Who is Alger Hiss?

Rush just stated that from now on he's going to refer to the Mosque Iman as Alger Hiss II.

Who is Alger Hiss? From Wikipedia:

Alger Hiss (November 11, 1904 – November 15, 1996) was an American lawyer, civil servant, businessman, author, and lecturer. He was involved in the establishment of the United Nations both as a U.S. State Department and UN official. Hiss was accused of being a Soviet spy in 1948 and convicted of perjury in connection with this charge in 1950.

On August 3, 1948, Whittaker Chambers, a former Communist Party member, testified under subpoena before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (known as HUAC) that Hiss had secretly been a communist while in federal service, despite the fact that Chambers had previously testified under oath that Hiss had never been a communist. Called before HUAC, Hiss categorically denied the charge. When Chambers repeated his claim in a radio interview, Hiss filed a defamation lawsuit against him.

During the pretrial discovery process, Chambers produced new evidence indicating that he and Hiss had been involved in espionage, which each had denied under oath to HUAC. A federal grand jury indicted Hiss on two counts of perjury; Chambers admitted to the same offense, but as a cooperating government witness he was never charged. Although Hiss's indictment stemmed from the alleged espionage, he could not be tried for that crime because the statute of limitations had expired. After a mistrial due to a hung jury, Hiss was tried a second time. In January 1950, he was found guilty on both counts of perjury and received two concurrent five-year sentences, of which he eventually served 44 months.

Arguments about the case and the validity of the verdict took center stage in broader debates about the Cold War, McCarthyism, and the extent of Soviet espionage in the United States. Since his conviction, statements by involved parties and newly exposed evidence, both incriminating and exculpatory, have added to the dispute. Although the question of Hiss's guilt or innocence remains controversial, according to the New York Times there developed among scholars during the 1990s a "growing consensus that Hiss, indeed, had most likely been a Soviet agent."

Early life and career
Hiss was born in Baltimore, Maryland, USA, to Mary Lavinia Hughes and Charles Alger Hiss. His early life was repeatedly marred by tragedy. His father committed suicide when Alger was two years old, his elder brother Bosley died of Bright's disease when Alger was twenty-two, and he lost his sister Mary Ann to suicide when he was twenty-five. His father had been a middle class wholesale grocer, and after his death, Mary Hiss relied largely on family members for financial support in raising her five children. The Hiss family lived in a Baltimore neighborhood that was described as one of "shabby gentility."

Hiss was educated at Baltimore City College (high school) and Johns Hopkins University, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa and was voted "most popular student" by his classmates. In 1929, he received his law degree from Harvard Law School, where he was a protégé of Felix Frankfurter, the future U.S. Supreme Court justice. Before joining a Boston law firm, he served for a year as clerk to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. That same year, Hiss married Priscilla Fansler Hobson (1903–1987), a Bryn Mawr graduate who would later work as a grade school English teacher. Priscilla, previously married to Thayer Hobson, had a three-month-old son, Timothy.

In 1933, Hiss entered government service, working in several areas as an attorney in President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal, starting with the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA). Hiss worked for the Nye Committee, which investigated and documented wartime profiteering by military contractors during World War I, and served briefly in the Justice Department.

Both Alger Hiss and his younger brother, Donald Hiss, began working in the United States Department of State in 1936. Alger served as assistant to Francis B. Sayre, a son-in-law of Woodrow Wilson, and later became special assistant to the Director of the Office of Far Eastern Affairs and in 1944 became a special assistant to the Director of the Office of Special Political Affairs (OSPA), a policy-making office that concentrated on postwar planning for international organization. He later became the director of OSPA, and, as such, he was executive secretary at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference, which finalized plans for the organization that would become the United Nations.

In 1945, Hiss was a member of the U.S. delegation to the wartime Yalta Conference, where the 'Big Three' (Franklin D. Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin, and Winston Churchill) met to coordinate strategy to defeat Hitler, draw the map of postwar Europe and continue with plans to set up the United Nations. Hiss's role at Yalta was limited to work on the United Nations. Hiss argued against Stalin's proposal for one vote for each of the Soviet Republics in the UN General Assembly (a total of 16 votes). In the final compromise, the Big Three decided to give Stalin three votes in the General Assembly: the Soviet Union itself, the Ukrainian SSR, and the Byelorussian SSR.

