October 7, 2024 • 37 mins
Alger Hiss worked in high-level roles in the U.S. government during the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration. And then he was accused of using his access to spy for the Soviets.
Research:
- “Alger Hiss.” FBI. https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/alger-hiss
- “A Byte Out of History, the Alger Hiss Story.” FBI. Jan. 25, 2013. https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/a-byte-out-of-history-the-alger-hiss-story
- Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Alger Hiss". Encyclopedia Britannica, 8 Jul. 2024, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Alger-Hiss
- Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Whittaker Chambers". Encyclopedia Britannica, 5 Jul. 2024, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Whittaker-Chambers
- Chambers, Whittaker. “The Ghosts on the Roof.” Time. 5, 1948. https://time.com/archive/6784924/the-ghosts-on-the-roof/
- Mark, Eduard. “In ReAlger Hiss: A Final Verdict from the Archives of the KGB.” Journal of Cold War Studies, vol. 11, no. 3, 2009, pp. 26–67. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26923052
- Fox, John F. Jr. “In the Enemy’s House: Venona and the Maturation of American Counterintelligence.” FBI.gov. Oct. 27, 2005. https://www.fbi.gov/history/history-publications-reports/in-the-enemys-house-venona-and-the-maturation-of-american-counterintelligence
- Hadley, David. “The Long Controversy Over Alger Hiss.” Teaching American History. Jan. 21, 2020. https://teachingamericanhistory.org/blog/the-long-controversy-over-alger-hiss/
- “KGB interviews GRU agent and net controller name ALES 30 March 1945.” https://media.defense.gov/2021/Aug/01/2002818545/-1/-1/0/30MAR_KGB_INTERVIEWS_GRU_AGENT.PDF
- Rowe, Daniel, and Sarah Fagg, ed. “Alger Hiss and American Anti-communism.” New Histories. Vol. 3, Issue 5. https://newhistories.sites.sheffield.ac.uk/volumes/2011-12/volume-3/issue-5-crime-punishment/alger-hiss-and-american-anti-communism
- Sander, Gordon F. “Microfilm hidden in a pumpkin launched Richard Nixon’s career 75 years ago.” New York Times. Dec. 2, 2023. https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2023/12/02/pumpkin-papers-richard-nixon/
- “Secrets, Lies, and Atomic Spies: Alger Hiss.” NOVA. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/venona/dece_hiss.html
- “The Yalta Conference.” U.S. State Department, Office of the Historian. https://history.state.gov/milestones/1937-1945/yalta-conf#:~:text=At%20Yalta%2C%20Roosevelt%20and%20Churchill,of%20influence%20in%20Manchuria%20following
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. It's another one where
I don't know how it got on my list. You've
had a lot of those lately. I know, I don't.
I guess I'm clearing out what was that? Why did
(00:23):
I get I mean, this is a weird one for
me because I feel like Algerhiss got talked about in
my home growing up a lot. Yeah. And I don't
know if I just had one parent or the other
who was fascinated by the whole thing, yeah, or if
it was some sort of like Boogeyman of treason or
(00:44):
like what it was, uh huh. But then it came
up recently. Maybe this is how it got on my list,
because I do remember it came up recently in like
a social group setting and I made a joke about
calling someone an alger Hiss and everybody looked at me like, oh,
Holly's talking about history things again, and I'm like, I mean,
not history history, And I realize people even our age
(01:07):
don't know this story. Well. I had instant name recognition. Yeah,
and then my mind kind of fished around, going was
this person though, right, he's one of those people that
I would be like, we should never do an episode
on that. Everybody knows that, but clearly they don't, so
now it's on the list. I guess that's probably how
it got on the list. Alter Hiss is a really
(01:30):
important moment historically. His case, his accusations of spying for
an enemy of the US while working at very high
levels of the US government, is one of the things
that people say really catalyze the McCarthy era and the
really really aggressive seeking and prosecuting of people during that
Second Red Scare. It's a very fascinating story of someone
(01:52):
who by all accounts was incredibly high achieving and successful
and then suddenly being accused of something pretty terrible. And also,
this is an interesting one because you have the story
of who he was, the story of this big event
and how it played out, and then a whole thing
that goes on after the fact as people try to
(02:15):
untangle the truth, which, by the way, spoiler alert, if
you want a definitive answer, you're not going to get
it here, because I don't think we can ever have
one yeah, about his level of gil. Some people feel
like there's a definitive answer. I still feel like there's
enough questions that I don't feel like we could give one.
But we're talking about Alger Hiss today. Alger Hiss was
(02:38):
born November eleventh, nineteen oh four, in Baltimore, Maryland, to
Charles Alger and Mary Lavinia Hugh's Hiss. He had four siblings,
but their family grew rapidly when Alger's uncle died and
his father, Charles took on the care of his sister
in law and seven children. Business and financial stress cause
(02:59):
Charles to fall into a depression, and he died by
suicide when Alger was still a toddler. The his family
experienced several other painful losses. When Alger was in his
early adulthood, he lost a brother to kidney disease and
a sister to suicide. As for Alger, he was a
really popular student and academically he was an achiever. He
(03:23):
attended high school in Baltimore and then received his undergraduate
degree from JOHNS Hopkins in nineteen twenty six. Following that,
he enrolled at Harvard Law School, and he graduated from
that program in nineteen twenty nine, and his was really
a star law student, and he became a law clerk
for Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes right after graduation,
(03:44):
and he worked for him for a year before joining
a pretty prestigious law firm. In nineteen thirty three, his
started working for President Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration as an attorney.
From there, Hiss served in a number of roles. He
worked on the legal team that defended the New Deal's
Agricultural Adjustment Administration, which was in charge of distributing subsidies
(04:06):
to farmers as part of a larger initiative to minimize
surplus and increase market rates of agricultural products. This was
to help support the farmers financially. He also served on
the NI Committee, which investigated war profiteering. In nineteen thirty six,
Hiss joined the State Department, working in the office of
(04:27):
Francis B. Sayer, who was the Assistant Secretary of State
briefly before joining the Office of Far Eastern Affairs. Then
in nineteen forty four he moved into the Office of
Special Political Affairs as its director. Yes, so clearly this
was a man on a pretty impressive career trajectory. In
(04:48):
nineteen forty five, having become a trusted member of the
Roosevelt administration, Hiss went to the Yalta Conference as one
of Roosevelt's advisors. On that trip, he reported to Under
Secretary of State Edward Stettinius. The Alta Conference was a
meeting where President Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin met
to discuss a possible situation where the Soviets would fight
(05:12):
against Japan in the ongoing war. The Allies were doing
pretty well in Europe at that point, and they felt
like they could be victorious, but there were real concerns
about the possibility of a Pacific theater conflict just dragging
on forever and depleting everyone's resources. Ultimately, Stalin did agree
to join forces, but that came with a price. The
(05:33):
Soviets would gain significant power in Manchuria in exchange for
their cooperation in fighting the Japanese. This was a very
significant and high profile event, and Hiss was right in
the middle of it. In nineteen forty six, Hiss left
his government work and became the president of the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace. Sometimes this is characterized as him
(05:58):
being forced out of the State Department. Regardless of exactly
how this transition played out, there were things happening during
these years that would change Hiss's life forever. So before
we move on, we need to talk about another major
player in this story, and that is Whittaker Chambers. He
was born Jay Vivian Chambers on April first, nineteen oh one,
(06:21):
in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and he grew up on Long Island
and attended Columbia University, where he was the editor of
The Morning Side, which was the school's literary paper. And
it was during this time that he changed his first
name to Whittaker, which had been his mother's maiden name.
