Was Alger Hiss 'Ales'?

Nathaniel Tapley

On October 14th 1992, Dmitri Volkogonov, head of the combined Russian intelligence

services' archives, wrote a letter to Alger Hiss, in which he said that, after trawling through all

available Russian intelligence archives: “Not a single document, and a great amount of material

[has] been studied, substantiates the allegations that Mr A. Hiss collaborated with the intelligence

services of the Soviet Union.”1, At one stroke, he seemed to have put to bed a controversy that had

raged for half a century: whether or not Alger Hiss had been a Soviet spy when he worked at the

U.S. State Department. However, despite this reasonably categorical denial, today most Americans

believe that Alger Hiss was a spy, that he did betray his country, and that he deserved to go to

prison. What changed?

The release and translation of the VENONA decrypts, a series of messages between Russian

intelligence operatives from 1942-46, have proved to be the deciding factor. Public intellectuals

whose reputations hang on Hiss' guilt have seized upon them as proof of it. In their book on the

subject, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr suggested that Russian agent ALES, referred to in a

transmission of 19442, was actually Alger Hiss3. Weinstein did not go quite as far, calling the

evidence that Hiss was ALES “persuasive but not conclusive”.

The VENONA decrypt is particularly important because of its date. Chambers had only ever

asserted that Hiss had been a Communist and a spy in the late-1930s, after which they had not seen

each other. The date on VENONA 1822 is March 1945. If ALES is Hiss then not only was does it

suggest that Chambers was right, but it also means that Hiss was spying for the Russians during the

Yalta Conference, when he was pivotal in setting up the United Nations (he was Secretary General

of the united Nations Conference on International Organization). The significance and literal

meanings of the VENONA decrypts have been hotly debated, but the public perception that Alger

1 Cited in Allen Weinstein, Perjury (New York: Random House, 1997, 2nd edition) (hereafter referred to as
'Weinstein'), pp. 505-6
2 Venona decrypt 1822
3 John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (New Haven, 1999), pp. 171-2
Hiss was ALES has led to a reversal in his reputation. It is reasonable to ask, then: was Alger Hiss

ALES?

The first piece of evidence is that fact that, in 1990, Oleg Gordievsky, a former colonel in the

KGB and British double-agent, said that Alger Hiss was a Russian spy, and that his code name had

been ALES4. This, coming separately from the Venona evidence may seem quite compelling. If a

high-ranking officer in the KGB says it, and then, independently, years later, a decrypted document

seems to suggest the same thing, then can one not reasonably assume it to be true? As Weinstein

says:

How else to account for Oleg Gordievsky's identification in 1988, over half a
decade before the decoded VENONA telegram was made public, of Hiss's Soviet
alias as 'ALES'?5

The answer is, by checking the footnotes. As ably demonstrated by Eric Alterman6, the source

for Gordievsky's statement is Thomas Powers, who received the information from an ex-CIA

operative who had seen VENONA 1822, at the bottom of which is the note made by a CIA

operative: “[ii] ALES: probably Alger Hiss.”7 Thus, a CIA assumption gains credibility by being

reported by a defected Russian spy, and the VENONA transcript becomes its own verification.

We should also take into account that Gordievsky has a track record for baselessly smearing

left-wing politicians, by saying that they were involved with the KGB. The Sunday Times had to

pay an undisclosed amount of damaged after it reported Gordievsky's accusation that Michael Foot

had been a KGB agent, codenamed: BOOT8. As well as being a double agent and an ex-KGB

officer, Gordievsky was also at the time a regular guest on game shows, and had to maintain his

exposure in the public eye with occasional outrageous comments, like:

Just listen with attention to the ideological nuances on Radio 4, BBC television, and the BBC

World Service, and you will realise that communism is not a dying creed.9

Weinstein has since written a book with Alexander Vassiliev, claiming that there are two other
4 Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), pp. 285-6
5 Weinstein, pp. 511
6 Eric Alterman, “I Spy With One Little Eye”, The Nation, April 26, 1996
7 VENONA 1822, 30 March, 1945, cable sent from Washington to Moscow.
8 Rhys Williams, “Sunday Times pays Foot damages over KGB claim”, The Independent, 8 July 1995
9 Oleg Gordievsky, letter to The Daily Telegraph, 3 August, 2005
sources from NKVD files that state that Hiss is ALES10. However, no one but Weinststein or his

translator, Vassiliev, has ever seen these documents. Of the 1099 footnotes in The Haunted Wood,

