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Alger Hiss

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Alger Hiss (November 11, 1904 – November 15, 1996) was a U.S. State Department official and involved in the early United Nations. In 1948, Whittaker Chambers accused Hiss of being a Communist and a spy for the Soviet Union. After two trials, Hiss was convicted of perjury in 1950. Subsequent evidence of prosecutorial misconduct, questions about the honesty of both men, and post-Cold War archival evidence from U.S. and Soviet services continue to fuel the controversy over Hiss's conviction. Hiss continued to maintain his innocence and was successful in reversing his disbarment, but he ultimately failed in his life-long goal of complete exoneration by the U.S. Supreme Court.

People's opinion of the Hiss case often reflected their attitudes on the Cold War. Dissenters view the Hiss case as yet another case of massive infiltration of the U.S. government by Communists, Communist sympathizers, and fellow travelers. Supporters regard the Hiss conviction as the destruction of a loyal and dedicated civil servant by those whose goals were the discrediting of both the United Nations and the entire New Deal.

Contents

Early life

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, 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, then in 1944, he 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 its director. 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 1) coordinate strategy to defeat Hitler, 2) draw the map of postwar Europe and 3) continue with plans to set up the United Nations. Hiss' role at Yalta was limited to work on the United Nations. Stalin made a request for 16 votes for the Soviet Union in the U.N. General Assembly. Hiss led U.S. opposition to Stalin's request. In the final compromise, Stalin was given two additional votes, for Byelorussia (today's Belarus) and Ukraine, not the 15 additional votes he had requested in the General Assembly. Hiss's opposition to Stalin's move has been cited by his supporters as evidence that Hiss was not in fact a Soviet agent. 
Both Yalta and the nature of Hiss's involvement with the conference have become sources of great controversy in the Cold War. Some historians have suggested parallels between Hiss and a Soviet operative known as ALES, based on the VENONA project. During testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, it was suggested that Hiss had helped the Soviet Union receive its three UN votes. Hiss testified that he had nothing to do with the decision that these votes be granted and that he opposed the extra votes. [link] 


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 afterwards 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 and served until May 5, 1949.  During this period, he lectured for the Quaker group, the American Friends Service Committee.



House Committee on Un-American Activities

The public controversy was brought to light in 1948 over Time managing editor Whittaker Chambers's accusation that Alger Hiss, assisted by his wife Priscilla, had been a member of the Communist Party and a spy. 


Chambers charged Hiss with being both a Communist and a spy. Chambers testified at the Hiss trials that he had previously committed perjury under oath. 


Alger Hiss voluntarily appeared before the House Committee on Un-American Activities to deny Chambers' accusations. Some Committee members had misgivings at first about attacking Hiss, but Congressman Richard Nixon, using materials which he had been secretly receiving from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Roman Catholic priest John Francis Cronin, claimed to have sensed that Hiss was hiding something and pressed the Committee to act. After being asked to identify Chambers, whom he had not seen since 1937 or 1938, 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 identified him as a person he had known as "George Crosley", whom Hiss had allowed to live in his home when Chambers was destitute in the mid-1930s. Later, Hiss had given Chambers an old car, which allegedly ended up in the hands of the American Communist party. All of Chamber's testimony however was given under congressional immunity, a fact which protected him from slander and libel 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. Both Chambers and Hiss had denied any act of espionage in their testimony to Congress. By introducing the "Baltimore Documents," Chambers subjected 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. It is unclear why the original documents were not directly photographed to avoid the tedious process of retyping them, which could have resulted in errors. Later Chambers produced four rolls of microfilm of State Department documents, which were given to Nixon on December 2, from a hollowed-out pumpkin on his Maryland farm (the so-called Pumpkin Papers). Hiss was linked to these "papers" by the matching of the type to the Hiss family's old typewriter. There has been much subsequent controversy about the genuineness of this typewriter which was located after the event, and the date of the typewriter's manufacture.



