Leaving No Doubt About Alger Hiss
At first glance, Alger Hiss would seem confined to the dustbin of Cold War History. Hiss, a State Department official accused by former Soviet spy-turned born-again anticommunist Whittaker Chambers in 1948, became a celebrity/matyr of the Old and New Left. With his guilt confirmed by the Venona telegrams, World War II era secret Soviet cables to their US agents released in 1996, the case seemingly was closed, opened only by The Nation crowd.
But a feature of the aging Hiss defenders is their tenacity. Into the 21st century, they have scrambled around the damning evidence to present desperate theories to vindicate Hiss or at create ambivalence about the verdict.
Enter Steven Salant, a professor of economics at the University of Michigan, who has longed been obsessed by the case. Last year, Salant donated his papers on the case to the University of Michigan Library Archive. He also introduced this web exhibit with an online essay in which he argues that Hiss was framed by Army Intelligence and the OSS. This cabal used as their point man one Horace Schmahl, an OSS agent who masqueraded as an investigator for the Hiss defense team, all the while alerting his handlers about the maneuvers Hiss might take. Schmahl also provided the prosecution with what Salant argues was the most damning bit of evidence, the infamous Woodstock typewriter with which Hiss and his wife Priscilla typed summaries of top-secret State Department cables, by “building” a fake typewriter that matched up with the documents in Chambers possession.
On the plus side, Salant has provided good information on Schmahl, the Zelig of Cold War history. A former OSS man and private detective Schmahl made appearances in the OSS, in the Hiss case, in the Dominican Republic coup in the '50s, and the Cuban exile training program of the early 1960s. Salant is to be commended also for avoiding the pro-Nazi coloration of the conspiracy that other Hiss conspiracy architects have charged Schmahl, German-born and an émigré from Nazi Germany with. Salant merely deals with the operation of framing Hiss, not its political orientation. And unlike other forgery-by-typewriter proponents, Salant entertains the possibility that Hiss may have been guilty.
But like those before him, Salant assigns primary importance to Schmahl in his “forgery by typewriter” thesis. Schmahl has been as useful to the Salant and other proponents of this thesis as the creator of Oswald’s backyard photos or the morgue attendant who put Oswald’s palm print on the Manlicher Carcano.
But Salant overlooks other damning evidence than the typewriter. Far from being the basis on which the prosection rests, the typewriter was merely accompanying evidence. Even if Schmahl was being run by an OSS out to get Hiss, there were others who viewed him as a spy, figures unattached to U.S. intelligence such as Noel Field, a member of the Hiss spy ring, Felix Frankfurter, Nikita Krushchev, Senator Gerald Nye, French Premier Edward Daladier, NKVD handlers (who christened Hiss with the alias "Lawyer" and "Ales").
Nor is the history of government intelligence operations state-side been the smooth-coordinated operation Salant assigns to his Hiss-framing OSS. Eleanor Roosevelt was instantly aware that she was under surveillance by a pratfalling G-2. Army intelligence’s surveillance of the Manhattan Project did not detect the Soviet penetration of the project. And Hiss, despite warnings as early as 1939 and increased surveillance by the FBI, was allowed to ascend the career ladder to the point where he was in charge of security at the Dumbarton Oaks conference and was Roosevelt’s point man at Yalta.
