"Somehow, settling factual disputes about who was and wasn't a spy [for the Soviets, during the Second World War] has failed to create any new consensus. Instead, it has brought the fight about Communism in America back to life."

Jacob Weisberg

"Cold War Without End," The New York Times, November 28, 1999.

>> THE ALGER HISS-WHITTAKER CHAMBERS CASE

"I can see this Alger, who is for me the first Alger, [the warm, 'effervescent and playful' father] standing behind the stiff and stilted mask of the second, or public, Alger. Those two figures make sense, as aspects of the same person. They are continuous, or at least flow into each other. But Chambers's portrait, even if it has one of Alger's ears or perhaps both of his eyebrows, is unrecognizable... in any real world there is no way to squeeze together inside one person the translucent father I got to know and the monstrous Alger that Chambers talked and wrote about, the Alger who had taken on the life of a dangerous criminal because his core personality -- smoldering, corrupt, disaffected with life -- had collapsed into a dangerously unstable form, like some kind of malignant, ashen dwarf star."

Tony Hiss, View From Alger's Window.

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999, 50-51.

Alger Hiss, Whittaker Chambers, strange-sounding names. I can remember my parents speaking those names during the time of our troubles without explanation. "Alger Hiss," perhaps a shady character from a murder mystery; "Whittaker Chambers," a name that conjured up for me then an image of a stiff, upper-class English gentleman. I remember at that time wondering which one of these people was the good guy, which one the bad.

When I began to write about my father's HUAC experience, I had a basic idea of what the famous Alger Hiss/Whittaker Chambers case was all about. By that point, I knew that Alger Hiss was the charming New Deal government bureaucrat who had been accused (falsely, I was sure) by the shabby, eccentric writer, Whittaker Chambers, an admitted former courier for the Russians, of having been a Communist who had passed confidential State Department memos to the Soviet Union. I knew there had been two famous trials (in l949 and 1950) and, as a result, Hiss had been found guilty of perjury and had served several years in prison. Along with my liberal friends, I believed in Hiss' innocence. When, in 1992, General Dmitri A. Volkogonov, a Soviet army general who chaired the Russian government's commission on archival policy, authorized a search of the files of the KGB (at Alger Hiss's request) and declared there was no evidence of Hiss having worked for the Soviets, I rejoiced over the news with my friends. This was a time of celebration, this exoneration, though it proved to be short-lived. [1]

Whittaker Chambers (nee Vivian Jay Chambers) was born in Long Island in 1901. He had a horrible childhood, filled with loss, violence and mental instability. Complex and troubled as a young man, yet highly intelligent, Chambers found himself at loose ends after graduating from high school. He traveled aimlessly for a while, working as a laborer in Washington D.C. before returning to New York to attend Columbia University, where he was introduced to Left politics and where he pursued his interest in writing, a field in which he had considerable talent. Chambers joined the Communist Party in 1925, having become convinced that capitalism and American democracy were doomed and that communism held the only hope for the future. For several years, Chambers wrote for the Communist publication, the Daily Worker, and then later, for the journal, New Masses. Periodically, he earned a living as a freelance writer, submitting articles to various magazines.

In 1932, Max Bedacht, a top Communist Party official and liaison with the OGPU (the Soviet intelligence agency at that time), informed Chambers that he had been selected to serve in the underground. Chambers was an unlikely choice because he was a maverick whose independence of thought and action sometimes cast doubt on his loyalty and because he was a known Communist writer, whose disappearance from the "open Party" would be noticed. Nevertheless, Chambers had qualities that made him desirable for secret work. He was an educated intellectual who spoke idiomatic German (Communism's "official" language), and he was known to be determined and bright. [2] He was certainly drawn to clandestine adventure.

