In 1978, the same year that Alger filed for his writ of coram nobis, Alan Weinstein brought out a book called Perjury. Nixon was right all along. Chambers spoke the literal truth. Fresh evidence from the Russian archives proved it.
A New Prosecution.
We need a review of our setting: the start of the cold war. For more than a decade, according to this New Prosecutor, the Soviets have been running the highest-placed agent they’d ever had in the US. He’s perfect. He has no record of youthful Communist sympathies like the Hollywood Ten and the Cambridge Five. He does his work with no more than a single ill-kempt courier – his close friend – calling regularly at his house in defiance of all espionage protocol. And yet he’s so clever that many years of intensive FBI surveillance found no trace of any contact between them. Nor has he ever given the Americans cause to doubt his loyalty. Then a committee of notoriously corrupt Congressmen – Washington nobodies – puts out a hook he could easily ignore. He swallows the hook, then begs for the line and sinker and swallows those too.
The former British secret service Officer Vernon Hinchley just couldn’t get his mind around it. The story was “impossible to understand.”
And Alger went right on flagrantly disobeying Soviet instructions. He didn’t lie low. He didn’t take the Fifth. He didn’t run. He tangled with the agent provocateur Chambers. Maybe he had escape plans and never used them? The US Navy Intelligence expert Ladislas Farago says Soviet spies are trained to plan and rehearse their escape routes. Svetlana says the famous spy Julius Rosenberg “had been arranging an escape ever since the Fuchs trial in London”. There was “an FBI panic instruction, given just 10 hours before the arrest, to place surveillance around the house’s many exits ‘even if he becomes aware of it’.”
The prosecution in Alger’s trials would have adored any hint of anything like this escape plan. If they found one, they never said so. If arrangements were made in Russia, nobody has found a trace of them either.
Nor is Weinstein the only writer to support Judge Owen’s verdict because of allegations about Russian archives. There’s book after book of the New Prosecution, a dozen or so by now. All of them swallow Chambers whole, something not even Nixon could manage. All of them say the Soviet archives prove it. All of them come to the same conclusion: guilty.
The New Prosecutors do differ from each other here and there. They say Soviet records identify Alger as a spy called Lawyer or Jurist. Or maybe Advokat. Or maybe Doctor. No, no. That turns out to be a Bessarabian Jew. So Alger’s a spy called Ales. Or maybe Master. Or maybe Leonard.
But he can’t be all these spies, can he? Wouldn’t the Russians get confused? Mostly people have one code name. Kim Philby was “Stanley”. Guy Burgess was “Hicks”. Anthony Blunt was “Johnson”. Not that having a code name makes a person a spy. Churchill was “Boar”. Roosevelt was “Captain”.
Never mind the confusion over Alger. He’s guilty.
Part of the trouble may be that Weinstein and the others haven’t actually visited the archives. From what Svetlana says, it’s awfully hard to get permission. A deal got struck. The Russian secret services needed money. They made an arrangement with Crown publishers in New York to exchange limited access to archive files in exchange for cash, and they assigned their own journalist to the job, a real Russian who’d once been a KGB agent. This guy didn’t actually go inside the archives either – that difficult-to-get permission – but he did visit an office in Moscow where friendly officials from the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service let him see some “passages” and “citations” specially chosen for him; the Service’s Press Officer Boris Labusov emphasized that the ex-agent saw “no official copies of documents”. No photocopying allowed. Only notes. And those notes had to stay behind in a locked safe.
Several hundred thousand dollars changed hands.
Here’s the gist of what the ex-agent has to say about Alger:
A woman called Hede Massing testified for the prosecution at Alger’s second trial; she was a real Soviet agent with the cover name Redhead – only the one cover name though, none of Alger’s rich endowment – who’d been an actress in Vienna. She’d told her controller about a conversation she’d had at a party with the eminent Alger Hiss, the two of them having a flirtatious squabble over which of them was going to recruit their host for the cause.
The FBI didn’t believe her. She’d been confessing to them for a couple of years, and not a word about Alger until agents prompted her – and suggested a wrong answer might end in deportation. The party’s hostess was certain the conversation never took place because she’d never invited Alger with the actress at the same time; the party’s host agreed. US State Department records show that both host and hostess were out of the country on all the possible party dates. They didn’t testify for the defence in the trial for the very unpleasant reason that both were being tortured in Hungary as US spies.
