COLUMN ONE : Innocent or Not, Hiss Is at Peace : The old man who symbolized Communist infiltration shows no bitterness, filling his days with books and the sound of birds. Though ‘cleared’ by a Russian general, his case remains a puzzle.

The Benedict Arnold of the 20th Century is 88 years old now and nearly blind. His days fill with murky shapes. He enjoys listening to the birds that whistle among the tombstones in a cemetery across from his home. A relay of friends read to him: newspapers, Shakespeare, the classics.

Recently, Alger Hiss has suffered a few strokes, mere annoyances next to the drubbing he once took from an obscure first-term congressman named Richard M. Nixon. It was the Hiss case that launched Nixon toward the presidency and turned Hiss into a symbol of Communist infiltration in the U.S. government.

These days, with the youth gone from his bones, the former State Department official seems almost a museum piece, some living artifact preserved in the leftover ice of the Cold War. For nearly half a century, he has professed his innocence against charges that have left an endless wake of ambiguity. Hiss has longed for exoneration. And, finally, he believes it has come his way.

The vindicator is Gen. Dmitri A. Volkogonov, the historian in command of that mausoleum of state secrets, the newly opened Soviet military archives. At Hiss’ request, he made a “very careful analysis” of files and, in late October, said there was no mention of the American as a Soviet agent: “You can tell Mr. Alger Hiss that the heavy weight can be lifted from his heart.”

At last it was over--or so it may have seemed. Tony Hiss, his father’s dedicated champion and a staff writer for the New Yorker, wrote in that magazine that his family’s long ordeal had been like “a fairy tale with a curse that couldn’t be lifted.” He welcomed this “very public happy ending.”

But happy endings are not simple arrangements, there for the declaration: Case closed, wrong righted. In the aftermath of Volkogonov’s statement, there has been a chorus of skeptics: Exactly what documents were consulted in that scattered labyrinth of archives? Could the Hiss file, like others, have been hidden or destroyed over the years amid the rivalries of Soviet spy agencies?

For now, Volkogonov’s historical sleuthing is merely another dig in a long excavation for the truth. The Hiss case has always been such a puzzle. Ever since it opened the way for the anti-Communist witch hunts of the 1950s, the case has periodically resurfaced, new facts and fantasies circling around to slay each other, testaments to the inscrutability of history.

Hiss is wobbly on his feet and his voice quavers, but he remains as keen in mind as ever. All the names and dates light up in his memory, just as if this was still 1950 and he was being led off for his 44 months in the federal pen, a jarring sight in handcuffs, fedora and vested suit. The FBI believed that he had passed State Department papers to a writer named Whittaker Chambers in a Soviet spy operation more than decade before. Because the statute of limitations barred an espionage charge, he was tried instead for perjuring himself before a grand jury, where he repeated testimony he had given to Nixon and the rest of the spy-hunting House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC).

Hiss made a startling example of the insidious Communist menace within the body politic. Here was an elite figure of the American meritocracy. He was Phi Beta Kappa at Johns Hopkins and cum laude at Harvard Law. He clerked for Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and entered government as one of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s idealistic New Dealers. He served at agriculture, justice and state, accompanied Roosevelt to Yalta, played a role in getting the United Nations started. When his troubles began, he was president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“There is a type of demonology in this country that goes back to the Salem witch trials,” Hiss said recently, looking gentlemanly as usual in a tweed sport coat and turtleneck. “In the 19th Century, waves of Irish immigrants were met with anti-Catholic prejudices. . . . Then there were legal lynchings of blacks in the South. There has never been a time when America did not have a regional or national demonology, so it shouldn’t be surprising that the Cold War and McCarthyism would lead to a hysteria that misled juries.”

There are no signs that life has chewed his spirit; inner harmony glints from his triangular face. He appears a model of rectitude, unfailingly courteous and remarkably persuasive, adhering to his story through endless repetitions. Nixon biographer Herbert Parmet once spent two hours with him. “It was perfectly eerie,” he said. “If the man was guilty, he gave off absolutely no trace. I felt like he was either innocent or I was talking to a really great actor.”

Hiss lacks bitterness, even as he explains how a miscarriage of justice leveled the high arc of his career. “I’ve had a life of rare friendships and great support, probably more than if my life had gone on without interruption,” he said.

Prison in Lewisburg, Pa., was “a good corrective to three years at Harvard.” He preferred the company of “racket guys,” most of them family men who regarded “the joint” as an occupational hazard. He once gave legal advice to famous mobster Frank Costello in the yard.

Visits from Hiss’ wife, Priscilla, were grim, the two of them separated by glass and talking through a tube. When he was released, she preferred to “change our names and move out West, but there was nothing I was ashamed of.” Prossy--as he called her--wanted to escape the case that he wanted to keep alive. “She kept worrying about our phones being tapped, which they probably were.” The two split up for good in 1959, though Prossy refused him a divorce.