In the nineteen twenties, Whittaker joined the Communist Party and
wrote for a number of Communist and Marxist papers. By
(06:45):
the mid nineteen thirties, he had been recruited by Soviet
agents to work as part of their network in New York,
but he became disillusioned with Communism in the late nineteen
thirties as he saw the Soviet Union prosecuting Bolshevik's and
sentencing them to prison or to death. He eventually went
to the Roosevelt administration to warn that communists backed by
(07:08):
the USSR were secretly working in the US government. Yeah,
we'll get into more detail on that in just a moment.
But in nineteen thirty nine, Chambers's journalism career really took
off when he was hired by Time magazine. He initially
worked there as a writer, and then he worked his
way up to special editor. His most famous piece of
(07:28):
writing while working there was a political fairy tale titled
The Ghosts on the Roof, And if you've never read
that particular piece of writing, it opens to my mind
rather spectacularly with quote with the softness of bats. Seven
ghosts settled down on the flat roof of the Levadia
Palace at Yalta. They found someone else already there, a
(07:49):
statuesque female figure crouching with her eye glued to one
of the holes in the roof. It had been through
the Russian Revolution, three years of Civil War, twenty one
years of socialist reconstruction, the German invasion, and the Russian reoccupation.
Madam said the foremost ghost, an imperious woman with a
bullet hole in her head. What are you doing on
(08:11):
our roof? The mysterious female figure turns out to be
Cleo the muse of history, and when she sees Nicholas
the Second, the last Emperor of Russia, she's at first
happy to see him, but as Nicholas explains the current
state of global politics to her, she becomes chagrined, telling
him at one point quote, I think I liked you
(08:32):
better Nicholas, when you were only a weakling Czar. You
are becoming a realist. This entire article is a scathing
review of the Yalta Conference. That article was of course
written shortly after the Alta Conference took place, but back
in nineteen thirty nine, the same year he started working
for Time, Chambers had a meeting with the Assistant Secretary
(08:54):
of State atolf A Burrel, and this is where he
gave his warning to the government about so spies. He
told Burle that he knew of eighteen people in the
government who were communists and who were working against US interests,
and one of those people was Alger Hiss. Burle took
the Chambers list to President Roosevelt, but there was no
(09:16):
action taken. It seems that the president didn't put a
lot of stock in Chambers's claim, and moreover, the government's
focus was on Germany and Hitler at that time, but
Burle was concerned enough to follow up on the information
the following year, this time taking Chambers's list to the FBI,
and the FBI did talk to Chambers, but it took
(09:38):
two years before he did. He met with Bureau officials twice,
first in nineteen forty two and then again in nineteen
forty five. The House on American Activities Committee, which had
been formed in nineteen thirty eight to investigate possible communist
activities in the US, subpoenaed Chambers in the summer of
nineteen forty eight to question him about what he knew
(10:01):
of Communist activity in the States. He told the committee
that he had been part of the Communist Party from
nineteen twenty four until nineteen thirty seven or nineteen thirty eight.
He stated that he knew seven officials in the US
government who had been part of a spy ring in
the nineteen thirties, and that ring was funneling information to
(10:22):
the Soviets, and he specifically named Alger Hisss as one
of these officials. Coming up, we will talk about Hiss's
reaction to those allegations, but first we'll pause for a
sponsor break. Once that accusation that he was a spy
(10:46):
for the Soviets was made. Algerhiss vehemently denied it, but
even after his appearance before the committee, Whittaker Chambers continued
to accuse Hiss of spying for the Soviet Union, and
he did so publicly. He went on news shows and
repeated the story over and over, and this led Hiss
to sue Chambers for slander. But Chambers was also adamant
(11:09):
that he was telling the truth and his accusations were accurate.
At the end of nineteen forty eight, on December sixth,
the sworn testimony of Chambers was released publicly by the
House Committee. At that point, everyone learned that Chambers testified
that he too had been a member of the espionage ring,
which was how he knew that Hiss was. Chambers gave
(11:33):
detailed information about State Department papers being handed off to
him by Hiss with the intent that they would in
turn be given to the Soviets. To prove that he
was telling the truth, Chambers produced documents that he said
had been handed over to him by Alger Hiss to
give to the Soviets during their time as spy ring collaborators.
(11:54):
Those documents included dozens of typed pages which Chambers said
Alger's wife Prisons Scilla, had typed, along with several pages
of handwritten communicates that Chambers said were written by his himself.
These documents came to be known as the Baltimore Papers,
and Chambers had kept these papers as evidence in case
he ever faced threats from the Communist Party. Once he left,
(12:17):
those papers were given to Hiss's legal team as evidence
that Chambers had not committed libel, with the exception of
one part of the document's package, and that was five
rolls of thirty five millimeter film. Chambers believed that Hiss's
legal team intended to steal the film, so he hid
(12:38):
it in a hollowed out pumpkin on his family farm,
and he told the House on American Activities Committee where
it was. Soon there were agents at the farm with
a subpoena. They found and confiscated the film. This was
supposed to be turned over to the FBI, but it
was developed by the committee instead. The film showed fo
(13:00):
of government documents that sounds like it could be sort
of thrilling, but the documents in question were actually pretty benign.
Some of them were Navy documents, which were incredibly boring.
They literally talked about things like paint colors on fire extinguishers.
The other papers were State Department papers that weren't especially
(13:22):
important in terms of holding secrets, but they still were
not things that people should have been sharing. His would
later offer his own commentary on these documents in The
Real World magazine in nineteen seventy six, stating that according
to Chambers and Richard Nixon, the documents had been quote
turned over to Chambers in the thirties for the reading
(13:43):
pleasure of the Russians. When Chambers, then an experienced publicist
himself as a time editor, produced these stills shortly after
Halloween nineteen forty eight from a scooped out pumpkin on
his farm in Maryland, Nixon, then a freshman congressman from California,
went into action, holding them up for the newsreel cameras.
(14:03):
He said the papers of which they were copies were
all from the State Department and were proof of quote,
the most serious series of treasonable activities which has been
launched against the government in the history of America. The
message intended and conveyed was that microfilms and spies go together,
Chambers had come up with five rolls of film, two
(14:25):
of them already developed, proved to contain fifty five frames
of dull State Department documents about routine trade negotiations with Germany,
all of which had nothing to do with my department,
let alone me, plus three documents, three very ordinary cables
that had passed over my desk on their way to
other people's desks or to the incinerator. If you noted
(14:48):
that mention of Nixon, he was right in the middle
of the his case. As a member of the House
an American Activities Committee. He had been part of the
committee since nineteen forty seven. When the Chambers accusations were made.
He had backed Whittaker chambers version of the story. Nixon
also surely saw an opportunity to make a name for
(15:09):
himself as somebody who was tough on communists. He had
introduced a bill in his short time as Senator to
make it mandatory for anyone who aligned with the Communist
Party to register with the US government. That did not
get past the Senate, but when Chambers offered up the
names of government officials who he claimed were communists, Nixon
(15:31):
jumped on it. The alger Hiss scandal and the Pumpkin Papers,
as the films came to be known, catapulted Nixon into
the public eye, and they paved the way for his
high profile political career. Yeah, we're not going to rehash
his whole political career because it's outside the scope of this,
but this is really where everybody suddenly knew who he was,
(15:51):
and a grand jury investigation began, and both Chambers and
his testified. His had denied that he had given any
papers to Chambers, and he also stated before the grand
jury that he had not spoken to Chambers since January first,
nineteen thirty seven. Hiss continued to assert his innocence, but
he was indicted on December fifteenth, nine days after the
(16:14):
Chambers testimony had been released by the House and thirteen
days after the seizure of the Pumpkin Papers. The indictment
was for two charges of perjury, based on the documents
produced by Chambers that he claimed showed that Hiss had
absolutely passed him papers. Hiss could not be tried for
espionage because there was a five year statute of limitations
(16:35):
on espionage charges and all of this had happened in
the thirties, but he could be charged for perjury, to
which Hiss also pleaded not guilty, and a lot of
people came to alger Hiss's defense, noting that those papers
that were being waived around were things that a lot
of people had access to. Some of those people weren't
even government employees, so the papers that Chambers produced could
(16:59):
have come from almost anywhere. Hiss's trial began on May
thirty first, nineteen forty nine, and continued until July eighth.