Massing’s story didn’t impress the Soviets either: she “was unable to educate not only an agent, but [even] herself”. Which brings me to the first general in my tale. He’s former KGB General Oleg Kalugin, chief of the Foreign Intelligence Department, and his comment was, “Some, not-too-honest KGB officers would gladly declare that ‘Hiss is my agent.’ In fact, he is not.”
The KGB ex-agent also said he’d seen Alger’s name on a couple of lists of spies. Press Officer Labusov said, “We, the Russian Intelligence Service, have no documents…proving that Alger Hiss cooperated with our service somewhere or anywhere.” Alger’s lawyer was openly contemptuous of the lists in an obscure British quarterly called Intelligence and National Security; Amazon.com printed a letter from him quoting from his article. That made the ex-agent angry. The journal really was obscure, but Amazon.com was an American behemoth. The thing is, back then “libel tourism” was a British cottage industry; the laws made it far easier to sue and win here than in almost any other country in the world. If the ex-agent could nail the obscure journal, he’d have Amazon too.
He lost both suits and £70,000 in costs. A unanimous verdict.
The New Prosecution interviewed witnesses, and they do sound damning. On the other hand, several witnesses complained that they had been misquoted. One of them said Allen Weinstein’s quotes were “sheer poppycock. My son says I should consult a lawyer.” Another did call his lawyer. His name was Sam Krieger, and he sued both Weinstein and his publisher. Result? An out-of-court settlement for an undisclosed amount.
Which makes for three legal analyses of the New Prosecution’s case, all of them coming down on the side of the defence.
Never mind. Alger’s guilty.
There are a number of spy handler confessions about, all of them by Russians who handled American spies. Where are the confessions of the lucky KGB or NKVD agent who handled this most important of all American traitors? Are we talking about Chambers? No, no. A spy for the Soviets had to have a handler in the Soviet secret services. Nobody claims the honour for Alger even though there’d be a lot of money in it. Glory too. Hollywood. A movie. And where are the confessions of co-conspirators? All the people Chambers named – every single one of them, in the Communist Party or out of it – denied any knowledge of Alger and espionage, even the ones who needed cash and could profit from it. They weren’t at risk. The statute of limitations protected them.
It’s now more than eighty years since Nixon began his crusade. In all that time, nobody – not a single human being – Russian or American or any other nationality, has corroborated Chambers’ tales of Alger the spy. Nor has a single document shown up to support the idea.
The New Prosecution does lots of delving into Alger’s personality. Not that they’re psychiatrists or psychoanalysts or anything like that. Some blame his treachery on his wife, just like Adam in the Bible. Some blame it on his domineering mother. Some say he remained serene because he was protecting somebody else. Some say his character is so complex, so tortured, so convoluted that his denial of guilt only “confirms” it.
Half a century of insisting he’s innocent: what greater proof of guilt could there be?
In 1992 a second general, Dimitri Volkogonov – Russian archival historian, code and espionage expert – studied the archives available to him and found nothing whatever to indicate Alger had ever been an agent, paid or unpaid. The New Prosecution asked if he’d examined everything that existed. The general admitted that he didn’t have the clearance to examine everything. Not that any human being could in a single lifetime, no matter how extensive the clearance. Many archives had been destroyed, hadn’t they? The General admitted that this was true.
Aha! He’s “retracted” his statement.
Now that’s just plain naughty for people who haven’t studied the Soviet archives themselves and know perfectly well that their own archives routinely destroy stuff. John Lowenthal, Professor of Law, asked the general, “In your opinion, if Alger Hiss had been a spy, would you have found some documents saying that?’
“Positively,” said the general.
In 1996 the National Security Agency released the Venona Papers, coded Soviet cables monitored by the US during World War II. The originals are long gone. All that’s left is decoding and partial translation – nobody knows how rough – and interpretation. The New Prosecution seized on them. The two cables allegedly concerning Alger were numbered 1822 and 1579. The first mentions the agent Ales. A comment notes, “It would appear likely that this individual is Alger Hiss” “Likely”? The comment turns out to be no part of the original cable, nothing to do with the Soviets at all. An FBI Special Agent added it a quarter of a century later, only a month or so after Alger was convicted.
What with my family’s records destroyed and palletized, the FBI as an archive facility could hardly impress me. As for their general accuracy in assessing the little they’ve kept of important files, a real treasure lurks in their newly released list of its files on famous dead people:
US Senator b. 1908
McCARTHY JOSEPH
d. 1957
COMMUNIST
Isn’t that glorious? The FBI condemns the arch anti-Communist as a Red? And this is an official record, not just some agent’s stray comment.
