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HISS, ALGER 1904-

ALLEGED SPY FOR THE SOVIET UNION

A Career in Government

To many, Alger Hiss is a symbol of cold-war tensions and anticommunism run amok in the late 1940s and 1950s. As a highly placed State Department official, who also had access to secret documents pertaining to American national security, Hiss had represented the United States in some of the most crucial meetings of the post-World War II era. He had accompanied President Franklin D. Roosevelt to the Yalta Conference in 1945; helped create the United Nations, serving as temporary secretary-general at the San Francisco Conference later that year; and served as principal adviser to the U.S. delegation to the United Nations.

Accused and Tried

On 3 August 1948 Whittaker Chambers, an editor at Time magazine and former Communist, appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and testified that in the 1930s he had been a part of a Communist cell that included several government officials—Hiss among them. Hiss denied the allegations and, after Chambers repeated his claims, sued Chambers for libel. During a pretrial hearing, the Hiss-Chambers affair took on more significant meaning when Chambers contradicted his HUAC testimony in claiming that the Communist cell had engaged in spying and that Hiss had stolen government documents. To substantiate his claims, Chambers handed five rolls of microfilm over to Rep. Richard Nixon, who headed the HUAC sub-committee in charge of the Chambers affair. The film came to be known as the "pumpkin papers" because Chambers had hidden it in a pumpkin on his farm; the microfilm, Chambers claimed, had been given to him by Hiss in 1938. Hiss was indicted for perjury—the statute of limitations having run out on treason—and in 1949 was tried twice, the first trial ending in a hung jury, the second in a conviction. Hiss entered prison on 22 March 1951 and served three years and eight months of a five-year sentence.

Aftermath of the Hiss-Chambers Affair

As a result of the affair, Chambers became a bestselling author (Witness, 1952) and respected conservative thinker. Nixon had proved a force for cleaning out Communists and had gained national attention as a hard-nosed congressional investigator and spear-carrier of the conservative movement. Hiss continued to protest his innocence into the 1990s, when Russian historians produced new evidence from the Soviet archives to show Hiss was not involved. But other historians immediately criticized the evidence as unreliable, and the controversy has raged on.