Alger Hiss, Convicted in Cold War Spy Scare, Dies

Alger Hiss, the Harvard-trained lawyer-diplomat whose conviction in 1950 for denying under oath that he turned over State Department papers to a Soviet agent shattered his promising career and clouded the American political climate for a decade, died Friday. He was 92.

Hiss, who died in Lenox Hill Hospital in New York, spent nearly half a century trying futilely to clear his name but remained known as the Benedict Arnold of the 20th century.

Four years ago, he hoped that he had finally been vindicated when a Russian historian said he was unable to find any documentary evidence that Hiss had spied for the Communists. But Gen. Dmitri A. Volkogonov, who presided over the newly opened Soviet military archives, soon backed off from his seemingly firm statement and amended his comments. He said he found no evidence in the KGB files he searched that Hiss was a spy, but added that separate Soviet intelligence systems and files had existed.

Hiss, a traitor to his accusers but a martyr to his defenders, denounced and denied espionage charges leveled against him by Whittaker Chambers, a confessed former Soviet agent, at two dramatic trials.

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Found guilty of perjury and imprisoned for 44 months, Hiss declared himself a victim of “forgery by typewriter.” But even as a nonagenarian, he never became bitter about what he always considered a miscarriage of justice.

“I’ve had a life of rare friendships and great support,” he told The Times in 1992, “probably more than if my life had gone on without interruption.” He outlived his tormentor Chambers by 35 years.

Hiss was convicted primarily on the evidence of copied official documents that Chambers swore he received from Hiss before World War II and then concealed for a decade. Much of the material was transcribed on an old typewriter Hiss once owned, experts testified. Impoverished by his costly defense and disbarred as a lawyer after his conviction, Hiss rebuilt his life while working as a salesman and occasional lecturer. In 1975 he was readmitted to the Massachusetts bar.

As the celebrated case intensified public awareness and suspicion of Soviet methods and motives, it revived red-baiting as a political weapon and cleared the ideological track for such demagogues as Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy (R-Wis.). As a first-term Republican congressman from California, Richard M. Nixon helped Chambers develop his charges, then made the guilty verdict a steppingstone to the White House.

Scholars debated the evidence for decades. Historian Allen Weinstein began an eight-year study believing Hiss had been framed but concluded in his book “Perjury” that Hiss had indeed been guilty as charged of lying under oath.

Hiss came to Washington in 1933 as an attorney serving President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. He was a high-achieving honors graduate of Johns Hopkins University in 1926 and of Harvard Law School in 1929, seasoned by a year as clerk to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and three years in private practice. A shabby-genteel upbringing in Baltimore clearly whetted his ambition to excel, and the worldwide Depression of the 1930s heightened his awareness of capitalism’s shortcomings.

In 1929, he married Priscilla Fansler Hobson, a socially conscious divorcee he called “Prossy,” who steadfastly maintained his innocence through both trials. The marriage broke up in 1958, and Hiss obtained a legal separation in 1960, but the couple never divorced. They had one son, Anthony Hiss, who survives. Priscilla Hiss died in 1984 at the age of 81, and a year later Hiss married his companion of a quarter-century, Isabel Johnson.

As a government lawyer for the old Agricultural Adjustment Administration, a Senate special committee studying the munitions industry, the Justice Department and the State Department, Hiss had access to confidential documents. He moved in 1939 to the State Department’s Far Eastern Division, and then to the new Office of Special Political Affairs organized for postwar planning, becoming its director in 1945.

He was executive secretary of the Dumbarton Oaks conference that drew up the blueprint of the United Nations Organization, then assisted Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius Jr. at the February 1945 Yalta Conference on the shape of the postwar world.

Hiss was temporary secretary-general of the U.N. organizing session that met in San Francisco two weeks after Roosevelt’s death raised Vice President Harry S. Truman to the presidency.

But his promising career began to fray in 1939 when Chambers, having broken with Communism, was hired as a writer at Time magazine. Chambers went to a presidential assistant with his story of Communists in government and named Hiss, among others.

In 1942, questioned by the FBI about his past in the Communist underground, he again named Hiss among his associates. A report was sent to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who called it mostly “history, hypothesis or deduction.”

But in March 1945, the FBI forwarded a summary of the 1942 interview to the State Department’s security office. In September of that year, Igor Gouzenko, a code clerk, defected from the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa, taking with him numerous documents reflecting Soviet espionage. He told of an unidentified Communist agent serving in the U.S. State Department, and by October, Hiss was placed under FBI surveillance.

In November 1946, Hiss resigned from the State Department and became president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in New York.

Interviewed separately by the FBI in June 1947, Hiss and his wife denied knowing anyone named Whittaker Chambers. Hiss repeated the denial in New York in March 1948 before a federal grand jury investigating Communism in government.

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The Hiss case erupted Aug. 3, 1948, when the House Committee on Un-American Activities called Chambers to corroborate testimony about party members who were U.S. officials. Chambers told of four individuals he had known in a Communist unit formed to infiltrate the government. One was Hiss.

