Alger Hiss - Accusation of Espionage

Accusation of Espionage

On August 3, 1948, Whittaker Chambers, a former Communist Party member appeared before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) to denounce Alger Hiss. A senior editor at Time magazine, Chambers had written a scathingly satirical editorial critical of the Yalta agreements, Chambers asserted that he had known Hiss as a member of "an underground organization of the United States Communist Party" in the 1930s. The group, which Chambers called the "Ware Group", had been organized by agriculturalist Harold Ware, an American Communist intent on organizing black and white tenant farmers in the American South against exploitation and debt peonage by the cotton industry (Ware had died in 1935). According to Chambers, "the purpose of this group at that time was not primarily espionage. Its original purpose was the Communist infiltration of the American Government. But espionage was certainly one of its eventual objectives". As historian Tim Weiner, points out: "This was a crucial point. Infiltration and invisible political influence were immoral, but arguably not illegal. Espionage was treason, traditionally punishable by death. The distinction was not lost on the cleverest member of HUAC, Congressman Richard Nixon ... He had been studying the FBI’s files for five months, courtesy of J. Edgar Hoover. Nixon launched his political career in hot pursuit of Hiss and the secret Communists of the New Deal."

Rumors had circulated about Hiss since 1939, when Chambers went to Assistant Secretary of State Adolf A. Berle, Jr. and accused Hiss of having belonged to an underground Communist cell at the Department of Agriculture. In 1942, Chambers repeated this allegation to the FBI. In 1945 two other sources appeared to implicate Hiss. In September, 1945, a Belorussian cipher clerk for the Soviet Embassy named Igor Gouzenko defected from the Soviet Union to Canada. Gouzenko reported that an unnamed assistant (or more precisely an "assistant to an assistant") to U.S. Secretary of State Stettinius was a Soviet agent. Hoover assumed he was referring to Alger Hiss. Three months later (in December 1945), Elizabeth Bentley, an American spy for the Soviet Union who served also as courier between Communist groups, told the FBI, as documented in the FBI Silvermaster File that, "At this time Kramer told me that the person who had originally taken Glasser away from Perlo's group was named Hiss and that he was in the U.S. State Department". Bentley also said that the man in question, whom she called "Eugene Hiss" worked in the State Department and was an advisor to Dean Acheson. In both cases (Gouzenko and Bentley), the FBI decided that Alger Hiss was the likely match. Hoover put a wiretap on Hiss's home phone and had him and his wife investigated and tailed for the next two years.

In response to Chambers's accusations, Hiss protested his innocence and insisted on appearing before HUAC to clear himself. Testifying on August 5, 1948, he denied having ever been a Communist or having personally met Chambers. Under fire from President Truman and the press, the Committee was reluctant to proceed with its investigation against so eminent a man. Committee member Richard Nixon, however, a Congressman from California, who later described Hiss's demeanor that day as, "insolent", "condescending", and "insulting in the extreme", wanted to press on. Nixon had received secret information about the FBI's suspicions from John Francis Cronin, a Roman Catholic priest who had infiltrated labor unions in Baltimore during World War II to report on Communist activities and had been given access to FBI files. Writing in a paper titled "The Problem Of American Communism In 1945" Cronin wrote, "In the State Department, the most influential Communist has been Alger Hiss.

With some reluctance, the Committee voted to make Nixon chair of a subcommittee that would seek to determine who was lying, Hiss or Chambers, at least on the question of whether they knew one another.

Shown a photograph of Chambers, Hiss conceded that the face "might look familiar" and asked to see Chambers in person. Confronted with him in person in a hotel elevator with HUAC representatives present, Hiss admitted that he had indeed known Chambers, but under the name "George Crosley", a man who represented himself as a freelance writer. Hiss said that in the mid-1930s he had sublet his apartment to this "Crosley" and had given him an old car. Chambers, for his part, denied on the stand ever having used the alias Crosley, though he admitted to Hiss's lawyers in private testimony that it could have been one of his pen names. When Hiss and Chambers both appeared before a HUAC subcommittee on August 17, 1948, they had the following exchange:

Chambers's statements, because they were made in a congressional hearing, were privileged against defamation suits; Hiss challenged Chambers to repeat them without benefit of such protection. When, on the national radio program Meet the Press, Chambers publicly called Hiss a Communist, Hiss instituted a libel lawsuit against him.

Chambers retaliated by claiming Hiss was not merely a Communist but also a spy, a charge he had not made earlier; and, on November 17, 1948, he produced, to support his explosive allegations, physical evidence consisting of sixty-five pages of re-typed State Department documents plus four in Hiss's own handwriting of copied State Department cables. These became known as the "Baltimore documents." He claimed Hiss had given them to him in 1938 and that Priscilla had retyped them on the Hisses' Woodstock typewriter to pass along to the Soviets. In their previous testimony, both Chambers and Hiss had denied having committed espionage. By introducing the Baltimore documents, Chambers admitted he had previously lied, opening both Hiss and himself to perjury charges. Chambers also gave a new date for his own break with the Communist Party, an important point in his accusations against Hiss. For over nine years, beginning September 1, 1939, he claimed to have quit the Party in 1937. Chambers now claimed the actual date was 1938, the year of the Baltimore documents.

On December 2, Chambers led HUAC investigators to a pumpkin patch on his Maryland farm; from a hollowed-out pumpkin in which he had hidden them the previous day, he produced five rolls of 35 mm film that he said came from Hiss in 1938, as well. While some of the film was undeveloped and some contained images of trivial content such as publicly available Navy documents concerning the painting of fire extinguishers, there were also images of State Department documents that were classified at the time. As a consequence of the revelation's dramatic staging, both the film and the Baltimore documents soon became known collectively as the "Pumpkin Papers".