The Alger Hiss Case and the Prothonotary Warbler

[wevets]

@Haberdash

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.

The first paragraph is correct, but the second is false.

@Prof. Harvey Klehr

I was the first American to gain access to the previously closed files of the Communist International and the CPUSA itself, located in Moscow, in the summer of 1992.
…

There is no doubt that Alger Hiss was a Soviet spy and continued to provide information through the Yalta Conference which he attended as an advisor to FDR.
…

All told, some 350 Americans turn out to have worked for Soviet intelligence during World War II- a time when we were allies. American counter-intelligence eventually identified more than 125 of these agents- but were never able to nail down who the other 200 plus were. Virtually every one of the people accused of being a Soviet agent by Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers- both reviled and denounced for making false charges not only by political partisans in the 1940s but by historians ever since- turns out to have been a Soviet spy.
…

But if McCarthy was right about some of the large issues, he was wildly wrong on virtually all of the details. There is no indication that he had even a hint of the Venona decryptions, so he did not base his accusations on the information in them. Indeed, virtually none of the people that McCarthy claimed or alleged were Soviet agents turn up in Venona. He did identify a few small fry who we now know were spies but only a few. And there is little evidence that those he fingered were among the unidentified spies of Venona. Many of his claims were wildly inaccurate; his charges filled with errors of fact, misjudgments of organizations and innuendoes disguised as evidence. He failed to recognize or understand the differences among genuine liberals, fellow-traveling liberals, Communist dupes, Communists and spies- distinctions that were important to make. The new information from Russian and American archives does not vindicate McCarthy.

Source: http://www.raleighspyconference.com/news/news_11-07-05.aspx

Relevance: Professor Klehr was the one who located and brought files related to the Communist International and the Communist Party of the USA out of Moscow in the 1990s.

While this statement: “Almost everyone accused by Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers of being a spy, was, in fact, a spy” is true.

This statement: “Everyone accused of being a spy, was, in fact, a spy” is false.
The latter statement is a corrupted version of the former published by Ann Coulter in her 2003 book Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism for the same reason Ann Coulter does anything.

[Haberdash]

Whether McCarthy was right about some people for the wrong reasons, or went on a witch-hunt towards a lot of people for refusing to testify or other things that were not espionage, does not change my points here:

1. Almost everyone accused of espionage was guilty. This is not saying “everyone” accused of espionage was guilty, nor that almost everyone “accused of anything” was guilty. Reading my statement as written – almost everyone accused of espionage was guilty – it is accurate. The innocent people swept up in McCarthyism were those who refused to testify on principle or were actually accused of being homosexuals. Very few people explicitly accused of spying were innocent of the charge.

2. The notions that there was no a huge conspiracy of Communists infiltrating the government, that Communists were just misguided liberals and not taking orders from Moscow, or that the entire idea that Communists existed, are “paranoia” or ginned up for some ulterior purpose, are false. All of these things were true, and it is a central responsibility of any democratic government to protect itself from external threats & revolutionary overthrow, most of all by totalitarians; furthermore, the idea that such notions were “paranoia” was a conscious strategy spread by the Soviet spies themselves in an attempt to dissuade the investigation of their activities.

3. It is undoubtedly true that Alger Hiss was guilty of everything he was accused of. The proof for this is far above that necessary to convict someone in an American court, and about a hundred times greater than the ordinary standard of evidence needed for accepted historical fact.

4. Most people continuing to defend Alger Hiss today are not communists or anti-Americans of any kind, nor are they historians specializing in revisionism. They are people who invested a lot of legwork in an argument they found interesting prior to 1995, who are unwilling to admit that their recreational activity (researching and arguing about Hiss) is now completely pointless.

I stand by all four of these points.

[Little_Nemo]

@Haberdash

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.”

You’re overstating the case. It’s true that much of the information about Ales matches Hiss. But it’s also true that some of the information doesn’t match Hiss. There are cites where the VENONA say that Ales was at a certain location or provided a certain report - and it was a location that Hiss wasn’t at or a report that he didn’t have access to. Some will argue that some of the VENONA information is incorrect. In a large body of documents there are going to be errors. Or even that false information was knowingly added to the documents to protect spies. But there’s no objective reason to say that the VENONA evidence that implicates Hiss is true and the VENONA evidence that exonerates Hiss is false.

It’s also true that defectors have corroborated that Hiss was Ales. And it’s true that other defectors have denied that Hiss was Ales. Again, there’s no objective basis in declaring which people are right and which are wrong.

Some people have looked at the VENONA evidence and come to the conclusion that Ales was Wilder Foote, another State Department official. Some of the VENONA information matches Foote better than it does Hiss. At the very least, Foote and Hiss are equally plausible as Ales.

[madsircool]

@md2000

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. )

FTR the Rosenbergs were electrocuted,