Alger Hiss

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Alger Hiss

Alger Hiss (* 11. November 1904 in Baltimore , Maryland ; † 15. November 1996 in New York City ) was an American lawyer and government official, the spy for the Soviet Union was accused and in 1950 a federal court for perjury condemned prison to five years. Until the end of his life, Hiss denied the allegations. Several American historians see evidence of his guilt after evaluating Soviet archival material in the 1990s, but the case remains controversial to the present.

Youth and early career

Hiss was born in Baltimore. He attended the posh Baltimore City College High School and then went to an elite university, Johns Hopkins University . After completing his bachelor's degree, he studied law at Harvard University , where he was protégé of Felix Frankfurter , a future judge at the United States Supreme Court . Immediately after graduation, Hiss worked for a year as an assistant to the respected federal judge Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

In 1933, Hiss accepted a position as advisor and attorney to the staff of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal reform program . He dealt first with the Agricultural Adjustment Administration , which was supposed to support the farmers, as well as with the Nye Committee . This group investigated against various armaments manufacturers for illegal price fixing in the First World War .

Hiss joined the Justice Department in 1935 and moved to the State Department in 1937 . where he soon became an assistant to Francis Bowes Sayre , a son-in-law of the late President Woodrow Wilson . Hiss received various duties under Edward Stettinius , the future Secretary of State of the United States .

In 1944 Hiss worked in a new department of the State Department, the "Office of Special Political Affairs" (department for special political affairs). This department was responsible for international planning and organization after the end of the war. He later became its director and was therefore a member of the staff of the conference in Dumbarton Oaks , where the first plans for the future United Nations were drawn up.

In 1945 he was part of the US delegation to the Yalta Conference . He was involved in negotiating the details of creating the UN. At this point, Hiss rejected Stalin's request for 16 votes (one for each Soviet Union republic ) at the General Assembly. Eventually, the Soviet Union agreed to a compromise to only get two additional seats. Then Hiss traveled to Moscow with the new Foreign Minister Edward Stettinius . At the first meeting of UN delegates in San Francisco on June 26, 1945, he was the UN Provisional Secretary-General . He was then appointed director of the Special Political Affairs Department.

In 1946, a security investigation revealed that Hiss had received certain classified reports that were not due to him. The reports dealt with nuclear technology , American foreign policy towards China, and military intelligence. Shortly afterwards, Hiss resigned. He informed the Secretary of State that he was leaving the civil service to become President of the Carnegie Foundation for International Peace .

The Alger Hiss case

The accusations

In September 1939 Whittaker Chambers , one of the editors of TIME magazine and a former member of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) , informed the FBI that until a few months ago he had been an informant for the Soviet secret service. In an initial interview, he also named Hiss and his wife Priscilla as Soviet spies.

But the matter was not pursued, not least because high officials and prominent lawyers stood up for Hiss, including Felix Frankfurter.

The subject was only taken up again after the Second World War. Chambers reiterated on August 3, 1948 before the House Un-American Activities Committee (House Un-American Activities Committee, HUAC), Hiss was a spy for the Soviet Union was. Hiss handed documents to a colonel in the NKVD . He was good friends with Hiss and his wife Priscilla, as evidence Chambers cited several personal details about them. Hiss owns a Woodstock typewriter, on which he typed the contents of the secret documents.

Now Chambers' claims aroused political interest: In the upcoming election , Republicans had the first chance since 1933 to nominate the president. In the early McCarthy era they therefore tried hard to be able to accuse the Democrats of having been "yielding to communism" and having traitors and spies in their ranks. In particular, the ambitious member of the US House of Representatives Richard Nixon stood out in the HUAC.

Hiss' reaction

Although his friends advised against it, Hiss appeared before the committee voluntarily. He denied ever being a communist and ever knowing Chambers. Several witnesses refuted the latter. After Chambers also announced on the radio that Hiss was a secret agent of the Soviet Union, Hiss sued him for character assassination and defamation . Thereupon Chambers gave the so-called "Baltimore Documents" to the press, copies of state documents that he had allegedly received from Hiss in the 1930s. According to Chambers' testimony, Priscilla Hiss is said to have typed the documents, after which Hiss himself photographed the copies and delivered the negatives to the Soviet secret service.

