A birdwatcher excitedly reported seeing a prothonotary warbler in the “Pumpkin Patch,” stating that it was a rare bird. (It may be rare where sighted but quite common in the summer where I live, but that has nothing to do with my question.) My question is what did the sighting of this bird in the “Pumpkin Patch” have to do with the Hiss case? How did that indicate that Hiss was a spy?
This should be pretty well known, but we’ll see if i remember it correctly-
Whittaker Chambers, a former communist, claimed that Hiss was a fellow spy. Hiss was a well respected man from a prominent family, and he denied knowing Chambers at all. Chambers had mentioned that Hiss was an ardent birdwatcher, who had bragged about spotting said warbler to him at one of their meetings. During his questioning, he was casually asked about his hobby, and eagerly told the questioner the same story that Chambers had mentioned- suggesting that he was lying, and the two men did indeed know each other.
The pumpkin patch was an entirely different incident, involving hidden microfilm.
Hiss’s primary accuser, Whittaker Chambers, was trying to establish how well he knew Alger Hiss while testifying to Senate investigators. He related that Hiss, an avid birdwatcher, was exited about having spotted a Prothonotary Warbler somewhere in the Washington DC area. It turned out that one of the investigating Senators was also a birdwatcher, and this Senator made sure he asked Hiss for the record about this sighting. The question was posed in a way which made Hiss think it was small talk unrelated to the investigation; Hiss subsequently incriminated himself by corroborating Chambers’ testimony.
The “Pumpkin Patch” was unrelated to the PW. Chambers had stored papers obtained from Hiss in a hollowed out pumpkin in a pumpkin patch. The papers were incriminating because they were copies of Top Secret government documents copied on a typewriter owned by Hiss.
I’m not sure how this was incriminating.
My experience with enthusiasts (like birdwatchers) that they all talk to each other, and pass on news/gossip rapidly. So it would seem quite likely that Hiss had been repeating this story to all his birdwatching friends (just like he told this Senator), and they were passing it along to other birdwatching friends. So Chambers could have heard the story secondhand from another Washington birdwatcher. Doesn’t seem to me that this approaches a legal level of ‘incriminating’. (Of course, this was a Congressional Hearing, not a court of law.)
Also of course, this was during the “Red Scare” period of the late 1940’s and 1950’s, and the House Unamerican Activities Committee (and also McCarthy’s committee in the Senate) were hell bent on finding Commies everywhere. Didn’t really matter who said what about some bird. Hiss was “convicted” right from the start no matter what anyone said or did.
I think the evidence that Hiss was a communist is pretty strong. It’s based on the testimony of a number of different witnesses not just Chambers. So the big question is whether Hiss just sympathized with the Soviet Union or whether he was spying for the Soviet Union; the evidence that Hiss was a spy is much weaker than the evidence that he was a communist.
In the end Hiss wasn’t convicted of spying. He was convicted of perjury because he had denied he had been a communist while he was testifying under oath.
I assumed from the subject that this was some kind of Pythonesque joke.
Fascinating bit of Cold War history.
At the time of the allegations Hiss was a respected patrician diplomat and Chambers was fat journalist and there were rumors that Chambers was making it all up because he was gay for Hiss. President Truman had come out in support for Hiss. Most of the committee members believed Chambers but were reluctant to stick their necks out because Hiss was so well connected. The PW story gave Chambers credibility in their eyes and the courage to pursue the case. Chambers testified before the committee, Hiss challenged him to repeat his accusations publicly, Chambers did so and Hiss sued for defamation. Then Chambers produced the pumpkin papers, which were microfilmed copies of State Department papers that Hiss had retyped and given to Chambers to pass to Soviet Intelligence. After the defamation trial, Hiss was convicted of perjury based on the pumpkin papers and the testimony of Chambers and another ex-spy.
The bird watching story was important in that it led to the hearings but it was not important in getting Hiss convicted.
I remember something from a few decades ago when the FBI(?) files on Hiss were opened. The apologists of the day suggested Hiss was railroaded and the FBI never seriously looked for the typewriter (never found) that Hiss allegedly used to retype the “pumpkin papers”. The FBI files indicated that the agency had in fact conducted a very extensive search for the typewriter that matched the papers.
In a certain amount of irony, I believe it was Richard Nixon during the Watergate troubles was discussing legal matters and mentioned that more often than not, a perp is caught on the cover-up instead of the original crime, and specifically mentioned Alger Hiss (which IIRC he was involved in as a congressman.)
As to the OP, if Chambers were a birdwatcher perhaps he would have heard the story about the bird second-hand and claimed he heard it from Hiss - but if he was not, then it’s more likely he did hear it directly from Hiss, which contradicts Hiss’s claim of never having met. So was Chambers a bird-watcher?
Chambers was not a birdwatcher, although he related that he was “fond of birds” (so am I and several of my friends, and I have a whole book of color plates of every living parrot species, but I do not know any birdwatchers, and I would never have heard of a Prothonotary Warbler if not for the Hiss case).