1049 are to documents that no one else has access to. There simply is no way of assessing the

claims made in the book. Anthony Summers, in his biography of Nixon, when reviewing

Weinstein's evidence: “The identification of ALES as Hiss is suggestive but must for now be

regarded as tentative.”11

There are facts to do with the codename itself that suggest the reverse: that ALES cannot be

Hiss. The first is that Hiss' name is mentioned in a GRU cable from 194312 spelled out in the Roman

alphabet, rather than in cyrillic script: HISS. This suggests that it was a name with which the GRU

were unfamiliar, which would hardly be the case had Hiss been spying for them for a decade by that

point. As spies were always (as far as we know) referred to in all of the other decrypts only by their

codenames, and never by their actual names, this appearance of Hiss' actual name would tend to

support the theory that he was not a spy. This same cable includes five codenames for other 'assets',

but refers to Hiss in the Roman alphabet, by his actual name.

Weinstein also argues that the spy known as LAWYER was Hiss13. He gives no evidence for

this, but asserts it wherever he finds mention of LAWYER. Thus, in his enthusiasm for portraying

Hiss as guilty of espionage, Weinstein has managed to give him something no other agent in

America at the time had: multiple code names. No other contemporary agent is known by two code

names. Whatever other conclusions we come to, it seems almost certain that, whether or not Hiss is

either LAWYER or ALES, he cannot be both.

In their 2007 paper, Kai Bird and Svetlana Chervonnaya argue that, rather than being Hiss, the

agent described as ALES, is a much better fit for another State Department official: Wilder Foote.

Haynes attempts to dismiss this by suggesting that, because there is no other mention of Foote

having been a Communist, he probably wasn't one, whatever other evidence might arise14 In a
10 Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America – The Stalin Era (New
York: Random House, 1999)
11 Anthony Summers, The Arrogance of Power, (New York: Penguin, 2000), pp. 77
12 VENONA 1579
13 Weinstein, pp. 182-3
14 John Earl Haynes, “Ales: Hiss, Foote, Stettinius?”, http://www.johnearlhaynes.org/page63.html , 7th June 2007
subsequent article15 Haynes and Klehr attempt to enumerate the ways in which Hiss is a better fit to

be ALES than Foote. Their main contention seems to be that:

There is no credible evidence that Wilder Foote was a member of the

Communist Party. He does not show up in memoir literature of party veterans,
in records of the party that are accessible in archives, or as a subject of interest
of various congressional investigating committees.16

In other words, they do not believe Foote could have been involved in subterfuge and

deception because he successfully concealed any record of subterfuge and deception.

There are, essentially, seven factual assertions made about ALES in VENONA 1822 (Haynes

and Klehr count six17). Haynes and Klehr suggest that there is no evidence to suggest that Foote is a

more likely candidate than Hiss on the basis of these facts. However, their methodology is flawed,

they persistently rely on the remarkably flawed and self-contradictory testimony of Whittaker

Chambers. When the facts contradict Chambers, Haynes offers:

Likely someone will make something of the difference between 1935 in Venona
1822 and 1936 in Chambers’ account, but minor discrepancies in remembered
chronology (Ales remembering in 1945 when he entered into a GRU connection,
Chambers remembering in 1948 when he and Hiss connected to GRU) are common,
and most research historians know not to regard a date someone remembers ten or
fifteen years after the fact as precise (close, probably, but not precise). 18

That is: “It is true because it is corroborated by Chambers, except when it is not, but one can

hardly expect Chambers to remember things like that after ten to fifteen years.” I suggest we

examine each factual point separately, and seeing to whom it best applies.

Haynes and Klehr depend for their analysis on their assumption that the agent codenamed

RUBLE is Harold Glasser. I have not made this assumption because Glasser was not in Italy when

we know RUBLE was. Haynes and Klehr assert that Glasser was RUBLE on the back of The

Gorsky Memo19. The Gorsky Memo is a list of U.S. Sources (not spies) used by Russian

intelligence. If we are to take the evidence of this memo as fact, then we should also accept another
15 John Earl Haynes & Harvey Klehr, “'Ales' Is Still Hiss: The Wilder Foote Red Herring”, 2007 Symposium on
Cryptologic History, 19 October 2007
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid.
18 Haynes, “Ales: Hiss, Foote, Stettinius”
19 KGB file 43173 vol. 2 (v), pp. 46 - 55
point it makes: that Alger Hiss was a source (not spy) whose codename was LEONARD.