The result was a hung jury. A second trial started
on November nineteenth, nineteen forty nine, that concluded in January
of nineteen fifty with a guilty verdict. His was convicted
(17:21):
of perjury and sentenced to five years in prison. One
of the key pieces of evidence had been expert testimony
regarding the woodstock typewriter that was used to type up
the documents Chambers had produced. It was determined that the
typewriter in question was one that belonged to Priscilla Hiss.
This was an issue that Hiss's legal team doggedly pursued
(17:46):
after the trial, trying to get a retrial in the
case based on evidence they were compiling that there had
been a forgery of the unique characteristics of the Hiss
family typewriter. A judge denied that most though, and Hiss
went to prison. Yeah, that whole typewriter story is its
own kind of fun side thing. I'll talk a little
(18:06):
bit about it in Behind the Scenes on Friday, and
coming up, we're going to talk about the rest of
Algerhiss's life and the life his case continues to have
decades after his death. But first we will hear from
his sponsors that keep the show going. Algerhiss was released
(18:32):
from prison in nineteen fifty four after serving forty four
months of his sentence, and he never ever wavered in
proclaiming his innocence. Over the next several decades after his release,
supporters of Hiss continued to defend him and assert that
he had been wrongly convicted. And this case remained really
important to people because the details of it impact what
(18:54):
we know about the Cold War and global politics, as
well as the state of US intelligence, both at the
time that Hiss was accused of spying and in the
years since, because in some cases, current methods have built
on those that were used then. Plus, if information came
to light that cleared Hiss, it would be proof that
he had been wrongfully convicted, and that would likely catalyze
(19:16):
a fresh analysis of the handling of his case. In
nineteen seventy eight, Alan Weinstein published a book about the
Hiss case called Perjury, in which he builds a pretty
well supported and logical chain of events and information that
seems pretty conclusively damning of Alge Hiss. It was convincing
enough that support for Hiss really wanes to a degree
(19:39):
after its publication. In nineteen seventy nine, Hiss tried unsuccessfully
to have his conviction overturned, claiming misconduct of the prosecutors
in his case. He had been taking advantage of the
Freedom of Information Act to request any and all documents
he could get related to his case. All was trying
to get more information and hoping to find some detail
(20:01):
that remained that would clear his name. In nineteen ninety two,
after the archives of the former Soviet Union were opened,
Hiss hoped that new light could be shed on his situation,
so he asked the Russian government to look into available
records for any information about him or his alleged involvement
with Soviet intelligence. That request was honored, and after several months,
(20:24):
Russian chairman of the Military Intelligence Archives, General Dmitri A.
Vol Kaganov, announced that they found nothing about Hiss in
the Soviet record. While this seemed to some like a
step toward exoneration, a lot of people made the point
that it was unlikely that every facet of a massive
secret spy ring would be mentioned in any kind of record.
(20:47):
It also appeared that not all intelligence files were actually searched,
so there was just no real resolution from the effort.
And in what's a little bit of a letdown in
how this story plays out, His died on November fifteenth
of nineteen ninety six. He was ninety two at the time,
and he had been trying to clear his name for
more than forty years. His wife, Priscilla, had died in
(21:10):
nineteen eighty five, and he remarried in nineteen eighty six
to Isabel Johnson, who survived him. He had been readmitted
to the Massachusetts bar in the mid nineteen seventies, so
he did leave a legacy of being the first lawyer
to ever do so after disbarment in the state of Massachusetts.
That same year that his died, new evidence came to
(21:32):
light when missives that US intelligence had intercepted during World
War II from the Soviets were released. The documents involved
were part of what was called the Venona Project, which
began in February of nineteen forty three and was focused
on cracking the encryption of intercepted Soviet messages and using
(21:53):
the information within them to the advantage of the United States.
This program continued until nineteen eighty, and starting in nineteen
ninety five, batches of these top secret documents were declassified
and released to the public once decrypted. One of these documents,
known as Cable number eighteen twenty two, included mentions of
(22:15):
an agent referred to as Ales Alees, who many have
come to believe is in fact Algerhiss. This was a
communication intercepted as it was sent from Anatoly Gorski, a
member of the US Soviet State Security Agency home to
the USSR from Washington, and that pertinent document, dated March thirtieth,
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nineteen forty five, includes the following bullet points sent from
Washington to Moscow. One. Ales has been working with the
neighbors Sosaid or so Seti continuously since nineteen thirty five two.
For some years past, he has been the leader of
a small group of the neighbour's probationers, for the most
part consisting of his relations. Three. The group and Ale's
(23:00):
himself work on obtaining military information. Only materials on the
bank allegedly interest the neighbors very little, and he does
not produce them regularly. Four. All the last few years,
Ales has been working with Paul pol who also meets
other members of the group occasionally. Five. Recently, Ales and
(23:21):
his whole group were awarded Soviet decorations. Six after the
Yalta Conference, when he had gone on to Moscow, a
Soviet personage in a very responsible position allegedly got in
touch with Ales and at the behest of the military
neighbors passed on to him their gratitude and so on.
You can view this document and the other released Venona
(23:44):
documents online at the nsay's website. There are notes at
the bottom which explain what the code names are believed
to be. So SETI, the neighbors are quote members of
another Soviet intelligence organization here probably the GRU, the bank
is the State Department, and Ales is listed as probably
(24:04):
alger Hisss. So how did anyone come to that conclusion? Well,
the key points are those mentions of the Yalta Conference
and the Soviet decorations. In two thousand and nine, a
historian named Edward Mark published an article in Journal of
Cold War Studies titled in re Algerhiss, a final verdict
from the Archives of the KGB, and in it he
(24:27):
actually references another article that he wrote six years earlier,
in which he laid out the case that he believed
pointed squarely to Algerhiss being Ales. He wrote, quote, I
matched the clues given in Cable number eighteen twenty two
against the biographies of all the members of the small
party that Secretary of State Edward R. Statinius led to
(24:47):
Moscow after the Yalta Conference of February nineteen forty five.
As Gorski's message left little room for doubt that Ales
had been one of Statinius's party, I concluded that gorsky
He's profile of Ales closely matched Alger Hisss and that
there was no other plausible candidate in the small universe
of suspects. Mark was not the only person to come
(25:11):
to that conclusion, although he does also note that it
is possible that Hiss was a spy and yet not
the Ales mentioned in Cable number eighteen twenty two. The
identity of Ales had been swirling in fresh controversy for
several years by the time Edward Mark wrote his two
thousand and nine article, including several events he alluded to.
(25:34):
One issue that has often been argued over is just
how much faith should be put in the Venona document
that mentioned Ales and its footnote that equates Ales with
alger Hiss. For one, there's really no confirmation that the
Venona decryption was accurate. The work done to tease out
the messages that were intercepted by the FBI and the
(25:56):
NSA that was incredibly difficult and arduous. There was a
thing like a Rosetta stone to guide them. That means
that at times decryption experts had to make some leaps
of faith in their work, and that means there could
be errors. Critics of the Venona documents note that the
translations of them didn't really incorporate cultural context or nuance,
(26:20):
so it's possible that really important information was missed or misconstrued.
