Alger Hiss

Alger Hiss (1904 to 1996) was a lawyer who worked for the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, the Nye Committee and the Department of State before he became president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in 1947. In August 1948 Whittaker Chambers named him before the House Committee on Un-American Activities as one of a group of Communists in Washington in the 1930s. Hiss denied the accusation under oath. He was indicted for perjury after testifying before a federal grand jury in December 1948, the first trial ended in a jury disagreement, and at a second trial he was convicted and sentenced on January 25, 1950.

Education and early career

Hiss told the House committee that he was born in Baltimore on November 11, 1904, and that he was educated in the public schools of Baltimore and at a preparatory school in Massachusetts before entering Johns Hopkins University, from which he took an A.B. in 1926.¹ He then entered Harvard Law School and graduated in 1929.¹ He said that his first federal employment was as secretary to one of the Associate Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States, and he named the justice as Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.² He practiced law in Boston and New York for about three years. In May 1933 he came to Washington, D.C. at the request of officials of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, where Jerome Frank was general counsel, and took a post as assistant general counsel.² He named Lee Pressman and Nathan Witt as members of the same legal staff, and said he knew Henry Collins from boyhood.³

A press report on the reorganization of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, reprinted in the House record, said that Hiss, one of Frank's assistants, was "recently assigned to assist Senator Nye's committee in its munitions investigation."⁴

Nye Committee

In early 1934, by his own recollection, the Department of Agriculture lent Hiss to the Senate Special Committee on Investigation of the Munitions Industry, chaired by Senator Gerald Nye. Asked about his position, he said: "I was counsel. The technical title was legal assistant."⁵ The committee's preliminary report of 1935 lists "Alger Hiss, Legal Assistant" among its staff, with Stephen Raushenbush as secretary.⁶ The printed hearings record the senators present and add "Also present: Alger Hiss, investigator."⁷

The transcripts show Hiss examining witnesses on corporate ownership and war profits. On September 10, 1934 the chairman told the room that "Mr. Hiss, one of the committee's staff, will proceed with the examination" of John S. Allard, president of the Curtiss-Wright Export Corporation. Hiss took the Curtiss-Wright witnesses through the company's stock holdings, interlocking directors and the position of the Sperry Corporation, and offered a chart (Exhibit No. 268) of the interest of the General Motors Corporation in airplane manufacturing companies. He stated that the du Pont Company, through a wholly owned subsidiary, held a 28 percent interest in General Motors; that General Motors held 48 percent of the General Aviation Corporation; and that General Aviation and General Motors together owned 52 percent of North American Aviation.⁷ Hiss continued the examination of Allard and Clarence W. Webster through September 12, and on September 17 and 18 he questioned Francis H. Love, Donald L. Brown and Charles W. Deeds.⁷

In December 1934 the committee turned to the du Pont interests. On December 12 Hiss questioned Lieutenant Colonel C. T. Harris of the Army Ordnance Department about wartime contracts, entered a War Department statement of cantonment and facilities construction (a grand total of $1,271,000,000), and examined an Interstate Commerce Commission accountant, John H. Rudd, on the 1916 and 1917 incomes and taxes of certain corporations, matching the coded entries in a Senate document of 1918 to company names. He then questioned Harris on the Old Hickory powder plant contract, in which the du Pont Engineering Company acted as agent of the government.⁸ The transcript records Hiss as questioner in the sessions of December 12 to 21, 1934 whose headings include the testimony of Pierre S. du Pont, Irénée du Pont and Lammot du Pont, C. K. Davis, Edwin Pugsley and Sol A. Rosenblatt.⁹

The 1982 district court opinion summarizes Chambers's testimony at both trials: he was introduced to Hiss in June or July 1934 by J. Peters and Harold Ware, and at first Hiss, "who was then counsel to the Nye Committee, furnished Chambers with copies of confidential State Department documents."¹⁰ Hiss testified that a free-lance writer calling himself George Crosley came to his Senate office during the munitions investigation.¹¹

State Department, 1936 to 1947

After the munitions committee Hiss was employed in the office of the Solicitor General of the United States. He said he went to the Department of State when Francis B. Sayre, the Assistant Secretary in charge of the Trade Agreements Act, asked him to supervise the constitutional arguments on that act. He testified: "I entered the Department of State, I think it was, in September, 1936. I resigned in January, 1947, to accept the appointment to my present position in private life to which I had been elected the preceding December."¹² The Foreign Relations of the United States volume for the Yalta conference identifies him as special assistant to the director of the Office of Special Political Affairs from May to October 1944 and as deputy director thereafter.¹³

