A Loss of Convictions Since Hiss

When the CIA’s Harold J. Nicholson was arrested on a charge of espionage at Dulles airport last Saturday, he was carrying a copy of the Washington Post, with its long obituary of a rather more significant figure in the annals of espionage.

The death of Alger Hiss and the arrest of Nicholson took place within 24 hours of each other, and they constitute a sad epilogue to an era when the profession of the spy had combined a deep if misplaced conviction with a dash of warped honor.

Nicholson is accused of blowing the identities of a generation of new U.S. agents to the Russians, in return for total payments of $180,000. Prices have evidently dropped in the spy market since the CIA’s last Russian mole, Aldrich H. Ames, took $2.5 millions for his services before finally being caught three years ago. But something other than the price has sunk pretty low since the prewar days when moles would betray their trust out of conviction--however misplaced.

Hiss died protesting his innocence. But the steady accretion of documentary evidence from Soviet archives and from declassified U.S. intelligence intercepts of Soviet communications shook the faith of a generation of American liberals who had believed him the innocent victim of Cold War hysteria and dirty tricks.

One of those liberals was Victor Navasky, long the editor of the leftist weekly the Nation and author of “Naming Names,” a haunting account of the persecution of the American left in the years of Joseph R. McCarthy’s witch hunts. Speaking shortly after news broke of Hiss’ death, Navasky said he no longer believed in Hiss’ innocence, but added, “It’s what exactly he was guilty of that still confuses me.”

Navasky is not alone. In 1992, Hiss’ defenders were enchanted when the retired Soviet Gen. Dmitri Volkogonov, who had become a sound historian with unrivaled access to the Soviet archives, reported he had found “not a single document” to attest that Hiss had ever spied for Soviet intelligence. Volkogonov later explained his verdict was “not proven,” rather than “not guilty,” and that he had not seen the GRU (military intelligence) archives, for whom Hiss allegedly worked.

The evidence is compelling that Hiss had been, at the least, a Soviet agent of influence when he worked at the State Department in the 1930s. It also appears that Hiss had conveyed to his contact (later his accuser), Whittaker Chambers, a large number of secret U.S. documents, some of which Chambers, a decade later, produced before the House Un-American Activities Committee and the courts.

It is important to understand exactly what Hiss betrayed. There were 65 State Department documents, retyped on Hiss’ typewriters. There were four memorandums in Hiss’ handwriting, and five rolls of microfilmed State and Navy Department papers.

They all related mainly to trade agreements and the prospect of China raising war loans in Europe; to possible U.S. responses to the Japanese war of aggression against China, and the threat of a Japanese attack on Siberia. There were also copies of cables from the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, which could have helped the Soviet cryptanalysts break the U.S. diplomatic codes.

Chambers later recounted in his book “Witness” that his Soviet control pressed him constantly to obtain State Department information on the activities of “the Anti-Comintern Pact”--as the Axis powers of Germany, Italy and Japan then called themselves. Hiss seems to have worked to help the defense of the Soviets, rather than subvert his nation’s security.

It is at this point that the concept of treason becomes tricky. It seems clear that Hiss betrayed the trust of his government, and whatever oath he had given to maintain the secrets of the State Department. But his country was not at war, and the country that was to become the main wartime ally, the Soviet Union, believed it was in for the fight of its life against the Axis fascists and militarists.

One did not have to be a Communist Party member in the years 1936-38 (when Hiss was at the State Department and dealing with Chambers), to reckon that if anybody was going to stop Adolf Hitler, it would be the Soviet Union.

After the defeat of Hitler and Japan, everything changed. The Soviet Union that was abrogating the Yalta agreement and turning Eastern Europe into a series of brutalised client states was a palpably different beast from the brave ally whose Red Army had borne the brunt of battle. Moreover, as the Cold War set in, the very nature of war had been changed by Hiroshima, and the atomic age was to open the next campaigns of espionage.

Spying for Josef Stalin in 1950 was not like sharing secrets with a wartime ally in 1943, nor even like helping the anti-Nazi cause in 1938 by betraying U.S. documents to the besieged Soviet state. The historical and even the moral context had been transformed. But, by then, young idealists who had believed in the Soviet mythology of the 1930s were trapped into an increasingly sickening loyalty.

Navasky is not alone in struggling to find a useful definition of Hiss’ guilt. But there is another serious question: Whether the witch hunts and Red-scare hysteria unleashed by Rep. Richard M. Nixon and then McCarthy did the cause of the West, as the defender of justice and democracy, far more harm, and probably did Stalin’s wretched empire more good, than anything betrayed by Hiss.

When Dwight D. Eisenhower introduced Nixon to the GOP national convention in 1952 as his running mate, he called the young senator from California “a man who has a special talent and an ability to ferret out any kind of subversive influence wherever it may be found, and the strength and persistence to get rid of it.”

But Nixon’s stated purpose was not simply to root out and crush the communists, but also to intimidate their potential sympathizers among the liberals.

“Hiss was clearly the symbol of a considerable number of perfectly loyal citizens whose theaters of operation are the nation’s mass media and universities, its scholarly foundations, and its government bureaucracies,” Nixon concluded in his book “Six Crises.” “They are of a mind-set, as doctrinaire as those on the extreme right, which makes them singularly vulnerable to the communist popular front appeal under the banner of social justice. In the time of the Hiss case, they were ‘patsies’ for the communist line.”

Nixon’s sneer at “patsies” had a specific target, Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who insisted that whatever the House Un-American Activities Committee might say, he “would not turn my back on Alger Hiss.” For Acheson, this was the code of a gentleman; for Nixon, the mark of the patsy, soft on communism.

Nixon could hardly have been more wrong. As Hiss was being convicted, the policy planning group at the State Department was preparing, on Acheson’s orders, the blueprint for the re-arming of America and the conduct of the Cold War.

It is one kind of folly to confuse a liberal like Acheson with a misguided and deluded idealist like Hiss. It may be a more wicked folly to use the same word, “spy.” to describe Hiss as well as Ames and Nicholson. In this tragedy of the American left, if Hiss was a fallen woman, Ames and Nicholson were just whores.