[Marxism] American Scholar, Summer 2007, challenges "conventional wisdom" on Hiss case

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I am not finished this article yet but, as someone who is tired of the use
of the former Soviet files, to justify historical distortions and frame-ups
of all kinds, I think this is very worth reading.  This introductory section
was more than enough to firmly grab my attention.
Fred Feldman

The Mystery of Ales


Was Alger Hiss really the Soviet spy named Ales, and if not, who was?


By Kai Bird and Svetlana Chervonnaya


Nearly 60 years ago, Alger Hiss, a former high official in the U. S. State
Department, was convicted of perjury and sentenced to prison on the grounds
that he had lied about his role in a Soviet spy ring prior to World War II.
The Hiss case became the most controversial spy story of the Cold War ? and
for good reason. As the distinguished historian Walter LaFeber once
observed, ?It was the Hiss trial, among other [events] that triggered the
McCarthy era.?1 For many conservatives, the Hiss case confirmed the specter
of Soviet infiltration at the highest levels of American government. The
case also catapulted an obscure California congressman, Richard M. Nixon,
onto the national scene. Nixon championed the allegations against Hiss and
in 1950 was elected to the U.S. Senate, largely based on the notoriety he
had acquired from the case.

Even today, the Hiss affair remains a painful metaphor for the
marginalization of left-wing New Dealers by anti-Communist crusaders, the
weakness of the American Left for the last half century, and the
less-than-courageous performance of American liberals during two generations
of conservative ascendancy.

Although Hiss insisted on his innocence until his death in 1996, many Cold
War historians, and perhaps most notably Allen Weinstein in his 1978 book,
Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case, have firmly concluded that Hiss was part of
a clandestine Communist cell from 1935 onward and that he passed information
to the Soviet Union from late 1936 to early 1938 through an underground
Communist courier named Whittaker Chambers. Most historians have conceded
the argument to Weinstein (who is today the Archivist of the United States).
They have done so, however, not because the evidence against Hiss is clear
and definitive, but because the evidence box ? filled as it is with a morass
of circumstantial detail ? leaves them the easy option of finding him guilty
of some form of espionage activity during his murky relationship with
Chambers.

To a few skeptics, however, this muddled spy case will remain an open
question until the Russian archives disgorge incontrovertible proof that
Hiss was or was not a conscious agent. Despite continuing claims that
documents U.S. researchers obtained from the Russian archives in the early-
tomid-1990s represent a ?massive documentation of the guilt?2 of Alger Hiss,
not a single document with his name or that of Whittaker Chambers has ever
been produced from the publicly accessible Russian archives. To be sure,
there are a few references to Hiss in Soviet-era documents that have been
leaked to Allen Weinstein and his Russian co-author, Alexander Vassiliev.
But in their book The Haunted Wood, Weinstein and Vassiliev leave the
impression that Hiss is repeatedly mentioned in Soviet-era documents. But
their narrative of Hiss?s espionage in the 1930s is heavily referenced to
Weinstein?s Perjury. And when they quote from three 1945 KGB documents
describing a Soviet source at the U.S. Department of State, they substitute
Hiss?s name in brackets for ?Ales,? the cover name for an American working
for the Soviets. They do the same thing when quoting from a Soviet
intelligence cable dated March 30, 1945, decrypted and released by the U.S.
government under the National Security Agency?s Venona program. Weinstein
and Vassiliev did get exclusive access to a crop of documents from the KGB
archive. But references to Alger Hiss in those documents boil down to only
five pages from a single SVR (Russian Foreign Intelligence Service) file.3

The Hiss case has also become a litmus test of what is considered to be
legitimate Cold War historiography. Since the late 1970s, historians and
journalists who remain agnostics on the question of Hiss?s guilt invite
ridicule ? or condemnation.4 The consensus historians ? led by Weinstein ?
have largely succeeded in making Hiss?s guilt a piece of the conventional
wisdom.

We do not propose to address the larger question of whether Hiss was guilty
or innocent of espionage, but rather to explore whether he fits the profile
of the Soviet asset hidden behind the cover name Ales (pronounced in Russian
as A´-les).

Historians of the craft of intelligence recognize that assigning identities
to code names more than 50 years after the fact is fraught with peril. It is
difficult at best to translate from one language and culture to another,
particularly when dealing with partially decrypted documents. Other
imponderables include the ambiguities surrounding witting and unwitting
sources and, most obviously, the incentives for intelligence officers to
exaggerate the value of both their information and their sources. All of
this is to say that we are aware that, like others before us, we tread on
thin ice. Still, we have found evidence to suggest that Hiss could not have
been Ales, and that an alternative candidate exists.

THE VENONA PUZZLE

Until the mid-1990s, Weinstein and other historians accepted Chambers?s
assertions that Hiss?s associations with the Soviets were confined to the
period of 1934?38. But when the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA)
declassified the Venona documents, students of the case claimed that Hiss
may have continued his presumed espionage into the World War II years. The
documents are a collection of intercepted and fragmentary decrypted cables
between Moscow and its overseas intelligence outposts (most prominently New
York and Washington, D.C.) that produced hundreds of cryptonyms for agents,
assets, contacts, or targets of Soviet intelligence. They also included many
names of unsuspecting Americans whom Soviet intelligence operatives
discussed, targeted, or merely mentioned. Alger Hiss?s name turned up in
this second group.

In a fragment of a decrypted GRU5 (Russian military intelligence) New
York-to-Moscow cable of September 28, 1943, a New York station chief of the
Soviet military intelligence ? GRU ? (whom the Russians referred to as
?rezident?) called ?Molier?6 reported to his Moscow director that ?the
NEIGHBOR? (in this case, a resident or operative from the NKGB ? as the KGB
was then called ? Foreign Intelligence) mentioned an official ?from the
State Department by the name of HISS [iv].?

Footnote iv to the cable comes from the NSA, which explains that by the time
they gave up on trying to decrypt it in August of 1969, the FBI and NSA had
only one candidate for ?HISS.? Normally, these Russian-language cables use
the Cyrillic alphabet, but here Hiss is spelled out in the Latin alphabet,
perhaps indicating that the name was unfamiliar to the sender. At the time
the cable was written, Alger Hiss was an assistant to Stanley Hornbeck, the
State Department Political Advisor in Charge of Far Eastern Affairs.

Could a person openly named in such a message be an agent of that service at
the time the message was written or at any previous time? Not according to
Lt. Gen. Vitaly Pavlov, a former KGB foreign intelligence officer who had
supervised intelligence operations focused on the United States beginning in
late 1938. When interviewed in 2002, Pavlov firmly stated that no one openly
named in the Venona cables could have been an agent.7 Why was he so sure?
?Had he ever been an agent, the service would have his code name in the
system.? Three years later, this opinion was upheld by another Russian
intelligence professional, Maj. Gen. Julius Kobyakov.8 After reading the
Sept. 28 Venona cable, Kobyakov told us that had Alger Hiss been an agent,
?it would be very unusual to put a true name in a cable: speaking about one
of their assets, normally, they would use a code name.?

This Venona message openly using the name Hiss has been lost in a heated,
decade-long discussion of yet another Venona cable, N 1822, sent from
Washington, D.C., to Moscow, originating from the NKGB intelligence station
in the Soviet Embassy. Dated March 30, 1945, the cable describes a Soviet
agent who had the code name Ales. The NSA released its English translation
of the cable in 1996 with a footnote saying that Ales was ?probably? Alger
Hiss. Here is the full text of cable N 1822 as released in 1996:
[snip]






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