When I first started my research on the Gouzenko affair, I did not expect that it would involve rethinking the sensational Alger Hiss case, which polarized American public opinion during the McCarthy era and aroused heated debate among historians in the United States in the past five decades. Ever since new documentation emerged in the 1990s, said to prove conclusively that Hiss was a spy, many historians have considered the Hiss case closed.
But a close scrutiny of this new evidence—prompted by my suspicion that the FBI distorted statements made by Gouzenko to help make their case against Hiss—led me to join the small minority of Cold War scholars who remained unconvinced that Hiss was a Soviet agent. The first supposedly definitive proof against Hiss was the now famous March 30, 1945 telegram from the Soviet intelligence chief in Washington, Anatolii Gorsky, to Moscow headquarters. Gorsky's message, deciphered by the U.S. National Security Agency (as part of a secret program called Venona) and made public in 1995, contained references to a spy code-named “Ales,” who was said to be Alger Hiss. As I explain in this book, there were actually far too many uncertainties of meaning in that fragmented message to come to any conclusions about the identity of Ales.
Since my book was published in Canada last year, the NSA has released the original Russian version of the decryption. Far from resolving the ambiguities, as many had hoped, the original makes it even more doubtful that “Ales” was Alger Hiss. To mention one example: the Russian text makes it clear that the group of spies run by Ales consisted of his family members. They had for many years provided such valuable military secrets to the Soviets that they were awarded decorations. It is highly improbable that Hiss's family could have had any military information worth sharing with the Soviets. Hiss's wife, Priscilla, was a stay-at-home mother, and his brother Donald a lawyer for the State Department.
The other much-cited evidence against Hiss appeared in a book called The Haunted Wood by Allen Weinstein (currently the archivist of the United States) and Alexander Vassiliev (a former KGB officer), published in 1999 and based on documents that Vassiliev consulted in the KGB archives. The fact that several of the messages from Soviet intelligence operatives reproduced in The Haunted Wood contained references to Alger Hiss led readers to the conclusion that he was a spy. But it turned out that the original Soviet messages did not mention Hiss by name. Weinstein inserted the name Hiss in place of the Russian code-name Ales. His co-author later observed that he had warned Weinstein against doing this: “I never saw a document where Hiss would be called Ales or Ales may be called Hiss. I made a point of that to Allen [Weinstein].” In addition, Weinstein omitted from the book two important pieces of documentation, written by the above-mentioned Gorsky, that Vassiliev copied and handed over to him. Gorsky's messages (which came to light only recently) seriously undermine the theory that Hiss was the spy codenamed Ales.
Although these new Russian materials do not prove that Hiss was innocent of charges of spying, they make it clear that his case, one of many touched upon in this book, is far from settled. For those who disdain historical ambiguities, this may come as unwelcome news. But the historian's job is not to come up with absolute truths. As Arthur Schlesinger Jr. recently observed, “history is never a closed book or a final verdict. It is always in the making.” *
April 2006
Basel, Switzerland
*Arthur Schlesinger Jr., “History and National Stupidity,” The New York Review of Books, April 27, 2006, p. 16. For a discussion among scholars on the Hiss- “Ales” issue, including the recent new evidence, see the postings on the Humanities and Social Sciences Net at www.h-net.org/~hoac, January-February 2004, March 2005, and November 2005. Also see David Lowenthal, “Did Allen Weinstein Get the Alger Hiss Story Wrong?” posted on History News Network at www.hnn.us/articles, May 2, 2005.