At the second trial the prosecutor asked Hiss whether he had recommended Noel Field to Sayre when Sayre went out to the Philippines as High Commissioner. Hiss answered: "Along with one or two others, yes." He named four others he had recommended to Sayre (Golden Bell, Woodbury Willoughby, Henry Hart and Claude Buss).¹⁴ Hiss testified that he had known Field through Laurence Duggan.¹⁴

Yalta and the San Francisco conference

A telegram from Secretary of State Edward Stettinius to Ambassador W. Averell Harriman in Moscow, dated January 15, 1945, lists the members of the American party for the Yalta Conference. It includes "Alger Hiss, for Dumbarton Oaks matters."¹⁵ The Foreign Relations volume states that "The collection contains the original penciled notes taken by Hiss at a number of meetings at Yalta," and it prints those notes in facsimile.¹⁶ For one plenary meeting the editors state that the notes "appear to have been taken by Hiss only during the discussion of the question of voting in the United Nations."¹⁶ The table of contents lists Hiss notes for the Foreign Ministers' meetings and plenary sessions of February 4, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10.¹⁶

The agreed record dated February 2, 1945 states that Hiss was asked to explain briefly the purpose of the proposed European High Commission. "Mr. Hiss said that the essential purpose was to secure unity of approach between the three Big powers to the manifold difficulties that must arise in liberated territories in Europe." The record adds that the proposed High Commission "would be a temporary body functioning until the World Organisation was set up."¹⁷

The notes for the February 6 plenary session at Livadia Palace are a separate document. It is headed "Dictated at San Francisco, June 3, 1945," and the editors state that it was dictated on the basis of longhand notes made during the meeting.¹⁸ Its account of the session includes the statement: "The President said that he felt strongly that people are going to insist on getting something that will insure peace, not for all time, but say for fifty years."¹⁸ Several undated memoranda of the Hiss Collection carry the editors' attributions to him. Of a draft report to the Foreign Ministers by the subcommittee on arrangements for the United Nations conference, the editors state that H. Freeman Matthews wrote on August 13, 1954 that it was written by Hiss. Of a memorandum of arguments against inclusion of any of the Soviet republics among the initial members of the organization, they state that the author was presumably Hiss. The editors also note that penciled changes in Hiss's handwriting on the draft invitation to the United Nations conference were incorporated in the text Stettinius presented on February 9, 1945, and that Hiss was a member of the subcommittee that drafted the report.¹⁹ Of the Foreign Ministers' meeting of February 11 the editors write that "Hiss was certainly there" with Stettinius, Anthony Eden and Vyacheslav Molotov.¹⁹

At San Francisco Hiss held the post of Secretary-General of the United Nations Conference on International Organization. On June 20, 1945 the president of Commission III opened the fifth meeting by stating: "The Secretary-General, Mr. Hiss, has asked me to make the following announcement."²⁰ The conference drafted the charter of the United Nations. John Foster Dulles, a member of the American delegation to the conference, testified in 1949 that he first met Hiss in the early part of 1945, probably about March, during briefings in Washington before the delegation left, and that he saw him with fair frequency at San Francisco, where Hiss was on the international secretariat and not on the American delegation.²¹

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Hiss testified in 1948 that the board of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace elected him president in December 1946 and that he assumed office on February 1, 1947.²² John Foster Dulles was chairman of the board of trustees. Asked by Representative F. Edward Hebert whether Dulles was the first to approach him, Hiss answered: "He first approached me." He described Dulles as "the chairman of my board of trustees." When Hebert asked whether Dulles had urged him to take the post, Hiss answered that Dulles had, "And other members of the board of trustees."²²

Dulles gave a different account at the second trial, where he testified in rebuttal for the government. He said he had been a trustee for about five years, and that he was "not elected chairman until the same meeting at which Mr. Hiss was elected president."²¹ Shown Hiss's testimony that Dulles had first raised the Carnegie presidency on the ship to London for the first meeting of the United Nations General Assembly, Dulles answered that he possibly asked Hiss whether he expected to stay in government service. He added: "I am quite clear in my own mind that I did not mention the Carnegie Endowment to Mr. Hiss at that time," and put his first mention of it at about April 1946, after he had spoken to other trustees. The selection committee consisted of John W. Davis, Arthur Ballantine and Elliott Wadsworth. Dulles testified that he gave the committee a list of names that included Hiss, that he arranged a luncheon in New York in the spring of 1946 at which Hiss met two of the three committee members, that he did not investigate Hiss's record, and that it was "through me that the committee obtained its primary information about his availability." He said he had probably spoken to Dean Acheson about Hiss, and asked about Hiss's reputation before the election, said that it "was very high, as far as I knew it."²¹