Like Elizabeth Bentley, Whittaker Chambers had told his story some years earlier. In 1939, just after the Hitler/Stalin pact [3] was signed, Chambers, who had recently defected from the Communist underground, [4] had gone to see Adolf Berle, then Assistant Secretary of State, to tell him that he personally knew of government employees who had been Communists during the 1930s, and who had been, and might still be, in a position to influence government policy. Chambers told of meeting a group of bright, young New Dealers, whom he found to be supportive of the goals of Communism, and who had apparently been eager to help the Communist Party and the Soviet Union by doing what they could to influence policy in their respective agencies. He named seven men as members of this group, later to be called the "Ware Group" after its leader and founder Harold Ware. [5] Among those named were lawyer Lee Pressman, the General Council of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) during the late 1930s, and his Agriculture Adjustment Administration (AAA) colleagues, Alger Hiss and John Abt. Also named were Charles Krivitsky (later to be known as Charles Kramer) and Nathan Witt (the man who hired my father in 1937) from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), Henry Collins, from the National Recovery Administration (NRA), and Abraham George Silverman from the Railroad Retirement Board (RRB). [6] In later testimony regarding the Ware Group Chambers would add the names of Victor Perlo, then also at the National Recovery Administration (the man who was my father's contact with the Communist Party at the NLRB), John Abt's sister, Marion Bachrach, and Alger Hiss' younger brother, Donald Hiss. Chambers, in his formerly secret life, had been known to this group as "Carl."

At the time Chambers first made these disclosures, the government took little interest. Berle did not consider the information a threat to the nation's security. But after the war, as the alliance between the U.S. and the Soviet Union broke down, anti-Communist investigators became very interested in what Chambers and the other "informers" had to say. For this reason, Chambers was subpoenaed to appear before HUAC in executive session on August 3, 1948.

Forty-seven-year-old Chambers, by now a senior editor at Time Magazine, gave a rumpled and disheveled appearance before the Committee; he spoke in a monotone. The content of his testimony, however, was anything but boring. Witness Chambers told of his entry into the Communist Party in the '20s, his move to the Communist underground in the early '30s and his subsequent association with government employees in a secret Communist "apparatus." Although Chambers had never met Elizabeth Bentley, he implicated some of the same people named by her. Therefore his testimony, if proven true, promised to corroborate Bentley's charges.

The reputation of HUAC, under the chairmanship of New Jersey Congressman, J. Parnell Thomas, an emphatically anti-New Deal, anti-Communist Republican, who treated witnesses with ridicule and disdain, was beginning to suffer widespread criticism. The Committee was struggling to maintain support for the continuation of its work. [7] Before the proceedings began that day in August, HUAC's chief counsel and primary investigator, Robert Stripling, read Chambers' prepared statement. Recognizing this testimony as potentially explosive and anticipating positive publicity for the Committee, Stripling convinced Acting Chairman Karl Mundt to move the hearing from HUAC's Hearing Room to the larger Ways and Means Committee Room and to invite in the press. [8]

Chambers was anxious and exhausted after a sleepless night. Reading from his prepared remarks, his voice barely audible, he told the Committee that he had joined the Communist Party because he believed that the words of Marx and Lenin provided the antidote for the crisis that was sure to befall our country from the inevitable crash of our economic system. What Chambers lacked in delivery he made up through the drama of his words. Thirteen years in the Party had convinced him, he said, that "Communism is a form of totalitarianism, that its triumph means slavery to men wherever they fall under its sway and spiritual night to the human mind and soul." After learning of the atrocities of the Moscow trials, in which old Bolshevik leaders and others were forced to testify (falsely) against themselves and were later executed, he had gone to the Government in 1939, "as a simple act of war, like the shooting of an armed enemy in combat." When he left the underground, Chambers had feared for his life; he had "lived in hiding, sleeping by day and watching through the night with gun or revolver within easy reach." [9] [10]

