![]() ![]() When that insinuation did not fly, Hiss defenders retreated to their familiar tactics of re-imagining the evidence. ![]() government project "to enlarge post-cold war intelligence gathering capability at the expense of civil liberty," while the prominent radical lawyer William Kunstler insisted that the messages were forgeries. In response, some students of the case, including Victor Navasky, then editorial director of The Nation, depicted VENONA as a sinister U.S. This new, seemingly damning, revelation brought to mind the old adage: be careful what you wish for. It turned out that only four State Department officials had gone from Yalta to Moscow for further consultations before coming home. Most importantly, the message noted that ALES, identified as a GRU agent, had been at the recently concluded Yalta conference and had returned to the United States via Moscow. The details conveyed in the message matched, in every particular, known or knowable facts about Hiss. The cable referred to a well-placed American agent, code-named ALES (pronounced A'-lis), who had been spying for Moscow continuously since 1935. Number 1822, dated 30 March 1945, was a partially decoded message from the KGB's Washington station to Moscow headquarters. And one VENONA intercept, in particular, set Hiss's shrinking band of defenders back on their heels. Yet the VENONA intercepts were sufficient in number and substance to make it clear that Washington had not acted rashly or without reason in internal security investigations, but in response to positive evidence of a vast espionage effort orchestrated from Moscow. Only a fraction of these messages were intercepted and deciphered by what is now known as the National Security Agency (NSA). In 1995, the NSA released one of its most closely-held secrets: the VENONA intercepts, the name given to coded messages between the Soviet Union and KGB officers stationed in the United States who ran Moscow's network of spies. The next, unexpected twist in the case came from U.S. The general volunteered that his inquiry had not encompassed the GRU, the intelligence arm of the Soviet Ministry of Defense, and it was the GRU, not KGB, that ran Hiss. But within a matter of weeks, Volkogonov felt compelled to issue a retraction. Lowenthal promptly claimed this was tantamount to exoneration for his long-suffering client. In late October Volkogonov did issue a statement, asserting that Hiss was not registered in KGB documents as a recruited agent. In 1992, John Lowenthal, Hiss's long-time lawyer and a film-maker, prevailed upon Dmitri Volkogonov, a respected Russian general, military historian, and adviser to Russian President Yeltsin on archival policy, to help establish Hiss's innocence once and for all on humanitarian grounds. The end of the cold war brought new primary sources into play, and Hiss's defenders-being true believers-raced to exploit these opportunities initially, thinking they could only redound to Hiss's benefit. Edgar Hoover who had only one goal in mind: the destruction of New Deal liberalism, so as to pave the way for the cold war abroad and domestic repression at home. Finally, they argued that the case against Hiss was a nefarious conspiracy, a Salem witch trial for the 1940s, orchestrated by such congenital anti-communists as Richard Nixon and J. ![]() When that fell short, Hiss and his defenders invented any number of Baroque theories to rebut hard evidence, including "forgery by typewriter" to explain away portions of classified documents that had been typed on a Hiss-owned machine. For nearly sixty years, Alger Hiss's defenders have mounted one campaign after another to discredit the mountain of evidence that proves he spied for the Soviet Union.įirst, they tried to smear Hiss's main accuser, Whittaker Chambers, as a fantasist, liar, and spurned homosexual. ![]()
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