Perjury 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, and the jury found Hiss guilty on two counts of perjury. Some of the Baltimore Documents were indeed classified (though of trivial trade regulations rather than military affairs), and four handwritten notes were in Hiss's own handwriting. The verdict was upheld at 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.



Later developments

Hiss was disbarred and became a salesman for a time.  He even enjoyed a rare victory in the courts, in 1972, when a federal court overturned the so-called Hiss Act, the law that Congress had passed to bar him from collecting his pension. The act had been applied in an unconstitutional manner, the court ruled, ordering the government to pay Hiss his pension retroactive to November 1966—$61 a month.


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. Nixon's downfall in the Watergate scandal cast new doubts on the Alger Hiss trial, and the methods used in his conviction.


In 1995, the public was informed of the existence of the VENONA project, a collaboration between British and American intelligence during the Cold War.  Several analysts identified Hiss as the Soviet spy "ALES" who figured prominently in the decoded cables.  Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the chairman of the Commission in charge of the release of the information, stated his belief that the messages left "no doubt" as to the guilt of Hiss.


Nonetheless, Hiss maintained his innocence, and fought to clear his name until his death at age 92 on November 15, 1996.



Case for innocence


Typewriter

The Woodstock typewriter was a key part of the prosecution's case against Hiss, the alleged "smoking gun" that physically linked the Hiss family to the Baltimore documents in Chambers' 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.  Hiss responded, "I am amazed; until the day I die I shall wonder how Whittaker Chambers got into my house to use my typewriter". Later, it was revealed that the FBI expert had committed perjury at the trial. Some of the papers also included handwritten notes by Hiss, and Hiss and his defense team did not dispute their provenance. 


Hiss continued for the rest of his life strenuously to protest his innocence, going so far as to file a petition of coram nobis, in which he presented his defense team's documented, putatively scientific evidence indicating that the typewriter used to convict him had been fabricated, that is, remanufactured. He claimed that the so-called Baltimore Documents, papers which Chambers claimed that Hiss or his wife Priscilla had typed, were forgeries. At the time, few people suspected that remanufacturing of typewriters was possible, and an FBI agent testified at the Hiss trial that it was impossible. In fact, during World War II, J. Edgar Hoover arranged for his own FBI agents to be trained at a British intelligence base called Camp X, 100 miles  (160 km) east of Toronto, where one of the specialties was the remanufacture of typewriters and document forgery.


Former White House counsel John Dean alleged in his memoir Blind Ambition that the typewriter had been forged. Dean asserted that he was informed that Nixon at one point in his presidency told Charles Colson, "The typewriters are always the key. We built one (a legal case) in the Hiss case." Colson denied ever having such a conversation with Nixon, and it has never been found in Nixon's tapes, although only around 60 hours of the Nixon tapes have been made publicly available, out of several thousand hours of recorded material.



Proof of Judicial Misconduct

As a result of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) suit by Hiss, government documents which became public in 1975 from the Department of Justice contained the following facts: 




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


The release to the public of the "Pumpkin Papers," the five rolls of microfilm that Nixon had described as evidence of the "most serious series of treasonable activities … in the history of America," showed one roll of microfilm was completely blank, and information on two rolls of microfilm were mostly unclassified and were about topics such as life rafts and fire extinguishers, information which was easily obtainable at any time from the open shelves at the Bureau of Standards.



Readmission to the bar

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 appointments, including Chief Justice Warren Burger, refused to nullify the Hiss perjury conviction, thus preventing the exoneration Hiss had sought.



Soviet archives

After the end of the Cold war and subsequent 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 that writing 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 been a member of a Soviet agency. They found no proof that Hiss was part of the Communist Party USA; and, similarly, that they had found no evidence that he had ever been an agent for the KGB, for the GRU (Soviet military intelligence), or for any other intelligence agency of the Soviet Union.


