Alger Hiss Totally Explained

Everything about Alger Hiss totally explained

National Security Agency analysts have also gone on record asserting that ALES could only have been Alger Hiss. In the second edition of his book Perjury, Allen Weinstein calls the Venona evidence "persuasive but not conclusive."
The Venona transcript with the most relevance to the Hiss case is #1822, sent March 30, 1945, from the Soviets' Washington station chief to Moscow.
However, the Venona evidence on Alger Hiss is disputed by some. John Lowenthal has challenged the Hiss-ALES identification in Venona #1822 by the following:

ALES was said to be the leader of a small group of espionage agents; Hiss was accused of having acted alone, aside from his wife as a typist and Chambers as courier.

ALES was a GRU (military intelligence) agent who obtained military intelligence, and only rarely provided State Department material; Alger Hiss in his trial was accused of obtaining only non-military information and the papers used against him were non-military State Department materials that he allegedly produced on a regular basis.

Even if Hiss was the spy he was accused of being, it's unlikely he'd have continued being so after 1938 as ALES did, because in that year Hiss would have become too great a risk for any Soviet agency to use. In that year, Whittaker Chambers broke with the Communist Party and then went into hiding, telling his Communist Party colleagues he'd denounce them if they didn't follow suit. At this point therefore, ALES's cover would be in extreme jeopardy if he were Alger Hiss.

Other recent information places ALES in Mexico City at the same time when Hiss was known to be in Washington. Lowenthal also suggested an interpretation of the transcript that differs from Lamphere's reading. Lowenthal's reading doesn't put ALES at the Yalta conference at all, but rather refers to the presence at Yalta of Andrey Vyshinsky, the Soviet deputy foreign minister. According to Lowenthal, the entire point of paragraph 6 of Venona #1822—that the GRU asked Vyshinsky to get in touch with ALES to convey thanks from the GRU for a job well done—would have been unnecessary if ALES had actually been in Moscow, because the GRU could have easily contacted ALES with no need of Vyshinsky. Others, notably Eduard Mark, dispute Lowenthal's analysis on this point. In the opinion of intelligence historian John R. Schindler, the original Russian text of Venona #1822 (released in 2005), removes some of the ambiguity present in the English translation and confirms ALES's presence at Yalta. Schindler concludes "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."
Also in rebuttal to Lowenthal, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr noted the following:

None of the evidence presented at the Hiss trial precludes the possibility that Hiss had been an espionage agent after 1938 or that he'd only passed State Department documents after 1938.

Chambers's charges were not seriously investigated until after the revelations made by the defection of Elizabeth Bentley in 1945, so Hiss and the Soviets could in theory have considered it an acceptable risk for him continue espionage work, even after Chambers's defection.

Vyshinsky wasn't 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., thus making Lowenthal's analysis impossible. There is one Venona cable, #1579, that includes the name "Hiss." This partially decrypted cable consists of fragments of a 1943 message from the GRU chief in New York to GRU headquarters in Moscow. The reference reads: "…from the State Department by name of HISS…" The name "Hiss" appeared "Spelled out in the Latin alphabet" according to a footnote by the cryptanalysts. In the cable, "Hiss" goes without a first name, so it could possibly refer to either Alger or Donald, since both were at the State Department in 1943. Lowenthal argues that for the GRU to name Hiss openly, not by a codename, would be highly unorthodox if he was, indeed, a spy. Once Soviet intelligence assigned a codename to an agent, it would be highly unusual for their actual name to be used in a coded transmission.
At an April 2007 symposium, authors Kai Bird and Svetlana Chervonnaya presented evidence that a U.S. diplomat named Wilder Foote was the best match to ALES, based on the movements of all the officials present at the U.S.-Soviet Yalta conference. In particular, Bird and Chervonnaya noted that Foote had been in Mexico City at a time when a Soviet cable placed ALES there, whereas Hiss had left Mexico several days earlier (see above). Other authors have disputed the likelihood that Foote was ALES, noting that Foote doesn't fit known information about ALES, and saying that the author of the Soviet cable could have been mistaken in stating that ALES was still in Mexico City.

Oleg Gordievsky

In 1985, Oleg Gordievsky, a high ranking KGB agent, defected to the West. In his 1990 book Gordievsky reported attending a lecture before a KGB audience in which Iskhak Abdulovich Akhmerov identified Hiss, apparently as one of the Soviet Union's U.S. agents during World War II. Although his reminiscence of the Akhmerov lecture remains unchallenged, Gordievsky went further and claimed that Hiss had the codename identity of "ALES". This at first appeared to be an independent corroboration of the codename, as it appeared before the Venona cables were revealed to the public. However, 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.