The other Venona cable, 1579, actually mentions the name Hiss. It’s a fragment sent from the Military Intelligence chief in New York to his director in Moscow and says a cable “has reported [gobbledygook] from the State Department by the name of HISS.” “Gobbledygook” means that the Americans couldn’t read the code. There’s no mistaking the name Hiss though because it appeared in the Latin alphabet in the original cable. It’s not as though the Soviet secret services were unfamiliar with Alger Hiss; he appears frequently in his official capacity. The “[gobbledygook]” could just as well mean “an uncooperative diplomat” or “a well-dressed man” or “a famous patriot” as anything sinister. Here there’s no first name – could be Alger, could be his brother, could be some other Hiss altogether. But referring to a spy without a cover-name? Spy-masters just don’t do that.
That’s the extent of the Venona papers on the case. But surely we can find something to damn Alger with, something for these New Prosecutors to work with? It’s hard going though, especially since nobody has found traces of cables and secret documents supplied by either Alger or Chambers. Not even the litigious ex-KGB agent. Press Officer Labusov said so. And then Ladislas Farago says all espionage encounters had to be arranged in Moscow. So does Vernon Hinchley. Nobody has found any evidence of plans for Alger or Chambers. Nor is there any evidence that the Soviets helped Alger financially. When he went on trial, the Soviets supplied no “money for the defence”, something they’d most certainly have done if he’d been a real spy. Money for Judith Coplon, caught red-handed in the act of giving information to a Soviet agent. Money for Klaus Fuchs, a physicist who gave the Soviets the theoretical outline for a hydrogen bomb and spent fourteen years in Wakefield Prison. Money for Julius Rosenberg, executed as a spy at Sing Sing in 1953. Money for lots of others too. Nothing for Alger. What about when Alger was in prison? Any worries about him then? According to one of Alger’s fellow prisoners, “All the top Commies in the country that were in jail at the time came through Lewisburg.” Svetlana found a report in Molotov’s papers – he was Stalin’s protégé – listing American Communists banged up in US jails “simultaneously with Hiss. In this Top Secret report for Molotov’s eyes only, Hiss’s name was not mentioned.”
What about the Russian public? Everybody loves spy stories. How does this hero fare in Russia? There’s a lot on other famous turncoats. Klaus Fuchs: he’s well covered. The Cambridge Five are all over the place, just as they are here. A book came out not long ago on Anthony Blunt.
But the Hiss case?
There are no popular books. Not one. All that exists are a few scholarly works that include references but don’t even consider the possibility that Alger had anything to do with Soviet espionage. They dismiss the case out of hand as an “obvious fabrication” or a “pure fabrication”. Even the last KGB chief didn’t know who Alger Hiss was until 1996, when an American journalist asked about him.
Then it occurred to me, thinking of Dexter and his novel The Accident, that since nobody can find solid evidence of guilt in Soviet documents, there might be proof of another kind to be found in the workings of the archives themselves.
Dexter told me that the project to build the atom bombs during World War II was an extraordinarily well-kept secret, even though a huge installation had to be built in a remote part of New Mexico. Thousands of tons of materials had to be transported there. Railway lines had to be diverted and their routes disguised to hide the destination. The army had been doing this for a number of months when a disabled newspaper reporter in Denver, confined to an apartment overlooking the railroads, noticed an increase in activity on lines heading out west. He plotted the activity, put together a pattern, discovered the secret.
Why not the same for Alger? If he really were a spy, surely the activity in the archives would greatly increase when he was under threat.
To get a sense of comparison, I asked Svetlana about other turncoats. She says there’s an “obvious increase in entries” around such cases. “Take, for instance, the Fuchs case. In Molotov Papers we see Soviet secret TASS reports with Molotov’s heavy pencil marks and notations – followed by instructions for publishing TASS official refutation. Same pattern around the arrest of Harry Gold in May 1950. Lots of activity around the arrest, investigation and trial of Judy Coplon in 1949.”
So what about Alger? What about his appearances in front of HUAC? His suit against his agent provocateur? His trials? What kind of activity went on in the Soviet archives during these crucial times?
What Svetlana says is:
“Total silence Re Hiss.”
