THE SPY OF THE CENTURY

An American died last week, aged 92, after 50 years of denying

treason. But, just before his death, James Srodes found

more evidence that he was deadlier than Philby

Austin, Texas ON THE day before he died last week, aged 92, I happened across a new bit of evi- dence which supports the claim that Alger Hiss was an even more important spy for the Soviets than Kim Philby. Without tak- ing anything away from Philby's perfidy, it was Hiss, the archetypal American Wasp diplomatic grandee, who provided a far wider variety of military, diplomatic and strategic intelligence for Stalin over a wider frame of time. But where Hiss clearly trumps Philby is that he was poised for a rise in post-war international diplomacy to a level which would have changed the direction of the Cold War catastrophically against the West if he had not been caught in time.

Yet some US newspaper obituaries even used the code word 'controversial' to describe the charges against him; even in death, editors were scared actually to say out loud what intelligence scholars have argued for more than 50 years — Alger Hiss was a Russian spy. Yet not just any spy; for what the newspapers glossed over was just how high up in the ranks of the American power elite he was. It is hard to exaggerate just how destructive a Soviet spy Hiss was from the mid-1930s onward through the war until 1950, when he went to prison for four years for committing perjury about his espionage activities.

Compare Hiss to, say, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were electrocuted for passing secrets about the atom bomb to Russia. One could argue that they merely gave Stalin's scientists the chance to close the time gap of a few years in the race to produce their own nuclear weapons capa- bility. Other atom spies such as Klaus Fuchs, who was caught by MI6, were only pieces of the larger treachery. One has to scroll down a long list, past even Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean to reach Philby in order to find a traitor who was so strategically placed and whose flow of information to Moscow Center was close to being as all-encompassing and so harmful.

Coming out of an impeccable Johns Hopkins-Harvard background, and with impressive Baltimore family credentials, Hiss rose steadily through the State Department ranks from 1933 to the senior post of director of special political affairs, reporting directly to the then secretary of state, James Byrnes. Hiss accompanied President Roosevelt as a senior adviser at the much-compromised Yalta Conference where Eastern Europe was consigned as a Soviet prize. He was a protégé of Dean Acheson, the secretary of state who was President Truman's main Cold War strate- gist. One of Acheson's law firm partners in private life was Alger's brother, Donald.

As head of the State Department's politi- cal affairs office, as one of the senior per- sonal advisers to both Byrnes and FDR, Hiss had access to—and made use of-- the most secret of America's strategies and policies. Think of Kim Philby with a key to the front doors of the whole Downing Street warren, the Treasury, the Bank of England and Churchill's War Cabinet rooms and one gets some idea of the scope of intelligence that Hiss and his network passed on to the Russians.

In his memoirs, President Truman recalls being baffled at the Potsdam conference with Clement Attlee and Stalin, when he privately told the Russian dictator that America had the atom bomb and was about to drop it on Japan. Stalin merely turned away in boredom. And why not? In that summer of 1945, Stalin certainly knew as much if not more about America's nuclear capabilities than Harry Truman.

The Rosenbergs did not provide that information; the primitive drawings of bomb components would have been the sole province of Russian scien- tists. What Stalin knew, he got from Hiss. And he knew that Truman and other US policy- makers had decided long before not to use atomic weapons in continental Europe unless absolutely forced into it by a Red Army invasion. Using A-bombs in Asia was another matter altogether, especially in the vast mainland theatre of China. With that knowledge tucked away, historians should not wonder why, in 1949, with his own atom bomb days away from coming into service, Stal- in would nudge China's Mao to push its North Korean client's armies south of the 38th Parallel.

While this might have been enough to base Hiss's claim as spy of the century, it is not all by any means. As the war ended, the 41-year-old Hiss found himself about to be elevated to a position of such power and access to intelligence that he could have destroyed the Western alliance and handed Stalin a Cold War triumph without Russia firing a shot. In short, Hiss almost became the first secretary-general of the United Nations even as Stalin began to plot the outbreak of the Korean war.