And the other big thing that detractors have focused on
is that while it's possible to triangulate the likelihood that
Ales was Hiss, the NSA and FBI never showed their
work in terms of how they determined that to be
(26:40):
the case. It appears in the document eighteen twenty two footnote.
And while a lot of people took that is fact,
other people questioned it. In two thousand and two, one
of Alger Hisss's lawyers wrote an article that was published
in Intelligence and National Security which called just about everything
about the Venona cable regarding Hiss into question. Yes, cable's plural,
(27:04):
because it turned out there were other mentions of Hiss,
mentions that the lawyer John Lowenthal thought actually helped the
Hiss case. That document was number fifteen seventy nine of
the Venona files, and it mentioned Algerhiss, not by any
code but by name. That message was intercepted on September
twenty eighth, nineteen forty three, and after information about money
(27:27):
needs the missive reads quote the neighbor so said, has
reported that one group unrecovered from the State Department by
the name of Hiss. So that unrecovered segment of cable
leaves a lot of context missing. But what we do know,
and it's noted at the bottom of the decryptied document,
is that Algerhiss was working at the State Department at
(27:50):
the time as assistant advisor for the Far East. Lowenthal
stated in his article that if Hiss was a spy,
there's almost no way that he would be mentioned by
his real name in secret communications. He also notes that
the way this reads, it seems as though he's being
introduced as someone the folks back in Moscow had not
(28:12):
heard of before. Lowenthal argued that Algerhiss didn't actually match
up with the identity of Ales based on the information
that was relayed about Ales in document in eighteen twenty two.
One of the things he pointed out was that his
had been accused of sharing State Department documents, but that
document eighteen twenty two specifically says that Ales is concerned
(28:34):
only with military documents. Lowenthal also noted the problems with
presuming the Venona documents were accurate, and even kind of
hinted at the idea that the NSA and the FBI
might have fudged some information to make Hiss look guilty,
although he really offered no evidence for that. Yeah, he
(28:55):
definitely was like, this was a case where they wanted
to prosecute someone, and that seemed like a good someone.
But he's really just going on conjecture. The two thousand
and three article that Edward Mark wrote and referenced in
his two thousand and nine write up was something of
a response to the Lowenthal claims. Mark was very diligent
(29:15):
and careful in his tracking of the movements of the
State Department members who matched up with all of the
evidence in document eighteen twenty two, and he also noted
that there was precedent for Soviets using spies, real names
and communications generally by accident, So there was no reason
to assume that that second document that Lowenthal invoked was
(29:36):
truly disqualifying of Hiss being Ales. Well into the two thousands,
there were new developments in the story. In two thousand
and five, the original untranslated version of Cable eighteen twenty
two was released. It showed that nothing had been added
or omitted to the information. Moreover, the decryption on which
(29:58):
the entire Ale's case had been base did appear to
have been correct, per an account written in two thousand
seven by John Erman for Studies in Intelligence. Quote in
April two thousand seven, a prominent American historian Ky Bird
and his Russian collaborator, historians Vetlana Charvanaya, stepped forward at
(30:18):
a conference to claim that the central piece of evidence
against Hiss, an intercepted cable in the Venona Series number
eighteen twenty two, naming a Soviet asset. Ayles did not
refer to Hiss, as the FBI and NSA had judged,
but someone else. If it could be proved, this claim
would have significant implications for the history of the case
(30:40):
and for historical interpretations of the Cold War era, and
might affect current politics in the field of intelligence. It
would call into question the credibility of US intelligence efforts
in the nineteen fifties and raised new doubts about the
validity of its current threat assessments under careful examination. However, ever,
the Bird Chevanyah assertion is built on thin reeds, suppositions,
(31:05):
and unsupportables. Ifs then that's but the stubborn efforts to
exonerate Hiss, even if unsuccessful, will nevertheless have consequences for
innocent bystanders and the conduct of intelligence today. That other
person that Bird and Shrevenyah named was a man named
Wilder Foot. While he did have some overlap with Hiss
(31:28):
and thus Ales in terms of positions and locations in
the nineteen thirties, he'd been living in Vermont, which for some,
including Edward Mark, disqualifies him from being the Soviet operative
in Washington at the time. While a lot of people
are convinced that Algerhiss was a spy for the Soviets,
there are still and probably will always be people who
(31:52):
have doubts about that because his accusation and trial happened
during the start of that Second Red Scare in the US,
when scapegoats being sought to reassure the general public that
the government was seeking out and prosecuting communists, and you
can find books that very thoroughly lay out a case
for almost any possible angle or belief that you can
(32:12):
think of. For this one, there are books that state
very confidently that Hiss was a spy. There are books
that say very confidently that Hiss was innocent. There are
others that say Hiss may not have been innocent, but
he wasn't ales, or that he was set up. Really,
anything you could think of is available, including Alger Hisss's
own version of the story. Additionally, it's an inherently compelling
(32:36):
story no matter which version you believe. Right, a Communist
spy in the highest levels of government or a wrongfully
convicted man fighting to regain his good name are both
pretty interesting topics, and as Edward Mark put it, quote,
the history of the controversy over his's true allegiance is
so long and involved that years of study might not
(32:57):
guarantee full mastery of it. That is algebras as we
know it, m M, as we know it. I have
listener mail that's sort of related. Okay, this is from
our listener May, who wrote to us about our Vidcan
Quizzling episode, and May writes, hello, friends, I wanted to
drop a note to say thank you for your episode
(33:18):
on vidcoan Quizzling. I'm playing catch up, so this is
a bit late. As a high school history teacher, I
was glad to hear of more World War Two history
that wasn't the classic items we tend to talk about,
though those are rather important. New information creates not only
deeper knowledge of the history as a whole, but further
interest as well. I wanted to let you know that
I am adding Quizzling to my World War Two unit
(33:40):
as best as I can, because it should be taught.
I fear I won't be able to give as much
detail time is a precious commodity to the classroom teacher.
I'm excited to bring this story in, especially the coupe
I radio tactic. Side note, I had just taught the
bubonic plague as a cause of the Renaissance when I
heard the Unearthed episode mentioning new research showing that the
plague spread by body lice. My students were super grossed
(34:03):
out to learn this, which is always fun. On that note,
I just wanted to also let you know how much
it pains myself and my colleagues to leave things out
of the curriculum because we simply don't have time. I
teach Western Civilization Part two to ninth graders, covering about
six hundred years of history in one year. Yikes. History
is unique in its curriculum because it literally grows with
(34:25):
every passing year. We are now expected to make it
through nine to eleven, whereas when I was a kid,
we were lucky if we made it to Watergate, let
alone the end of the Cold War and about ten years.
I expect teaching the pandemic will be the ending point.
I so appreciate your comments specifying that you weren't criticizing teachers,
but I wanted to bring this problem to your mind.
In case you weren't aware of the teaching history dilemma,
(34:48):
this has always been and will always be a problem.
Thank you for all you both do. Your research and
delivery is top notch, and I constantly encourage my students
and colleagues to check out your show. I listen when
doing parking duty, and the students now ask me what
the particular episode is about while I help them cross
the parking lot. My pet tax comes from our free
range chickens, Marshmallow the rooster and his girls, Brownie Cocoa
(35:11):
and John Deere. Can you guess these were named by
my kids. Marshmallow takes his duty of providing and protecting
his ladies quite seriously and often scratches up bugs for
them to eat. In case you didn't know, an adolescent
rooster learning to crow sounds like a rubber chicken see
attached video. And we had two roosters. May this is
wonderful one. I'm so incredibly touched that you would include
(35:34):
something because you've heard about it on our show. That's
incredibly kind and lovely of you to tell us two.