Hiss served as the secretary-general of the United Nations Conference on International Organization (the United Nations Charter Conference) in San Francisco in 1945. He later became the full Director of the Office of Special Political Affairs. Hiss left government service in 1946 and became president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he served until May 5, 1949.

Accusation of espionage
August 25, 1948 – In an appearance on August 3, 1948, before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), Whittaker Chambers, a senior editor at Time magazine and a former Communist, accused Alger Hiss of having been a member of "an underground organization of the United States Communist Party". At this time Chambers described the purpose of the organization, which became known as the Ware Group, as promoting communist policies in U.S. government. He made no mention of espionage activity, and would later specifically deny that he or Hiss had engaged in espionage. Chambers would change his story several times, and he would be forced to testify at the two Hiss trials that he had committed perjury many times in earlier testimony.

Chambers gave varying dates for the time when he broke with the Communist party; a point that was to prove important in his later accusations against Hiss. For nine years, between September 1, 1939, and November 17, 1948, Chambers said he had left the Party in 1937. The 1938 Party-leaving date only emerged on November 17, 1948, when Chambers produced copies of State Department documents that he said Hiss had given him; the documents were dated 1938.

Prior to Chambers' testimony, the FBI had already come to suspect Hiss of Communist activities. The FBI had interviewed Chambers several times since 1942, and in 1945 further evidence corroborating Chambers's story was received from two sources. Elizabeth Bentley, an American spy for the Soviet Union, defected and told the FBI about a Soviet contact in the State Department whom she identified as "Eugene Hiss." The same year, a Belorussian code clerk named Igor Gouzenko defected to Canada and reported that an unnamed assistant to the U.S. Secretary of State was a Soviet agent. In both cases, the FBI decided that Alger Hiss was the most likely match.

Hiss insisted on appearing before HUAC, which granted his request. Testifying before the Committee on August 5, Hiss denied ever being a Communist. Some Committee members had misgivings at first about attacking Hiss, since he had recently served as a senior level official in the State Department. Congressman Richard Nixon, a member of HUAC, pressed the Committee to continue the investigation. Nixon had received information about Chambers's allegations and the suspicions around Hiss from Roman Catholic priest John Francis Cronin, an anti-communist author who had been given access to FBI files.

After being asked to identify Chambers from a photograph, Hiss indicated that his face "might look familiar" and requested to see him in person. When he later confronted Chambers in a hotel room, with HUAC representatives present, Hiss claimed that he had known Chambers as "George Crosley", who had presented himself to Hiss as a freelance writer. Hiss said he had sublet his apartment to "Crosley" in the mid-1930s and had given him an old car.

When Hiss and Chambers both appeared before a HUAC subcommittee on August 17, they had the following exchange:

HISS. Did you ever go under the name of George Crosley?
CHAMBERS. Not to my knowledge.
HISS. Did you ever sublet an apartment on Twenty-ninth Street from me?
CHAMBERS. No; I did not.
HISS. You did not?
CHAMBERS. No.
HISS. Did you ever spend any time with your wife and child in an apartment on Twenty-ninth Street in Washington when I was not there because I and my family were living on P Street?
CHAMBERS. I most certainly did.
HISS. You did or did not?
CHAMBERS. I did.
HISS. Would you tell me how you reconcile your negative answers with this affirmative answer?
CHAMBERS. Very easily, Alger. I was a Communist and you were a Communist.[11]
Because Chambers's testimony was given in a congressional hearing, his statements were privileged against defamation suits. Hiss challenged him to repeat his charges in public without the benefit of such protection. After Chambers publicly reiterated his charge that Hiss was a Communist on the radio program Meet the Press, Hiss instituted a libel lawsuit against Chambers.

Chambers responded by now claiming that Hiss had been a spy, and on November 17, he presented physical evidence to support his charge. This evidence consisted of sixty-five pages of retyped State Department documents, plus four pages in Hiss's own handwriting of copied State Department cables. Chambers stated that he had obtained these from Hiss in the 1930s; the typed papers having been retyped from originals by Priscilla Hiss on the family's Woodstock typewriter.