LEONARD makes no other appearance in the VENONA transcripts, making it very unlikely that he

was a spy. Interestingly, The Gorsky Memo, a document that pertains directly to Alger Hiss, and

mentions him directly, was never referred to in The Haunted Wood, during the research for which it

was first unearthed by Vassiliev and Weinstein. At the libel trial he launched (and lost) against John

Lowenthal, Vassiliev suggested that its omission from the book was Weinstein's decision, and that

he found it surprising: “I put every document in... to let Allen make up his own mind... To preserve

his scientific correctness I wanted him to read as much of the documents as possible.”20

These, then are the factual assertions made in VENONA 1822 and the Gorsky Cable21, and an

examination of to whom they apply best:

1) ALES has worked with the NEIGHBOURS continuously since 1935. Chambers stated

definitively that Hiss had no contact with the GRU before 1937, and that prior to that he had not

been a spy22. Foote was a journalist and editor of newspapers which hired many who were suspected

of Communism. Result: Inconclusive, tending towards Foote.

2) ALES has worked with a group of NEIGHBOURS probationers, mainly his family. Many

have assumed that this referred to Donald and Priscilla Hiss, although there is no evidence that it

does. Members of Foote's family who were likely to have been Communists have not been

identified. Result: Inconclusive, tending towards Hiss.

3) ALES provides only military information – As a member of the State Department, Hiss

did not have access to military information. Foote had access to everything that Edward Stettinius,

Secretary of State, had access to. Result: Clearly in favour of Foote.

4) ALES does not produce materials on the BANK (State Department) often - Hiss had

access to little else. Foote was involved in lend-lease. Result: Clearly favours Foote.

5) ALES has been working with POL - We do not know who POL was. Result –

inconclusive.
20 Vassiliev interview with Susan Butler, Ct JB 3:418
21 KGB File 43173, vol. 1, pp.88
22 HUAC Hearings, pp. 563-86
 6) ALES and group were recently decorated by the Soviet military - If this happens, as

seems likely, in Moscow at the Bolshoi Ballet, it could apply equally to Hiss or Foote. Result:

inconclusive, could have just as easily been either.

7) ALES thanked in Moscow by Vyshinski – Result: inconclusive, could apply equally to

either.

8) ALES had not returned from Mexico City on March 5, 1945 - Hiss had returned to

Washington. Foote had not. Result: clearly favours Foote.

9) ALES and RUBLE in KARL's group -Chambers said that his code name had been

KARL. He famously said that Hiss was in his group; he never mentioned Wilder Foote. Result –

clearly favours Hiss.

I have assigned the following points: 0.5 for inconclusive, tending towards either, 1 for clearly

favouring, 2 for definite favouring. This gives the following scores: Hiss - 1.5, Foote – 3.5. On

balance, then, having weighed up the factual claims made by the VENONA decrypts, and weighing

them against the facts we know, it appears that Foote is more likely to have been ALES than Hiss.

The argument is now more often made by those who have made careers out of associating

Hiss with Soviet spying that it does not matter who ALES is. Chambers' evidence, and that of the

trials stands as enough to convict Hiss. Weinstein says: “But this single newly available document

does not alter the extensive underlying fabric of evidence”23 and Haynes echoes him “the point

ought to be clear that the Ales messages, as interesting as they are, are but a few stones on a large

rock pile of evidence.”24

This episode is still fought about bitterly. As Whittaker Chambers said at the time: “All the

politics of our time, including the politics of war, will be the politics of this crisis.”25 It is more than

that: it is central to the current debates on the role of the United States in the world, enhanced

interrogation, anything that smacks of the New Deal. As Jacob Weisberg says: “Listening in, you

23 Weinstein, pp.512
24 Haynes, “Ales: Hiss, Foote, Stettinius?”
25 Whittaker Chambers, Notes From the Underground (Washington: Regnery, 1997), Chambers to de Toledano 3 May,
1956
get the sense that these are less a posthumous sorting out of the cold war than a sublimated

continuation of it.”26

However, the identity of ALES has been the core of the right-wing case against Alger Hiss for

much of the last fifteen years, and has formed a constant refrain in the public discussions of the

case. As more documentary evidence emerges, it has become clearer that the identification of Alger

Hiss with ALES is shaky, at best, and ideologically-motivated, at worst. ALES probably was not

Alger Hiss, and perhaps the most telling evidence for that is the fact that those historians who have

most vociferously said that he was, now claim that it doesn't matter whether he was or not.

26 Cited in Susan Jacoby, Alger Hiss And the Battle For History, (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2009),
pp. 206