Two weeks later, Chambers took HUAC investigators to his Maryland farm and gave them five reels of film he had hidden in a hollowed-out pumpkin. The filmed documents became known as the "Pumpkin Papers". They would prove that Hiss was involved in an espionage conspiracy. With this, Chambers contradicted the statements that he had earlier made under oath that he himself did not know about espionage cases. After Nixon testified before a grand jury on December 14, 1948, there was no prosecution of Chambers for perjury.

The perjury trial

Hiss could not be charged with espionage as the allegations were already statute barred. But since he had denied under oath before the HUAC that he was a spy, he was charged with perjury. The first trial, which lasted from May 31 to July 7, 1949, resulted in no conviction, as the jury did not come to a unanimous verdict: eight jurors believed in his guilt, four were not convinced. Hiss had summoned a number of exonerating witnesses: the Democratic Governor of Illinois Adlai Ewing Stevenson , Judge Felix Frankfurter, and the former presidential candidate and respected attorney John W. Davis . The second trial lasted from November 17, 1949 to January 21, 1950. An FBI agent testified under oath that the Baltimore documents had clearly been typed on Hiss' typewriter: forgery was technically impossible. It took the jury less than 24 hours of consultation to reach a guilty verdict.

The appellate body and the Federal Court of Justice confirmed the guilty verdict. On January 25, 1950, Hiss was sentenced to five years in prison, of which he served 44 months.

After imprisonment

In November 1954, Hiss was released from prison. His professional existence was now ruined when the Massachusetts Bar Board revoked his license to practice law. Therefore, he subsequently earned his living as a representative of a stationery company. As long as he was alive, Hiss protested his innocence. In 1978 he submitted a Coram Nobis petition. He claimed he had scientific evidence that the typewriter evidence was fake. Hiss was re-admitted to the bar in 1975. He continued to seek full rehabilitation, but the Supreme Court refused to overturn the conviction.

Hiss spent the last years of his life in Greenwich Village, New York . His son Tony supported him in his continuing efforts to prove his innocence. In 1989 he brought out his memoirs in which he again protested his innocence.

controversy

irregularities

In 1975, Hiss sued the US government under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) for disclosure of certain information. During the trial, his lawyers made the following arguments:

  • Counterfeiting of typewriters was indeed possible, the FBI agent had committed perjury with his statement to the contrary.
  • The FBI had an informant on Hiss' team: Horace W. Schmahl, a private detective employed by Hiss . Schmahl had briefed the government on Hiss' defense strategy.
  • Litigation-related information, such as the fact that the FBI knew about Chambers ' homosexuality and that it had been closely monitoring Hiss' intelligence services, had been kept secret from Hiss and his lawyer.

Chambers died of a heart attack in 1961 without retracting his allegations.

After evaluating Soviet archive materials

In 1992, a lawyer for Hiss said that former Soviet general and Stalin biographer Dmitry Volkogonov had announced that the Soviet archives contained no evidence against Hiss. However, Volkogonov corrected the New York Times that he had only reproduced the testimony of KGB archivists. Incidentally, the KGB archives are not the right place to find traces of Hiss, who are accused of spying for the GRU military intelligence service . The GRU archive remains closed to researchers. However, Hiss's espionage activity should also have been recognizable from the files available to Volkogonov.

In 1995 the American government published the papers of the “ VENONA Project ”, deciphered messages from the Soviet intelligence services from the 1940s. The documents mention a Soviet spy, code-named "Ales", who served in the US State Department. The biographical details matched Hiss. In 1996, the NSA released telegrams that intercepted and decoded them between Moscow headquarters and their agents in the United States. It mentions an agent named "Ales" who the NSA said was Hiss. According to the documents, "Ales" took part in the trip of a small US delegation from the Yalta Conference to Moscow to see Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Vyshinsky ; the delegation belonged to Hiss, none of the other of its members matched the already gained knowledge about "ales".