Reiterating what he had told Berle in 1939, Chambers described the Ware Group, from whose ranks, he suggested, "certain members of Miss Bentley's organization were apparently recruited." He stated, as he had previously, that the group had originally been founded not for the purpose of committing espionage, but rather for the purpose of infiltrating government and influencing government policy by planting Communists "in key places". "But espionage was certainly one of its eventual objectives," the witness declared. "Let no one be surprised at this statement." [11]

Chambers told the Committee that in 1936, J. Peters, then the "guiding spirit of this apparatus," [12] pulled several men out of the Ware Group, men who showed promise of rising to top positions in government service. These men, it was hoped, would someday enter the "old-line agencies," like the State, War, Treasury and Interior Departments. They were to be handled separately (and secretly) by Chambers. Hiss and Treasury official Harry Dexter White were among them. [13]

A very dramatic moment in Chambers' testimony came when he told of a visit to Hiss and his wife at their home sometime after he (Chambers) had decided to defect. The witness testified that during that visit he had tried to persuade Hiss to break with the underground, but to no avail. "... he [Alger Hiss] cried when we separated when I left him," Chambers said, "but he absolutely refused to break. I was very fond of Mr. Hiss." [14]

Reporters seized the story. The main article on the front page of The Washington Post, on Wednesday, August 4, featured Chambers' testimony implicating Harry Dexter White and the members of the Ware Group, including Alger Hiss. Page one carried the following headline:

Former High U.S. Officials

Named as Acting for Soviet;

Witness Is Ex-Red Courier

"Charges that certain top officials of the Roosevelt-Truman Administration were continuously under orders from a secret foreign agent of the Soviet Union rocked Capitol Hill yesterday," the lead story began. Here for the first time, the public learned of the details of Chambers' allegations regarding Hiss and the others. [15]

Most of the men named by Chambers had been known to the FBI and the Congressional committees for some years and had, by now, left government service. Their names, therefore, were of less interest than that of Alger Hiss. The suggestion that Hiss had been a member of the Communist Ware Group was big news.

Alger Hiss had a stellar background and reputation. Graduated from Harvard Law School in 1929, he had been a clerk for Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, having been recommended by Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. His career included time at the Agriculture Adjustment Administration, the Senate's Nye Committee (investigating the munitions industry) and, briefly, the Justice Department. In 1936, Hiss joined the State Department as an aide to Assistant Secretary of State, Francis B. Sayre. In February 1945, he attended the Yalta Conference [16] as a member of the American delegation and, in 1947, he presided over the United Nations organizing meeting in San Francisco. At the time of the HUAC hearing, Hiss was the President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

"I don't know Chambers." Alger Hiss told the Post when asked to comment on Chambers' testimony, "So far as I know I never laid eyes on him. There is no basis for his statements about me." [17]

Hiss requested and was granted an appearance before the Committee the next day to deny, categorically, the accusations made by Chambers. Composed, charming, amiable, Hiss' appearance was as impressive as his resume, in contrast to the drab and bumbling Chambers. Hiss willingly responded to the questions of the Committee. The headlines reflected the conflicting testimony of the two men:

Alger Hiss Denies

All Red Accusations

Made by Chambers

Doesn't Recall Him,

House Probers Told;

Time Editor May

Be Called Back

"I am not and never have been a member of the Communist Party," Hiss emphatically maintained, though he did acknowledge a friendship or acquaintance with most of the men Chambers had listed as members of the Ware Group.

"I do not and never have adhered to the tenets of the Communist Party. I am not and never have been a member of any Communist-front organization. I have never followed the Communist Party line directly or indirectly. To the best of my knowledge none of my friends is a Communist."

Stripling presented Hiss with a photograph of Chambers taken at the hearing on August 3, and asked him if the man in the picture looked familiar. After studying the photo, Hiss offered the following comment, "If this is a picture of Mr. Chambers, he is not particularly unusual looking. He looks like a lot of people. I might even mistake him for the chairman of this committee." Everybody laughed.

"I would like to see him [Chambers] and then I think I would be better able to tell whether I had ever seen him," Hiss told the Committee.