Davis, a defense character witness at the same trial, testified that his committee investigated "the nature of his past services, his interest in international affairs ... and his general reputation," that it recommended Hiss, and that Dulles "was not a member of that committee. He was chairman of the Endowment and, of course, thoroughly advised of whatever the committee was doing." He testified that he had heard "that Mr. Dulles and Mr. Hiss had some conversation" about reports of Communist association, "purely hearsay on my part," and that no adverse reports reached him before August 1948.²³ James T. Shotwell, a trustee and a defense witness, testified that he had made inquiries at the State Department and was told that Hiss "was regarded as one of the ablest men in the Department."²⁴

The Kohlberg letters and the Dulles conversations

Hiss testified before the House committee on August 25, 1948 that "shortly after I had been elected but before I had assumed office I had a conversation with Mr. John Foster Dulles in which he said that he had heard reports that people had called me a Communist."²⁵ He said he assumed that Dulles "was satisfied that there was nothing to the reports, as I was myself." Representative Richard Nixon questioned him in the same hearings about his conversations with Secretary of State James F. Byrnes in 1946 about the charges, and Representative Karl Mundt asked whether he had told the Carnegie directors of them. In his answer Hiss said that before accepting the Carnegie post he had "checked with" Byrnes "specifically as to whether he thought the issue had been laid to rest."²⁶

At the second trial Hiss gave a fuller account. He testified that in December 1946, a week or ten days after his election was announced, Dulles telephoned from New York and asked "What shall I say in answer to a letter from some man who claims you are a Communist?"; that he replied that the subject had been "laid to rest"; and that Dulles later named the writer as Mr. Kohlberg, "the publisher of Plain Talk."²⁷ Dulles contradicted him. He testified that the letter, dated December 31 and received on January 2 (Hiss took office on February 1, 1947), "led me to call up Mr. Kohlberg," who came to see him that afternoon, and that he did not discuss the contents with Hiss until some days later. He denied discussing the matter with Byrnes, said he did not recall naming Kohlberg to Hiss and that he never wrote to Kohlberg in answer to the first letter, and testified that he had received three letters from Kohlberg in all, in January, February and April or May.²⁷ The writer appears in the transcript as "Mr. Kohlburg" and is described as the publisher of the magazine Plain Talk; he was Alfred Kohlberg.²⁷

Hiss and Dulles gave separate accounts of March 1948 as well. Dulles testified that in March 1948 he told Hiss of a communication he had recently received, that Hiss mentioned he had just been before a grand jury, and that Hiss said he had been questioned about a number of people, knew only Pressman among them, and had met some left-leaning people in the Department of Agriculture only casually. Asked on cross-examination whether he had told Dulles that after law school he was "thrown into association with people who were Communists," Hiss answered: "Not in that form; definitely not."²⁷

The resignation offer and the board's action

Hiss testified that on August 3, 1948, the day Chambers testified, he telephoned Dulles before doing anything else, and told him that he would have "enough on my shoulders" for the next weeks and asked Dulles to decide, as chairman, whether his continuing as president became an embarrassment, adding that "at that moment he had my resignation."²⁸ Dulles testified that he recalled no discussion of resignation until a meeting he called at the Hotel Roosevelt shortly before he went abroad in the latter part of August. He told Hiss then, he said, that the Chambers testimony "was very disturbing to the trustees," that some had communicated with him, and that he was "confident that the trustees would not take any initiative in asking for his resignation." Hiss, in Dulles's account, said he would probably resign in September, but not while the hearings continued. Hiss testified that Dulles told him that two or perhaps three trustees thought the publicity embarrassing and that it was their feeling that he should resign, and that his counsel afterward spoke to John W. Davis, who became acting chairman while Dulles was abroad.²⁷²⁸

Dulles remained abroad on United Nations business from late August 1948 until December 24, 1948.²¹ Shotwell testified that Davis presided at the trustees' dinner of December 12, 1948, and that William C. Bullitt, a trustee, asked Hiss at the dinner whether he had testified to the House committee that he had checked with Justice Byrnes about coming to the Endowment. Hiss withdrew; each trustee was called on separately, and Davis summed up.²⁴ The Charlotte News reported on December 13, 1948 that Hiss submitted his resignation and that the trustees tabled it and granted him a three-month leave of absence.²⁹ Shotwell testified that the leave was with full pay, that the executive committee voted on February 17, 1949 to extend it to the annual meeting of May 5, 1949, that at Hiss's request he communicated Hiss's decision informally to the executive committee before a letter to the May 5 meeting, and that he himself served as acting president from early September 1948.²⁴ Dulles, cross-examined, confirmed that he was a member of the executive committee that voted the extension.²¹ Shotwell also said he had collected some 360 letters about Hiss and had talked to many people.²⁴ Hiss testified in December 1949 that he had asked the board not to put his name up at the election of the preceding May.²⁸

