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.

Protestations of innocence

Disbarred, he became a salesman. But he continued for the rest of his life strenuously to protest his innocence, going so far as to file a petition of coram nobis, in which he presented his defense team's documented, putatively scientific evidence indicating that the typewriter used to convict him had been fabricated, that is, remanufactured, and that the so-called Baltimore Documents, papers which Chambers claimed that Hiss or his wife Priscilla had typed, were forgeries. At the time, few people suspected that remanufacturing of typewriters was possible, and an FBI agent testified at the Hiss trial that it was impossible. In fact, during WWII J. Edgar Hoover arranged for his own FBI agents to be trained at a British intelligence base called Camp X 100 miles east of Toronto, where one of the specialties was the remanufacture of typewriters and document forgery.

Related Topics:
Coram nobis - Typewriter - WWII - J. Edgar Hoover - FBI - Camp X - Toronto

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Years later John Dean, in his book Blind Ambition, asserted that he was informed that Nixon at one point in his Presidency told Charles Colson, "The typewriters are always the key. We built one in the Hiss case." Colson denied ever having such a conversation with Nixon.

Related Topics:
John Dean - Charles Colson

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As a result of a Freedom of Information Act suit, government documents were released in 1975 which revealed:

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1) an FBI agent knowingly committed perjury at the Hiss trial, testifying it was impossible to forge a document by typewriter,

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2) the FBI knew that the typewriter introduced as evidence at the trial could not have been the Hiss typewriter, but withheld this information from Hiss, and

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3) the FBI had an informer, Horace W. Schmahl, a private detective who had been hired by the Hiss defense team, who reported on the Hiss defense strategy to the government.

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Other information which had been withheld from Hiss and his lawyers included the FBI's knowledge of Chambers's homosexuality and the intensive FBI surveillance of Hiss, which included phone taps and mail openings (none of which showed any indication that Hiss was a spy or a Communist.)

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As for the "Pumpkin Papers," the five rolls of microfilm that Nixon had described as evidence of the "most serious series of treasonable activities ? in the history of America," the FOIA releases showed one roll of microfilm was completely blank, and information on two rolls of microfilm were largely not only unclassified but were about topics such as life rafts and fire extinguishers, information which was easily obtainable at any time from the open shelves at the Bureau of Standards. 1975 Hiss was readmitted to the Massachusetts State Bar Association.

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