On the basis of the Soviet documents, studies were submitted, the authors of which considered the espionage allegations to have been proven beyond doubt. In 1935, a year after joining the underground organization of the CPUSA, he committed himself to the Soviet military intelligence service GRU. These authors, who from now on dominated the discourse, included the son-in-law of Hiss' former lawyer, G. Edward White.

Historian Allen Weinstein, who was the United States' archivist from 2005 to 2008 , found a 1936 GRU document in a Moscow archive that named Hiss by real name. His contacts to the operations center in Moscow were temporarily also through the secret service resident Vasily Sarubin . Weinstein stated that his original intention was to prove Hiss' innocence, but after studying the archival materials he came to the conclusion that he was guilty. A document from 1955 about a testimony of the US diplomat Noel Field , who had spied on behalf of the Soviet Union in Washington, also came to light in an archive in Prague . Noel told the Czechoslovak secret service that Hiss had tried to recruit him as a spy for the Soviet Union.

According to the New York Times reviewer, the writer Susan Jacoby was " almost, but not entirely, persuaded " of the correctness of the espionage allegations . Her book presents the controversy against the background of the great ideological clash between right and left: Hiss was tailor-made for the right "who wanted to tarnish the memory of Roosevelt" and wanted to blur the "distinction between communism and liberalism". ... For the left, Hiss is an elegant representative of liberalism under the New Deal , which like so many others fell victim to the hysteria during the Cold War. ( For the right, Hiss was "tailor-made for those who wished to besmirch the memory of Roosevelt," and to blur "the distinction between Communism and liberalism." ... For the left, Hiss was an elegant representative of New Deal liberalism, who with so many others became a victim of cold war hysteria. ) Max Frankel also saw the Hiss case in the context of a fundamental cultural controversy: “The belief as to whether Hiss was guilty or innocent depended more on a cultural point of view than on the evaluation of Facts. "( Believing Hiss guilty or innocent was likely to depend more on a cultural choice than a factual assessment. )

