Innocent after all?

ON OCTOBER 14, 1992, General Dmitri Volkogonov, the designated teller of Soviet secrets, declared that long-standing charges that Alger Hiss spied for the Soviets a half-century ago were and are "completely groundless." Hiss was the victim of "either false information or judicial error," he said, adding operatically, "You can tell Alger Hiss [now 88 and nearly blind] that the heavy weight should be lifted from his head." Two months later, the general conceded that he had not made as thorough a search of the matter as he had first implied [see "Soviet Historiography, Western Journalism," by Amos Perlmutter, p. 30], adding that given the size, depth, and gaps in the Soviet archives, we may never know for certain whether Hiss was and is innocent.

However, the question of Hiss's guilt or innocence does not rest on Soviet archives. It rests on the mountain of publicly available documents in this country. The same is true for a second categorical, unqualified (and astonishing) declaration from Volkogonov which is not addressed in his partial retreat. Not only was Hiss not a spy, he said in October, but his accuser, Whittaker Chambers, was not a spy either. In other words, Chambers not only lied, in massive, apparently documented (and apparently verified) detail, about Hiss, he also lied, in massive, apparently documented (and copiously verified) detail, about himself.

But if Hiss is innocent and if Chambers's confession was an elaborate lie, there is hell to pay, for Hiss cannot be innocent without there having been major miscreancy in concocting the copious evidences of his guilt. Can that be?

Witness

IN 1948, Chambers confessed publicly to having worked full-time as a Soviet agent from 1932 to 1938. He told of his many secret identities and his frequent changes of residence in that connection. He also named his spy bosses--"Ulrich and Elaine," "Bill," Peters (who, allegedly, supervised the Communist Party underground in this country), Bykov (allegedly from Soviet Military Intelligence), describing them, their aliases, and their activities in elaborate detail. Indeed, he described the entire Soviet spy apparatus, reported gossip about rivalries and tensions between overlapping jurisdictions, and told lurid tales about the disciplining and occasional murdering of alleged turncoats.

And he described his own spy activities as a liaison to two secret cells of Communists in government, whose leaders and participants (including Hiss) he named. Members of these cells, he said, were expected to move into positions of influence and there serve the Soviet cause. He spoke of delivering gifts from the Soviets, expensive Oriental rugs, to four of his contacts (Hiss was one). He had worked, he said, as a courier relaying information and documents between spies in Washington and New York, and as a recruiter of new spies. He also described his role in producing some of the fake passports which Communist agents used in getting around the world, and his efforts in setting up respectable front operations for spy activities in England and Japan. (Again, all of this in elaborate, and therefore eminently testable, detail.) Most compellingly, he told of his activities in soliciting, receiving, and arranging for the filming of "four to five hundred" secret documents supplied by government collaborators (whom he named, Hiss included). He said he transmitted these documents, the contents of which he described, to his contacts in Soviet intelligence.

In 1938, Chambers said, he prepared to break away from the Communist movement, and he described elaborately his activities in that dangerous regard. One thing he did to protect himself, he said, was to keep some of the secret documents which had been supplied to him for transmittal to the Soviets. (Allegedly, Alger Hiss was the principal supplier.) Chambers said that he then sent messages to his spymasters informing them that any harm to him or his family would result in revelations about their operations. At that time, 1938-39, he also prepared two long magazine articles describing Soviet spying, and informed a major government official of some of the espionage activities.

Driving in the Nails

EVERY ELEMENT of Chambers's tale has, seemingly, been verified by abundant independent testimony and documentary sources. What would need to be true in order for these confirmations to be fake?

Chambers's claim of having lived a secretive life, with the use of several aliases and frequent changes of address, is incontrovertible if one is to believe the contiming documents and the reports of many people-- maids, renting agents, friends, contacts. Why would they lie? Who told them to? And why would Chambers live this way if he were not a spy?

"Elaine," who with her husband, "Ulrich," supervised Chambers's early spying, was really Nadya Ulanovsky, who in 1977, living in Israel, confirmed Chambers's accounts of their underground work together to Allen Weinstein (whose mighty account of the Hiss case, Perjury, remains unshaken 15 years after its publication). Elaine's testimony supports other details given by Chambers as well, such as his description of Bykov as a major player in the efforts of Soviet Military Intelligence. Did Mrs. Ulanovsky lie? Did Mr. Weinstein?

There are many other people who testified to Bykov's active role in organizing and supervising espionage: Maxim Lieber, Walter Krivitsky, William Edward Crane (who also testified to having received money from Chambers to support his underground activities), Julian Wadleigh (who also confessed to giving secret documents to Chambers). Bykov himself, in Moscow in 1939, bragged to Ulrich and Elaine about having placed agents in the very center of the American Government. Are these multiple confirmations phantasms?