The whole case against Hiss depended on close acquaintance with Chambers, a fact which Hiss denied. It is reasonable to consider the PW conversation unlikely to have arisen except between people who spent a lot of time together, and it was only one of many details about Hiss and his wife that Chambers related to support his contention that he was as close them as he claimed.
Hiss is identified as a spy by the VENONA documents: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/venona/dece_hiss.html .
This debate was closed in 1995 when the Soviet archives were open – nearly everyone accused of being a spy was, in fact, a spy. Not a “sympathizer” or an innocent railroaded social-democrat, but a person taking direct orders from Moscow on how to sabotage the United States.
Sometimes I think that it’s not so much political motives so much as the desire to prolong an engaging argument with a lot of years invested in it that makes people unwilling to admit that it’s a settled question.
PS- I have referred to a “Senator” as being the birdwatching investigator. Thay might be true, but the initial investigation which exposed Hiss was made by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (often abbreviated HUAC), so it is more likely that the investigating birdwatcher was a Congressman.
This is incorrect. McCarthyism was a later, 1950s phenomenon. HUAC was not nearly as reckless as McCarthy, and did not proceed without reasonably firm evidence obtained by extensive investigation. Also, Hiss’s first trial ended with a hung jury, belying any nonsense about his being “convicted right from the start”.
What has been left out of this thread is Hiss was assumed to be lying that he never knew Chambers. Hiss’ response (later in the investigation) was that he knew Chambers by another name so of course he didn’t know “Chambers”.
Yes, Hiss and his wife claimed very brief 1930s acquaintance with someone named “Crosley” who might or might not have been the same person who was making the accusations of the 1940s.
The VENONA documents confirm that the Soviets had a American spy whose codename was Ales. But Ales was never explicitly identified. So it’s certainly possible that Alger Hiss was Ales (personally, I think he probably was) but it’s not a proven fact.
And the statute of liability had expired for his spying activities, so they could then not try him for that. I brought up this topic because of a recent column concerning Weinstein’s book: *Perjury: the Hiss-Chambers Case *. http://digitalcommons.law.wne.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1630&context=lawreview&sei-redir=1&referer=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bing.com%2Fsearch%3Fq%3Dweinstein%253A%2BPerjury%26src%3DIE-TopResult%26FORM%3DIETR02%26conversationid%3D#search=“weinstein%3A%20Perjury”
I don’t know if we can ever uncover the truth behind this. Any or all of the witnesses could have been coerced, the Pumpkin Patch photos could have been planted. If he was a spy he had brass balls, he had plenty of opportunities to run.
It’s not like people just decided “Ales kind of sounds like Alger Hiss.” “Ales” is described as a State Department employee with personal access to FDR who went to the Yalta Conference and then visited Moscow immediately afterwards. The only person who fits that set of facts is Alger Hiss. I’m not sure what you think a “proven fact” is but “logically demonstrating that X can only equal Y” is in fact proof.
And, of course, there are other sources, such as KGB defector Oleg Gordievsky, who were in a position to know what the codenames meant and specifically said “Ales was Alger Hiss.”
Again, I know people in the 50s to the 80s liked to argue about this. It was a fun mystery with all sorts of competing explanations. Ever since the 90s, it has been a closed question. Hiss was a traitor, working for a foreign power with the intention of overthrowing American democracy in favor of a Moscow-controlled dictatorship. So was nearly everyone else accused of being so in the 40s and 50s. “There’s a wave of paranoia about nonexistent Soviet espionage” was a calculated disinformation campaign by the Soviets to try to hide the extent of their spying and make it more difficult to investigate it in the future. We know this because the Soviets themselves identified all their spies in documents that were available in the 1990s. It’s basically creationism to deny it at this point.
Remember that the idealists of the 20’s and 30’s were true believers. They saw the paradise of the future being formed in the Soviet Union, the rich leeches were tossed out and the workers took control of their own means of production. I recall reading an interview with one of the defectors still living in Moscow in the late 1980’s or early 90’s, who specifically said the thing that convinced him and so many other British moles was the promise that homosexuality was not illegal in the new Worker’s Paradise.
Of course, once these idealists were hooked into advancing the cause of world liberation, once it was too late, once the Soviet spy network had so much dirt on them that they could not back out, they may have realizes what Stalin did to a paradise that never existed in the first place. ( The British fellow mentioned that by the time Stalin made homosexuality illegal it was too late to back out of spy role).
So I suspect a lot of people were like Hiss - their youthful enthusiasm for a better world produced associations that later, in the cold war, could get them on a blacklist. No doubt Russia exploited this.
The Rosenbergs’ sons, for example, were well on their way to a campaign of demanding apologies and an admission their parents were railroaded and hanged even though innocent due to the paranoia of the times. Then the Russian archives and Venona files proved the Rosenbergs were spies all along. (One item I read suggested they threatened Julius that they would charge, convict, and execute his wife too if he did not cooperate. Since she was complicit, they had the grounds. Either he did not believe they would carry out their threat, or “the cause” was more important than his wife. )