These papers became known as the "Baltimore documents." The typeface characteristics of the Baltimore documents would become a key piece of evidence used to convict Hiss. Both Chambers and Hiss had denied any act of espionage in their testimony before HUAC. By introducing the Baltimore documents, Chambers admitted that he committed perjury, and opened both Hiss and himself to perjury charges.

On the evening of December 2, 1948, Chambers produced the "pumpkin papers", five rolls of 35 mm film, two of which contained State Department documents. Chambers had hidden the film in a hollowed-out pumpkin on his Maryland farm the previous day.

Perjury trials and conviction
Hiss was charged with two counts of perjury; the grand jury could not indict him for espionage since the statute of limitations had run out. Chambers was never charged with a crime. Hiss went to trial twice. The first trial started on May 31, 1949, and ended in a hung jury on July 7. Chambers was forced to admit on the witness stand that he had previously committed perjury several times while he was under oath. Chambers also was forced to admit that he needed to change key dates when confronted with contradictions in his story. Hiss's character witnesses at his first trial included such notables as future Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, and former Democratic presidential candidate John W. Davis. The second trial lasted from November 17, 1949, to January 21, 1950.

At both trials, a key piece of prosecution testimony was that of expert witnesses who stated that identifying characteristics of the typed Baltimore documents matched samples known to have been typed on a typewriter owned by the Hisses at the time of his alleged espionage work with Chambers. Also presented as prosecution evidence was the typewriter itself, which the Hisses had given away years earlier; it had been located by defense investigators.

In the second trial, Hede Massing, an American ex-Communist, provided some slight corroboration of Chambers's story when she recounted meeting Hiss at a social function in which they both spoke obliquely about their Communist activities.

The second trial jury found Hiss guilty on both counts; on January 25, 1950, he was sentenced to five years imprisonment. The verdict was upheld by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit (case citation 185 F.2d 822) and the Supreme Court of the United States (340 U.S. 948). Hiss served 44 months at the Lewisburg Federal Prison and was released on November 27, 1954. While in prison, Hiss acted as a voluntary attorney, advisor, and tutor for many of his fellow inmates.

The case heightened public concern about Soviet espionage penetration of the U.S. government in the 1930s and 1940s. As a native-born, well-educated, and highly connected government official, Alger Hiss did not fit the profile of a typical spy. Publicity surrounding the case fed the early political career of Richard M. Nixon, helping him move from the U.S. House of Representatives to the U.S. Senate in 1950, and to the vice presidency of the United States in 1952. Senator Joseph McCarthy made his famous Wheeling, West Virginia, speech two weeks after the Hiss verdict, launching his career as the nation's most visible anti-communist.

Post-incarceration
After his release in late 1954, Hiss, who had been disbarred, worked as a salesman for a stationery company. In 1957 his book In the Court of Public Opinion was published. It challenged the prosecution's case against him in detail, emphasizing the theory that the typewritten documents traced to his typewriter had been forged. He separated from his first wife, Priscilla, in 1959, though he did not remarry until after Priscilla's death in 1986.

On November 11, 1962, Hiss appeared on the ABC television program Howard K. Smith: News and Comment, in a segment titled "The Political Obituary of Richard M. Nixon". The controversial and premature report, following Nixon's defeat in the 1962 election for governor of California, led sponsors to withdraw from Smith's program, while viewers bombarded ABC with complaints about the decision to invite a convicted perjurer on air. The show was cancelled in June 1963.

The five rolls of 35 mm film known as the "pumpkin papers" were thought until late 1974 to be locked in HUAC files. Independent researcher Stephen W. Salant sued the U.S. Justice Department in 1975 when his request for access to them under the Freedom of Information Act was denied. On July 31, 1975, as a result of this lawsuit and follow-on suits filed by Peter Irons and by Alger Hiss and William Reuben, the Justice Department released copies of the "pumpkin papers" that had been used to implicate Hiss. One roll of film is totally blank due to overexposure, two others are faintly legible copies of nonclassified Navy Department documents relating to such subjects as life rafts and fire extinguishers, and the remaining two are photographs of State Department documents that had been introduced at the two Hiss trials.