Many conservatives and other Hiss detractors were shocked and quickly questioned Volkogonov's analysis. Though Volkogonov admitted that it was possible some evidence had been lost or destroyed, he ultimately stood by his assessment. General-Lieutenant Vitaly Pavlov, who ran Soviet intelligence work in North America in the late 1930s and early 1940s, also corroborated Volkogonov in his memoirs, stating that Hiss never worked for the USSR as one of his agents.[11] Of course, it is understood that Soviet Communists had an interest in denying someone was their spy.



ALES

Many of those who believed in Alger Hiss's innocence have maintained that ALES could have never been Alger Hiss. The late John Lowenthal, a Hiss lawyer and longtime supporter, is one of chief proponents of this view.


FBI Special Agent Robert Lamphere was the official who surmised in a footnote to the cable that ALES was "Probably Alger Hiss." But Lowenthal challenges much of Lamphere's reasoning by the following:







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 (for a day with Sec. of State Stettinus). According to Lowenthal, the entire point of paragraph 6 (#1822), that the GRU asked Vyshinski to get in touch with Ales to convey the GRU's thanks 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.


Venona #1579 is only other cable to mention Hiss, and it is mostly fragments of a 1943 message from the GRU chief in New York to GRU 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. A possible reason for the GRU to switch from the Russin Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet, just for a name, is for the sake of accuracy in rendering an unfamiliar name in a non-Russian, Latin-alphabet language. The name "Hiss" also goes without a first name, so it could refer to either Alger or Donald, since both were at the State Department in 1943.


For the GRU to name Hiss openly and directly, not by a covername, would be radically unorthodox for Soviet espionage protocols. Both the NSA and the FBI have insisted that once a covername was assigned it was used to the exclusion of the real name. [12]


Some historians, the most well-known being Eduard Mark, dispute this analysis. See References for more information.


New information about ALES has placed that agent in Mexico City at the same time when Hiss was known to be in Washington [link], casting further doubt on ALES-Alger connection. 



Critique of the critics

The historian Allen Weinstein and the journalist Alexander Vassiliev are often criticized for the nature of their work in The Haunted Wood. Through exclusive access to several Soviet intelligence files, reported to cost the publisher Random House over 1 million dollars in payments to ex-KGB agents, the authors quoted several memos which they believed proved Hiss's guilt. These memos, however, have been questioned in that they were discovered in Soviet Archives on a lucrative "cash-for-documents" access rights basis [5]. 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 book Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case. One of his sources, Samuel Krieger, sued Weinstein for libel in 1979. Weinstein settled out of court, issuing a public apology and paying Krieger an undisclosed sum for his error.


Through a failed libel suit issued against him by Vassiliev, David Lowenthal furthermore discovered a considerable amount of scholarly friction that existed between the two coauthors (see [[http://hnn.us/articles/11579.html]]). 


Vassiliev writes: 

"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."




Case for guilt

Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was instrumental in securing the release of the long-awaited FBI files relating to the Venona project, in his 1998 book, Secrecy: The American Experience wrote, "Belief in the guilt or innocence of Alger Hiss became a defining issue in American intellectual life.  Parts of the American government had conclusive evidence of his guilt, but they never told." [1] 


Vassiliev told PBS's NOVA, "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." [14] 



Venona Project and ALES

One of the strongest pieces of evidence against Hiss is his close association with the Soviet operative known as ALES by the Venona cable wires. The details describing ALES seem to closely match Hiss's own profile during the Yalta Conference. ALES was a military information spy, who was described as being a high-level official of the State Department attending the summit at Yalta.



Venona project transcript #1822 dated March 30, 1945, reads in part




"For some years past he has been the leader of a small group of probatiners, for the most part consisting of his relations.




"After the Yalta Conference, when he had gone on to MOSCOW, a Soviet personage in a very responsible position allegedly got in touch with ALES and at the behest of the Military NEIGHBORS passed on to him their gratitude and so on. [link]



The 1997 Moynihan Commission on Government Secrecy, echoing the sentiments of former FBI agents, wrote in its final report, "[t]his could only be Alger Hiss" (see [link]).


Furthermore, Hiss was 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."  Oleg Gordievsky however spoke 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 [link].



