Alger Hiss

Alger Hiss (November 11, 1904 – November 15, 1996) was a U.S. State Department official and Secretary General to the founding charter conference of the United Nations. Following accusations that he spied on behalf of the Soviet Union, Hiss was convicted of perjury.

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."

Yalta and the United Nations

Born in Baltimore, Maryland, he 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.. The same year Hiss married the former Mrs. Priscilla Hobson who later worked for the Library of Congress.

In 1933, Hiss entered government service, working in several areas as an attorney in President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal, starting with the Agricultural Adjustment Administration. Hiss worked for the Nye Committee, which investigated wartime profiteering by military contractors during World War I. He served briefly in the Justice Department, and 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 started paying Communist Party dues. He 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 transfered 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.

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

In 1945 he went with the president to the meeting of Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill in Yalta, which precipitated the Western betrayal of Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union and its client states behind the Iron Curtain. At Yalta, Hiss negotiated the final agreement to give the Soviet Union three seats in the United Nations. After the Yalta conference Hiss traveled on to Moscow with Secretary of State Stettinius, Venona project transcript #1822 dated 30 March 1945 reads in part

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

"After the Yalta Conference, when he had gone on to MOSCOW, a Soviet personage in a very responsible position (ALES gave to understand that it was Comrade VYShINSKIJ) allegedly got in touch with ALES and at the behest of the Military NEIGHBORS passed on to him their gratitude and so on. [1]

The 1997 Moynihan Commission on Government Secrecy, empowered by statute, wrote in its final report,

"This could only be Alger Hiss" [2]

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. On 7 September 1945, 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. 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 largely with United Nations diplomacy."

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

House Committee on Un-American Activities

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

Few serious historians still regard the matter of Hiss's guilt as unresolved, given the overwhelming evidence of his guilt compiled by, among others, Allen Weinstein, author of "Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case," who had begun his research intending to prove Hiss innocent before coming to the opposite conclusion as the facts mounted. More recently G. Edward White slammed the door on any serious question of Hiss's guilt with his meticulously researched "Alger Hiss's Looking Glass Wars: The Covert Life of a Soviet Spy," published in 2004.

Hiss's case heightened public concern about Soviet espionage penetration of the US Government in the 1930s and 1940s. Publicity surrounding the case fed the early political career of Richard Nixon, helping him move from the House of Representatives to the Senate in 1950 and to the Vice Presidency of the United States in 1952.

In February 1952 Nathaniel Weyl testified before the McCarran Committee that in 1933 he and Alger Hiss were in the Ware group, a group that operated within the Agricultural Adjustment Administration. The testimony corroborated Whittaker Chambers, although why Weyl didn't testify at the Hiss trial is a mystery. Hiss was later proven to be a spy through the declassification of the VENONA project.

Hiss and Chambers

After Time magazine managing editor Whittaker Chambers charged him as being a Communist, Alger Hiss voluntarily appeared before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Some Committee members had misgivings at first about attacking Hiss, but Congressman Richard Nixon, who was fed information by the Catholic Church's secretive Communist hunter, Father John Cronin, and using materials from the FBI, claimed to have sensed that Hiss was hiding something and pressed the Committee to act. Initially, Hiss denied having ever known Chambers.

After Chambers publicly reiterated his charge that Hiss was working for the Soviets on the radio program "Meet the Press," Hiss instituted an unsuccessful slander lawsuit against Chambers, but only after several of his supporters began to publicly question his curious reluctance to file an action. Chambers, in response, presented the "Baltimore Documents", which were copies of a series of government documents that he had obtained from Hiss in the 1930s. The government documents had first been re-typed by Hiss's wife, Priscilla, and these copies were then photographed and passed on to the spy network. Later Chambers produced highly incriminating microfilm evidence which was given to Nixon on December 2nd, from a hollowed-out pumpkin on his Maryland farm (the so-called Pumpkin Papers).

Conviction on perjury

Hiss was charged with two counts of perjury; the grand jury could not indict him for espionage, as the statute of limitations had run out. Hiss went to trial twice. The first trial ended in a hung jury. Hiss's character witnesses at his first trial included such notables as Adlai Stevenson, Justice Felix Frankfurter, and former Democratic presidential candidate John W. Davis. The second trial Hiss was found guilty on two counts of perjury. Some of the Baltimore Documents were classified, and four handwritten notes were in Hiss's own handwriting. The verdict was upheld at the Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court. Hiss was sentenced to five years on Jan. 25 and served 44 months in Lewisburg Federal Prison before being released in November 1954.

Disbarred, he became a salesman. But, despite the mountains of evidence against him that only increased as Soviet bloc incriminatory documents came to light following the collapse of Communism, Hiss continued for the rest of his life to claim innocence.

Corroboration from Soviet archives

An 25 April 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, sometimes working for the KGB, but at times also the GRU. Glasser learned from his friend Hiss that the latter's group had been decorated with honors. Glasser felt slighted, as the others in Hiss's group were decorated, but Glasser himself was not.

After the exposure of several Soviet espionage networks in the United States, 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 incontrovertibly identifies Alger Hiss as a longtime Soviet agent who worked in the U.S. State Department.

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

Alger Hiss's known cryptonyms were "Lawyer" ("Advocate" or "Advokat" which was assigned during his brief time at the United States Department of Justice between 1935 and 1936, and "Ales" in 1945. "Leonard" 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.

Further reading

• Interlocking Subversion in Government Departments, Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security (SISS report July 30, 1953),
• The Alger Hiss Story: Search for the Truth
• Gay, James Thomas. "The Alger Hiss Spy Case." American History (May-June 1998)
• John Lowenthal, "Venona and Alger Hiss," Intelligence and National Security 15, no. 3 (Autumn 2000)
• Eduard Mark, �Who Was �Venona�s� �Ales?� Cryptanalysis and the Hiss Case,� Intelligence and National Security 18, no. 3 (Autumn 2003).
• Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America--the Stalin Era (New York: Random House, 1999).
• Weinstein, Allen "Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case" (Random House, 1997) ISBN 0394495462.
• [http://www.johnearlhaynes.org/page44.html#_ftnref5 Alexander Vassiliev�s Notes on Anatoly Gorsky�s December 1948 Memo on Compromised American Sources and Networks (Annotated)]
• Nathaniel Weyl testimony corroborating Alger Hiss as member of CPUSA secret apparatus, 23 February 1953
• Fitin to Merkulov 25 April 1945, File #43072, Vol. 1, pp. 96-97, KGB Archives.
• Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy. Secrecy: Report of the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy. VI. Appendices: A. Secrecy: A Brief Account of the American Experience. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1997, pgs. 36, 39. (PDF 746K) [3]

External links

• Crime Library
• The Alger Hiss Trials: An Account
• Cold War Counterintelligence
• VENONA Files and the Alger Hiss Case
• 1579 New York to Moscow 29 September 1943 Five GRU sources are named. Milton Schwartz needs a loan to pay off debts. KGB (or perhaps Naval GRU) has mentioned a person from State Department named Hiss.
• The Hiss-Chambers Case, New York Times, 12 June 1949