Then there is Peters, the indubitable aboveground Communist official who for years denied underground espionage activity. Soviet files recently examined by American scholars Harvey Klehr and John Haynes prove that Peters was indeed, as Chambers described him, a major figure in the underground, working under the cover of the open Communist Party. But even without these Soviet tiles, Peters's espionage role, and his direct contact with Chambers in that connection, is contimed: for example, by David Zablodowsky, who said he delivered messages from Chambers to Peters in 1936; by Maxim Lieher, the publisher, who also confirms Chambers's cooperation with him in establishing publishing fronts for contemplated Soviet spying in Japan and England. And there is this detail: In one of his confessions, Chambers recalled a fake birth certificate prepared for Peters's daughter; checking Chambers's recollection, the FBI later found records of that document in Atlantic City.

The existence of the two parallel and separate Communist cells and Chambers's contact with them have been confirmed in the numerous subsequent testimonies of actual members and their wives. Ella Winter and others testified about Chambers's efforts to recruit them for spying. The photographer who worked with Chambers on fake passports has testified to that effect. Did Chambers deliver four Oriental rugs, on Bykov's orders, to his agents? Chambers's friend Meyer Schapiro, the great art historian, recalls arranging for the purchase of the rugs, and all four of those to whom Chambers said he gave them (including Hiss, as we shall see) dearly received them. State Department official Julian Wadleigh conceded that he understood the rug to be a gift from the Soviets.

But the most telling evidence are the confessions of those who admit having given Chambers secret documents (Wadleigh and Vincent Reno) and of three men who remember having photographed secret documents for Chambers (Felix Inslerman, William Edward Crane, and David Carpenter). Then, of course, there are the documents themselves, which Chambers produced in 1948, handwritten by two of those he was to accuse of spying, Hiss and Harry Dexter White; films of secret documents traceable to his alleged sources; and documents typed on Alger Hiss's typewriter.

Hiss defenders have frequently argued that the FBI, or some other sinister alphabetical agency, brilliantly concocted these documents in 1948 to support Chambers's allegations. But several of Chambers's friends testify that he told them in 1938 that he had secreted those documents; three people actually saw a cache of documents at that time; and the articles on Soviet espionage which Chambers wrote in 1938 refer indirectly but demonstrably to the contents of documents he was to reveal a decade later.

As for the details of Chambers's break with the underground and the Party, they would seem to have been decisively contimed by the testimony of: Mike Intrator, to the effect that the Soviets had grown suspicious of him; Meyer Schapiro, who aided his flight; Inslerman and Schapiro, who forwarded his warnings to the Party; Maxim Lieber, who said he was ordered by Bykov to find Chambers after he disappeared. In 1939, Herbert Solow notarized a lengthy description of Chambers's detailed self-reports, which correspond with the tale he was to tell a decade later; and Adolf Berle, friend of President Roosevelt, produced extensive notes of his meeting with Chambers in 1939, written at the time and then typed up under the heading: "Underground Espionage Agent."

This then is the man who, according to Volkogonov, had no contact whatsoever with Soviet intelligence, and whose highly elaborated confession must therefore be a chimera. But what of Hiss?

Hiss, of course, denied the charges at the time and has denied them, perfervidly, ever since. He has denied being a spy, denied being a Communist ("I have never done the slightest thing or said the slightest word to further Communism"), even denied ever knowing that any of his many close friends and associates who were named as Communists, and who later admitted to being Communists (Henry Collins, Harold Ware, Lee Pressman, John Herrmann, Victor Perlo, Noel Field, Nathan Witt, John Abt, Nathan Gregory Silvermaster), were. Indeed one of Hiss's lines of defense was that Chambers, whom he contemptuously described as an admitted Communist spy, should not be believed over a loyal American like himself. General Volkogonov's statement that even Chambers was not a spy must have startled Hiss as it startles us.

Hiss denied Chambers's claim that the two had closely associated for three years. He conceded that he had known Chambers briefly, but only as a self-described journalist named "Crosley." True, he had sublet his old apartment to Crosley and his wife during the summer of 1935 and given him an old Ford car into the bargain; true, Crosley had never paid the rent except indirectly, with the gift of an Oriental rug in 1935; true, he had traveled to New York with Crosley once, for reasons he had forgotten; and true, Crosley had stayed in Hiss's new apartment overnight: but those facts only betoken Hiss's characteristic kindness to struggling strangers, not evidence of a closer relationship. "Crosley" proved to be a deadbeat, Hiss said; he never saw him again, under any name, after 1936.

However, Chambers's story (and that of his wife, Esther) of much deeper and longer contact seem verified by the cascade of detail they produced in 1948 about Hiss's hobbies, eating habits, relatives, intimate nicknames, childhood memories, and pets; his medical problems (was he deaf in the left ear?) and those of his children; his wife's previous marriage and her alimony arrangements; maids and doctors; the layout, furniture, and books in the apartments Hiss lived in after 1936.

