Alger Hiss

Alger Hiss (1904-1996) was a US State department official and an alleged communist spy in the United States government during the 1940s. He denied he knew Whittaker Chambers, a former American Communist who claimed that Hiss had been passing him State Department secrets for years. Congressman Richard Nixon was convinced that Hiss was lying and questioned him when he appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee during the Cold War in 1948.

Both Hiss and Chambers testified before the House Committee, contradicting each other. When Chambers ultimately produced typed documents of State Department information and claimed they came from Hiss, a federal prosecutor in Manhattan indicted Hiss for perjury in the early 1950s.

The character witnesses for the defense included two U. S. Supreme Court justices, a former Solicitor General, a former Democratic presidential candidate (John W. Davis) and a future one (Adlai Stevenson).

Hiss did well on the witness stand in his defense, and his defense counsel was scathing in his attack on the prosecution's star witness, Chambers himself, who admitted that he worked for the liberal and communist cause in America.

The jury could not agree on a verdict, splitting with eight in favor of conviction and four against it. Despite testimony that the unlawfully leaked documents were typed on Hiss' typewriter, the four were not convinced beyond reasonable doubt.

The government then brought the case for retrial. During this trial the judge allowed a broader range of questioning. New defense counsel was weaker, conceding that the leaked documents were typed by the typewriter found in Hiss' possession, but disputing that he typed them. Inexplicably, Supreme Court Justice Frankfurter did not testify for Hiss in the second case.

The defense relied heavily on testimony by a expert witness who was a psychiatrist, who painted Chambers as a pathological liar. But the prosecutor destroyed the witness in one of the most famous cross-examinations in American legal history.

Hiss maintained his innocence until he died, and there is still some uncertainty as to whether or not he was a Soviet spy. Evidence retrieved as a result of the freedom of information act in 1975 revealed that the FBI knowingly comitted perjury when ascerting that certain documents could not have been forged, and that the FBI had illegally withheld evidence from the Defense concerning an inconsistency between a typewriter used as evidence's alleged manufacture date and its serial number. In the early 90's Russian authorities stated that they had found no evidence that Hiss ever worked as a Soviet agent, however Hungarian records from the 1950's may suggest otherwise. The existance of decoded telegrams from the late 40's and early 50's suggest that Hiss is likely to have been an operative code-named "ALES," however this has never been conclusively prooven.

The Alger Hiss espionage case played a major role in American politics during the Cold War era and affected the careers of many of those involved. The case helped propel Nixon to the Vice Presidency in 1952, Barry Goldwater to the Republican nomination for president in 1964, Nixon to the White House in 1968, and ultimately Ronald Reagan to the White House in 1980, where he awarded Chambers a posthumous Medal of Freedom.