As the proceedings continued, Hiss scored a major victory when Congressman Mundt, who had already accused the witness of having been involved in an alleged State Department plan to aid in the defeat of Chiang Kai-shek in China, questioned him as to his role at the Yalta Conference concerning the voting status of the Soviet Union in the new UN General Assembly. Hiss testified that he had come out publicly against giving the Soviets a voting advantage. This, in fact, was true. [18]

Throughout the hearing, Hiss had been in control. He had held his own and carried the day. His eloquence and sincerity had pulled his audience into his camp. [19]

Congress, the press and the public, mindful of Hiss's exemplary reputation and learning of his persuasive testimony, were certain of his innocence.

In spite of Alger Hiss' early, convincing testimony, HUAC moved forward with its investigation. Junior Congressman Richard Nixon, Republican from California, led the inquiry, encouraged by rumors linking Hiss to Communism. [20] The fact that the rumors were unsubstantiated did not deter the young Congressman. For one thing, during the early HUAC proceedings, Nixon had developed an intense dislike for Hiss, whom he considered "arrogant" and "condescending." [21] For another, he felt he had nothing to lose and everything to gain, politically, from moving forward. Nixon and chief counsel Stripling had serious doubts about the truthfulness of Hiss' denials, which they found "evasive and legalistic." Since proving membership in the Party would be difficult (Communists in the underground held no Party membership cards, nor were their names on membership lists), the investigators set out to show that Hiss had committed perjury by denying he had known Whittaker Chambers at an earlier time in his life. [22]

Chambers and Hiss met separately with the Committee on several occasions. At an early session, Chambers reiterated his knowledge of Hiss as a "dedicated and disciplined Communist." [23] He surprised the Committee with a flood of details about the Hiss family, about their various homes, their children, their habits and hobbies, including their interest in ornithology, which led to a rare sighting of a prothonotary warbler. He told of a car that the Hisses had let him use, a Ford Roadster that Alger later donated for the use of the Communist Party, and a rug that was one of four rugs given by the Soviets to "friends of the Soviet people." These details seemed to prove the veracity of Chambers' testimony and appeared to substantiate his claim of having known Hiss more than casually. [24]

At a subsequent meeting, Hiss conceded that a photo of Chambers "had a certain familiarity." He testified that the man in question might be "George Crosley," a freelance writer, (with very bad teeth), whom Hiss had known briefly in the '30s. Crosley, Hiss said, was a man who had borrowed money and had sublet an apartment from him. Along with the apartment, Hiss had "thrown in" an old Ford automobile for which the Hisses no longer had any use. Once, Hiss told the Committee, Crosley had given the family an Oriental rug as payment in lieu of rent. At one point in the hearing, Congressman John McDowell asked Hiss if he had ever seen a prothonotary warbler. Hiss answered this trick question by describing the warbler he had seen on a walk along the Potomac River. [25]

The Committee arranged for the two witnesses to meet on August 17th at New York's Commodore Hotel. After listening to Chambers speak and demanding to see his teeth, Hiss finally identified Chambers as the man he had known as George Crosley. [26] Hiss then challenged Chambers to repeat his allegations in a setting in which there would be no "privilege for suit for libel." [27] On August 27th, Whittaker Chambers did just that. Making an appearance on the Meet the Press radio show, Chambers again asserted his claim that Alger Hiss had been "a Communist and may be now." A month later, Hiss filed suit for damages. [28]

Though the investigation originally focused on the precise nature of the relationship between the two men and the question of whether or not Hiss was a Communist, its focus changed to an inquiry as to whether or not Hiss had committed espionage. Chambers had originally testified that his Washington contacts were mainly interested in influencing government policy; espionage, he said, was not a primary goal. In grand jury testimony, he had denied knowing anyone "guilty of espionage," i.e. "the turning over of secret or confidential documents." [29] But now, confronted with a charge of libel, he felt compelled to speak about the purloining of government papers.