I reached this conclusion at the end of a week of research in the papers of Drew Pearson, the pre-eminent American inves- tigative journalist of the mid-century. Those documents are housed in the Lyn- don Johnson presidential library here in Austin. In a previously undiscovered memo to his files, Pearson recalls that as early as the summer of 1945, the State Department was planning to push through the nomina- tion of Hiss to head the UN after its organ- ising conference in San Francisco. But, according to the Pearson memo, an aide to General William 'Wild Bill' Donovan, head of the wartime US spy agency, the Office of Strategic Service, was sent to warn the State Department that Hiss was named by `several of our overseas sources' as a con- duit of US secrets to the Soviets. The memo concludes that the State Depart- ment then abandoned its campaign to ele- vate Hiss and threw America's weight behind a Scandinavian bid on behalf of the Norwegian diplomat Trygve Lie, who served with pedestrian honour from 1946 to 1953.

The Kremlin had nothing to lose from the Korean war; a nuclear war in the Pacif- ic did not bother Stalin at all, not even the possibility that China's communist govern- ment might be destroyed in the process. But with Alger Hiss in the central role inside the infant United Nations, it is unlikely that the quick response of the Western Allies to the North Korean incur- sion into South Korea in 1950 would have happened at all. And the fall of South Korea would have surely stifled the seedlings of democracy just planted in Japan. The rest of the history of world democracy does not bear thinking about.

But for the time being in 1945, nothing more happened to Hiss. While he was denied the top UN post, the setback was only temporary. He went to San Francisco for the May-June conference where he was the charter session's secretary-general. There is a strange news photograph of the opening day of that historic meeting where Hiss and President Truman pose among the dignitaries from the 51 charter nations—each at separate ends of the plat- form as far away from each other as possi- ble. Yet that was in mid-1945. Hiss remained as the senior state official for United Nations affairs until 1947 when he was urged to resign.

Several other asides flow out of the Pear- son memo. First, there is little doubt that Pearson knew about Hiss's treason from early days. He was the dominant investiga- tive journalist of the time. His 'Washington Merry-Go-Round' daily columns and week- ly radio shows were studded with invariably accurate revelations of the weaknesses and foibles of the great and good. He was prominent, if not at the top of, the enemies list of every president from Herbert Hoover to Richard Nixon. He was hated by senators such as Joseph McCarthy, pursued by the FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and sued by others an astonishing 250 times for libel without ever losing a major case.

Pearson's secret was that even his ene- mies—Truman, Hoover and McCarthy included—were not above leaking authori- tative information to him when it suited. No one had better sources from Capitol Hill to the White House than Pearson, and his carefully cross-referenced files on the major players in the Cold War drama offer documentation of what others have only guessed at about the extent of Hiss's guilt.

More, the OSS leaks from General Donovan to Pearson are based on 'overseas sources' which certainly include Allen Dulles, the spy agency's chief of station in Berne for espionage against the Nazis, and an old friend of the columnist. Part of Dulles's huge success in penetrating Hitler's elaborate security apparatus lay in his cool-handed use of German communist émigrés who were interned by Vichy inside France. The man who selected agents for Dulles to be inserted at enormous risk inside the Third Reich was Noel Field, a Harvard-Yankee aristocrat who later con- fessed his role as a Soviet spy in a parallel network inside the State Department to the one run by Hiss. When Hiss was finally brought before a Congressional investigat- ing committee in 1948, Field fled to East Germany where he was arrested, accused of being a Dulles spy for the CIA, tortured and imprisoned. After Stalin's death, Field was pardoned and lived as an unrepentant Marxist in Czechoslovakia for the rest of his days. There is even speculation that Dulles, the master of the double-cross, had betrayed Field to the East German Stasi in 1949 as a way to frighten Hiss into breaking and confessing—something he steadfastly refused to do for more than 50 years.

The OSS accusations against Hiss were neither the first nor the only warnings received at the highest levels of the Ameri- can government that there was a turncoat among the top ranks. Whittaker Chambers, a seedy editor for Time magazine, went back to the FBI in 1945 to repeat a confes- sion he first made in 1942 that he had been a regular courier of top secrets from Hiss to Soviet spyniasters operating in New York. A few weeks after that revelation, President Truman was told by no less than the Canadian prime minister Mackenzie King that there was a Russian spy high inside the State Department as well as oth- ers within his own White House staff, and at the US Treasury.