A few days after the pumpkin papers release, on August 5, 1975, Hiss was readmitted to the Massachusetts bar, reinstating his license to practice law. The state's Supreme Judicial Court overruled its Committee of Bar Overseers and stated in a unanimous decision that, despite his conviction, Hiss had demonstrated the "moral and intellectual fitness" required to be an attorney. Hiss was the first lawyer ever readmitted to the Massachusetts bar after a major criminal conviction.

In 1988 Hiss wrote an autobiography, Recollections of a Life. Hiss maintained his innocence and fought his perjury conviction until his death at age 92. He died of emphysema on November 15, 1996, at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City.

Later evidence, for and against
Testimony by Bullitt and Weyl
In testimony before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, known as the McCarran Committee, in 1952, William C. Bullitt claimed that as Ambassador to France in 1939 he was advised by Premier Édouard Daladier of French intelligence reports that two State Department officials named Hiss were Soviet agents.

Nathaniel Weyl testified before the McCarran Committee that he had been a member of the Ware group in 1933 and that Alger Hiss was also a member at this time. His testimony corroborated that of Chambers, but Weyl had not testified at Hiss's trial, leaving Chambers as the only witness to testify at first hand that Hiss was a Communist or a spy. By 1952 Hiss had already been convicted. In 1950, after Hiss's conviction, Weyl wrote a book on the history of treason in America.

In the chapter of this book that Weyl devoted to the Hiss case, he expressed doubt about Hiss's guilt and made no reference to the personal knowledge about the case that would later be the basis of his testimony before the McCarran Committee. This apparent discrepancy and his failure to come forward as a witness in the Hiss trials was never explained by Weyl, who is now deceased.

Questions raised about the typewriter in the motion for a new trial
At both trials, FBI typewriter experts testified that the Baltimore documents in Chambers's possession matched samples of typing done in the 1930s by Priscilla Hiss on the Hisses' home typewriter, a Woodstock brand. As early as December, 1948 the chief investigator for the Hiss defense, Horace W. Schmahl, set off a race to find Hiss's typewriter.

The FBI, with vastly superior resources, joined the competition but ultimately it was the defense that tracked down what was believed to be the family's old machine and introduced it as a defense exhibit, hoping that examination of the actual typewriter would point up flaws in the FBI's matching of documents. This proved not to be the case, as tests with the typewriter only seemed to confirm the FBI's analysis.

With Hiss in prison, his lawyer, Chester T. Lane, filed a motion in January 1952 for a new trial. Lane sought to show that forgery by typewriter was feasible and such forgery had occurred in the Hiss case. Unaware that the feasibility of such forgeries had already been established throughout the War by the military intelligence services which engaged in such practices, the Hiss defense sought to establish feasibility directly by hiring a civilian typewriter expert, Martin Tytell, to create a typewriter that would be indistinguishable from the one the Hisses owned. Tytell spent two years creating a facsimile Woodstock typewriter whose print characteristics would match the peculiarities of the Hiss typewriter.

To demonstrate that forgery by typewriter was not merely a theoretical possibility but had actually occurred in the Hiss case, the defense sought to show that Exhibit #UUU was not Hiss's old machine but a newer one altered to type like it. According to former Woodstock executives, the production date of a machine could be inferred from the machine's serial number. The serial number on the Exhibit #UUU typewriter indicated that it would have been manufactured after the man who sold the Hiss machine had retired from the company and the salesman insisted that he sold no typewriters after his retirement.

Decades later, when FBI files were disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act, it turned out that the FBI also doubted that the trial exhibit was Hiss's machine and for exactly the same reasons; although the FBI expressed these concerns internally as the first trial was about to begin, the public did not learn about the FBI's doubts until the mid-1970s.

To explain why typing from Exhibit #UUU seemed indistinguishable from the typing on Hiss's old machine, Lane assembled experts prepared to testify that Exhibit #UUU had been tampered with in a way inconsistent with professional repair work to make it type like Hiss's old typewriter. In addition, experts were prepared to testify that Priscilla Hiss was not the typist of the Baltimore documents.

In summarizing the conclusions of the forensic experts he had assembled in his motion for a new trial, Chester Lane told the court, "I no longer just question the authenticity of Woodstock N230099. I now say to the Court that Woodstock N230099—the typewriter in evidence at the trials—is a fake machine. I present in affidavit form, and will be able to produce at the hearing, expert testimony that this machine is a deliberately fabricated job, a new type face on an old body. This being so, it can only have been planted on the defense by or on behalf of Whittaker Chambers as part of his plot for the false incrimination of Alger Hiss."