Until he retired in the late 1970s, Hiss primarily worked for a New York stationery store, originally as an outside salesman: “I sensed that business executives who received me genially were looking forward to saying at dinner parties, ‘Guess who wants to sell me rubber bands and paper clips.’ ”

Prossy died in 1985, and Hiss married Isabel Johnson, a woman he had loved for 25 years. They divide their time between a flat in Manhattan and the modest home here on Long Island’s eastern end. In both places, he has been a popular dinner guest and an intriguing mixer at parties: There he was to be pointed out, the Hiss of the Hiss case, eye of a mid-century storm.

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Those birds call out from the cemetery across the way. Hiss, once an avid bird-watcher, recognizes the varying sounds. There are jays and robins, an occasional whippoorwill and mockingbird, warblers during migration season. “No,” he said, anticipating a question to come, “the prothonotary warbler does not come this far north.”

That particular warbler became an emblem of the Hiss case (along with a Woodstock typewriter, a 1929 Ford roadster and five rolls of microfilm stashed in a pumpkin.) Hiss had once seen the rare bird. When the ex-Communist Whittaker Chambers needed to establish his one-time intimacy with Hiss, he privately told Nixon about the warbler sighting. The congressman then baited a trap, asking Hiss, almost in passing, if he had ever seen such a bird. “I have right there on the Potomac . . . beautiful yellow head, a gorgeous bird,” the witness replied, inadvertently providing credibility to his lone accuser.

The portly Chambers was a dour, tormented man, though a gifted wordsmith and master of languages, the first to translate “Bambi” from German into English. He had been active in the Communist underground in the 1930s, and, when he quit the party, he eventually found his way to the FBI. He had used a dozen names before reinventing himself as Whittaker Chambers, a penitent newly come to the savior Jesus Christ and to a job as a senior editor at Time magazine.

American Communists were nothing remarkable in the 1930s. Capitalism seemed cruelly indifferent during the Great Depression; to many, the promise of a worker’s paradise was a fetching idea. But by the late 1940s the Cold War swept in with accompanying gusts of hysteria. Treasons were suspected, the treasonous stalked. A former operative such as Chambers was of great value to HUAC, naming names as he was, especially that full-blooded specimen of New Deal liberalism whose name carried the actual sound of a snake.

Alger Hiss appeared at the hearings, lawyerly and at times condescending. He recalled it now with only a single misgiving: “I may have been disdainful of the House committee. I thought of them as a rather low level of public officialdom. They were not a noble or particularly brilliant group.”

The hearings were riveting theater. Hiss testified he knew no one called Whittaker Chambers. Then, when the two men faced each other, Hiss allowed that his accuser might be someone he had befriended 13 years before as George Crosley, a “deadbeat” who aroused his sympathy until he welshed on payments for that roadster, an apartment and some personal loans. Hiss wanted a closer look. The Crosley he remembered had awful teeth, two discolored rows of gaps and stumps. “Would you mind opening your mouth wider?” Hiss asked, ready to inspect.

The teeth had been repaired, but from other clues Hiss concluded that Crosley was indeed Chambers. In anger, he demanded that his accuser repeat his charges outside of the privileged HUAC hearing room, so he could sue him for slander. Chambers did so on the radio program “Meet the Press.”

When Hiss sued, the magazine editor made a curious modification to his story. Hiss, he said, had not only been a Communist but a State Department mole who actually passed him government papers. For proof, he went to a farmhouse and recovered the film of some 10-year-old documents, recently hidden in a hollowed-out pumpkin.

The fact that Chambers himself had lied under oath was overlooked by federal prosecutors. Hiss, however, was indicted. There was one hung jury before the conviction. Both trials--as well as facts unearthed later--were not filled with the dramatic proof of a nation at peril; the so-called “pumpkin papers” contained nothing of great consequence.

Instead, Hiss’ guilt or innocence would come to rely on a tedium of contradictory evidence: those papers, some of which may have come from Hiss; the serial number on the typewriter, which may have been used to retype the papers; that roadster, which may have been given by Hiss to “Crosley” for Communist travels.

“I don’t think there are 10 people in the world who have mastered all the allegations and all the defenses, and I’m not one of them,” said Tony Hiss.

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Reputations are now welded to the case: those of historians, lawyers, politicians. It filled the first chapter of Richard Nixon’s “Six Crises,” a 1962 autobiographical book he never tired of commending to his aides. In it, he wrote that without the whole affair he never would have become vice president or a candidate for President.

Over the years, Hiss’ guilt or innocence has become an article of faith for many on the far left and far right--part of the basic geography of a world view. Some subscribe to various subterranean explanations: Chambers and Hiss had been homosexual lovers; or Hiss was covering up for Prossy, the real Red; or FBI director J. Edgar Hoover framed Hiss to discredit the New Deal.