The Bureau's Hiss file summarizes the press reports of the period. It records that Drew Pearson, in his column in the Washington Post of September 15, 1948, reported that Senator Styles Bridges told Governor Thomas E. Dewey that the directors of the Foundation had been "lukewarm about Hiss" and were brought into the appointment by Dulles, and that Dulles might have difficulty in being confirmed by the Senate. The same summary records an item from the Washington Evening Star of August 5, 1948 headed "Hiss Declares Dulles Helped Him to Get Carnegie Peace Post," and the statement of an informant that Dulles had been advised of Hiss's background and had discounted the report.³⁰ A Bureau memorandum of September 28, 1949 records a lead to learn what happened at the Endowment after Chambers's accusation, and notes that Shotwell and Ballantine had suggested examining the stenographic minutes of the board's meetings.³¹

Joseph E. Johnson was elected president of the Carnegie Endowment on May 11, 1950; the nominating committee, as the Endowment described it to the House foundations committee, was headed by Dulles.³² In a 1951 Bureau interview about Johnson, Shotwell remarked that "the Foundation, and particularly Dulles, is quite sensitive regarding the Alger Hiss" matter.³² The House select committee on tax-exempt foundations (the Cox Committee) stated in its report that Hiss's "nomination and election came about through the efforts of men of proven loyalty and broad experience in public affairs" and that "during his term as president of the Carnegie Endowment, Hiss took no official action to further the Communist cause."³³

The 1948 directory of foundations lists Hiss as a trustee of the World Peace Foundation for the fiscal year ended December 31, 1947. The same entry gives Harvey H. Bundy as president of that board.³⁴ At the second trial the government introduced Hiss's letter on Carnegie Endowment letterhead, signed "Alger Hiss, President," sent to Duggan, whose agency was the Institute of International Education. Hiss testified that Field had written to Duggan to ask whether the Endowment had any work he could do, that the request came to Hiss through Duggan, and that he asked Freda Kirchwey, whom he met at a dinner party, whether she would be interested in articles from Field.³⁵

Chambers's accusation and the 1948 hearings

Chambers testified before the committee in early August 1948. He said that he had approached Hiss in an effort to persuade him to leave the Communist Party USA. "I went to the Hiss home one evening at what I considered considerable risk to myself and found Mrs. Hiss at home," Chambers said, and he added that Hiss "absolutely refused to break."³⁶ Chambers also named Hiss among the Communists in a Washington group, saying: "One of them clearly was Alger Hiss," in the context of members of the group who were going "places in the Government."³⁷ According to the 1982 district court opinion, Chambers had spoken guardedly from 1939 to 1946 to various officials, among them Assistant Secretary of State Adolf A. Berle, and had stated in those conversations that Hiss was a Communist.¹⁰

Hiss appeared on August 5, 1948 and read a statement denying the charges. He said: "the statements made about me by Mr. Chambers are complete fabrications." He said that he had first heard of Chambers in 1947, when two agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation asked him whether he knew Chambers and other people, and that "So far as I know, I have never laid eyes on him, and I should like to have the opportunity to do so."³ He later told the committee that a man named George Crosley, a free-lance writer whom he met while working for the Nye committee, had sublet his apartment and stayed in his house.¹¹

In the later exchanges Chambers was asked to identify Hiss as the man he had known. He answered "Positive identification."³⁸ Hiss rose and walked toward Chambers. He then said that he would invite Chambers to make the same statements outside the committee room, without the protection of privilege, and added: "I challenge you to do it, and I hope you will do it damned quickly."³⁸

Nixon questioned both men. During the exchange over Chambers's account of his dental work, Nixon interrupted: "Since some repartee goes on between these two people, I think Mr. Chambers should be sworn." Nixon then asked Hiss whether he would have to have the dentist tell "just what he did to the teeth before you could tell anything about this man." Hiss answered: "I would like a few more questions asked."³⁹

Pumpkin papers and the grand jury

On December 15, 1948 Hiss testified before a federal grand jury in the Southern District of New York. He stated that he had never, nor had his wife in his presence, turned over any documents of the State Department, or copies of them, to Chambers or any other unauthorized person, and that he did not see Chambers after January 1, 1937.⁴⁰ The grand jury indicted him on perjury counts based on those two statements.⁴⁰

