * *


Articles

* Kai Bird and Svetlana Chervonnaya
"The Mystery of Ales (expanded version)"
''The American Scholar'', Summer 2007. * John Erhman (2007), "The Alger Hiss Case; A Half-Century of Controversy", Center for the Study of Intelligence,
Central Intelligence Agency The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA ), known informally as the Agency and historically as the Company, is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States, officially tasked with gathering, processing, ...
, 2007. Searchable by google: www.cia.gov › ... › Studies Archive Indexes › Vol44No5 › html
Interview footage with Alger Hiss
* Chervonnaya, Svetlana
''Letting Documents Talk: A Non-Definitive History''.
Website about documents from formerly secret Soviet and other Eastern and Central European archives relating to the Hiss controversy. * Cook, Fred J. Hiss: New Perspectives On The Strangest Case Of Our Time.
The Nation ''The Nation'' is an American liberal biweekly magazine that covers political and cultural news, opinion, and analysis. It was founded on July 6, 1865, as a successor to William Lloyd Garrison's '' The Liberator'', an abolitionist newspaper t ...
. September 21, 1947. * A review of the 1976 edition of Weinstein's ''Perjury'' * Fetter, Henry D. 2020. " Alger Hiss at Yalta: A Reassessment of Hiss's Arguments against Including Any of the Soviet Republics as Initial UN Members." ''Journal of Cold War Studies''. * * * * A detailed critique of the book ''Alger Hiss's Looking-Glass Wars'' * A critique of the chapter of Coulter's book that deals with Hiss * Levin, David (1976)
"In the Court of Historical Criticism: Alger Hiss's Narrative"
''Virginia Quarterly Review Online'', Winter, 1976, pp. 41–71. * Levin, David (1978)
"Perjury, History, and Unreliable Witnesses"
''Virginia Quarterly Review Online'', Autumn, 1978, pp. 725–732. *

* * * A review of Weinstein's "Perjury" * * Rustin, Susanna. "Joan Brady: Alger Hiss 'was framed by Nixon'" ''The Guardian'', October 19, 2015
Read online
* * * Schrecker, Ellen (December 14, 2009)
Review of John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev's ''Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America''. ''Diplo Roundtable Review'': XI: 9 (December 14, 2009): 22–25.
* Discusses "unique context" of 1930s and 1940s espionage. * * Weinberg, Robert L
"Not Guilty as Charged: A Revised Verdict for Alger Hiss".
''The Champion'', May/June 2008, p. 18. (Published by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers)


Unpublished materials

* * *


External links

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