King's source for the accusation and descriptions was Igor Gouzenko, a code 'clerk inside the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, who defected earlier that year and identi- fied half a dozen important moles in Tru- man's councils. King told Truman that Gouzenko had pointed to an assistant sec- retary of state who was feeding military data to Moscow. To King's surprise, Tru- man turned to Dean Acheson and said that he had thought the suspect really was an assistant to an assistant secretary. Indeed, even before the accusations were made, State Department internal security officers had complained repeatedly that Hiss had demanded and been handed crucial mili- tary and diplomatic intelligence documents that were outside his mandate and there- fore proscribed. There were even disci- plinary enquiries about documents which had gone missing after being taken out by Hiss. Yet the response of his superiors was to promote him to the very nerve centre of Western diplomatic information-sharing, giving him an opportunity to both inform and serve as a covert agent for his Kremlin masters.

There are some superficial similarities in the way the immediate superiors of both Philby and Hiss persisted in protecting even as they took steps first to neutralise them and then, at last, to bring the suspects to book. But no British foreign secretary, let alone any British prime minister, went publicly on record to vouch for Philby's honesty even as the evidence mounted.

Yet look at Hiss. An angry Harry Tru- man in 1948 denounced the charges against Hiss as 'a red herring' used by Congres- sional Republicans to sabotage his efforts to reach a conciliatory peace with Stalin. Even after his 1950 conviction for perjury (the statute of limitations had run out on wartime spy charges), Dean Acheson pledged that 'whatever the outcome' of subsequent unsuccessful appeals, 'I do not intend to turn my back on him.' Two sitting Supreme Court justices, Felix Frankfurter and Stanley Reed, appeared as character witnesses for Hiss in court. Nor were Hiss partisans merely besieged Democrats. Even after Hiss had been forced from the State Department in 1947, that most orthodox Republican, Foster Dulles—predicted to be the next secretary of state after the probable presidential election of Thomas Dewey in 1948 — used his influence to make Hiss the managing director of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, a leading establishment foreign policy think-tank in Washington.

After his release from prison in 1954, Hiss became a victim figure of Cold War mythology. In recent years the American Left has grudgingly given ground in the argument over whether the Rosenbergs and other conspirators were completely innocent. Most recently the argument has been refined to a last-ditch assertion that, whatever their guilt, they were unfairly prosecuted because they were Jews and lib- erals, and — in the final analysis — that the Soviet Union was a wartime ally and should have had free access to all of Amer- ica's strategic secrets anyway.

But Hiss has been treated deferentially both by the old Left and by America's mainstream media throughout his life. A cloud of cautious reticence hung above the public debate on his role as a Soviet spy. This was partly because he lived so much longer than the others and was combatively ready to sue for substantial damages any- one who questioned his position of inno- cence. He also benefited from his accusers being such sleazy characters. One thinks of the confessed Soviet courier Whittaker Chambers, or a young Congressman, Rich- ard Nixon, or the even more malevolent Senator Joseph McCarthy, and it is easy to see why some were more ready to doubt Hiss's guilt.

Certainly the confusing pursuit of Hiss lent credence to his claim that he had been framed. Incredible drama stirred up the case in the public mind. The Congressional hearings which brought Chambers and Hiss into confrontation were among the first to be televised to Americans at home. Cham- bers was not content with naming Hiss; in fact he denounced no fewer than nine top US officials as sources of spy material which he picked up and delivered to the NKVD (predecessor to the KGB) station in New York. Harry Dexter White, a lead- ing Treasury official, was named, so was Lauchlin Currie, a personal aide to FDR. There were mysterious deaths of potential witnesses.

Hiss at first denied under oath ever knowing or meeting Chambers. When the two were brought together, Hiss conceded that Chambers was a man known to him as `Crosley', who had rented the Hiss flat in Washington. Chambers went on television to repeat his charges in order to provoke a libel suit and Hiss obliged. In pre-trial manoeuvring, the ambitious Nixon helped Chambers recover microfilm copies of doc- uments provided by Hiss going back into the 1930s. Chambers had led investigators at night to his farm in Maryland where he had hidden the microfilm in a pumpkin in his field. The dramatic controversy over the `Pumpldn Papers' became even more bizarre when government experts announ...:ed that they had recovered the typewriter used to produce those docu- ments in the Hiss home; Hiss defence experts countercharged that the typewriter (or the Woodstock #230009 as it became known) had been a crafty fabrication by federal agents, who then planted the coun- terfeit in place of a similar Woodstock model. The whole circus became mixed in the public mind with the other spy trials going on, with emotions fired by the death of the Rosenbergs and the imprisonment of others.