A San Francisco psychiatrist, Dr. Meyer Zeligs, studied the case for seven years, interviewing participants (Chambers declined) and probing “motives and forces.” In a 1967 volume, he took some strenuous psychiatric leaps to conclude that Chambers was paranoid, conspiratorial, persecutory and generally delusional--a fantasist with a lifelong pattern of turning on friends.

In 1978, John Kenneth Galbraith, the eminence grise and economist, wrote that he, like many other liberals, believed Hiss guilty. He rendered that judgment not unsympathetically, pressing an enduringly popular theory that Hiss had gotten caught “in transition from the fashionable radicalism of the ‘30s to the prestigious foreign policy Establishment” of the ‘40s. A generation of the left had similar “glass jaws,” but few were hit with such an uppercut.

Chambers died in 1961, but his personal account is preserved in a gloomy memoir, the best-selling “Witness.” He recounted his goodby to “sweet and gentle” comrade Alger, begging him to quit the party and denouncing the Soviet Union as a “gigantic ulcer of corruption.” But Hiss only showed him the door, becoming weepy after handing over a gift for Chambers’ daughter.

Hiss, for his part, today sees himself as a victim of concocted evidence and manipulated hysteria. Three men brought him down: Hoover, “out to settle a score with the New Deal.” Nixon, “a power-hungry opportunist.” Chambers, “a psychopath . . . who became a creature of the FBI . . . who (made) use of my kindness to try to destroy me.”

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Opinions swing over time like the pendulum of a grandfather clock. After Watergate, Hiss’ reputation was suddenly superior to Nixon’s. He became a celebrated speaker on college campuses, the first victim of Tricky Dick’s tricks. He was readmitted to the Massachusetts bar in 1975.

In an attempt to resuscitate the case in the courts, friends helped Hiss obtain FBI files through the Freedom of Information Act. Among the records were statements by Chambers about a furtive sex life with other men in flea bag hotels, causing speculation that he obliged the FBI with whatever it wanted to hear in order to guard a forbidden secret.

The other side has had dedicated advocates as well, its banner carried highest by author William F. Buckley, who reveres the writings of Chambers, “the most durable poetry of a decadent West.” President Ronald Reagan was in this camp. In 1984, he awarded Chambers the Medal of Freedom, saying he “personified the mystery of human redemption in the face of evil.”

Most damaging to the Hiss faithful, however, has been the work of a respected historian, Allen Weinstein. His 1978 book “Perjury” concluded that Hiss was in fact guilty. Although three previous authors had decided the opposite--and despite some conspicuous errors on Weinstein’s part--”Perjury” was widely accepted in major reviews as definitive. It seemed to have the goods: holes in Hiss’ story and confirmations from the spy network.

Hiss regrets having cooperated in the research. “That book is on library shelves all over,” he said regretfully. “I felt (Weinstein) would not be a victim to the demonology. He really does believe the New Deal was a nest of Communists--and I don’t doubt there was a nest--but I don’t think anyone did anything contrary to New Deal policies.”

There were other disappointments. Appeals of Hiss’ 30-year-old conviction--based on the recently opened FBI files--were denied by the courts in 1982 and 1983. Those defeats were “the most depressing experiences of my life,” he said. The pendulum seemed unlikely to swing back an old man’s way.

Then, with amazing suddenness, the Iron Curtain lifted, leaving all its Cold War secrets to be revealed backstage. Last August, Hiss wrote to five men with access to the Soviet archives, including Volkogonov. A month later, a close friend, lawyer John Lowenthal, went to Moscow, his trip financed by the Nation Institute, which is associated with the Nation magazine. Lowenthal contacted Volkogonov, who agreed to help and later sent a faxed message with his findings.

On a second trip, the lawyer made a videotape of the general’s expanded conclusions: not only was Hiss not a party member or a spy, it appeared that Chambers, while a Communist, had never been involved in espionage, either.

The part about Chambers especially puzzles some scholars. “Evidence that Whittaker Chambers was an agent has never been problematic,” said Weinstein, whose Washington-based Center for Democracy has analyzed documents from the former Soviet bloc. “The problem is the chaos of the (Soviet) archives. Who has what and where is it? There is nothing pristine and neatly organized over there. The military and everyone else kept their own archives.”

Not many of these dissenting voices have found their way from the Op-Ed pages to Hiss’ ears. He prefers the singsong of the birds and the congratulatory phone messages from old friends. “I don’t expect anyone with a deep investment in my guilt to change their minds,” he said. “I regard them like the people who refuse to accept evidence that the Earth moves around the sun.”

His inner serenity continued to throw light as he talked, a peace remarked on by many who have observed Hiss over the years. It is the tranquillity of an innocent man who has learned to love his life in spite of its web of troubles. Or then again, it may be that second possibility, the calm of someone who has come to brilliantly live a lie, a prolonged victory of mind over memory.