What kind of information should General Volkogonov have found about Alger the spy in the Soviet archives? “With my knowledge of the file-keeping of the period,” Svetlana told me, “there should’ve been, first, an Alger Hiss informational file (like for many others, much less important) and a subject file.”
Clearly he didn’t find anything like that, and yet those Soviet archives yielded up an “informational file” for Secretary of State Dean Acheson and for Averell Harriman, presidential candidate, ambassador to the UK, governor of New York. The FBI had files on both of them too. Here’s the entry for Harriman in that recently released list of files of famous dead people:
Ambassador
HARRIMAN WILLIAM AVERALL also spelled Averill
COMMUNIST
Wonderful. Two spellings for Averell – and both of them wrong. Never mind that though. The FBI listed him as a Communist! And he has an “informational file” in the secret Soviet archives! He was at Yalta. He was ambassador to the USSR too. His Moscow office was bugged. Who’s to say he didn’t engineer that himself? Why isn’t the New Prosecution in hot pursuit? As for Bullitt, the spy Ludwig Lore fingered him on record, and Svetlana found cables from him in Stalin’s private archive, annotated in Stalin’s own hand. He’s a doddle. So where are all these eager New Prosecutors?
During a war people at a high diplomatic level have no choice but to make compromises the rest of us might consider dicey. Negotiations like the ones at Yalta are so tense precisely because crossings-of-the-line are obligatory. How does Roosevelt get Stalin to understand that he doesn’t want Churchill to invade Japan while Churchill is sitting right there? How do Roosevelt and Churchill keep Stalin in the dark about an atom bomb when they’re trying to agree on how to deploy it? A case could be made against any diplomat or politician of Alger’s stature, and anybody could make a stronger case against many of them than the New Prosecution’s against Alger.
So I have this theory.
The stumbling into Nazis is everywhere. Nazi cartels. Nazi military. Nazi contracts. FBI Agent Reynolds, quoting Confidential Informant T-27 about my father, writes that he was one of the few who didn’t trust multinational corporations because of their connection to the “known activities of German fifth column agents”.
The phrase “fifth column” comes from the Spanish Civil War, when Franco claimed he would march on Madrid with four columns and be met by the fifth inside. Way back in 1943, the investigative journalist George Seldes wrote that “only the little seditionists and traitors have been rounded up by the FBI. The real Nazi Fifth Column in America remains immune.” There are a number of recent books that support the idea, including Stephen Kinzer’s study of the Dulleses, The Brothers. Their sources include the Congressional Record, documents from the Justice Department’s Economic Warfare Unit, reports of Treasury investigations, minutes of Embassy meetings, military intelligence memoranda and communications, corporate reports, letters in corporation files, investigative articles in magazines and newspapers.
Sources include even the Code of the Federal Regulations of the United States.
On December 13, 1941 – two days after the United States declared war on Germany and the very day after Germany declared war on the United States – President Roosevelt himself signed into law an exception to the ban on trading with the enemy: it’s okay to do this “provided it is authorized by the Secretary of the Treasury.” The bill sped through Congress – the First War Powers Act – stamped and ready in five days.
Given this, there’s no way the government could have been unaware of at least some of what was going on, especially since so many of the moneymakers were in government themselves – or closely tied to it. The extent was staggering. The Dulleses’ patents for I. G. Farben were what created the rubber shortages in America. Their patents for I. G. Bosch stopped the Allies using direct fuel injection technology in diesel engine production, crucial in the manufacture of efficient trucks, tanks, ships, submarines, and planes. The Rockefellers’ Standard Oil of New Jersey shipped fuel to Nazi troops through Switzerland. The Bushes’ Union Bank held millions of Hitler’s funds. Ford built trucks for German occupation troops in France, where their business increased dramatically during the war. Alcoa shipped aluminium for airplanes to Germany and left the American military short. The telephone conglomerate ITT helped improve German communication systems and build the V1 and V2 bombs that destroyed London. There was no function they wouldn’t stoop to. IBM had the contract for the punch cards that identified Holocaust victims in Auschwitz.
This industrial and financial cooperation laid the foundations for a new, international, empire. It’s an empire that had nothing to do with ideology. Nothing to do with emperors or cabals in dark basements. It wasn’t limited to the United States either. This was a new approach to the world’s economy. This was banking, industry and political power married as they were in what might be called “the German experiment”. John Foster Dulles called that experiment an “economic and financial union”; he championed its spread over the globe as “a kind of supranational guild”.