I am obsessed with Marshmallow. I grew up we had
a small farm, so I grew up with free ranging
roosters and chickens that were on our property, and I
never loved the roosters. They were always very mean to me.
But Marshmallow is very beautiful, and I wish he would
(35:55):
accept hugs, but I doubt it. And three, I wanted
to say, like I I appreciate also from a teacher's perspective,
how hard it is, especially when you're trying to engage
students to get all of the stuff in. I know
we run into it just doing our show, where it's
like okay, but I have like a finite amount of
time in an episode to talk about a thing, and
(36:16):
I got to cut stuff, and I know that's painful.
So I can only imagine when you're trying to do
a comprehensive history that's very, very hard. So I appreciate it.
My hat is always off to teachers. Thank you to
all the educators. And I had not thought about the
way that what you're expected to teach might shift so
so drastically based on big events in history that happen,
(36:40):
but they do shape our world, so I understand why
they would want them to be included. But also that's
a lot more work to add to people's plates. So
thank you again for all the teachers, all the teachers,
and especially history teachers. I super appreciate it. Thank you.
May I hope this school year is the best one
ever and that it's only the least of those to come.
It will only get better. If you would like to
(37:03):
write to us and share your chicken pictures or your
thoughts on history or anything else for that matter, you
can do so at History podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
You can also subscribe on the iHeartRadio app or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in
History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts
(37:26):
from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. It's another one where
I don't know how it got on my list. You've
had a lot of those lately. I know, I don't.
I guess I'm clearing out what was that? Why did
(00:23):
I get I mean, this is a weird one for
me because I feel like Algerhiss got talked about in
my home growing up a lot. Yeah. And I don't
know if I just had one parent or the other
who was fascinated by the whole thing, yeah, or if
it was some sort of like Boogeyman of treason or
(00:44):
like what it was, uh huh. But then it came
up recently. Maybe this is how it got on my list,
because I do remember it came up recently in like
a social group setting and I made a joke about
calling someone an alger Hiss and everybody looked at me like, oh,
Holly's talking about history things again, and I'm like, I mean,
not history history, And I realize people even our age
(01:07):
don't know this story. Well. I had instant name recognition. Yeah,
and then my mind kind of fished around, going was
this person though, right, he's one of those people that
I would be like, we should never do an episode
on that. Everybody knows that, but clearly they don't, so
now it's on the list. I guess that's probably how
it got on the list. Alter Hiss is a really
(01:30):
important moment historically. His case, his accusations of spying for
an enemy of the US while working at very high
levels of the US government, is one of the things
that people say really catalyze the McCarthy era and the
really really aggressive seeking and prosecuting of people during that
Second Red Scare. It's a very fascinating story of someone
(01:52):
who by all accounts was incredibly high achieving and successful
and then suddenly being accused of something pretty terrible. And also,
this is an interesting one because you have the story
of who he was, the story of this big event
and how it played out, and then a whole thing
that goes on after the fact as people try to
(02:15):
untangle the truth, which, by the way, spoiler alert, if
you want a definitive answer, you're not going to get
it here, because I don't think we can ever have
one yeah, about his level of gil. Some people feel
like there's a definitive answer. I still feel like there's
enough questions that I don't feel like we could give one.
But we're talking about Alger Hiss today. Alger Hiss was
(02:38):
born November eleventh, nineteen oh four, in Baltimore, Maryland, to
Charles Alger and Mary Lavinia Hugh's Hiss. He had four siblings,
but their family grew rapidly when Alger's uncle died and
his father, Charles took on the care of his sister
in law and seven children. Business and financial stress cause
(02:59):
Charles to fall into a depression, and he died by
suicide when Alger was still a toddler. The his family
experienced several other painful losses. When Alger was in his
early adulthood, he lost a brother to kidney disease and
a sister to suicide. As for Alger, he was a
really popular student and academically he was an achiever. He
(03:23):
attended high school in Baltimore and then received his undergraduate
degree from JOHNS Hopkins in nineteen twenty six. Following that,
he enrolled at Harvard Law School, and he graduated from
that program in nineteen twenty nine, and his was really
a star law student, and he became a law clerk
for Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes right after graduation,
(03:44):
and he worked for him for a year before joining
a pretty prestigious law firm. In nineteen thirty three, his
started working for President Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration as an attorney.
From there, Hiss served in a number of roles. He
worked on the legal team that defended the New Deal's
Agricultural Adjustment Administration, which was in charge of distributing subsidies
(04:06):
to farmers as part of a larger initiative to minimize
surplus and increase market rates of agricultural products. This was
to help support the farmers financially. He also served on
the NI Committee, which investigated war profiteering. In nineteen thirty six,
Hiss joined the State Department, working in the office of
(04:27):
Francis B. Sayer, who was the Assistant Secretary of State
briefly before joining the Office of Far Eastern Affairs. Then
in nineteen forty four he moved into the Office of
Special Political Affairs as its director. Yes, so clearly this
was a man on a pretty impressive career trajectory. In
(04:48):
nineteen forty five, having become a trusted member of the
Roosevelt administration, Hiss went to the Yalta Conference as one
of Roosevelt's advisors. On that trip, he reported to Under
Secretary of State Edward Stettinius. The Alta Conference was a
meeting where President Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin met
to discuss a possible situation where the Soviets would fight
(05:12):
against Japan in the ongoing war. The Allies were doing
pretty well in Europe at that point, and they felt
like they could be victorious, but there were real concerns
about the possibility of a Pacific theater conflict just dragging
on forever and depleting everyone's resources. Ultimately, Stalin did agree
to join forces, but that came with a price. The
(05:33):
Soviets would gain significant power in Manchuria in exchange for
their cooperation in fighting the Japanese. This was a very
significant and high profile event, and Hiss was right in
the middle of it. In nineteen forty six, Hiss left
his government work and became the president of the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace. Sometimes this is characterized as him
(05:58):
being forced out of the State Department. Regardless of exactly
how this transition played out, there were things happening during
these years that would change Hiss's life forever. So before
we move on, we need to talk about another major
player in this story, and that is Whittaker Chambers. He
was born Jay Vivian Chambers on April first, nineteen oh one,
(06:21):
in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and he grew up on Long Island
and attended Columbia University, where he was the editor of
The Morning Side, which was the school's literary paper. And
it was during this time that he changed his first
name to Whittaker, which had been his mother's maiden name.
In the nineteen twenties, Whittaker joined the Communist Party and
wrote for a number of Communist and Marxist papers. By
(06:45):
the mid nineteen thirties, he had been recruited by Soviet
agents to work as part of their network in New York,
but he became disillusioned with Communism in the late nineteen
thirties as he saw the Soviet Union prosecuting Bolshevik's and
sentencing them to prison or to death. He eventually went
to the Roosevelt administration to warn that communists backed by
(07:08):
the USSR were secretly working in the US government. Yeah,
we'll get into more detail on that in just a moment.
But in nineteen thirty nine, Chambers's journalism career really took
off when he was hired by Time magazine. He initially
worked there as a writer, and then he worked his
way up to special editor. His most famous piece of
(07:28):
writing while working there was a political fairy tale titled
The Ghosts on the Roof, And if you've never read
that particular piece of writing, it opens to my mind
rather spectacularly with quote with the softness of bats. Seven
ghosts settled down on the flat roof of the Levadia
Palace at Yalta. They found someone else already there, a
(07:49):
statuesque female figure crouching with her eye glued to one
of the holes in the roof. It had been through
the Russian Revolution, three years of Civil War, twenty one
years of socialist reconstruction, the German invasion, and the Russian reoccupation.