Alleged spying activity

Beyond the "Pumpkin Papers," many Hiss detractors have suggested further acts of spying by Hiss.


On September 7, 1945, Hiss proposed that the State Department create the new post of 'special assistant for military affairs', which was linked to his Office of Special Political Affairs. When Hiss was investigated in 1946, it was discovered he had obtained top secret reports "on atomic energy ... and other matters relating to military intelligence" that were outside the scope of his Office of Special Political Affairs, which dealt mostly with United Nations diplomacy." [3]


The following is a reconstruction of Hiss's activities according to subsequent accusations by his contemporaries.  Hiss allegedly became a member of the Ware group of underground Communists, a Soviet espionage group. In August or September of 1934, Hiss met Whittaker Chambers and allegedly started paying Communist Party dues. He allegedly began working with the GRU in 1935 and Chambers acted as courier.  GRU Illegal Rezident Boris Bykov recommended espionage procedures, followed by Hiss, that included bringing files home nightly and retyping them.  Harold Glasser was transferred to GRU in 1937.  Hiss's membership was later corroborated by Nathaniel Weyl who also worked in the AAA and was a member of the Ware group in testimony before the McCarran Committee. [2]



Testimony by Nathaniel Weyl

In February 1952, Nathaniel Weyl testified before the McCarran Committee that in 1933, he and Alger Hiss were in the Ware group, a group that operated within the Agricultural Adjustment Administration. The testimony corroborated with Whittaker Chambers'. However, Weyl failed to testify at the Hiss trial, making Whittaker Chambers the only witness to give first hand testimony that Hiss was a Communist or a spy. By 1952, Hiss had already been convicted, and thus Weyl's belated testimony has no bearing at either Hiss trial. Why Weyl did not testify when it would have made a difference is a mystery. 



Soviet archives revisited

Besides Weinstein, another author to accuse Hiss is G. Edward White, whose Alger Hiss's Looking Glass Wars: The Covert Life of a Soviet Spy, was published in 2004. In the course of White's research, the following two Soviet memos have come to light: 1) an April 25, 1945, memo from KGB General Pavel Fitin, head of foreign intelligence, to Vsevolod Merkulov, overall head of the KGB, explained that Harold Glasser moved back and forth, working for the KGB and the GRU. Glasser learned from his friend Hiss that the latter's group had been decorated with honors. Glasser felt slighted because others in Hiss's group were decorated but Glasser was not.


After the exposure of several Soviet espionage networks in the United States, Joseph Stalin created the KI, a centralized bureaucracy, modelled on the CIA, to funnel information from both KGB and GRU to intelligence users. During the KI's short existence (1947 - 1951), Anatoly Gorsky, who served in the United States and Great Britain, wrote a memorandum on Compromised American Sources and Networks. This memo identifies Alger Hiss as the U.S. State Department worker (called "Leonard") associated with a group that included Whittaker Chambers and Noel Field. The memo, however, does not indicate the nature of Alger Hiss's involvement, nor whether he was an agent or merely an unwitting person of interest. "Leonard" as a codename does not appear in any other Soviet intel files, either in reference to Alger Hiss or another person.


In 1996, the United States government released the Venona papers, decoded Russian intelligence intercepts dating from the mid-1940s. These documents briefly reference a Soviet spy at the State Department, code-named "Ales", whose biographical details matched some of Hiss'. Ales was described as a military information spy, which may explain why Hiss proposed that the State Department create a new post, that of 'special assistant for military affairs' linked to his Office of Special Political Affairs.


Alger Hiss's alleged cryptonyms were "Lawyer" [6]   ("Advocate"[7] or "Advokat" [8]) which was assigned during his brief time at the United States Department of Justice, between 1935 and 1936, and "Ales" [9] in 1945. "Leonard" [10] did not occur as a cover name in the World War II deciphered KGB Venona traffic, and may be a later (or possibly earlier) cryptonym, or a GRU covername.



Notes





References



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