Hiss's first trial ended in a mistrial as the result of a hung jury. He was tried again in January 1950 and this time was found guilty of perjury. He served 44 months in Lewisburg penitentiary.

The Chambers charges of August 1948 and the publicity surrounding the Hiss/Chambers trials that followed resounded through the paranoid atmosphere of post-World War Two America. One's reaction to that dramatic case at the time reflected one's personal values and political beliefs. Hiss represented New Deal liberalism; Chambers personified Conservative, anti-Roosevelt and Truman forces on the right. [30]

The Hiss case remains enigmatic. Until his death in 1996, Hiss adamantly denied having been a spy for the Russians. [31] For more than a decade since his death, the debate over his guilt or innocence has continued with zeal.

In the mid-'90s, historians convinced of Hiss' involvement with the Soviets cited a Venona cable, [32] dated March 30, 1945, referring to an agent, code name "Ales" (identified by an anonymous person as "probably Alger Hiss"), who worked for the GRU (Soviet military intelligence) and provided military information to the Soviets. According to the official reading of the cable, Ales, who worked in the State Department, attended the Yalta Conference and traveled after the conference to Moscow, as Hiss is known to have done. [33]

Hiss defenders, in particular former Nation publisher/editor Victor Navasky and Hiss's friend, attorney John Lowenthal, took exception to the use of the single Venona cable as evidence that Hiss worked for the Russians. In an article in Intelligence and National Security, published in 2000, Lowenthal stated his claim that Hiss could not have been the still active spy, "Ales," described in the 1945 cable, because, if Hiss had in fact been working for the Soviets in the '30s, it is unlikely that he would have been careless enough to continue the "alleged espionage activities" once he learned that Chambers had denounced him as a spy to government officials in 1939, and continued to implicate him. Nor, suggested Lowenthal, would the Soviets have agreed to the appointment of Hiss as secretary-general of the United Nations organizing conference if he was, at that time, a spy for them, because of the potential danger to the Soviet Union if he were to be found out. [34] Lowenthal went further to cite a December 1948 memo from Anatoly Gorsky (Washington "legal" station chief) which lists Alger Hiss (code-name "Leonard") among a number of "exposed" sources in order to claim, once more, that Hiss could not have been "Ales" if he was "Leonard." This claim, however, overlooks the fact that code names changed often in the world of Soviet espionage, and that some individuals had two or even three code names over the years.

In continuing to make their case that Hiss was "Ales," historians Allen Weinstein and Sam Tanenhaus refer to a State Department document (declassified in 1993) that reports Hiss made a proposal in 1945 that a new "'special assistant for military affairs'" be linked to his department; at that time, Hiss requested and was granted secret reports "'on atomic energy ... and other military intelligence,'" information considered beyond the scope of his Office of Political Affairs. [35]

The Hiss-as-Ales claim continues with citations from the released KGB archives including one in which Anatoly Gorsky informs Moscow, on March 5, 1945, that Ales, described by a reliable source as "a strong, determined man with a firm and resolute character," was "aware that he is a Communist with all the consequences of illegal status..." Another message discusses Ales having told [Harold] Glasser about having been decorated with USSR orders. [36]

In 2009 historians John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, teamed up with Alexander Vassiliev, co-author of the Haunted Wood, to publish Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America. In the early 1990s, Vassiliev, a former KGB officer, was permitted unique brief access to KGB files filled with contemporaneous documents dealing with KGB activity in the United States during the 1930s and '40s. In 1996, convinced that the climate in Russia was no longer hospitable to this type of research, Vasiliev left the Soviet Union for London. Before his departure, he gave his notebooks to someone he trusted; in 2001 he had them sent to him in London. These notebooks contain transcriptions of reports and cables, never before made public, that document KGB "knowledge of and contacts with Alger Hiss and unequivocally identify Hiss" as a source for the GRU, Soviet military intelligence. [37] [38]Within these documents, which cover Hiss's relationship with Soviet agents Hede Massing and Noel Field among other subjects, Hiss is identified by his real name and three different code names, "Jurist," "Ales," and "Leonard" -- names that are clearly linked to him. [39]

