HISS: A NEW BOOK FINDS HIM GUILTY AS CHARGED

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01350R000200230017-1
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 3
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: October 26, 2004
• Sequence Number: 17
• Publication Date: February 13, 1978
• Content Type: MAGAZINE

A n 77,1_1 E rIt`,'::r3 z:i J
r -" --Approved For Release 2005101/1 CIA-RDP88-0135080002
ON GE
13 February 1978
A-M
Gera.,
Hiss: A New Book Finds Him Guilty as Charged
On the basis offresh evidence, a scholar concludes that he spied and lied
0 n a crisp day in January 1950, Alger
and Priscilla Hiss sat in a Manhat-
tan courtroom, he pressing his lips in a
tight smile, she fingering her handbag. A
federal jury was ready to pass judgment
on whether he had lied in denying that
he had given secret State Department
documents to a Soviet agent in 1938. In-
toned the forewoman: "We find the de-
fendant guilty on the first count and guilty
on the second." Showing almost no emo-
tion, Hiss and his wife slowly walked out
of the room, surrounded by a pack of law-
yers and spectators.
Thus ended the great spy trial that
pitted an elegant, aristocratic cynosure
of the Eastern Establishment against a
rumpled, relatively obscure, former Com-
munist. For many Americans, the con-
test was an elemental struggle between
good and evil, between leftist New Deal-
ers and right-wing anti-Communists. It
divided the nation, set off widespread
fears that the State De-
partment was infiltrated
by Soviet agents, and
helped launch Joseph
McCarthy on his hunt
for Reds. Moreover, the
case gave national prom-
inence to a fledgling
California Congress-
man, Richard Nixon,
who used the notoriety
to help win a Senate seat
in 1950 and the vice presidency in 1952.
The controversy over the trial has
continued for nearly 30 years. Who was
telling the truth? Was it the serene and un-
failingly courteous Hiss, who went to
Lewisburg prison for 44 months and to-
day, at age 73, still professes innocence?
Or was it his brooding, tormented accus-
er, Whittaker Chambers, who died on his
Maryland farm in 1961? Despite a dozen
books and hundreds of articles about the.
case, many of them little more than briefs
for one side or the other, the question has
not been answered conclusively. Now Al-
len Weinstein, a respected historian at
Smith College, has turned up previously
undisclosed evidence that inexorably led
him to this unqualified verdict: "The ju-
rors made no mistake in finding Alger
Hiss guilty as charged."
Weinstein carefully and persuasively
documents his conclusion in an absorbing
new book due to appear this spring, Per-
jury: The Hiss-Chambers Case," a copy
of which was made available to TIME.
The historian set out convinced that Hiss
was innocent. He changed his mind dur-
ing five years of research into a mass of
records that had never before been stud-
ied. Among them were more than 40,000
pages of FBI files, which Weinstein ob-
tained by suing under the Freedom of In-
formation Act. The files of Hiss's own
attorneys, which Hiss opened to Wein-
stein, yielded other revealing facts that
were kept hidden dur-
ing the trial. The au-
thor also questioned
more than 80 people
who were connected
with the Hiss-Cham-
bers drama, includ-
ing five former Soviet
agents, and talked with
Hiss on six occasions.
The last meeting
between them took
place in March 1976 in the office of Pub-
lisher Alfred A. Knopf, 21 floors above
Manhattan's East 50th Street. After a few
minutes of uneasy conversation, Wein-
stein told Hiss: "When I began working
on this book four years ago, I thought I
would be able to demonstrate your in-
nocence, but, unfortunately, I have to tell
you that I cannot; that my assumption
was wrong." Hiss shifted slightly, looked
*To be published in April (Knopf; $15).
beyond Weinstein and said. "I'm not sur-
prised." Later he added: "I've always
known you were prejudiced against me."
When the meeting ended, Weinstein told
TIME Senior Correspondent James Bell
last week: "I realized I'd never speak to
him again. I offered my hand, but he
stepped away. He wouldn't even look at
me." Hiss told TIME that he was famil-
iar with Weinstein's views but would not
comment on them because the book had
not yet been published.
I n his interview with Bell, Weinstein said
simply: "In the end, Chambers' version
turned out to be truthful, and Hiss's ver
sion did not. Alger Hiss is a victim of the
facts."
This judgment will not go unchal-
lenged; when Weinstein published an ar-
ticle in the New York Review of Books ;
almost two years ago detailing some of
his findings, he stirred up a row,. and his
book is certain to do the same. For three
decades, Hiss has waged a campaign for
vindication, and next month he intends
to ask the courts again for a new trial on
the ground that the prosecution withheld
vital evidence from him in 1949.
Hiss lately has been winning new
sympathizers--some as a result of his son
Tony's apologia, Laughing Last, and some
who look on him as Richard Nixon's first
victim. Ironically, Weinstein's book also
discredits Nixon's performance, demon-
strating that as a member of the House
Un-American Activities Committee, he
actually fell apart at critical points dur-
ing the investigation (see box).