On every salient point of Chambers's account which Hiss chose to challenge, Chambers's version has found triumphant verification. Hiss had indeed had difficulty hearing in his left ear. If Hiss gave Chambers the Ford early in the summer of 1935, as he claimed, it would have been before he purchased a new automobile, not after. (One also wonders why Hiss continued to pay insurance on the car for a year after he gave it to a stranger for nothing.) Chambers's claim that in 1936 Hiss asked that the Ford be turned over for use by the Communist Party seems sufficiently documented by the discovery of a document notarized by a State Department colleague of Hiss, dated mid 1936, with Hiss's signature on it, assigning the car to an auto agency owned by Communists. William Rosen, also a sometime Communist, admitted to having obtained the car from the agency.

Hiss's denial of family intimacy or any contact after 1936 seems refuted by the testimony by Chambers's maid of visits by both Hiss and his wife to Chambers's apartment in Baltimore and by testimony of Hiss's pediatrician concerning an encounter with Chambers. Chambers claimed that Hiss loaned him $400 to purchase a car in November 1937, and a withdrawal in that amount, completely emptying Hiss's account, seems to support Chambers's claim, as do testimonies and documents refuting Hiss's counter-contention that the withdrawal was to purchase household items for a new apartment. (It turns out the apartment in question was not made available by its owner until weeks after the withdrawal, and Hiss was forced to borrow money in late December to supply the new apartment.)

No Johnny-Come-Lately

IT IS important to remember that Chambers first named Hiss as a Communist in 1939 to Adolf Berle. He offered detailed testimony about Hiss and many others to the FBI in interviews in 1941, 1945, 1946, and 1947. Furthermore, claims that Hiss was a Communist agent came from other sources than Chambers; French intelligence advanced this rumor as early as 1940, and in 1945 a defecting Soviet, Igor Gouzenko, referred to an agent in place close to Secretary Stettinius, which sounds very much like Alger Hiss. Hiss's claim, meanwhile, that he had never heard the name "Chambers" before 1948 is refuted by revelations that he was told by the FBI in 1947 that a man named Chambers had accused him of being a secret Communist; indeed, he was told of Chambers's claims again in 1948, just three months before he publicly denied ever having heard the name or knowing the man.

But the most decisive proof of Chambers's charges that Hiss had been not only a Communist (many people were in the Thirties, many of them innocent idealists) but a conscious and active spy are the documents which Chambers produced in 1948. They include four handwritten documents which Hiss admits writing, detailed summaries, with long quotations, from secret cables that came across his desk at the State Department; also 65 typed documents, either verbatim copies of secret cables or summaries in a form similar to the handwritten notes, apparently typed on Alger Hiss's typewriter, with interlinear corrections in what is arguably Hiss's handwriting; and several rolls of film, which, as we have noted, were filmed by the camera of Felix Inslerman. Many of these filmed documents contained Hiss's initials and office stamp.

If Hiss was not a spy, turning over handwritten summaries of materials of interest to the Soviets, bringing home documents every ten days for overnight filming and next-day return, typing documents for subsequent filming--how did Chambers obtain these documents (in 1938, remember)?

Hiss's answers to this pivotal question over the years seem ludicrous. He has said that the notes were made routinely in his job in the State Department (though much of the contents of the notes and their form are clearly unrelated to his duties) and were somehow stelen from his office wastepaper basket in 1938, perhaps, he said, by an innocuous-seeming colored man working for Chambers. The typewritten documents, he said, were typed, in 1938, by Chambers or confederates of his, admittedly on Hiss's typewriter, which somehow Chambers had obtained and returned undetected. The documents they summarized or quoted were either stolen from his office, or taken from the desks of others who routinely saw them (like Julian Wadleigh, the confessed spy), or stolen from the burn room at the State Department before being routinely destroyed. The interlinear corrections, presumably, are forgeries. The films were similarly obtained, all for the purpose of framing him. In 1938. Later, Hiss changed this story, claiming that he had given the typewriter to his maid late in 1937, months before the documents in question were typed, which would mean that Chambers had stolen it from and returned it undetected to the domicile of the maid. (Hiss never explained how Chambers could have known of the gift to the maid, if, as Hiss claims, he had no contact with Chambers after 1936.)

Later still, when, under pressure, Hiss produced the typewriter, and when that typewriter proved to have typed the crucial documents, Hiss dropped the awkward claim that Chambers had somehow stolen and returned his typewriter and offered the argument that the typewriter was a forgery, an exact lookalike, which had been specially built (when?) to produce typing which looked like that of other documents typed on Hiss's typewriter (so we need to steal those as well) and then planted, in 1948, for him to discover and turn in so that he would incriminate himself.