In July, 1952 Judge Goddard—expressing great skepticism that Chambers had the resources and know-how to commit forgery by typewriter and would have known where to plant such a fake machine so it would be found—denied Hiss's motion for a new trial. Professor Irving Younger wrote, "To leave the counterfeit Woodstock lying about for the defense to pick up and examine would serve only to expose the whole scheme to the risk of discovery—and for no reason."

In a 1976 memoir, former White House counsel John Dean alleged that President Nixon's chief counsel Charles Colson told him that Nixon had admitted in a conversation that HUAC had fabricated a typewriter, saying, "We built one on the Hiss case." However, Colson subsequently denied the statement. John V. Fleming found nothing on the copious Nixon tapes that fits the claimed statement by Colson.

Evidence of government misconduct
Based on the documents released by the Justice Department in 1976, the Hiss defense filed a petition in federal court in July 1978 for a writ of coram nobis, asking that the guilty verdict be overturned due to prosecutorial misconduct. The petition was denied by a federal judge in 1982, and in 1983 the U.S. Supreme court declined to hear the suit. In the writ, Hiss's attorneys argued the following points:

The FBI illegally withheld important evidence from the Hiss defense team, specifically that typewritten documents could be forged. Unknown to the defense, military intelligence operatives in World War II, a decade before the trials, "could reproduce faultlessly the imprint of any typewriter on earth."

With regard to the Woodstock No. 230099 typewriter introduced as Exhibit #UUU by the defense at the trial, the FBI knew there was an inconsistency between its serial number and the manufacture date of Hiss's machine but illegally withheld this information from Hiss.

That the FBI had an informer on the Hiss defense team, a private detective named Horace W. Schmahl. Hired by the Hiss defense team, Schmahl reported on the Hiss defense strategy to the government.

That the FBI had conducted illegal surveillance of Hiss before and during the trials, including phone taps and mail openings. Also that the prosecution had withheld from Hiss and his lawyers the records of this surveillance, none of which provided any evidence that Hiss was a spy or a Communist.

In 1982, Judge Owen denied Hiss's coram nobis petition just as Judge Goddard had denied Hiss's motion for a new trial thirty years earlier. In his ruling, Judge Owen quoted in full two points made earlier by Judge Goddard: "…there is not a trace of any evidence that Chambers had the mechanical skills, tools, equipment or material for such a difficult task [as typewriter forgery]." In addition, "If Chambers had constructed a duplicate machine how would he have known where to plant it so that it would be found by Hiss?"

According to University of Michigan economist Stephen Salant, Schmahl was not an FBI plant as Hiss believed but a trained Army "spy-catcher" (as they called themselves)—a special agent in the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC). At the Military Intelligence Training Center, CIC students like Schmahl were taught the rudiments of forgery and its detection, the matching of typed samples to the typewriter that produced them, etc.

During the 1940s, domestic surveillance of civilians like Hiss by the CIC was extensive but so covert that it usually escaped notice. Undercover CIC agents who were detected were often mistaken for FBI agents, since only the Bureau was authorized to investigate civilians.

Domestic surveillance by the Army may be relevant to the case against Hiss. For example, Franklin Vincent Reno, employed as a civilian at the Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground, passed Whittaker Chambers information about Army weapons shortly after Army counterintelligence began monitoring Reno as a suspected communist subversive. While it is unknown whether this led Army counterintelligence to monitor Chambers’ other associates, by the time Hiss presided over the UN Charter Conference as its secretary general, more than a hundred undercover CIC agents were in attendance.

Unlike Whittaker Chambers (or the FBI), Army Military Intelligence had vast experience forging documents during World War II since every agent behind enemy lines required phony documentation to support his cover story. Moreover, with its special agent initiating the search for Hiss's typewriter while disguised as Chief Investigator for the Hiss defense, Military Intelligence was well positioned to plant forged evidence in the right location without arousing suspicion. Thus the two reasons given by the judges for disregarding the forensic evidence of forgery assembled in the motion for a new trial, while applicable to Chambers, certainly do not apply to Military Intelligence. In the future, some of the misconduct previously attributed to the FBI by Hiss and his defenders may turn out to have been the work of Army counterintelligence.