The committee had subpoenaed Chambers for documents. The appellate opinion records that "In response to a subpoena duces tecum served upon him by the Committee above mentioned at his farm in Maryland that same evening, Mr. Chambers produced from a pumpkin, in which he had recently hidden them, two rolls of developed micro-film, which had been made of other confidential documents from the State Department, and three rolls of undeveloped micro-film."⁴⁰ The opinion adds that some of the papers so produced were of a nature that, for security reasons, they could not safely be made public, and that the proper officials of the government took charge of them.⁴⁰

Hiss had brought suit against Chambers in the United States District Court in Maryland for defamation. In the pretrial deposition there Chambers produced on November 17, 1948 four handwritten notes and sixty-five typewritten pages, which became known as the Baltimore documents. The 1982 district court opinion states that Hiss later conceded the notes were in his hand and that most of the typed pages were typed on the Woodstock typewriter belonging to Priscilla Hiss.⁴¹

The Bureau's New York office recorded the day of the indictment. A memorandum by Assistant Special Agent in Charge A. H. Belmont dated December 15, 1948 states that the FBI Laboratory had told the office that the pumpkin documents (items Q74 through Q131) "were compared with" the Baltimore documents and "it was ascertained that different machines were used," and that the Laboratory had reported that it could not determine from the paper, writing or typing the age of the Baltimore documents. The same memorandum records a conference that day of the government attorneys on what indictments the grand jury, whose term was ending, could return; the recommendation to indict Hiss for perjury, which Alexander Campbell of the Department of Justice put by telephone to Peyton Ford; the consideration and rejection of an indictment of Priscilla Hiss for want of evidence; a presentment proposed by Campbell that would have criticized the House committee, to which United States Attorney John F. X. McGohey, Thomas F. Donegan and the other attorneys were "outspokenly opposed"; and the Department's intention to call a new grand jury "in an effort to find additional evidence which will bring the substantive espionage case within the statute of limitations."⁴² The Washington Times reported in 1992 that Hiss "was never charged with spying because the statute of limitations for that crime had elapsed."⁴³

The typewriter

The case on the documents turned in part on a typewriter. The appellate opinion says that "Tending to substantiate Mr. Chambers' testimony was the concession that all the copied documents produced by him were, save one, copied on the Hiss Woodstock typewriter." The opinion records the testimony of Hiss and his wife that the typewriter "had been given to one of their servants and taken away from their home before the dates of any of the documents of which Mr. Chambers produced copies." The court held that the jury could find the typewriter was in the Hiss home when the copies were made, and that this evidence corroborated Chambers. The opinion acknowledges that the copies could have been typed later from the originals or from microfilmed copies.⁴⁴

The Bureau's file records the effort to trace the machine. In a memorandum of May 18, 1949 Belmont recorded a call from the special agent in charge in Philadelphia, who noted that a report of the Chicago office of December 23, 1948 reflected that a Woodstock bearing serial number 230,099 "would have been produced in 1929, whereas the Woodstock typewriter sold in Philadelphia to the MARTIN & FANSLER CORP. was sold in 1927," and that the laboratory had identified that earlier machine as the one used to type the Chambers documents. Belmont advised that the number 230,099 appeared on the receipt given by Hiss's attorney to the person from whom he bought the Woodstock, "which may be the Woodstock typewriter in question," and recommended a complete history of the machine from manufacture, adding that the Chicago office could not assume "that this serial number was accurate."⁴⁵ The December 15, 1948 memorandum had already asked the laboratory for typing specimens identified with the machine as in the possession of the Hisses after September 9, 1936, which Belmont called very important.⁴²

Hiss's 1978 petition raised the serial number. In the 1982 opinion Judge Owen wrote that the Bureau's reports on the question were "highly contradictory and far from conclusive," quoting Judge Goddard's 1952 opinion denying a new trial: "The defense reasoning that No. 230,099 was manufactured after the Hiss machine is not sustained by any proof."⁴⁶

The trials

The appellate opinion summarizes the two trials in these words: "He was duly tried by jury twice, the jury at the first trial having failed to agree upon a verdict. At the second trial he was convicted on both counts."⁴⁰ The 1982 district court opinion gives the dates: the first trial ran from May 31 to July 7, 1949, and the second began on November 17, 1949 and ended with a conviction on both counts on January 25, 1950.⁴⁷ The finding aid for the defense files of Debevoise & Plimpton, which represented Hiss and his wife, Priscilla Hiss, records the same two trials.⁴⁸ Hiss was sentenced on January 25, 1950. The footnote to the Harry S. Truman Library's press conference transcript of January 27, 1950 records that he was sentenced to five years in a federal penitentiary for perjury.⁴⁹ The Washington Times reported that he served 44 months of the sentence.⁴³