By this time the anti-espionage crusade had been taken over and perverted by Sen- ator McCarthy and others, who laid charges of Marxist allegiance at anyone who caught their eye. Presidents Truman and Eisenhower, and most of their chief foreign policy advisers, were lumped into a confused conspiracy to deliver an unwitting America into the hands of the Kremlin. Even when public opinion rebelled — as when a McCarthy aide accused the entire Protestant clergy of the United States— McCarthy merely dropped that accusation and made one even more fantastic about something else.

But just as time has dulled the terrible injustices McCarthy and his acolytes visited on innocent Americans, so a stream of steady revelations about the depth and breadth of the verified Soviet spy network inside America has come into sharp focus. The real evil of McCarthy's persecutions is that today even the guilty feel they have been abused, the fans of Alger Hiss most of all. Just a month before his death, Hiss was used as a rallying cry at a two-day confer- ence called in Washington by the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Secu- rity Agency (the signals spy agency). The stated purpose of the invitation-only affair was to release the last instalment of the famous Venona papers, a series of partial decryptions of 2,900 telegrams sent to Moscow by Soviet spies and moles inside the United States during the second world war. The Venona papers, the spymasters asserted, were every bit as important a coup as Britain's Ultra unravelling of the codes which drove the Nazi secret wartime communications, which were penetrated by the famed geniuses at Bletchley Park.

The old-guard Leftists who were there seized upon admissions about the timing of the decryptions and what use was made of them. US intelligence crypto-analysts con- tinued to scrape away at the Venona mes- sages. So the debate that generated all the heat, passion and considerable shouting through the auditorium of the National War College was really about meaning and subtext. Even the cover name assigned to the decoded spy messages drew fire. Venona is a made-up word which signifies nothing; but do the documents themselves signify what the decoders assert?

The reaction to the Venona decrypts cre- ated some strange alliances. Such normally polar opposites as the establishment histo- rian Arthur Schlesinger Jr and Victor Navasky, editor of the leftist Nation, both argued on a conference panel that Venona amounts to very little indeed. `I think [the papers] tell us more about the culture of Fergie steps out. those times than about intelligence,' Schlesinger said. Navasky claimed his invi- tation was a sham to lend an ecumenical spirit to the affair. He stuck to his long- held assertion that the Rosenbergs, Hiss, Fuchs et al. were merely persecuted.

The Venona story is exciting enough, especially since several of the actual code- breakers were trotted out to tell how they extracted information out of batches of telegrams which were in enciphered num- ber series, which in turn masked complex codes, which in turn revealed messages that used euphemisms and cover names—all in Russian bureaucratese. As with Bletchley Park, a group of talented amateur linguists and academic decrypters came together across the Potomac at a former girls' school known as Arlington Hall. It was not until early in 1947 that the first cover names were pulled up in a context which suggested that the Russians might have an active web of spies working in America, inside the US government itself; indeed, inside the Army Signals operation and other counter-intelligence agencies. As the months passed, fanciful cover names were extracted by the dozens from the ciphers: Stanley (Kim Philby), Hicks (Guy Burgess), Homer (Donald Maclean), Kapitan (Franklin Roosevelt), Antenna, later changed to Liberal (Julius Rosenberg), Charlz (Klaus Fuchs) and Enormoz (the Manhattan Project) were just a few. Wash- ington is Carthage, San Francisco is Baby- lon. The Venona papers editors drew instant fire for cautiously advising that a single reference to a Soviet operative named `Ales' probably referred to Alger Hiss. The dissidents demanded, 'Says who?'

The Venona decrypts show that for many of the Americans recruited by the Soviets, Julius Rosenberg among them, the chief motive was the money grudgingly doled out by the Russian paymasters. What then, besides the psychopathic resentment and arrogance of all narcissists, motivated Alger Hiss? In their hatred for the very society which had elevated them, Hiss and Philby were twins. The real question that remains is just how far Hiss was prepared to go to hand the Western alliance over to the Soviet Union.

The answer to that and other of the Venona questions will probably come from Moscow and London before long. Several well-known British scholars are busily at work at the other end of the vast Venona document pipeline inside the KGB'S archives; this time they have the advantage of using the NKVD decryption templates and underlying code books as they try to match the intercepts with the messages in full. The final Venona story will surely have some more dramatic information including the full extent of what Hiss provided Moscow Center from his vantage point at the State Department and White House. It is unlikely, though, that the soldiers of the old Left will give up their battle as a result.