Soviet archives
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Alger Hiss petitioned General Dmitry Antonovich Volkogonov, who had become President Yeltsin's military advisor and the overseer of all the Soviet intelligence archives, to request the release of any Soviet files on the Hiss case. Both former President Nixon and the director of his presidential library, John H. Taylor, wrote similar letters, though their full contents have not been made publicly available.

Russian archivists responded by reviewing their files, and in late 1992 reported back that they had found no evidence that Hiss had ever engaged in espionage for the Soviet Union or that he was a member of the Communist Party. However, Volkogonov subsequently declared that he had spent only two days on the search and had mainly relied on the word of KGB archivists. "What I saw gave me no basis to claim a full clarification", he stated. Referring to Hiss's lawyer, he added, "John Lowenthal pushed me to say things of which I was not fully convinced."

General-Lieutenant Vitaly Pavlov, who ran Soviet intelligence work in North America in the late 1930s and early 1940s for the NKVD, provided some corroboration of the initial report in his memoirs, stating that Hiss never worked for the USSR as one of his agents.

In 2003, General Julius Kobyakov, a retired Russian intelligence official, revealed that he had been the person who actually searched the files for Volkogonov. According to Kobyakov, his research revealed that there was no indication that Hiss had been either a paid or unpaid agent of the Soviet Union only "after careful study of KGB-NKVD archives and querying sister services" (military intelligence). Four years later, Russian researcher Svetlana Chervonnaya, who had been studying Soviet archives since the early 1990s, also testified that Hiss's name was absent from the archives.

Noel Field
In 1992, records were found in Hungarian Interior Ministry archives in which Noel Field named Alger Hiss as a Communist spy. Field was an American who had spied for the Soviet Union, but had been arrested while traveling through Eastern Europe on charges that he was actually spying for American intelligence. Field was imprisoned in Hungary from 1949 to 1954, and was interrogated often during this time. In the transcripts of these interrogations, he referred to Hiss as a fellow Communist and spy four times, including relating the following:

"Around the summer of 1935 Alger Hiss tried to induce me to do service for the Soviets. I was indiscreet enough to tell him he had come too late." Hede Massing told a similar story to US authorities after her 1947 defection. She said that when she attempted to recruit Noel Field for one Soviet spy network (the OGPU), Field replied that he already worked for another (the GRU). Massing also claimed during Hiss's second trial that whether Noel Field was to be an OGPU agent with her or a GRU agent with Hiss was the subject of a brief cocktail-party conversation with Hiss.

Field was released by the Hungarian secret police in 1954 but remained in Hungary until his death in 1970. Upon his release, he wrote a letter to the Communist Party's Central Committee in Moscow complaining that he had been tortured in prison and that this had caused him to "confess more and more lies as truth." Hiss's defenders argue that Field's implication of Hiss may have been one of these lies and that Field was trying to show his veracity as a Communist by connecting his activities to the well-known Hiss. In 1957, Field wrote a letter to Hiss in which he expressed his belief in Hiss's innocence and spoke of personal knowledge of Hede Massing's "outrageous lie" when she testified at Hiss's second trial.

Venona and "ALES"
In 1995, the existence of the Venona project was revealed to the public. This project had resulted in the decryption or partial decryption of thousands of telegrams sent to the Soviet Union from its U.S. operatives in the years 1942 to 1945. FBI Special Agent Robert Lamphere identified the Soviet spy known by the codename "ALES" in one decoded cable as "probably Alger Hiss".

In 1997, the bipartisan Moynihan Commission on Government Secrecy, chaired by Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, stated in its findings: "The complicity of Alger Hiss of the State Department seems settled. As does that of Harry Dexter White of the Treasury Department."

In his 1998 book Secrecy: The American Experience, Moynihan wrote, "Belief in the guilt or innocence of Alger Hiss became a defining issue in American intellectual life. Parts of the American government had conclusive evidence of his guilt, but they never told."