Hiss and those who agree with him on this point do not scruple to explain when this alleged forgery took place. If it was in 1948, how to explain proofs of the documents' existence in 1938? If it was 1938, who could have perpetrated such a forgery and why, when the microfilms and handwritten notes are proof enough? And why leave a forged typewriter for Hiss to discover, when that could only give him an opportunity to find signs of the forgery? And where is the real typewriter? Perhaps it is with the magic bullet from the Kennedy assassination.

And what of the question of questions: If, as Hiss insisted, the two men knew each other only briefly and superficially, why would Chambers--apparently a real spy working with real other spies--go to such extraordinary lengths to frame the innocent Hiss of spying?

Un-PC Answer

PROGRESSIVE supporters of Hiss cannot be proud of the answer he and psychiatrist friends have given from the first moment this obvious question was posed. Chambers's behavior, Hiss says, is that of a spurned homosexual. Having secretly and silently fallen in love with Hiss after their casual encounter, Chambers took Hiss's rejection very hard. For the next two years, he proceeded to organize a massive plot: trailing Hiss, unbeknownst to his quarry; informing himself about every detail of Hiss's life; stealing handwritten notes from the wastepaper basket in his office (though the notes Chambers produced were carefully folded and not crumpled); concocting documents (with the help of Julian Wadleigh and other spies in the State Department); and then in dribs and drabs over a decade informing on him for the purpose ultimately of destroying him. We are instructed that, owing to his homosexuality, Chambers was a pathological liar, a pathological destroyer of unavailable love objects. Much later, government agencies collaborated with Chambers, concocting documents and faking a typewriter, suborning immense perjuries, though apparently their motives were political and not homosexual.

As it happens, after Hiss initially voiced his theories on this matter, evidence of Chambers's sometime homosexuality surfaced. A devoted husband and father as well, he never denied his great affection for Hiss, indeed offered it as explanation for his early reluctance to destroy Hiss by adding the accusation of spy to his earlier charge of Communist. He produced the documents, proof of Hiss's spying, he pointed out, only when Hiss pushed him to the wall with a slander suit.

Hiss and his supporters often argue that Chambers was a confessed perjurer. How can you believe a perjurer? they ask. What they fail to add is that the perjury that Chambers confessed to was hiding Hiss from the charge of being a spy. If Chambers lied when he said that Hiss had not been a spy, then the truth is that Alger Hiss was a spy. Similarly, Hiss and his supporters often argue that Hiss was never convicted of spying but only of perjury. But that argument too is a trick: the perjury he was tried for concerned his insistence that he never had seen Chambers after 1936 and his insistence that he had not committed espionage. Because the statute of limitations had run out on his activities there could be no formal charge of spying. But make no mistake: the perjury trial was an espionage trial.

Notwithstanding all the foregoing, the amnesiac media allowed General Volkogonov to rewrite American history with a one-page press release, and now, after his reservation, they are asking us to withhold historical judgment until a more complete search of Soviet files enables us to understand ourselves. We may never know the full truth, we now hear, for many files have been destroyed. What these cautious lucubrations fail to address is that the answer is not in Soviet files but in our own. In absolving Hiss of guilt and, as it were, blaming Chambers of innocence, one must, inescapably, allege a web of conspiratorial plots on high which defy common reason.

General Volkogonov's performance--two steps forward and one step back--needs further review. Did he not review notes of meetings held within Soviet Military Intelligence, the Politburo, the KGB, when the case became prominent in 1948? The question of the identity and activities of Hiss and Chambers could not fail to have arisen at that time.

What else could explain this unscholarly performance? It should be remembered that Hiss himself requested the review. We know that Hiss's champion, John Lowenthal, met with Volkogonov for "a half-hour," in Moscow, prior to the general's search through the archives. According to Lowenthal the general plied him with questions about the case. What questions were asked, and what were Lowenthal's answers? We have not been told. Interestingly, the only specific statement of fact in Volkogonov's brief encyclical was that there was no evidence that Hiss was in touch with Soviet intelligence while he performed important international duties during the 1940s. As we have seen, the documentable charges against Hiss all refer to the 1930s. What did Lowenthal say that might have persuaded the general to clear Hiss of another charge?

One prominent emigre historian I spoke to asked me why, if Hiss is guilty, he would demand a search that would probably nail him to the wall. I answered cautiously that for reasons developed in this article I believe Hiss was indeed guilty, adding that he has been taking risks of precisely this kind from the beginning of the case; his is a performance of innocence for the ages. And, I added, perhaps Volkogonov and his government are up to more than we know.

Mr. Cohen is chairman of the Department of American Studies at Brandeis University. He is currently working on a book entitled The Performance of Innocence, which includes a chapter on Alger Hiss.