Before Chambers' charges of espio-
nage cut him down, Hiss had seemed.
headed for a great future; some associ-
ates even thought he was a. potential Sec-
retary of State. One of the New Deal's
bright young men, he worked briefly for
the Agriculture Department and the Nye
committee,. which was investigating the
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arms manufacturers of World
War I, and then joined the
State Department. In the 1940s
he rose almost effortlessly as a
protesg6 of Secretary Edward
Stettinius and his deputy, Dean
Acheson, serving as an adviser
to Franklin Roosevelt at the
Yalta conference and as Sec-
retary-General of the founding
convention of the United Na-
Lions. In 1947, at age 42, he became pres-
ident of the prestigious Carnegie Endow-
ment for International Peace.
Eighteen months later, Chambers
(then a senior editor of TIME) told I-WAC
that Hiss was a Communist. Not so, said
Hiss, who also insisted that he had never
known Chambers. But Chambers knew
so many details about Hiss's life-includ-
ing the fact that Hiss, an amateur or-
nithologist, had once spotted a rare pro-
thonotary warbler on the banks of the
Potomac-that his adversary was finally
forced to reverse himself. Then Chambers
made a more serious accusation: that Hiss
had passed State Department secrets to
him in the late 1930s.
As evidence, Chambers produced four
memorandums in Hiss's handwriting and
65 pages of retyped State Department
documents, all but one of them unde-
niably produced on Hiss's old Woodstock
typewriter. A few weeks later, Chambers
led HUAC investigators to a hollowed-
out pumpkin, where he had hidden five
rolls of film, two of them containing pho-
tographs of confidential Government
dispatches that he said had been given
to him by Hiss. Because of the statute
of limitations, Hiss could not be tried
for espionage. Instead, he was indicted
on two counts of lying to a federal grand
jury: for claiming that he had never giv-
en Chambers secret documents nor even
met with him in February and March
of 1938.
"Poor Chambers," Nixon remarked
to an associate early in the investigation.
"Nobody ever believes him at first." But
Weinstein came away from his research
convinced that Chambers usually told the
truth. Among the new evidence the his-
torian uncovered were answers---not al-
ways complete---to these questions:
Was Chambers a Soviet agent? Some
Hiss supporters maintain that Chambers'
account of life as an underground Soviet
courier was largely fiction. In FBI records,
however, Weinstein found depositions
from ex-spies that confirmed parts of
Chambers' story. Additional details were
corroborated during interviews with Jo-
zef Peters, who headed the American
Communist Party's underground work in
the 1930s and now lives in Budapest. Na-
dezhda Ulanovskaya, wife of Chambers'
Soviet spy master in 1931-34 and now a
resident of Israel, told Weinstein after
reading Chambers' 1952 memoir Witness:
"All of it I find perfectly in order."
Continues Weinstein in his boo
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"Ella Winter [who was mar-
ried to Muckraker Lincoln
Steffens] recently recalled
having been approached in
her New York hotel room in
1933 by 'Harold Phillips,'
whom she later identified as
Chambers. Phillips asked
Winter to transport a large
sum of money from New
York to California for the un-
derground." She refused. Later, she
turned down Chambers' request that she
steal some pages from her friend William
Bullitt's desk in Washington after Roo-
sevelt appointed him the first U.S. Am-
bassador to the Soviet Union.
Was Hiss a Communist? Two close
friends of Hiss's were Communists: Gov-
ernment Officials Henry Collins and Lee
Pressman, who recommended fuss for his
Nye committee job- Another Communist,
When did Hiss meet Chambers? Hiss
initially agreed with Chambers that
they met in 1934, then switched to a Jan-
uary 1935 date. But Radical Novelist
Josephine Herbst told Hiss's lawyers that
Chambers began trying to recruit Hiss
for undercover work in July or August
1934.
Hiss insisted that he stopped see-
ing Chambers by mid-1936-about 18
months before the period when Chambers
claimed to have received secret docu-
ments from him. But in interviews with
Hiss and one of his lawyers, Weinstein
learned that Pediatrician Margaret Nich-
olson recalled for the Hiss defense team
that she -encountered a -heavy-set, "very
gruff man" at the Hiss home in January
1937. "You may not come in!" declared
the man. Writes Weinstein: "From news-
paper photographs in 1949, Dr. Nicholson
recognized the man who had answered
the door as Whittaker Chambers."
Was Hiss a Soviet agent? Noel Field, a
confessed Soviet agent in the- State De-
partment, and his wife Herta fled to
Czechoslovakia in 1948 and were ques-
tioned by both Czechoslovak and Hun-
garian security officials. Czech Historian
Karel Kaplan, who read the interrogation
records 20 years later, told Weinstein that
(he Fields named Hiss as a Communist.
underground agent during the 1930s. In-
deed, writes Weinstein, "Herta Field,
when seized in Prague, initially believed
that American intelligence agents had
come to kidnap her and bring her back
to give evidence against Hiss." -
Chambers testified that he gave Hiss
and three other agents Bokhara rugs in
January 1937 as gestures of appreciation
for their undercover work. Hiss admitted
receiving a red oriental rug from Cham-
o~og'31935 and was par-
Nathaniel Weyl, told the FBI, that Hiss at-
tended meetings of a secret party cell in
Washington as early as 1933.