In addition to Moynihan, the identification of Hiss as ALES has been accepted by many other authors, including John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr. National Security Agency analysts have also gone on record asserting that ALES could only have been Alger Hiss.[48] In the second edition of his book Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case, Allen Weinstein calls the Venona evidence "persuasive but not conclusive." Former KGB operative Alexander Vassiliev, who researched Soviet intelligence files alongside Weinstein, testified in court, "I never saw a document where Hiss would be called Ales or Ales may be called Hiss."

The Venona transcript with the most relevance to the Hiss case is #1822, sent March 30, 1945, from the Soviets' Washington station chief to Moscow. This transcript indicates that ALES attended the Yalta conference and then went to Moscow. Hiss attended Yalta and then traveled to Moscow in his capacity as adviser to Secretary of State Edward Stettinius.

However, the Venona evidence on Alger Hiss is disputed by some. John Lowenthal has challenged the Hiss-ALES identification in Venona #1822 by the following:

ALES was said to be the leader of a small group of espionage agents; Hiss was accused of having acted alone, aside from his wife as a typist and Chambers as courier.

ALES was a GRU (military intelligence) agent who obtained military intelligence, and only rarely provided State Department material; Alger Hiss in his trial was accused of obtaining only non-military information and the papers used against him were non-military State Department materials that he allegedly produced on a regular basis.
Even if Hiss was the spy he was accused of being, it's unlikely he would have continued being so after 1938 as ALES did, because in that year Hiss would have become too great a risk for any Soviet agency to use. In that year, Whittaker Chambers broke with the Communist Party and then went into hiding, telling his Communist Party colleagues he would denounce them if they did not follow suit. At this point therefore, ALES's cover would be in extreme jeopardy if he were Alger Hiss.

Other recent information places ALES in Mexico City at the same time when Hiss was known to be in Washington.

Lowenthal also suggested an interpretation of the transcript that differs from Lamphere's reading. Lowenthal's reading does not put ALES at the Yalta conference at all, but rather refers to the presence at Yalta of Andrey Vyshinsky, the Soviet deputy foreign minister. According to Lowenthal, the entire point of paragraph 6 of Venona #1822—that the GRU asked Vyshinsky to get in touch with ALES to convey thanks from the GRU for a job well done—would have been unnecessary if ALES had actually been in Moscow, because the GRU could have easily contacted ALES with no need of Vyshinsky.

Others, notably Eduard Mark, dispute Lowenthal's analysis on this point. In the opinion of intelligence historian John R. Schindler, the original Russian text of Venona #1822 (released in 2005), removes some of the ambiguity present in the English translation and confirms ALES's presence at Yalta. Schindler concludes "the identification of ALES as Alger Hiss, made by the U.S. Government more than a half-century ago, seems exceptionally solid based on the evidence now available; message 1822 is only one piece of that evidence, yet a compelling one."

Also in rebuttal to Lowenthal, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr noted the following:

None of the evidence presented at the Hiss trial precludes the possibility that Hiss had been an espionage agent after 1938 or that he had only passed State Department documents after 1938.

Chambers's charges were not seriously investigated until after the revelations made by the defection of Elizabeth Bentley in 1945, so Hiss and the Soviets could in theory have considered it an acceptable risk for him continue espionage work, even after Chambers's defection.

Vyshinsky was not in the U.S. between Yalta and the time of the Venona message and the message is from the Washington KGB station reporting on a talk with Ales in the U.S., thus making Lowenthal's analysis impossible.

There is one Venona cable, #1579, that includes the name "Hiss." This partially decrypted cable consists of fragments of a 1943 message from the GRU chief in New York to GRU headquarters in Moscow. The reference reads: "... from the State Department by name of HISS ..." The name "Hiss" appeared "Spelled out in the Latin alphabet" according to a footnote by the cryptanalysts. In the cable, "Hiss" goes without a first name, so it could possibly refer to either Alger or Donald, since both were at the State Department in 1943. Lowenthal argues that for the GRU to name Hiss openly, not by a codename, would be highly unorthodox if he was, indeed, a spy. Once Soviet intelligence assigned a codename to an agent, it would be highly unusual for their actual name to be used in a coded transmission.