In the opinion of the former editor-in-chief of the New York Times, Max Frankel , since the analysis of Soviet archive material, American historians have been of the opinion that he was an informant for the Soviet secret services. The Moscow daily Pravda also called Hiss a Soviet spy .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Allen Weinstein / Alexander Vassiliev: The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America - the Stalin Era. Modern Library, New York 2000, p. 41 f.
  2. ↑ John Earl Haynes / Harvey Klehr: In Denial. Historians, Communism & Espionage. New York / London 2003, p. 154.
  3. ↑ Joseph E. Persico: Roosevelt's Secret War. FDR and World War II Espionage. Random House, New York 2002, p. 442.
  4. ↑ Joseph E. Persico: Roosevelt's Secret War. FDR and World War II Espionage. Random House, New York 2002, pp. 260 f.
  5. ↑ Allen Weinstein / Alexander Vassiliev: The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America - the Stalin Era. Modern Library, New York 2000, p. 48.
  6. ↑ Jeff Kisseloff: Hiss, Alger . In: Peter Knight (Ed.): Conspiracy Theories in American History. To Encyclopedia . ABC Clio, Santa Barbara, Denver and London 2003, Vol. 1, p. 313.
  7. ↑ Allen Weinstein / Alexander Vassiliev: The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America - the Stalin Era. Modern Library, New York 2000, p. 42; John Earl Haynes / Harvey Klehr: In Denial. Historians, Communism, and Espionage. Encounter Books, New York / London 2003, p. 153.
  8. ↑ Jeff Kisseloff: Hiss, Alger . In: Peter Knight (Ed.): Conspiracy Theories in American History. To Encyclopedia . ABC Clio, Santa Barbara, Denver and London 2003, Vol. 1, p. 314.
  9. ^ Alger Hiss: Recollections of a Life . Little Brown, London 1989.
  10. ↑ Jeff Kisseloff: Hiss, Alger . In: Peter Knight (Ed.): Conspiracy Theories in American History. To Encyclopedia . ABC Clio, Santa Barbara, Denver and London 2003, Vol. 1, p. 316.
  11. ↑ John Earl Haynes / Harvey Klehr: In Denial. Historians, Communism, and Espionage. Encounter Books, New York / London 2003, p. 168.
  12. ↑ Jeff Kisseloff: Hiss, Alger . In: Peter Knight (Ed.): Conspiracy Theories in American History. To Encyclopedia . ABC Clio, Santa Barbara, Denver and London 2003, Vol. 1, p. 316.
  13. ↑ Jeff Kisseloff: Hiss, Alger . In: Peter Knight (Ed.): Conspiracy Theories in American History. To Encyclopedia . ABC Clio, Santa Barbara, Denver and London 2003, Vol. 1, p. 316.
  14. ↑ Allen Weinstein / Alexander Vassiliev: The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America - the Stalin Era. New York 2000, p. 269.
  15. ^ Donal O'Sullivan: The American Venona Project. The exposure of Soviet foreign espionage in the 1940s , in: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte , 4.2000, p. 609 ( PDF ).
  16. ↑ John Earl Haynes / Harvey Klehr: In Denial. Historians, Communism, and Espionage. Encounter Books, New York / London 2003, pp. 153 f .; Joseph E. Persico: Roosevelt's Secret War. FDR and World War II Espionage. Random House, New York 2002, p. 368; Allen Weinstein / Alexander Vassiliev: The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America - the Stalin Era. Modern Library, New York 2000, p. 269.
  17. ↑ Joseph E. Persico: Roosevelt's Secret War. FDR and World War II Espionage. Random House, New York 2002, pp. 299, 368.
  18. ^ Max Frankel: Reading Alger Hiss's Mind. (Review on G. Edward White: Alger Hiss's Looking Glass. The Covert Life of a Soviet Spy) . In: nytimes.com , February 29, 2004.
  19. ↑ John Earl Haynes / Harvey Klehr: In Denial. Historians, Communism, and Espionage. Encounter Books, New York / London 2003, p. 149.
  20. ↑ Joseph E. Persico: Roosevelt's Secret War. FDR and World War II Espionage. Random House, New York 2002, p. 392.
  21. ↑ Allen Weinstein, Historian of Alger Hiss Case, Dies at 77 , nytimes.com , June 20, 2015.
  22. ↑ John Earl Haynes / Harvey Klehr: In Denial. Historians, Communism & Espionage. New York / London 2003, p. 148.
  23. ^ A Clash of Symbols , nytimes.com , May 7, 2009.
  24. ^ Max Frankel: Reading Alger Hiss's Mind. (Review on G. Edward White: Alger Hiss's Looking Glass. The Covert Life of a Soviet Spy) . In: nytimes.com , February 29, 2004.
  25. ^ Max Frankel: Reading Alger Hiss's Mind. (Review on G. Edward White: Alger Hiss's Looking Glass. The Covert Life of a Soviet Spy) . In: nytimes.com , February 29, 2004.
  26. ↑ "Obratnaja storona OON" , Pravda.ru , June 2, 2006.

literature

  • The Alger Hiss Research and Publication Project : The Alger Hiss Story: Search for the Truth.
  • James Thomas Gay: The Alger Hiss Spy Case. American History (May – June 1998)
  • Susan Jacoby : Alger Hiss and the Battle for History. Yale University Press, Yale 2009.
  • Jeff Kisseloff: Hiss, Alger . In: Peter Knight (Ed.): Conspiracy Theories in American History. To Encyclopedia . ABC Clio, Santa Barbara, Denver and London 2003, Vol. 1, pp. 313-317.
  • Eduard Mark: Who Was “Venona” s' “Ales?” Cryptanalysis and the Hiss Case . In: Intelligence and National Security 18/3 (2003).
  • Allen Weinstein: Perjury. The Hiss-Chambers Case. Random House, 1997, ISBN 0-394-49546-2
  • G. Edward White: Alger Hiss' looking glass-wars. The Covert Life of a Soviet Spy. Oxford University Press, New York 2004, ISBN 0-19-515345-6

Web links

Commons : Alger Hiss  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

See also

personal data
SURNAME Hiss, Alger
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American lawyer
DATE OF BIRTH November 11, 1904
PLACE OF BIRTH Baltimore , Maryland
DATE OF DEATH November 15, 1996
Place of death New York City