The government's witnesses at the second trial included Chambers and his wife, Henry Julian Wadleigh, Felix Inslerman, Philip C. Jessup and Hede Massing. The defense called Hiss, Priscilla Hiss, Hiss's brother Donald Hiss, Sayre, and witnesses including Davis, Gerard Swope Jr., Shotwell and Charles E. Wyzanski Jr.; Dulles testified for the government in rebuttal.⁵⁰

On January 25, 1950, the day of sentencing, Dean Acheson, then secretary of state, spoke about Hiss. Acheson told reporters at his press conference that day, according to the New York Times as the Truman Library footnote records: "I do not intend to turn my back on Alger Hiss."⁴⁹

Noel Field and Hede Massing

Massing, a witness for the government at the second trial, testified that she met Hiss in the late summer or early fall of 1935 at the Washington home of Noel Field, then in the State Department, whom she described as working in what she believed was the Western European Division. She testified that she was working in "a Russian apparatus" and that she said to Hiss, "I understand that you are trying to get Noel Field away from my organization into yours," that he replied, "So you are this famous girl that is trying to get Noel Field away from me," and that he said, as she remembered it, "Well, we will see who is going to win." She testified that either he or she then said that "Whoever is going to win we are working for the same boss."⁵¹ She testified that she never saw Hiss again, that an arrangement was made at an FBI office so that he could look at her, and that at a second meeting about a year before the trial, attended by one of his lawyers and an FBI agent, he was friendly and said he did not remember her.⁵¹

Priscilla Hiss testified that she first heard of Hede Massing when she appeared at the grand jury, had never met her, and that she and her husband had been to the home of Noel Field and his wife "a few times."⁵² Hiss testified that he had known Field through Duggan, had seen him once or twice after his returns to the United States in the late 1940s, and had recommended him to Sayre.¹⁴³⁵ Asked whether he knew that Field had been dismissed by the Unitarian Service Committee for using its funds for Communist purposes, Hiss answered, "Quite the contrary," and said that a Boston Unitarian official had told him of a difference of opinion over relief policy.⁵³ The defense called Henrikas Rabinavicius, who testified that at a gathering at the home of the journalist Eugene Lyons, Massing, asked how she had met Hiss, described a young State Department man she called "Mr. X" and quoted Hiss as saying "You can't have that man"; Massing's account at trial was of a meeting at Field's home.⁵⁴

The Bureau's file summary records that Massing told agents Duggan was one of the State Department employees she had tried to recruit for Soviet espionage, and that Duggan, a close associate of Hiss according to her, "fell or jumped" out of a New York City office room on December 20, 1948.³⁰ A September 1949 Bureau memorandum records an informant's story that after the loyalty program began, State Department employees who left were placed by Duggan at the Institute of International Education, which received funds from the Carnegie Endowment, and that Hiss had pressed Duggan to take them; the Bureau considered whether the Institute's files might bear on a retrial.³¹

Hungarian records bear on Field. Ethan Klingsberg, the only foreign researcher permitted to read Field's dossier of about 2,500 pages in the Hungarian Interior Ministry archive, wrote in The Nation on November 8, 1993 that its references to Hiss amount to about four pages.⁵⁵ The Hungarian historian Maria Schmidt presented findings from the Hungarian secret-police files on Field at a seminar of the Institute for the Humanities of New York University on October 11, 1993. Sam Tanenhaus relied on her unpublished work in an op-ed in the New York Times on October 15, 1993 and in an article in Commentary, and Klingsberg wrote that both pieces claimed the files contain "unimpeachable" evidence that will "seal the case against Alger Hiss."⁵⁵ In the statements and prison autobiographies the Hungarian police took from Field he said that Hiss tried to recruit him about 1935 and that Field had replied that he was too late, that Hiss later supported his State Department career and tried to get him a Philippines post in 1940, and that they met briefly in 1939 and agreed on a signal if either's cover was blown. Klingsberg wrote that those statements were made under coercion, citing Field's March 1954 letter to the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party describing beatings and starvation, a 1991 Hungarian memoir by Vladimir Farkas that says Field was tortured, and the confirmation by the archive's director that political prisoners were routinely abused. Klingsberg wrote that Field's letters of 1948 and 1954 were supportive of Hiss and that in one of 1954 Field called Massing's testimony about him "nothing but a lie."⁵⁵