At an April 2007 symposium, authors Kai Bird and Svetlana Chervonnaya presented evidence that a U.S. diplomat named Wilder Foote was the best match to ALES, based on the movements of all the officials present at the U.S.-Soviet Yalta conference. In particular, Bird and Chervonnaya noted that Foote had been in Mexico City at a time when a Soviet cable placed ALES there, whereas Hiss had left Mexico several days earlier (see above). Other authors have disputed the likelihood that Foote was ALES, noting that Foote doesn't fit known information about ALES, and saying that the author of the Soviet cable could have been mistaken in stating that ALES was still in Mexico City.

Oleg Gordievsky
In 1985, Oleg Gordievsky, a high ranking KGB agent, defected to the West. In his 1990 book Gordievsky reported attending a lecture before a KGB audience in which Iskhak Abdulovich Akhmerov identified Hiss, apparently as one of the Soviet Union's U.S. agents during World War II. Although his reminiscence of the Akhmerov lecture remains unchallenged, Gordievsky went further and claimed that Hiss had the codename identity of "ALES". This at first appeared to be an independent corroboration of the codename, as it appeared before the Venona cables were revealed to the public. However, it was later revealed that Gordievsky's source for the ALES identity was an article by journalist Thomas Powell, who had seen National Security Agency documents on Venona years before their release.

Haynes, Klehr, and Vassiliev
The 2010 book Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev includes information from KGB documents reportedly hand-copied by Vassiliev, a former KGB agent. Among its many conclusions, the book attempts to definitively settle the question of Hiss's identity as a Soviet spy. It argues that KGB documents show that Hiss was the elusive ALES, but was also known by the codenames "Jurist" and "Leonard" and worked for the GRU; it is claimed that in some documents, Hiss is referred to by his actual name, leaving no room for ambiguity about his guilt. In view of what they refer to as the "massive weight of accumulated evidence", Haynes and Klehr conclude that "to serious students of history continued claims for Hiss's innocence are akin to a terminal case of ideological blindness."

In a 2009 Journal of Cold War Studies article, U.S. Air Force historian Eduard Mark also concluded that the documents "conclusively show that Hiss was, as Whittaker Chambers charged more than six decades ago, an agent of Soviet military intelligence (GRU) in the 1930s."

Some writers have been very critical of Spies and have accused Haynes and Klehr of engaging in shoddy research and of reaching conclusions not borne out by the evidence. Haynes and Klehr never saw, and cannot prove the existence of the documents they claim convict Hiss and others of espionage. Instead, they relied on handwritten notebooks authored by Vassiliev during the time he was given access to the Soviet archives in the 1990s. Vassiliev was never able to explain how he managed, despite being required to leave his files and notebooks in a safe at the KGB press office at the end of each day he was allowed in the archives, to smuggle out the notebooks with his extensive transcriptions of documents.

It has further been suggested that Vassiliev omitted relevant facts and selectively replaced covernames with his own notion of the real names of various persons. Boris Labusov, a press officer of the SVR, the successor to the KGB has stated that Vassiliev could not, in the course of his research, have possibly "met the name of Alger Hiss in the context of some cooperation with some special services of the Soviet Union." Vasiliev also admitted under oath in 2003 that he'd never seen a single document linking Alger Hiss with the cover name "Ales."

Additionally, many of the conclusions reached by Haynes and Klehr regarding the Vassiliev notes and what they demonstrate are false. For example, the notes suggest that Hiss talked to self-confessed former spy Hede Massing about recruiting their mutual friend, Noel Field, into the Communist underground. State Department documents however, prove that Field was not in the United States at the time in question. Another example is Haynes and Klehr's connection of Hiss with alleged Soviet agent and former Treasury Department official Harold Glasser. Their claim that Glasser was a member of Whittaker Chambers' Communist underground group was disputed both by Soviet intelligence agent Elizabeth Bentley and by Chambers himself.

Finally, some of the evidence compiled by Haynes and Klehr actually tends to exonerate rather than convict Hiss. For example, it includes a KGB report from 1938 in which Iskhak Akhmerov, New York station chief, writes, "I don't know for sure who Hiss is connected with." Haynes and Klehr also claim that Hiss was the agent who used the cover name "Doctor." According to Soviet sources, however, "Doctor" was a middle-aged Bessarabian Jew who was educated in Vienna.