Madam said the foremost ghost, an imperious woman with a
bullet hole in her head. What are you doing on
(08:11):
our roof? The mysterious female figure turns out to be
Cleo the muse of history, and when she sees Nicholas
the Second, the last Emperor of Russia, she's at first
happy to see him, but as Nicholas explains the current
state of global politics to her, she becomes chagrined, telling
him at one point quote, I think I liked you
(08:32):
better Nicholas, when you were only a weakling Czar. You
are becoming a realist. This entire article is a scathing
review of the Yalta Conference. That article was of course
written shortly after the Alta Conference took place, but back
in nineteen thirty nine, the same year he started working
for Time, Chambers had a meeting with the Assistant Secretary
(08:54):
of State atolf A Burrel, and this is where he
gave his warning to the government about so spies. He
told Burle that he knew of eighteen people in the
government who were communists and who were working against US interests,
and one of those people was Alger Hiss. Burle took
the Chambers list to President Roosevelt, but there was no
(09:16):
action taken. It seems that the president didn't put a
lot of stock in Chambers's claim, and moreover, the government's
focus was on Germany and Hitler at that time, but
Burle was concerned enough to follow up on the information
the following year, this time taking Chambers's list to the FBI,
and the FBI did talk to Chambers, but it took
(09:38):
two years before he did. He met with Bureau officials twice,
first in nineteen forty two and then again in nineteen
forty five. The House on American Activities Committee, which had
been formed in nineteen thirty eight to investigate possible communist
activities in the US, subpoenaed Chambers in the summer of
nineteen forty eight to question him about what he knew
(10:01):
of Communist activity in the States. He told the committee
that he had been part of the Communist Party from
nineteen twenty four until nineteen thirty seven or nineteen thirty eight.
He stated that he knew seven officials in the US
government who had been part of a spy ring in
the nineteen thirties, and that ring was funneling information to
(10:22):
the Soviets, and he specifically named Alger Hisss as one
of these officials. Coming up, we will talk about Hiss's
reaction to those allegations, but first we'll pause for a
sponsor break. Once that accusation that he was a spy
(10:46):
for the Soviets was made. Algerhiss vehemently denied it, but
even after his appearance before the committee, Whittaker Chambers continued
to accuse Hiss of spying for the Soviet Union, and
he did so publicly. He went on news shows and
repeated the story over and over, and this led Hiss
to sue Chambers for slander. But Chambers was also adamant
(11:09):
that he was telling the truth and his accusations were accurate.
At the end of nineteen forty eight, on December sixth,
the sworn testimony of Chambers was released publicly by the
House Committee. At that point, everyone learned that Chambers testified
that he too had been a member of the espionage ring,
which was how he knew that Hiss was. Chambers gave
(11:33):
detailed information about State Department papers being handed off to
him by Hiss with the intent that they would in
turn be given to the Soviets. To prove that he
was telling the truth, Chambers produced documents that he said
had been handed over to him by Alger Hiss to
give to the Soviets during their time as spy ring collaborators.
(11:54):
Those documents included dozens of typed pages which Chambers said
Alger's wife Prisons Scilla, had typed, along with several pages
of handwritten communicates that Chambers said were written by his himself.
These documents came to be known as the Baltimore Papers,
and Chambers had kept these papers as evidence in case
he ever faced threats from the Communist Party. Once he left,
(12:17):
those papers were given to Hiss's legal team as evidence
that Chambers had not committed libel, with the exception of
one part of the document's package, and that was five
rolls of thirty five millimeter film. Chambers believed that Hiss's
legal team intended to steal the film, so he hid
(12:38):
it in a hollowed out pumpkin on his family farm,
and he told the House on American Activities Committee where
it was. Soon there were agents at the farm with
a subpoena. They found and confiscated the film. This was
supposed to be turned over to the FBI, but it
was developed by the committee instead. The film showed fo
(13:00):
of government documents that sounds like it could be sort
of thrilling, but the documents in question were actually pretty benign.
Some of them were Navy documents, which were incredibly boring.
They literally talked about things like paint colors on fire extinguishers.
The other papers were State Department papers that weren't especially
(13:22):
important in terms of holding secrets, but they still were
not things that people should have been sharing. His would
later offer his own commentary on these documents in The
Real World magazine in nineteen seventy six, stating that according
to Chambers and Richard Nixon, the documents had been quote
turned over to Chambers in the thirties for the reading
(13:43):
pleasure of the Russians. When Chambers, then an experienced publicist
himself as a time editor, produced these stills shortly after
Halloween nineteen forty eight from a scooped out pumpkin on
his farm in Maryland, Nixon, then a freshman congressman from California,
went into action, holding them up for the newsreel cameras.
(14:03):
He said the papers of which they were copies were
all from the State Department and were proof of quote,
the most serious series of treasonable activities which has been
launched against the government in the history of America. The
message intended and conveyed was that microfilms and spies go together,
Chambers had come up with five rolls of film, two
(14:25):
of them already developed, proved to contain fifty five frames
of dull State Department documents about routine trade negotiations with Germany,
all of which had nothing to do with my department,
let alone me, plus three documents, three very ordinary cables
that had passed over my desk on their way to
other people's desks or to the incinerator. If you noted
(14:48):
that mention of Nixon, he was right in the middle
of the his case. As a member of the House
an American Activities Committee. He had been part of the
committee since nineteen forty seven. When the Chambers accusations were made.
He had backed Whittaker chambers version of the story. Nixon
also surely saw an opportunity to make a name for
(15:09):
himself as somebody who was tough on communists. He had
introduced a bill in his short time as Senator to
make it mandatory for anyone who aligned with the Communist
Party to register with the US government. That did not
get past the Senate, but when Chambers offered up the
names of government officials who he claimed were communists, Nixon
(15:31):
jumped on it. The alger Hiss scandal and the Pumpkin Papers,
as the films came to be known, catapulted Nixon into
the public eye, and they paved the way for his
high profile political career. Yeah, we're not going to rehash
his whole political career because it's outside the scope of this,
but this is really where everybody suddenly knew who he was,
(15:51):
and a grand jury investigation began, and both Chambers and
his testified. His had denied that he had given any
papers to Chambers, and he also stated before the grand
jury that he had not spoken to Chambers since January first,
nineteen thirty seven. Hiss continued to assert his innocence, but
he was indicted on December fifteenth, nine days after the
(16:14):
Chambers testimony had been released by the House and thirteen
days after the seizure of the Pumpkin Papers. The indictment
was for two charges of perjury, based on the documents
produced by Chambers that he claimed showed that Hiss had
absolutely passed him papers. Hiss could not be tried for
espionage because there was a five year statute of limitations
(16:35):
on espionage charges and all of this had happened in
the thirties, but he could be charged for perjury, to
which Hiss also pleaded not guilty, and a lot of
people came to alger Hiss's defense, noting that those papers
that were being waived around were things that a lot
of people had access to. Some of those people weren't
even government employees, so the papers that Chambers produced could
(16:59):
have come from almost anywhere. Hiss's trial began on May
thirty first, nineteen forty nine, and continued until July eighth.
The result was a hung jury. A second trial started
on November nineteenth, nineteen forty nine, that concluded in January
of nineteen fifty with a guilty verdict. His was convicted
(17:21):
of perjury and sentenced to five years in prison. One
of the key pieces of evidence had been expert testimony
regarding the woodstock typewriter that was used to type up
the documents Chambers had produced. It was determined that the
typewriter in question was one that belonged to Priscilla Hiss.