Weinstein also turned up some tan-
talizing details of how Hiss's 1929 Ford
roadster ended up in Communist hands.
Hiss testified that he had given the car to
Chambers in mid-1935 but changed his
story when HUAC investigators estab-
lished that Hiss actually sold it to an auto
dealer on July 23, 1936. That same day
the car was resold for $25-less than half
of its market value-to Communist Wil-
liam Rosen, who was acting as the mid-
dleman in a dummy transaction. Rosen's
lawyer later told one of Hiss's attorneys
that the deal had been arranged by "a
very high Communist. His name would
be a sensation in this case. The man
who ultimately got the car is also a
Co
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in 1968, during a dinner in Chicago, sh
exploded in anger and, according to
guest, "announced that she was sick o
all the lies and cover-ups."
'&Aleinstein found no conclusive proo
Chambers' defection from Communis
in 1938. Stilj~GIA files show that Hiss in
.agency's wartime predecessor, the office
deserted his cause. Weinstein reports tha
tial payment for a debt. Two other re-
cipients told the FBI that they had received
their rugs in early 1937. Moreover, a rug
expert hired by the defense established
from a description on a sales slip that
Hiss's rug was apparently one of four that
had been bought by a Communist agent
for Chambers in December 1936.
Was Hiss framed? After Hiss's convic-
tion, he insisted that Chambers had forged
the 64 typewritten pages used as evidence
at the trial. But, in the files of.Hiss's law-
yers, Weinstein found reports from two
experts confirming that the documents
were definitely typed on Hiss's Woodstock
(serial number: N230099) by his wife
Priscilla.
During December 1948 and January
1949, Hiss insisted to the FBI and a grand
jury that he did not know what had hap-
pened to the typewriter, probably, he said,
Priscilla had sold it to a junk dealer. But
Weinstein found a letter in the defense
files demonstrating that as early as Dec.
7, 1948, Hiss knew that Priscilla had giv-
en the typewriter in April 1938 to the son
of a former maid. Says Weinstein: "While
the FBI searched frantically for the ma-
chine, Hiss's brother Donald, aided by the
maid's son, traced the typewriter in Feb-
ruary 1949 but said nothing to the law-
yers or the authorities. Two
months later, Hiss's lawyer,
Edward McLean, made a
search of his own, found the
machine and told the FBI that f
stein, if the typewriter ob-
tained by McLean was a fake,
as Hiss later claimed, "the
only two people, other than Alger Hiss,
in a position to make a switch were Don-
ald Hiss and the maid's son."
As the trial went on, even some of
Hiss's attorneys began to doubt his in-
nocence. Says Weinstein: "Several of them
were persuaded that either Hiss or his wife
committed perjury." Even Priscilla once
Richard Nixon regarded the Alger Hiss case as his first
major crisis, and one that he handled masterfully. As
President, he frequently urged his aides to read the ac-
count of it in his autobiographical Six Crises. "Warm up
to it, and it makes fascinating reading," he told H.R. Hal-
deman. Charles Colson claimed to have read the book 14
times. "The fact is," says Historian Allen Weinstein,
"Nixon didn't behave very courageously during the Hiss
case. He buckled under pressure."
At the climactic point-when the
House Un-American Activities
Committee was seeking documents.
ry evidence from Whittaker Cham-
. against Hiss--Nixon and his wife left
Washington for a cruise to Panama. "I don't think he's got
a damned thing," he told Robert Stripling, who was HUAC's
chief investigator. Writes Weinstein: "If Chambers' bomb-
matters in Britain China France and the
Soviet Union. Says Weinstein: "It was ob-
whatever his use of the material migh
have been."
Another intriguing incident occurred
in September 1945, when Soviet Ambas-
Secretary of State Stetdnius "for his laid
ness and his impartiality"and suggestedi
that he be appointed temporary Secre-
tary,-General of the U.N. By that time'
however, the FBI and the State Depart-
ment's security staff' were investigating
.Hiss's loyalty.
In 1946 Secretary
of State James Byrnes
documents. He was
' s. kept under surveil-
lance, and even his
desk calendar was monitored. But there
was no evidence of his disloyalty, not tin-
til Whittaker Chambers made his bomb-
shell revelations two years later. Even
then, enough doubts existed for Alger Hiss
to wage a 30-year fight for vindication
-a campaign that shows no signs of
slackening, despite Weinstein's fresh ev-
shell fizzled, or if it exploded in Stripling's face, Nixon would
be in Panama, far from the scene of carnage.. He might be
country, Chambers turned over five rolls of film--two of -
the U.S. aboard a Navy seaplane.
The next day, Nixon was confronted with another crisis:,
the manufacturer of three rolls reported that they had been
made in 1945, meaning that Chambers' evidence was. forged'.
By Nixon's account, he reacted coolly, almost stoically. But
Stripling and other IWAC investigaa
tors told Weinstein that Nixon actu-
ally became almost hysterical, ex-
claiming: "Oh my God. This is the
end of my political career." In abu-
sive language, he blamed the investi-
the film had actually been made in 1937.
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