The new data in Spies, combined with the information gathered from other sources: records from the Comintern and CPUSA, FBI files released through the Freedom of Information Act, the Mitrokhin archive and Venona decryptions, when put together with eyewitness accounts, public testimony and private correspondence of people like Whittaker Chambers, Hede Massing, and Noel Field, provide convincing evidence of Hiss's involvement with the Soviets over an extended period of time.

FOOTNOTES

[1] When challenged, Volkogonov retracted his claim, acknowledging that his had not been a thorough search and that he might have missed relevant files.

[2] Sam Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1997), 80.

[3] The non-aggression pact between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany assured that, for the near future, neither nation would align itself with any power or group of powers opposing the other. Potentially, this would allow Hitler to overrun Poland and Stalin to take over the Baltic States and move in on Finland without interference. At the point at which Chambers decided to defect, he feared that the Germans would gain access to Soviet intelligence gathering in the U.S. Tannenhaus, Whittaker Chambers, 159-60.

[4] Chambers became disillusioned with his secret work as he became aware of the sensational trials of former Bolshevik leaders in Moscow at which the defendants confessed their "crimes" and were executed.

[5] Whittaker Chambers, Witness (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, Inc., 1952, 332-34.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Thomas was later accused of accepting kickbacks from members of his Congressional office staff. He was convicted of bribery and served a prison term at the federal penitentiary in Danbury, Connecticut. William Klingaman, Encyclopedia of the McCarthy Era (New York: Facts On File, Inc., 1996), 364.

[8] Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers, 218.

[9] Chambers, Witness, 34-42, 75-81, 541. Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers, 118, 220. Weinstein, Perjury, 5, 273.

[10] According to Allen Weinstein, Otto Katz, a leading Comintern agent "known for his role in tracking down and assisting in the murder of key Soviet intelligence defectors in Europe," contacted Chambers' friends looking for him. Chambers got in touch with his former comrades and warned them not to pursue him. Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood, (New York: Random House, 1999), 46.

[11] Chambers, Witness, 542. Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers, 216-17.

[12] J. Peters, whom Chambers described as a "quiet, soft-spoken little man," was a Hungarian, who fought in the First World War. Peters joined the Communist Party in 1918 and was sent to the U.S. in 1924 to become an organizer for the Hungarian-language federation of the CPUSA. Known as "Isidor Boorstein," "Alexander Stevens," "Alexander Goldberger," and "J. Peter," Peters was a delegate to the Sixth Congress of the Comintern in Moscow. He was sent to Moscow in 1931 to receive training with the Communist International. John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 61. Chambers, Witness, 32, 543. Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers, 95. Peters was the author of the American Party's manual of organization. He was also known for providing false passports for people working for the underground. He accomplished this by placing loyal Party workers at the New York City Library where they searched through newspaper obituaries for the names of infants whose dates of birth coincided with those of agents needing to travel. The agents obtained birth certificates using the deceased infants' birth dates; they used the false birth certificates to obtain passports. Chambers, Witness, 355-56. Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers, 99. Weinstein, Perjury, 54.

After extensive questioning by the FBI, Peters was deported to Hungary in 1949. There he became an official of the Hungarian Communist Party. Allen Weinstein interviewed Peters in Budapest in 1975 at which time Peters denied any involvement with the Communist underground in the U.S. Weinstein and Vassiliev, Haunted Wood, 38.

[13] Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers, 96. Weinstein, Perjury, 6.

[14] Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers, 222. Weinstein, Perjury, 6.

[15] Many of the accused men made public statements ridiculed Chambers' allegations which, in Pressman's words were "stale and lurid mouthings of a Republican exhibitionist ..." Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers, 223.