This was an issue that Hiss's legal team doggedly pursued
(17:46):
after the trial, trying to get a retrial in the
case based on evidence they were compiling that there had
been a forgery of the unique characteristics of the Hiss
family typewriter. A judge denied that most though, and Hiss
went to prison. Yeah, that whole typewriter story is its
own kind of fun side thing. I'll talk a little
(18:06):
bit about it in Behind the Scenes on Friday, and
coming up, we're going to talk about the rest of
Algerhiss's life and the life his case continues to have
decades after his death. But first we will hear from
his sponsors that keep the show going. Algerhiss was released
(18:32):
from prison in nineteen fifty four after serving forty four
months of his sentence, and he never ever wavered in
proclaiming his innocence. Over the next several decades after his release,
supporters of Hiss continued to defend him and assert that
he had been wrongly convicted. And this case remained really
important to people because the details of it impact what
(18:54):
we know about the Cold War and global politics, as
well as the state of US intelligence, both at the
time that Hiss was accused of spying and in the
years since, because in some cases, current methods have built
on those that were used then. Plus, if information came
to light that cleared Hiss, it would be proof that
he had been wrongfully convicted, and that would likely catalyze
(19:16):
a fresh analysis of the handling of his case. In
nineteen seventy eight, Alan Weinstein published a book about the
Hiss case called Perjury, in which he builds a pretty
well supported and logical chain of events and information that
seems pretty conclusively damning of Alge Hiss. It was convincing
enough that support for Hiss really wanes to a degree
(19:39):
after its publication. In nineteen seventy nine, Hiss tried unsuccessfully
to have his conviction overturned, claiming misconduct of the prosecutors
in his case. He had been taking advantage of the
Freedom of Information Act to request any and all documents
he could get related to his case. All was trying
to get more information and hoping to find some detail
(20:01):
that remained that would clear his name. In nineteen ninety two,
after the archives of the former Soviet Union were opened,
Hiss hoped that new light could be shed on his situation,
so he asked the Russian government to look into available
records for any information about him or his alleged involvement
with Soviet intelligence. That request was honored, and after several months,
(20:24):
Russian chairman of the Military Intelligence Archives, General Dmitri A.
Vol Kaganov, announced that they found nothing about Hiss in
the Soviet record. While this seemed to some like a
step toward exoneration, a lot of people made the point
that it was unlikely that every facet of a massive
secret spy ring would be mentioned in any kind of record.
(20:47):
It also appeared that not all intelligence files were actually searched,
so there was just no real resolution from the effort.
And in what's a little bit of a letdown in
how this story plays out, His died on November fifteenth
of nineteen ninety six. He was ninety two at the time,
and he had been trying to clear his name for
more than forty years. His wife, Priscilla, had died in
(21:10):
nineteen eighty five, and he remarried in nineteen eighty six
to Isabel Johnson, who survived him. He had been readmitted
to the Massachusetts bar in the mid nineteen seventies, so
he did leave a legacy of being the first lawyer
to ever do so after disbarment in the state of Massachusetts.
That same year that his died, new evidence came to
(21:32):
light when missives that US intelligence had intercepted during World
War II from the Soviets were released. The documents involved
were part of what was called the Venona Project, which
began in February of nineteen forty three and was focused
on cracking the encryption of intercepted Soviet messages and using
(21:53):
the information within them to the advantage of the United States.
This program continued until nineteen eighty, and starting in nineteen
ninety five, batches of these top secret documents were declassified
and released to the public once decrypted. One of these documents,
known as Cable number eighteen twenty two, included mentions of
(22:15):
an agent referred to as Ales Alees, who many have
come to believe is in fact Algerhiss. This was a
communication intercepted as it was sent from Anatoly Gorski, a
member of the US Soviet State Security Agency home to
the USSR from Washington, and that pertinent document, dated March thirtieth,
(22:36):
nineteen forty five, includes the following bullet points sent from
Washington to Moscow. One. Ales has been working with the
neighbors Sosaid or so Seti continuously since nineteen thirty five two.
For some years past, he has been the leader of
a small group of the neighbour's probationers, for the most
part consisting of his relations. Three. The group and Ale's
(23:00):
himself work on obtaining military information. Only materials on the
bank allegedly interest the neighbors very little, and he does
not produce them regularly. Four. All the last few years,
Ales has been working with Paul pol who also meets
other members of the group occasionally. Five. Recently, Ales and
(23:21):
his whole group were awarded Soviet decorations. Six after the
Yalta Conference, when he had gone on to Moscow, a
Soviet personage in a very responsible position allegedly got in
touch with Ales and at the behest of the military
neighbors passed on to him their gratitude and so on.
You can view this document and the other released Venona
(23:44):
documents online at the nsay's website. There are notes at
the bottom which explain what the code names are believed
to be. So SETI, the neighbors are quote members of
another Soviet intelligence organization here probably the GRU, the bank
is the State Department, and Ales is listed as probably
(24:04):
alger Hisss. So how did anyone come to that conclusion? Well,
the key points are those mentions of the Yalta Conference
and the Soviet decorations. In two thousand and nine, a
historian named Edward Mark published an article in Journal of
Cold War Studies titled in re Algerhiss, a final verdict
from the Archives of the KGB, and in it he
(24:27):
actually references another article that he wrote six years earlier,
in which he laid out the case that he believed
pointed squarely to Algerhiss being Ales. He wrote, quote, I
matched the clues given in Cable number eighteen twenty two
against the biographies of all the members of the small
party that Secretary of State Edward R. Statinius led to
(24:47):
Moscow after the Yalta Conference of February nineteen forty five.
As Gorski's message left little room for doubt that Ales
had been one of Statinius's party, I concluded that gorsky
He's profile of Ales closely matched Alger Hisss and that
there was no other plausible candidate in the small universe
of suspects. Mark was not the only person to come
(25:11):
to that conclusion, although he does also note that it
is possible that Hiss was a spy and yet not
the Ales mentioned in Cable number eighteen twenty two. The
identity of Ales had been swirling in fresh controversy for
several years by the time Edward Mark wrote his two
thousand and nine article, including several events he alluded to.
(25:34):
One issue that has often been argued over is just
how much faith should be put in the Venona document
that mentioned Ales and its footnote that equates Ales with
alger Hiss. For one, there's really no confirmation that the
Venona decryption was accurate. The work done to tease out
the messages that were intercepted by the FBI and the
(25:56):
NSA that was incredibly difficult and arduous. There was a
thing like a Rosetta stone to guide them. That means
that at times decryption experts had to make some leaps
of faith in their work, and that means there could
be errors. Critics of the Venona documents note that the
translations of them didn't really incorporate cultural context or nuance,
(26:20):
so it's possible that really important information was missed or misconstrued.
And the other big thing that detractors have focused on
is that while it's possible to triangulate the likelihood that
Ales was Hiss, the NSA and FBI never showed their
work in terms of how they determined that to be
(26:40):
the case. It appears in the document eighteen twenty two footnote.
And while a lot of people took that is fact,
other people questioned it. In two thousand and two, one
of Alger Hisss's lawyers wrote an article that was published
in Intelligence and National Security which called just about everything
about the Venona cable regarding Hiss into question. Yes, cable's plural,
(27:04):
because it turned out there were other mentions of Hiss,
mentions that the lawyer John Lowenthal thought actually helped the
Hiss case. That document was number fifteen seventy nine of
the Venona files, and it mentioned Algerhiss, not by any
code but by name. That message was intercepted on September
twenty eighth, nineteen forty three, and after information about money
(27:27):
needs the missive reads quote the neighbor so said, has
reported that one group unrecovered from the State Department by
the name of Hiss. So that unrecovered segment of cable
leaves a lot of context missing. But what we do know,
and it's noted at the bottom of the decryptied document,
is that Algerhiss was working at the State Department at
(27:50):
the time as assistant advisor for the Far East. Lowenthal
stated in his article that if Hiss was a spy,
there's almost no way that he would be mentioned by
his real name in secret communications. He also notes that
the way this reads, it seems as though he's being
introduced as someone the folks back in Moscow had not
(28:12):
heard of before. Lowenthal argued that Algerhiss didn't actually match
up with the identity of Ales based on the information
that was relayed about Ales in document in eighteen twenty two.