Appeals and petitions

Hiss's conviction was affirmed by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit on December 7, 1950 in an opinion by Circuit Judge Chase, with Judges Swan and Hand on the panel. The opinion holds that the sentences on the two counts were concurrent and that a conviction on either count, if without error, "would alone sustain the judgment and require its affirmance." The reported citation is United States v. Hiss, 185 F.2d 822 (2d Cir. 1950).⁴⁴ The Supreme Court denied certiorari on March 12, 1951.⁵⁶ In 1952 Hiss moved for a new trial on the ground, among others, that the Woodstock was not the Hiss machine; Judge Goddard denied the motion, the Second Circuit affirmed on his opinion, and certiorari was denied in 1953.⁴⁶

The defense files at Debevoise & Plimpton record that a 1975 suit under the Freedom of Information Act, brought by Hiss with William Ruben, produced FBI documents. Those documents formed the basis of a petition for a writ of error coram nobis, filed in 1978, which argued that the FBI documents had been withheld from the defense. The finding aid states that the petition was rejected in 1982. Its abstract dates the petition to 1979, while its historical note dates it to 1978.⁴⁸

The petition was decided on July 15, 1982 in In re Hiss, 542 F. Supp. 973 (S.D.N.Y. 1982), No. 78 Civ. 3433, by District Judge Richard Owen. Hiss moved on about 150 of the documents he had obtained, asserting (1) improper contacts between the prosecution and an investigator for the defense, (2) suppression of three statements by Chambers, (3) suppression of information about the Woodstock typewriter, (4) the knowing use of perjured testimony by two government witnesses, and (5) improper argument by the prosecutor in summation. The court wrote that the claims "raise no real question whatsoever, let alone a reasonable doubt, as to Hiss's guilt," that "The trial was a fair one by any standard," and that "nothing presented in these papers, extensive though they are, places that verdict under any cloud." It dismissed the petition without a hearing: "Accordingly, Hiss's petition for a writ of error coram nobis is dismissed."⁵⁷ The opinion also recorded that Hiss served three years of the five-year sentence.⁵⁷

Venona cable 1822

The National Security Agency released a set of decrypted Soviet intelligence messages under the Venona program. The cable numbered 1822 was sent from the Soviet residency in Washington to Moscow on March 30, 1945. It names an agent called ALES, who had worked with the "Neighbors" (a Soviet military intelligence organization) since 1935, had led for some years a small group of probationers made up mostly of his relatives, and whose group worked on obtaining military information only. The cable says that the group was recently awarded Soviet decorations, and that after the Yalta Conference, when ALES had gone on to Moscow, a senior Soviet official, whom ALES understood to be Vyshinsky, got in touch with him.⁵⁸

The NSA release annotates the name ALES with the words "Probably Alger HISS."⁵⁸ Ehrman's 2007 review in the CIA journal Studies in Intelligence reports that a historian at the United States Air Force, Eduard Mark, published findings in 2003 in Intelligence and National Security: that he found eight members of the Yalta delegation who had traveled to Moscow immediately afterward and that, in his judgment, only Hiss met the other criteria, so that "ALES was very probably Hiss."⁵⁹

The identification has been contested. In 2000 John Lowenthal, one of Hiss's lawyers, published "Venona and Alger Hiss" in Intelligence and National Security 15 (Autumn 2000), arguing that ALES was not Hiss. Ehrman reports that Lowenthal pointed out that Hiss had been accused of espionage only to 1938, of acting alone except for his wife and Chambers, and of passing State Department and not military documents; that he cited Venona cable 1579 of September 28, 1943, from the Soviet military intelligence office in New York, which mentions a State Department official named Hiss, and concluded that it "would seem to be a first-time reference to someone unknown to the GRU and not a spy"; and that he suggested a correct translation of cable 1822 would concern the presence of Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Vyshinsky at Yalta. Ehrman reports that Lowenthal also wrote that when Hiss appealed in 1950 the "FBI had an urgent need...for new evidence."⁵⁹ Ehrman wrote that Mark answered that Soviet cables sometimes used true names mistakenly, and that in 2005 the NSA released the original Russian text of the cable, which Ehrman states showed the English translation to be correct.⁵⁹

In April 2007 the historians Kai Bird and Svetlana Chervonnaya proposed Henry Wilder Foote, an assistant to Stettinius, as ALES, at a conference at New York University titled "Alger Hiss and History." Ehrman states that they relied on notes taken by Aleksandr Vassiliev in the KGB archives on a cable of March 5, 1945, which Vassiliev's notes record as stating that ALES had been at Yalta but had since left for Mexico City and had not yet returned to Washington. Ehrman reports that Hiss and Foote had both accompanied Stettinius to Mexico City on February 20, 1945 for the Inter-American Conference on the Problems of War and Peace, that Stettinius then sent Hiss back to Washington to prepare the San Francisco conference, and that on March 3, 1945 Hiss appeared on a State Department radio broadcast over NBC, which the Washington Star and the New York Times reported on March 4. Bird and Chervonnaya concluded, as Ehrman summarizes them, that because the Soviet resident knew Hiss was in Washington, ALES was someone else. Ehrman rejected that argument. Hiss's stepson, Timothy Hobson, spoke at the same conference and denied key elements of Chambers's testimony.⁵⁹

