On January 21, 1950 Alger
Hiss (1904 -
1996), a
well-heeled Harvard graduate and former official in the US State Department –
and almost certainly a spy for Stalin's
Soviet
Union – was found guilty of perjury (as the statute of limitations
for espionage had expired), in New York City.
Hiss, who always maintained his
innocence, was sentenced to five years in prison. The
verdict was upheld at the Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court. Hiss was sentenced
to five years on January 25 and served 44 months before being released in
November, 1954.
Although in 1993 compelling evidence came to light that Hiss might indeed
have been guilty of endangering his country, the matter is still one of some
debate. The media
line has tended to make Hiss a martyr to anti-Communist ‘witch-hunts’; his main detractors,
Time Magazine senior editor Whittaker Chambers (1901 - 1961) and young lawyer named Richard
Nixon, are generally portrayed as persecutors of an innocent man.
However, Allen Weinstein's
massive 1978 book, Perjury:
The Hiss-Chambers Case, possessing far less evidence than is now
available, convinced even most
pro-Hiss liberals of Hiss’s guilt. (Through his research Weinstein himself had
gone from being a Hiss supporter to an unbeliever.) However, the propaganda myth
of the witch-hunted Hiss was promoted by powerful interests of the Cold War
period, and there is still a strong tendency in liberal circles to speak and act
as though the myth still pertains.
Chambers, a former communist, testified on August 3, 1948 before the House Un-American Activities
Committee and presented a list of what he said were members of an
underground communist network working within the United States government in the
1930s and 1940s. One of the names on that list was that of Alger Hiss.
Chambers said that in 1937 he introduced Mr Hiss to a Russian agent named
Colonel Bykov and that Hiss ever since had been passing American classified
material to the Russians.
Chambers’s accusations were very well supported with documentation he
alleged he had received from Hiss while Chambers was a Communist. Famously, Chambers
led HUAC investigators to a pumpkin patch on his Maryland farmlands where he
produced, from a hollowed-out pumpkin, four rolls of microfilm containing secret
State Department documents that he said had also been secretly passed to him by
Hiss in the 1930s. Forensic evidence showed that Hiss’s typewriter had been
used on espionage documents. Hiss was sunk, to all but leftist supporters within
and without the media and academia.
The Venona
files
In 1993, historian Maria
Schmidt announced the discovery, in secret files of the Hungarian Interior
Ministry, documents that appear to refer to Alger Hiss as a spy. In 1996,
the US National Security Agency released these ‘Venona’
documents, which were of Soviet origin, and they are freely available.
Chambers stood by his accusation till his death, as Hiss stood by his own
defence. However, the Venona transcripts, released in 1996, which detailed the
activities of a spy code-named ‘Ales’ mirrored Chambers's testimony against
Hiss. Whether Chambers was right about Hiss or not, history has vindicated his
assertion of influential and extensive Soviet espionage activity at high levels
in the USA at a time that the Communists were exterminating tens of millions of
victims, and announcing (through their ideological texts if not their PR
campaign) their intention to conquer the USA.
Still liberal
bias in media
Among intellectual,
academic, progressive and media elites, Hiss enjoyed four decades of undeserving
hagiography. Few mea culpas or apologies have been forthcoming, and Hiss
was allowed to fade from mind the true facts rarely having been accorded media
expression as much as the persistent Cold War propaganda of his alleged
innocence.
Even in death, the probable
traitor and proven liar Hiss received media
support in the West, and the myths promulgated initially from the desks of
Stalinist propagandists remain to this day.
When Hiss died on November 15, 1996,
Associated Press sent a dispatch labelled ‘Urgent’ at 5:11 that night,
headlined ‘Alger Hiss, Nixon Nemesis, Dead at 92’. The AP release –
which was doubtless reprinted in countless newspapers worldwide – is a marvel
and textbook case of ideologically based bias. It is scarcely necessary to read
between the lines to discover an imputation that it was Nixon and Chambers who
were at fault, and Hiss was a maligned and persecuted hero. The dispatch read:
"Alger
Hiss, the patrician public servant who fell from grace in a Communist spy
scandal that propelled Richard Nixon to higher office, died Friday afternoon ...
Hiss' life can be neatly broken into two parts. The first was a stellar rise to
a brilliant academic career, clerking for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver
Wendell Holmes, a series of important posts in the New Deal and the foreign
policy establishment, foundation work. But on Aug. 3, 1948, a rumpled,
overweight magazine editor named Whittaker Chambers alleged that 10 years
earlier, Hiss had given him State Department secrets ... For the rest of his
life, he worked for vindication, both in court and in the court of public
opinion. He proclaimed that it had come finally in 1992, at age 87, when a
Russian general in charge of Soviet intelligence archives declared that Hiss had
never been a spy, but rather a victim of Cold War hysteria and the McCarthy
Red-hunting era."
Associated Press’s clearly
pro-Hiss obituary left out significant information. The Russian general referred
to in the AP story, Dimitri
Volkogonov, had indeed made such a declaration in 1992, only to admit some
months later that his research of KGB files had been at best cursory, and that
many documents were missing or had been destroyed.
Today it is widely accepted
that the Venona intercepts implicate Hiss as being precisely that which
Whittaker Chambers claimed him to be all those years ago: a high-ranking spy for
the USSR – history’s most brutal dictatorship, and proclaimed enemy of the
USA. Perhaps another half century must go by before the truth about the official
Party line of the Stalinist era trickles down into the media and academies of
the Western world.
“Now the most
die-hard Hiss apologist will find it daunting to explain away a document the
authors discovered in the K.G.B. files revealing that Hiss and his ring were
awarded Soviet decorations for providing military information going back to
1935.” Source
“Most
historians deplored the anticommunist movement of the 1950s and 1960s as
‘extremist,’ ‘paranoid,’ ‘right-wing’ hysteria …
“The KGB files
prove beyond doubt that Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs, and numerous other
Americans accused of spying for the Soviets were guilty. They confirm what J.
Edgar Hoover and the House Un-American Activities Committee were saying all
along: that spies reached the highest levels of the State and Treasury
departments, the White House, and the Manhattan Project, and that the
Communist Party USA (which had 50,000 members in World War 11) got its
marching orders from Moscow.”
Source
