Alger Hiss

Alger Hiss (November 11, 1904 – November 15, 1996) was a U.S. State Department official and Secretary General to the founding charter conference of the United Nations. Following accusations that he spied on behalf of the Soviet Union, Hiss was convicted of perjury.

Hiss responds

After Time magazine managing editor Whittaker Chambers charged him as being a Communist, Alger Hiss voluntarily appeared before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Some Committee members had misgivings at first about attacking Hiss, but Congressman Richard Nixon, covertly being fed information by the Catholic Church's secretive Communist hunter, Father John Cronin, and using materials which he had been secretly and illegally receiving from the FBI, claimed to have sensed that Hiss was hiding something and pressed the Committee to act. Initially, Hiss denied having ever known Chambers, saying quite specifically "the name means nothing to me." After being asked to identify Chambers, whom he had not seen in at least a dozen years, from a photograph, Hiss indicated that his face "might look familiar." When he later confronted Chambers in a hotel room, with HUAC representatives present, Hiss identified him as a person he had known as "George Crosley", whom Hiss had allowed to live in his home when Chambers was destitute in the mid-1930s. Later, Hiss gave Chambers an old car, which Chambers claimed was for use in transporting documents.

Related Topics:
Whittaker Chambers - Communist - House Committee on Un-American Activities - Richard Nixon - John Cronin - FBI

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After Chambers publicly reiterated his charge that Hiss was working for the Soviets on the radio program "Meet the Press," Hiss instituted a libel action against Chambers. Chambers, in response, presented the "Baltimore Documents", which were copies of a series of government documents that he claimed had been obtained from Hiss in the 1930s, although why Chambers did not give these documents to the authorities previously, especially when Hiss was working for the government, is a mystery. Chambers claimed that the government documents had first been re-typed by Hiss's wife, Priscilla, and that these copies were then photographed and passed on to the spy network. Why the documents were not directly photographed is a mystery, since retyping them, a much more time intensive process, could lead to errors. Later Chambers produced microfilm evidence which was dramatically given to Nixon on Halloween, from a hollowed-out pumpkin on his Maryland farm (the so-called ?Pumpkin Papers.?). Some of the papers were dated later than the time when Hiss claimed to have ceased all contact with Chambers, AKA "Crosley". Chambers would change the date he initially gave as the date he ceased contact with Hiss, so that there would be no contradiction with the Baltimore documents.

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