Bart Barnes
ALGER HISS (92), the former State Department official whose 1950 perjury conviction for lying to a grand jury about communist espionage activity became one of the most celebrated and dramatic spy cases of this century, died last week in New York. He had emphysema.
Hiss, who served almost four years in prison after exhausting his appeals, insisted until his death that he was innocent, and his case stirred passion and controversy that continued for more than four decades.
It propelled Richard Nixon into national prominence when Nixon, as a young Republican congressman from California, orchestrated the House Un-American Activities Committee investigation into charges by Whittaker Chambers, a writer for Time magazine, that Hiss had passed copies of stolen State Department documents to him as part of a communist espionage operation during the 1930s.
Hiss was first named in public as a communist spy in 1948. At 43, he had left the State Department and had recently been appointed president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, one of the United States’s most prestigious, private foreign-policy organisations.
Chambers told a hearing of the House Un- American Activities Committee that he had been a courier of copies of stolen government documents in a communist espionage operation during the 1930s and that Hiss had been one of his suppliers. The next day, Hiss wired the chairman of the committee demanding a chance to deny Chambers’s charges in public and under oath, and later testified that he had never been a communist, never participated in espionage and never knew anyone named Whittaker Chambers.
Hiss’s testimony to the committee seemed convincing. Several committee members feared they had blundered seriously by permitting Chambers to testify in public without checking his story, and they were ready to drop the case.
But Nixon reasoned that although the committee might never be able to establish whether Hiss had been a communist or a spy, it should be able to determine whether he had known Chambers. If Hiss was lying about the one, he was probably lying about the other, Nixon said, and persuaded the committee to name him chairman of a subcommittee to continue the investigation.
In December 1948, the grand jury indicted Hiss on two counts of perjury, charging that he had lied in denying that he had given Chambers copies of confidential State Department documents and that he had lied in denying that he spoke to Chambers in February and March of 1938. Hiss was convicted on January 1950, and was sentenced to five years in prison. He was released with time off for good behavior in November 1954.