Volkogonov and the Russian archives

In late 1992, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Lowenthal asked the Soviet general and historian Dmitri Volkogonov, then a military adviser to Russian President Boris Yeltsin, to search the Russian archives for information about Hiss.⁶⁰ Volkogonov's letter to Lowenthal, dated October 14, 1992, reads, in the text Victor Navasky of The Nation later quoted: "On the basis of a very careful analysis of all the information available, I can inform you that Alger Hiss was never an agent of the intelligence services of the Soviet Union ... Not a single document, and a great amount of materials has been studied, substantiates the allegation that Mr. A. Hiss collaborated with the intelligence services of the Soviet Union."⁶¹ The Washington Post of October 31, 1992 printed another sentence of the letter: "Mr. A. Hiss had never and nowhere been recruited as an agent of the intelligence service of the U.S.S.R." It reported that Volkogonov added that there was no evidence Hiss was a Communist Party member.⁶² Hiss said he was "overjoyed, pleased as punch." Allen Weinstein, the author of Perjury, said: "We don't know what he's (Volkogonov) seen, we don't know what he hasn't seen."⁶²

On December 17, 1992 the New York Times printed an article by Serge Schmemann titled "Russian General Retreats on Hiss." According to the quotation of it by Mark Kramer of Harvard, Volkogonov told Schmemann: "I was not properly understood. The Ministry of Defense also has an intelligence service, which is totally different, and many documents have been destroyed. I looked only through what the K.G.B. had. All I said was that I saw no evidence." Kramer quotes him as saying that his motive had been "primarily humanitarian" and that "His attorney, Lowenthal, pushed me hard to say things of which I was not fully convinced."⁶¹ Kramer wrote that Volkogonov published an article in the Russian newspaper Nezavisimaya gazeta on November 24, 1992 retracting the written statement, and that in January 1993 he told Kramer that he had "not seen anything from the GRU archive."⁶¹

Navasky replied that Lowenthal had reinterviewed Volkogonov in Washington, on a date Kramer gives as November 11, 1992, on video, and quoted the transcript: Lowenthal asked whether he had examined the GRU files, and Volkogonov answered, "Yes, we also asked to examine the military intelligence files and there, too, no traces of Alger Hiss have been found," adding "naturally I can't say that I've seen all existing documents." In the transcript Volkogonov also said: "naturally I can not give a one hundred percent guarantee that something wasn't destroyed, but as far as I know ... these documents were not touched." Navasky wrote that Major General Julius Kobyakov, who did some of the research for Volkogonov, said publicly that he would "take a bite of my hat" if the GRU files, once opened, showed that Hiss was a spy, and that in messages to the H-DIPLO list beginning October 16, 2003 Kobyakov wrote that he had corresponded with the GRU and received "the relevant answer."⁶¹ Ehrman's 2004 review of G. Edward White's book on Hiss states that Volkogonov wrote a second letter "a few weeks later" stating that his search had not been thorough, and that the Venona releases of 1995 ended any chance that Hiss could be exonerated.⁶⁰

The Bundy contribution and the Hiss defense

The Bureau's Hiss file includes a 1953 memorandum on Harvey H. Bundy that began with a December 1952 letter to Senator McCarthy from a reader in Clanton, Alabama. The letter enclosed a newspaper clipping that said Bundy had a post at the Carnegie Endowment "with Alger Hiss' background."⁶³ In July 1953 Joseph McCarthy wrote to Allen Dulles, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, about a $400 contribution to the defense of Hiss by Bundy's son William P. Bundy, a CIA employee and Acheson's son-in-law; McCarthy's letter of July 27, 1953 said the confirmation of the contribution "raises the gravest question as to his holding a sensitive post in an intelligence agency."⁶⁴

Michael Whitney Straight

Michael Whitney Straight appears in the Hiss record through Allen Weinstein's book Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case, which asserted that Straight tried to recruit Hiss. Straight wrote to The New York Review of Books in December 1997 that in the June 1938 dispatch of Akhmerov, the Soviet contact "Jung," published by Weinstein, Akhmerov noted only that Straight "mentioned" Hiss as "a very progressive man." Weinstein replied that the book's line should read that Straight, code-named "Nigel," "identified and described Hiss to Itzhak Akhmerov."⁶⁵