One of the things he pointed out was that his
had been accused of sharing State Department documents, but that
document eighteen twenty two specifically says that Ales is concerned
(28:34):
only with military documents. Lowenthal also noted the problems with
presuming the Venona documents were accurate, and even kind of
hinted at the idea that the NSA and the FBI
might have fudged some information to make Hiss look guilty,
although he really offered no evidence for that. Yeah, he
(28:55):
definitely was like, this was a case where they wanted
to prosecute someone, and that seemed like a good someone.
But he's really just going on conjecture. The two thousand
and three article that Edward Mark wrote and referenced in
his two thousand and nine write up was something of
a response to the Lowenthal claims. Mark was very diligent
(29:15):
and careful in his tracking of the movements of the
State Department members who matched up with all of the
evidence in document eighteen twenty two, and he also noted
that there was precedent for Soviets using spies, real names
and communications generally by accident, So there was no reason
to assume that that second document that Lowenthal invoked was
(29:36):
truly disqualifying of Hiss being Ales. Well into the two thousands,
there were new developments in the story. In two thousand
and five, the original untranslated version of Cable eighteen twenty
two was released. It showed that nothing had been added
or omitted to the information. Moreover, the decryption on which
(29:58):
the entire Ale's case had been base did appear to
have been correct, per an account written in two thousand
seven by John Erman for Studies in Intelligence. Quote in
April two thousand seven, a prominent American historian Ky Bird
and his Russian collaborator, historians Vetlana Charvanaya, stepped forward at
(30:18):
a conference to claim that the central piece of evidence
against Hiss, an intercepted cable in the Venona Series number
eighteen twenty two, naming a Soviet asset. Ayles did not
refer to Hiss, as the FBI and NSA had judged,
but someone else. If it could be proved, this claim
would have significant implications for the history of the case
(30:40):
and for historical interpretations of the Cold War era, and
might affect current politics in the field of intelligence. It
would call into question the credibility of US intelligence efforts
in the nineteen fifties and raised new doubts about the
validity of its current threat assessments under careful examination. However, ever,
the Bird Chevanyah assertion is built on thin reeds, suppositions,
(31:05):
and unsupportables. Ifs then that's but the stubborn efforts to
exonerate Hiss, even if unsuccessful, will nevertheless have consequences for
innocent bystanders and the conduct of intelligence today. That other
person that Bird and Shrevenyah named was a man named
Wilder Foot. While he did have some overlap with Hiss
(31:28):
and thus Ales in terms of positions and locations in
the nineteen thirties, he'd been living in Vermont, which for some,
including Edward Mark, disqualifies him from being the Soviet operative
in Washington at the time. While a lot of people
are convinced that Algerhiss was a spy for the Soviets,
there are still and probably will always be people who
(31:52):
have doubts about that because his accusation and trial happened
during the start of that Second Red Scare in the US,
when scapegoats being sought to reassure the general public that
the government was seeking out and prosecuting communists, and you
can find books that very thoroughly lay out a case
for almost any possible angle or belief that you can
(32:12):
think of. For this one, there are books that state
very confidently that Hiss was a spy. There are books
that say very confidently that Hiss was innocent. There are
others that say Hiss may not have been innocent, but
he wasn't ales, or that he was set up. Really,
anything you could think of is available, including Alger Hisss's
own version of the story. Additionally, it's an inherently compelling
(32:36):
story no matter which version you believe. Right, a Communist
spy in the highest levels of government or a wrongfully
convicted man fighting to regain his good name are both
pretty interesting topics, and as Edward Mark put it, quote,
the history of the controversy over his's true allegiance is
so long and involved that years of study might not
(32:57):
guarantee full mastery of it. That is algebras as we
know it, m M, as we know it. I have
listener mail that's sort of related. Okay, this is from
our listener May, who wrote to us about our Vidcan
Quizzling episode, and May writes, hello, friends, I wanted to
drop a note to say thank you for your episode
(33:18):
on vidcoan Quizzling. I'm playing catch up, so this is
a bit late. As a high school history teacher, I
was glad to hear of more World War Two history
that wasn't the classic items we tend to talk about,
though those are rather important. New information creates not only
deeper knowledge of the history as a whole, but further
interest as well. I wanted to let you know that
I am adding Quizzling to my World War Two unit
(33:40):
as best as I can, because it should be taught.
I fear I won't be able to give as much
detail time is a precious commodity to the classroom teacher.
I'm excited to bring this story in, especially the coupe
I radio tactic. Side note, I had just taught the
bubonic plague as a cause of the Renaissance when I
heard the Unearthed episode mentioning new research showing that the
plague spread by body lice. My students were super grossed
(34:03):
out to learn this, which is always fun. On that note,
I just wanted to also let you know how much
it pains myself and my colleagues to leave things out
of the curriculum because we simply don't have time. I
teach Western Civilization Part two to ninth graders, covering about
six hundred years of history in one year. Yikes. History
is unique in its curriculum because it literally grows with
(34:25):
every passing year. We are now expected to make it
through nine to eleven, whereas when I was a kid,
we were lucky if we made it to Watergate, let
alone the end of the Cold War and about ten years.
I expect teaching the pandemic will be the ending point.
I so appreciate your comments specifying that you weren't criticizing teachers,
but I wanted to bring this problem to your mind.
In case you weren't aware of the teaching history dilemma,
(34:48):
this has always been and will always be a problem.
Thank you for all you both do. Your research and
delivery is top notch, and I constantly encourage my students
and colleagues to check out your show. I listen when
doing parking duty, and the students now ask me what
the particular episode is about while I help them cross
the parking lot. My pet tax comes from our free
range chickens, Marshmallow the rooster and his girls, Brownie Cocoa
(35:11):
and John Deere. Can you guess these were named by
my kids. Marshmallow takes his duty of providing and protecting
his ladies quite seriously and often scratches up bugs for
them to eat. In case you didn't know, an adolescent
rooster learning to crow sounds like a rubber chicken see
attached video. And we had two roosters. May this is
wonderful one. I'm so incredibly touched that you would include
(35:34):
something because you've heard about it on our show. That's
incredibly kind and lovely of you to tell us two.
I am obsessed with Marshmallow. I grew up we had
a small farm, so I grew up with free ranging
roosters and chickens that were on our property, and I
never loved the roosters. They were always very mean to me.
But Marshmallow is very beautiful, and I wish he would
(35:55):
accept hugs, but I doubt it. And three, I wanted
to say, like I I appreciate also from a teacher's perspective,
how hard it is, especially when you're trying to engage
students to get all of the stuff in. I know
we run into it just doing our show, where it's
like okay, but I have like a finite amount of
time in an episode to talk about a thing, and
(36:16):
I got to cut stuff, and I know that's painful.
So I can only imagine when you're trying to do
a comprehensive history that's very, very hard. So I appreciate it.
My hat is always off to teachers. Thank you to
all the educators. And I had not thought about the
way that what you're expected to teach might shift so
so drastically based on big events in history that happen,
(36:40):
but they do shape our world, so I understand why
they would want them to be included. But also that's
a lot more work to add to people's plates. So
thank you again for all the teachers, all the teachers,
and especially history teachers. I super appreciate it. Thank you.
May I hope this school year is the best one
ever and that it's only the least of those to come.
It will only get better. If you would like to
(37:03):
write to us and share your chicken pictures or your
thoughts on history or anything else for that matter, you
can do so at History podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
You can also subscribe on the iHeartRadio app or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in
History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts
(37:26):
from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
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Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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