The Case of Alger Hiss Revisited

THE INSTITUTE FOR THE STUDY OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION SUMMER 2019 THE PAPERS IN THE PUMPKIN: THE CASE OF ALGER HISS REVISITED

ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 Alger Hiss 1904-1996

ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 Lauchlin Currie (1902-1993)

ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 Harry Dexter White 1892-1948

ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 Lawrence Duggan 1905-1948

ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 Duncan Chaplin Lee 1913-1988 #2 at the OSS

ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 Elizabeth Bentley 1908-1963

ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 Martha Dodd (1908-1990)

ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 Ambassador William Dodd with daughter Martha

ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 “Hitler needs a woman. Hitler should have an American woman—a lovely woman could change the whole destiny of Europe. Martha, you are the woman!— Martha Dodd, quoting a member of Hitler’s entourage, in her memoir Through Embassy Eyes (1939)

ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 Meredith Gardner 1912-2002

ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 Codebreakers at Arlington Hall

ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 “He was a quiet, scholarly man, entirely unaware of the awe in which he was held by other cryptanalysts. He used to tell me how he worked on the matches in his ofﬁce, and how a pipe-smoking Englishman named Philby used to regularly visit him and peer over his should and admire the progress he was making.” —Peter Wright

ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 Julius Rosenberg (1918-1953)

ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 Harold Ware 1889-1935

ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 “Harold Ware was a frustrated farmer. The soil was in his pores. Unlike most American communists, who managed to pass from one big city to another without seeing anything in the intervening spaces, Ware was absorbed in the land and its problems. He held that, with the deepening of the agricultural crisis and the rapid mechanziation of agriculture, the time had come for revolutionary organization among farmers.” —Whitakker Chambers, on Harold Ware

ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 Lee Pressman 1906-1969

“In my desire to see the destruction of Hitlerism and the improvement of economic conditions here at home, I joined a Communist group in Washington, D. C., about 1934.”

ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 J. Peters (Sandor Golberger) (1894-1990) aka “Alexander Stevens”

ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 “Once the New Deal was in full swing, Hal Ware was like a man who bought a farm sight unseen only to discover that the crops are all in and ready to harvest. All that he had to do was to hustle them into the barn. The barn in this case was the Communist Party. In the AAA, Hal found a bumper crop of incipient or registered Communists. On its legal staff were Lee Pressman, Alger Hiss and John Abt …” —Whitakker Chambers

ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 “By 1934, the Ware Group had developed into a tightly organized underground, managed by a directory of seven men. In time it included a number of secret sub-cells whose total number I can only estimate—probably about seventy-five Communists. Sometimes they were visited officially by J. Peters who lectured them on Communist organization and Leninist theory and advised them on general policy and specific problems. For several of them were so placed in the New Deal agencies (notably Alger Hiss, Nathan Witt, John Abt and Lee Pressman) that they were in a position to influence policy at several levels.” —Whitakker Chambers

ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 Whitakker Chambers by David Levine

ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 Lionel Trilling 1905-1975

ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 Jacques Barzun (1907-2012)

ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 Ignace Reiss (1899-1937) “Suddenly, revolutionists with a lifetime of devoted activity would pop out, like rabbits from a burrow, with the GPU on their heels… Krivitsky from Amsterdam, Reiss from Switzerland. Not that Reiss fled. Instead, a brave and lonely man, he sent his single-handed defiance to Stalin: Murderer of the Kremlin cellars, I herewith return my decorations and resume my freedom of action… It was foredoomed that sooner or later the door of a GPU limousine would swing open and Reiss’s body with the bullets in the defiant brain would tumble out…”—Whitakker Chambers

ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 Walter Krivitsky 1899-1941

ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 Juliet Stuart Poyntz 1886-1937

ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 Adolf A. Berle 1895-1971

ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 At the State Department 1940

ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 Leaving for Yalta, 1945

ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 Custodian of the UN Charter 1946

ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 “Alger Hiss was a legendary birder. As a young New Dealer in Washington, he once saw a prothonotary warbler on the banks of the Potomac. It was a rare, thrilling ﬁnd, and he told his friends about it. At the HUAC hearings—when Chambers was trying to establish his long intimacy and political complicity with Hiss—Chambers privately told the Committee of Hiss’s enthusiasm for birds, for the warbler in particular. When Hiss was asked, seemingly in passing, about the warbler, he responded that, yes, he had seen one and wasn’t that remarkable? Yes, it was, thought young Richard Nixon and the rest of the HUAC members, indeed it was. From there the Hiss story began to unravel.” —David Remnick

ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 “The Pumpkin Papers consist of 65 pages of retyped secret State Department documents, four pages in Hiss’s own handwriting of copied State Department cables, and five rolls of developed and undeveloped 35 mm film. The film included 58 frames, mostly photos of State and Navy Department documents. The State Department documents dealt with a wide variety of subjects, including U.S. intentions with respect to the Soviet Union, the Spanish Civil War, and Germany’s takeover of Austria. Other frames dealt with subjects that hardly seem the stuff of spy novels, such as diagrams of fire extinguishers and life rafts. All of the documents that bore dates came from the period from January 5 through April 1, 1938.”

ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 But there was also a cable sent in code to the State Department’s American ambassador to France, William C. Bullitt, who was close to FDR. Sumner Welles, undersecretary of state during the period when the documents were copied, testiﬁed that the Bullitt cable had been transmitted in the most secret codes used at that time, and that possession of the cable would have enabled a foreign government to break the American code.

ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 Sumner Welles

ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 Ambassador William C. Bullitt

ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 “Hiss was identiﬁed as ALES in 1988 by Oleg Gordievsky, a high-ranking KGB agent who defected to the West in 1985. Gordievsksy wrote that ‘a handful of the most important agents were run individually [and not through spy networks.} Among them was Alger Hiss (code-named ALES) whose wartime controller was the leading NKVD illegal in the Unites States, Ishak Abdulovich Akhmerov.’ This reference to Hiss as ALES occurs more than six years before the release of the VENONA transcript, adding to its credibility.”

ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 “As the Great Patriotic War approached its end, the most valuable Soviet political intelligence agent in the United States was a high-ﬂying young diplomat Alger Hiss, agent ALES of the GRU…. At the conference of the Big Three in February 1945, Stalin had an extraordinary encounter with Hiss, which remains unique in intelligence history. As he looked across the conference table in the Livadia Palace, he could see agent ALES just behind Roosevelt’s right shoulder. Stalin, had, no doubt, already read Hiss’s brieﬁng on the US negotiating position at Yalta.” —Christopher Andrews, The Secret World

ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 “In the course of this work I began natural to form bonds of personal friendship and I had to conceal from them my inner thoughts. I used my Marxist philosophy to establish in my mind two separate compartments. One compartment in which I allowed myself to make friendships, to have personal relations, to help people and to be in all personal ways the kind of man I wanted to be and the kind of man which, in a personal way, I had been before with my friends in or near the Communist Party. I could be free and easy and happy with other people without fear of disclosing myself because I knew that the other compartment would step in if I approached the danger point. I could forget the other compartment and still rely on it. It appeared to me at the time that I had become a “free man” because I had succeeded in the other compartment to establish myself completely independent of the surrounding forces of society. Looking back at it now the best way of expressing it seems to be to call it a controlled schizophrenia.”—Klaus Fuchs

ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019 ThursdayAugust 15, 2019