Allen Weinstein's Perjury

In 1978, Allen Weinstein, then a professor of history at Smith College, published Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case. The book, in which Weinstein argues that Hiss was guilty, has been cited by many historians as the "most important" and the "most thorough and convincing" book on the Hiss-Chambers case. Weinstein drew upon 30,000 pages of FBI documents released through the Freedom of Information Act, the files of the Hiss defense attorneys, over 80 interviews with involved parties and six interviews with Hiss himself. In 1997, Weinstein published an updated and revised edition of Perjury, which incorporated recent evidence from Venona decrypted cables, released documents from Soviet intelligence archives and information from former Soviet intelligence operatives.
In arguing for Hiss's guilt, Weinstein presented no major new revelations about the case. Rather, he noted a great many points at which Chambers's story, or an assumption of Hiss's guilt, seemed to be a better fit to documented facts than did Hiss's accounts of events. In his review of Perjury, George Will wrote "the myth of Hiss's innocence suffers the death of a thousand cuts."
Among the points where Weinstein found Hiss's defense questionable were the following:

Hiss's disclosure of the history of the Woodstock typewriter appeared to be "secretive and improvised," and that he seemed at times to deliberately mislead investigators about the probable current whereabouts of the typewriter.

Hiss stated that he'd given an old car to Chambers, whereas Chambers said that Hiss had donated it to the Communist party. Documents show that Hiss transferred title for the car to a dealer who immediately resold the car to a known Communist party member.

Chambers testified that in 1937 he'd given Oriental rugs to four of his espionage sources, including Hiss, in appreciation for their work. Hiss responded that he'd received the rug from Chambers in 1935 as payment for a debt. Evidence indicates that Chambers had in fact given rugs to three other known Communist agents, and that he'd bought them in late 1936.

Chambers claimed that the Hisses loaned him $400 in 1937 or 1938. Records show that Priscilla Hiss withdrew $400 from the couple's joint savings account in November of 1937. The Hisses testified that they withdrew the money to buy furniture for a new apartment, but they hadn't signed a lease for a new apartment at the time of the withdrawal.

The evidence seems to favor Chambers's description of a close working relationship between himself and Hiss during the 1930s more than Hiss's account of a casual acquaintanceship. This included Hiss subletting his apartment to Chambers without a formal lease, Hiss giving Chambers use of his car without transferring the title, and evidence that Chambers was in the Hiss home in 1937, a year after Hiss said he broke off contact with Chambers. Weinstein also devotes an appendix to examining and dismissing various "conspiracies" that Hiss defenders have proposed to explain the evidence against Hiss. In his conclusion, Weinstein writes "the body of available evidence proves that Hiss perjured himself when describing his secret dealings with Chambers, so that the jury in his second trial made no mistake in finding Alger Hiss guilty as charged."

Criticism

Some authors have been critical of Perjury. Victor Navasky reported that he wrote to seven of Weinstein's "key sources" and six of the seven "responded that they'd been misquoted, quoted out of context, misrepresented, misconstrued, or misunderstood." Weinstein countered that the sources were only recanting their previous statements. One of Weinstein's sources, Samuel Krieger, sued Weinstein for libel in 1979. Weinstein settled out of court by promising to correct future editions of Perjury and paying Krieger an undisclosed sum. Although he's said several times that he'd make his files and interview tapes available to other investigators, to date Weinstein hasn't done so.
In the late 1990s, Weinstein conducted research into Soviet intelligence files with former KGB operative Alexander Vassiliev. This research was primarily for the 1999 book The Haunted Wood, but the material Vassiliev and Weinstein found that related to the Hiss case was added to the 1997 edition of Perjury. It was later revealed that some scholarly friction existed between the two coauthors. Vassiliev stated, "I never saw a document where Hiss would be called ALES or ALES may be called Hiss. I made a point of that to Allen." Weinstein was "sloppy almost every time he quoted documents relating to Alger Hiss." However, in a 2002 episode of PBS's NOVA, Vassiliev said, "The Rosenbergs, Theodore Hall and Alger Hiss did spy for the Soviets, and I saw their real names in the documents, their code names, a lot of documents about that. How you judge them is up to you. To me, they're heroes."

Everything about Alger Hiss totally explained

Oleg Gordievsky

Allen Weinstein's Perjury

Criticism

Footnotes

References and further reading