Two days later, Hiss appeared in the jammed House Caucus Room, and testified memorably:

“I am not and never have been a member of the Communist Party. I do not and never have adhered to the tenets of the Communist Party. . . . To the best of my knowledge, I never heard of Whittaker Chambers until 1947, when two representatives of the Federal Bureau of Investigation asked me if I knew him and various other people. . . . So far as I know, I have never laid eyes on him. I should like to have the opportunity to do so.”

A three-member subcommittee headed by Nixon heard Chambers behind closed doors in New York on Aug. 7. He said Hiss had known him “by my party name of Carl” and swore he knew Hiss “as a dedicated, disciplined Communist.”

He described an old Ford that he said Hiss transferred to the open Communist Party to be used by “some poor organizer,” despite an underground taboo against leaving such a traceable trail.

At a follow-up executive session of the subcommittee, Hiss denied knowing anyone named Carl, but recalled befriending a freelance writer named George Crosley in 1934. He said he sublet an apartment to Crosley and sold Crosley a 1929 Ford.

The initial Hiss-Chambers confrontation took place behind the closed doors of a Manhattan hotel room Aug. 17, 1948. Hiss said he was still unsure about a firm identification. Chambers denied using the name Crosley and denied renting from Hiss but said he and his family had lived rent-free for about three weeks in an apartment Hiss was vacating.

Asked by Hiss how he reconciled their conflicting testimony, Chambers replied: “Very easily, Alger. I was a Communist, and you were a Communist.”

The first televised hearing in congressional history took place Aug. 25, when Hiss publicly faced Chambers under glaring lights in the steamy House Caucus Room.

Things went badly for Hiss. Pressed by Nixon, he conceded that his title for a new Plymouth sedan was dated Sept. 7, 1935, four months after the time he maintained he had thrown in the old Ford with the apartment he sublet to Crosley. Another record showed that Hiss had not assigned the Ford to a Washington dealer until July 23, 1936. Chambers described Hiss’ testimony as “80% at least fabrication.”

Chambers said in a radio interview: “Alger Hiss was a Communist and may be now.” Hiss sued him for slander in U.S. District Court in Baltimore. To Hiss supporters, the suit was the reaction of an innocent man. Many lawyers, however, called it a major blunder that opened the door to his indictment.

During intensive pretrial examination by plaintiff’s counsel, Chambers testified that he frequently read State Department documents at Hiss’ house in Washington’s Georgetown neighborhood. Asked to produce documentary proof, he brought forth a dusty envelope, containing notes, documents and microfilm, that he had entrusted to his wife’s nephew after he broke with Communism in 1938. It had lain untouched in a dumbwaiter shaft in Brooklyn.

Its contents, if genuine, were dynamite: 65 typed sheets purporting to be summaries and copies of 71 State and War Department cables from late 1937 to April 1, 1938; four manuscript notes, apparently in Hiss’s handwriting; four sheets bearing longhand notations by Harry Dexter White, a Treasury official; two strips of developed microfilm, and three cans of undeveloped film.

Taken at face value, the haul documented apparent espionage on Hiss’ part and undermined his claim to have had no dealings with Chambers--or Crosley--after mid-1936.

Chambers told the FBI it was at the request of Col. Boris Bykov, a Soviet spymaster, that Hiss agreed in the fall of 1937 to procure State Department documents, bringing them home in his briefcase to be typed by his wife, then passing them to Chambers.

On Dec. 2, Chambers led committee investigators to microfilms that he had temporarily cached in a hollowed-out pumpkin on his Maryland farm. The hoard, headlined as the “Pumpkin Papers,” was promptly subpoenaed by the House committee.

On Dec. 15, 1948, the last day of its term, the grand jury indicted Hiss on two counts of perjury. He was accused of swearing falsely in denying to the grand jury that he had given Chambers “secret, confidential and restricted” documents and in denying that he met with Chambers in February and March 1938. Hiss pleaded not guilty on both counts and was released on $5,000 bail.

Defense investigators recovered Woodstock No. 230099, Hiss’ old typewriter, six weeks before Hiss went on trial May 31, 1949, in New York. Defense and FBI analysts found independently that 230099 had typed the State Department papers. A handwriting expert held that Hiss wrote all four of the notes produced by Chambers.

The jurors took less than a day to decide they could never agree, and were dismissed. They had deadlocked 8 to 4 for conviction.

The second trial lasted nine weeks. On Jan. 21, 1950, the verdict came down: guilty on both counts.

Hiss was sentenced to serve five years in prison and to pay a $10,000 fine. He entered the federal penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pa., on March 21, 1951, and served until Nov. 27, 1954.

In 1957, he wrote a book, “In the Court of Public Opinion,” arguing that he had been unfairly convicted on the basis of manufactured evidence. It sold poorly.

In 1970, the American Civil Liberties Union sued successfully to upset a federal law enacted after his conviction that denied Hiss $61 monthly based on his payments into the government pension system.