When the war was over, the “supranational guild” moved into Germany to protect its assets. And to insure its continued survival: today’s bankers and multinationals, stronger than ever, no boundaries, no loyalties. One example of how this worked is I. G. Farben, makers of Zyklon-B, lethal gas for the Holocaust. It was a conglomerate to begin with. In 1945 the Allies split it back into its constituent parts. Bayer Healthcare is – and was – one of them. Another is – and was – BASF, right now the largest chemical company in the world.
Dulles’s economic and financial union is now well-entrenched, even though most of us are unaware of its existence. It’s the reason that bankers can bring about almost total collapses of global markets. But getting its hold in America without revealing its structure: that took some doing.
Nixon is the one who said in that radio interview after Alger’s first trial, “I think the entire Truman administration was extremely anxious that nothing happen to Mr. Hiss.” A truly Nixonian approach: blame a jury’s failure to reach the verdict he wanted on the political machinations of those Red-tinted Democrats. But a shift of parties actually makes it work pretty well. All those decades of a Republican-dominated HUAC – close to forty years of it – all that money spent on it, all those lives ruined: the one and only justification for the pain, fear, waste and destruction is Alger Hiss. HUAC went on doing its dirty work for twenty-five years after they’d put Alger in prison. They’d never caught anybody before him, and they never caught anybody after him. Not that there weren’t spies around; the FBI trapped many and turned many. HUAC? Just Alger. Not anybody else in all their forty years. Nobody. Not one spy.
The Red scare they whipped up, which concentrated anti-communist paranoia around Alger Hiss, became for America what antisemitism had been to Germany, a force to unify the people and deflect attention from an economic re-arrangement that could not function freely without chipping away at their rights. The Democrats with their New Deal commitments were a barrier. A 1943 memorandum of a secret meeting of industrialists from several countries states that “The new Presidential elections must bring the United States on the side of the powers fighting for the reorganization of the world markets.” Republican election campaigns concentrated on the Red smear as their route to victory. J Parnell Thomas, chairman of HUAC, explained that the Republican National Committee had urged him “to set up spy hearings…in order to put the heat on Harry Truman.”
Chambers had no choice but to play the heroic role assigned to him; he had those charges of perjury and homosexuality ready to put him behind bars if he didn’t. A scapegoat – a hate figure for the public to focus on – was a missing element. Svetlana thinks HUAC’s original target was Lee Pressman. He was on Chambers’ list before Alger was and also on all the lists that sprang up from it, and he’d have been a much easier victim. He was a Jew. He’d had a real live Communist Party past. He’d have made a splash, a prominent lawyer, an ex-State Department official, a major force in the unions.
When Alger Hiss volunteered to appear before HUAC, he was walking straight into the role; there was no longer a need for Pressman or anybody else. Nowadays, the stream of books condemning Alger anew – with disproved evidence and tealeaves from Russian archives – cement his position as the scapegoat for America’s role in the supranational guild.
But we’re still missing an element.
“Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean” – this is George Kennan, diplomat, historian, the “father of containment” – “the American military-industrial complex would have to remain substantially unchanged until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy.”
He couldn’t have known what form his prediction would take, but the war on terrorism that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union certainly fulfilled it. It’s as much a fact as communism. Osama Bin Laden was a real man. The Trade Center really was bombed. There really are jihadis and suicide bombers. ISIS is a living, breathing eruption of the Dark Ages right in our modern faces. Terrorism has advantages over communism too; it’s a worldwide movement, no boundaries or loyalties. Just like the guild itself.
But we common people need to stories make things come alive for us. We need a setting and a human history. Here’s how I think this story goes. A world full of terror – from whatever source – has to be our setting. Chambers is the founding hero in our fight against it. Alger is the bogeyman. He’s the one who made the threat real to us right back at the beginning. To this day, he continues to serve as the embodiment of what happens when we let our guard down.
And my theory is that that’s why books condemning him over and over keep coming out.
In 2003, a third general, Julius Kobyakov, added weight to my first two generals with spelling mistakes that are charmingly his, not mine: “After carefull study of every reference to Mr. A.Hiss in the SVR” – that’s the Russian Federal Security Service – “(KGB NKVD) archives, and querring sister services, I prepared an answer to Mr. J.Lowenthal that in essence stated that Mr. A.Hiss had never had any relationship with the SVR or its predecessors.”
Then he added, “I am ready to eat my hat if someone proves the contrary.”