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Alger Hiss at Yalta a Reassessment of Hiss’S Arguments Against Including Any of the Soviet Republics As Initial UN Members

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Alger Hiss at Yalta a Reassessment of Hiss’S Arguments Against Including Any of the Soviet Republics As Initial UN Members Alger Hiss at Yalta A Reassessment of Hiss’s Arguments against Including Any of the Soviet Republics as Initial UN Members ✣ Henry D. Fetter The decades-long controversy over whether State Department official Alger Hiss was a Soviet agent, and the nature and extent of his activities if he was, has largely been fought with documents—“immutable evidences,” as U.S. At- torney Thomas F. Murphy labeled them in his summation at the close of Hiss’s second trial for perjury—from the “Pumpkin Papers” at the contro- versy’s initiation to the Venona decryptions of Soviet intelligence documents that clinched the case for Hiss’s guilt in the eyes of most historians.1 Amid that flood of documentation, one item continues to hold an intriguing place in the debate, a short memorandum Hiss prepared during the Yalta conference entitled “Arguments against Inclusion of Any of the Soviet Republics among the Initial Members [of the United Nations]” (hereinafter referred to as the Hiss Memorandum).2 Hiss, at the request of Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., was participating in his capacity as acting director of the State Department Office of Special Political Affairs. His remit was to lend his ex- pertise to the conference’s deliberations on the proposed postwar international organization, about which key questions of structure and operation remained unresolved. 1. U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, “United States v. Alger Hiss,” Transcript of Record (hereinafter cited as “Hiss Transcript”), pp. 4672–4673. That the controversy continues, how- ever, is attested by a recent argument for Hiss’s innocence. Joan Brady, Alger Hiss Framed: A New Look at the Case That Made Nixon Famous (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2016). For Hiss’s guilt, see Har- vey Klehr, “The Agony of Alger,” The New Criterion, Vol. 36, No. 1 (September 2017), pp. 64–68 (reviewing Brady’s book). 2. United States Delegation Memorandum, Attachment 1, “Arguments against Inclusion of Any of the Soviet Republics among the Initial Members,” in U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States: The Conferences at Malta and Yalta, 1945 (hereinafter referred to as FRUS, Malta and Yalta), pp. 746–747. In a footnote to the memorandum, the editors of the volume state, “author not indicated but presumably Hiss” (p. 746 n. 2). When the volume was published in 1955, Hiss confirmed that he was the author. “Hiss Identifies Yalta Notation,” The New York Times,17March 1955, p. 79. Journal of Cold War Studies Vol. 22, No. 1, Winter 2020, pp. 46–88, https://doi.org/10.1162/jcws_a_00925 © 2020 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 46 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws_a_00925 by guest on 30 September 2021 Alger Hiss at Yalta As the composition of the U.S. delegation to the upcoming Big Three conference at Yalta was being determined in late December 1944 and early January 1945, Stettinius suggested to President Franklin D. Roosevelt that “we might want someone who had been a keener student” than Stettinius himself “of the technical angles of the international organization.” Hiss, who had served as secretary of the Dumbarton Oaks “conversations” among the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and China on that subject in the summer of 1944, was designated to fill the role.3 Hiss later described his activities at Yalta: I was primarily responsible for the United Nations topics which were rather nu- merous and of considerable importance. The most important objective was to obtain agreement on voting procedure in the Security Council. Other topics were fixing the date and place of the United Nations Conference and deter- mining the governments to be invited. The determination of nations to be invited was of particular importance to us as we wanted all of the Latin Ameri- can countries to be invited; the Russians on the other hand wanted only nations actually at war with the Axis.”4 The subject matter of the Hiss Memorandum lies squarely within the range of issues on which Stettinius had expressed the need for the assistance that Hiss was assigned to provide. The memorandum is dated 8 February 1945, the day after the fourth Yalta conference plenary session, during which Soviet Foreign Minister Vy- acheslav Molotov had demanded membership in the contemplated postwar international organization for “three or at least two of the Soviet Republics as original members” (specifically, the Ukrainian, Belorussian, and Lithua- nian republics).5 The memorandum has been characterized by, among many others, Roosevelt’s Yalta interpreter Charles E. Bohlen as a “closely reasoned argument against admitting the Soviet republics.”6 3. Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., Calendar Notes, 30 December 1944, in Box 243, Edward Reilly Stettinius Jr. Papers, 1918–1949, Accession MSS 2723, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, Charlottesville, Virginia (hereinafter referred to as “Stettinius Papers”); and Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., Summary of Conversation, 1 January 1945, in Box 236, “Telephone Summaries and Transcripts 1–6 January 1945 (Hyde file, Telephone Summaries etc.),” Stettinius Papers. 4. Alger Hiss, “Memorandum of Duties in the Department of State 1944 until January 15, 1947” [prepared for his lawyers], ca. September 1948, cited in Allen Weinstein, Perjury: The Hiss–Chambers Case, rev. ed. (New York: Random House, 1997), p. 313. All references to Weinstein’s Perjury are to the revised (1997) edition. 5. Charles E. Bohlen, Minutes of Fourth Plenary Session, 7 February 1945, in FRUS, Malta and Yalta, p. 712. 6. Charles E. Bohlen, Witness to History 1929–1969 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1973), p. 194. 47 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws_a_00925 by guest on 30 September 2021 Fetter My aim in this article is not to assess the nature and extent of Hiss’s role at Yalta or the claims that have been made by former Soviet intelligence officers that Hiss undermined U.S. interests by disclosing confidential information about U.S. positions and objectives to Soviet officials during the conference.7 My goal here is more limited: to explore whether the memorandum is evi- dence that Hiss was not a Soviet agent (at least at the time of the conference) or whether it is no more than a “puzzling anomaly,” as one proponent of Hiss’s guilt has characterized it.8 The exploration involves consideration of the emer- gence of the Soviet republics issue at the Dumbarton Oaks “conversations” in August- September 1944, along with U.S. State Department and presidential preparations for Yalta, the decision to include Hiss in the U.S. delegation at Yalta, and the way the deliberations on—and resolution of—that issue at Yalta became entangled with issues concerning voting procedure in the UN Secu- rity Council (the veto question) and the right of countries, principally in Latin America, to become founding members of the UN despite their failure to have embraced the United Nations Declaration prior to the Yalta conference. The article then analyzes the text of the memorandum more closely than it has been examined before and considers whether the circumstances of its preparation, as well as its contents, are consistent with the evidence that Hiss was still a Soviet agent at the time of the Yalta conference.9 When the mem- orandum was released to the public in 1955 as part of the overall collection of Yalta papers, Hiss claimed that it expressed both “his personal convictions” and the official policy of the State Department.10 My analysis here does not contend, as some have alleged, that Hiss was responsible for the U.S. decision to support initial UN membership for the Ukrainian and Byelorussian Soviet Republics. However, it does consider the extent to which arguments put forth in the memorandum diverged from the position of the State Department and thereby raise the possibility that Hiss took advantage of the opportunity he enjoyed as a trusted and expert adviser to promotee a case that was at odds with U.S. interests. 7. As noted (but discounted) in S. M. Plokhy, Yalta: The Price of Peace (New York: Viking, 2010), p. 357. 8. Christina Shelton, Alger Hiss: Why He Chose Treason (New York: Threshold Editions, 2012), p. 149. 9. For Hiss’s alleged espionage activities on behalf of the Soviet Union at the time of Yalta, see John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev, Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), pp. 18–27; Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood (New York: Random House, 1999), pp. 267–269; and Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield (New York: Basic Books, 2001), pp. 132–134. 10. “Hiss Confirms His Yalta Memo,” NewYorkHeraldTribune, 18 March 1955, p. 6; and “Hiss Identifies Yalta Notation,” p. 79. 48 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws_a_00925 by guest on 30 September 2021 Alger Hiss at Yalta The Hiss Memorandum in the Hiss Debate The question of the admission of several Soviet republics, in addition to the Soviet Union itself, to “initial membership” in the UN has played so long a part in the Hiss controversy that it may even be said to belong to the “prehis- tory” of the Hiss case. As early as July 1945, American Affairs, a journal with a limited circulation, published an article by Isaac Don Levine, a confidant of Whittaker Chambers, claiming that, during the Yalta conference, Premier Stalin found an occasion, at the termination of a session, to chat with President Roosevelt when all the other American delegates, with the exception of one had left the room.
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