[16] At this conference FDR, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin met to discuss the future of Eastern Europe as the war was coming to a close. At the time, the Allies believed that Stalin would honor his agreement to support the development of democracies in the defeated Nazi puppet regimes. Stalin, however, had no intention to do so and the Yalta Conference came to be known as the conference at which the western leaders betrayed the cause of freedom.

[17] Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers, 222. Washington Post, August 4, 1948, 3.

[18] Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers, 227.

[19] Chambers described the audience's sympathy for Hiss: "Hiss's testimony had been sweepingly convincing. The crowd in the Ways and Means Committee room, including many newsmen, had attended with rapt sympathy. Hiss was a voluntary witness before the Committee and his manner combined, in very tactful proportions, well-bred outrage and well-phrased bafflement. His candor was disarming. Even his occasional sarcastic barbs did not transgress the limits of patience of an innocent man unjustly accused." Chambers, Witness, 551.

[20] Weinstein, Perjury, 7.

[21] Ibid., 15-25.

[22] Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers, 232-35.

[23] Hearings Regarding Communist Espionage in the U.S. Government. Hearings before the Committee on Un-American Activities. U.S. Congress Committee Hearings. Eightieth Congress. Senate Library. Vol. 1223, 1948, 661-72. Chambers, Witness, 549-50, 558.

[24] Chambers was inaccurate about some details he remembered concerning Hiss and his family. See Alger Hiss, In The Court of Public Opinion (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1957), 42-68 for a list of Chambers' inaccuracies.

[25] James Thomas Gay, 1948:The Alger Hiss Spy Case, 2 and 3 of 6.

http://www.historynet.com/the-alger-hiss-spy-case-mayjune-98-american-history-feature.htm

William K. Klingaman, Encyclopedia of the McCarthy Era. (New York: Facts on File, Inc., 1996), 60.

[26] Klingaman, Encyclopedia of the McCarthy Era, 61. Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers, 257.

[27] Hearings Regarding Communist Espionage in the U.S. Government. Hearings Before the Committee on Un-American Activities, U.S. Congress Committee Hearings. Eightieth Congress, Vol. 1, 1948, 975-1001. Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers, 260.

[28] Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers, 275-78. Weinstein, Perjury, 51-52.

[29] Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers, 287.

[30] James Thomas Gay, 1948: The Alger Hiss Spy Case, 1 of 6

http://www.historynet.com/the-alger-hiss-spy-case-mayjune-98-american-history-feature.htm

[31] In an obituary in the Guardian, Linda Melvern quotes Hiss as having told her he wanted "to die peacefully after proving that he was never a paid, contracted spy" (italics mine). Linda Melvern, "In the Shadow of the Cold War: Obituary of Alger Hiss," The Guardian, November 18, 1996.

[32] Venona cable #1822, Washington to Moscow, March 30, 1945, National Security Agency.

http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/venona/1945/30mar_kgb_interviews_gru_agent.pdf

[33] File 43173, Vol. 1, 88-89 and 43072, Vol. 1, 96-97 in Weinstein and Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood, 268-69, 370n14. Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 599n81.

[34] Intelligence and National Security 15, no. 3 (Autumn 2000): 98-130.

[35] Weinstein, Perjury, 321-2. Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers, 519. See also John Earl Haynes and Harbvery Klehr, In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2003), 148-62.

[36] File 43173, Vol. 1, 88-89 and 43072, Vol. 1, 96-97, in Weinstein and Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood, 268. Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 599n81.

[37] John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev, Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), 1.

[38] To provide aid to researchers and to convince readers of the authenticity of these documents, the authors of Spies have made available the following material: electronic scans of Vassiliev's original handwritten notes, a Cyrillic word-processed transcription, an English-language translation of these notes, and a list of cover names with corresponding real names.

[39] Haynes, Klehr, and Vassiliev, Spies, 1-31.