Somehow, the Hiss case never goes away. The basic question—whether Alger Hiss was a spy for the Soviet Union during the 1930s and 1940s—was finally settled during the 1990s, as Cold War archives opened and documents proving his guilt became available. But other issues remained uncertain. Unlike many other Soviet spies who confessed their guilt, Hiss went to his grave in 1996 claiming to be innocent; he left no record of why he had committed espionage or why he denied it publicly for almost 50 years. Now, in Alger Hiss's Looking-Glass Wars, G. Edward White, a law professor at the University of Virginia and son-in-law of one of Hiss's lawyers, provides a convincing analysis of Hiss's reasons.
Born in 1904, Alger Hiss graduated from Johns Hopkins University and Harvard Law School, worked as a secretary for Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, and, like many educated liberals, migrated toward the radical left during the Depression. He moved to Washington in 1933 to work in the New Deal and, after serving in the Agricultural Adjustment Administration and on the legal staff of the Nye Committee's investigation of US munitions sales during World War I, he joined the State Department in 1936. Hiss rose high at State, eventually serving as an aide to Secretary of State Stettinius at the Yalta conference in 1945 and then as Secretary General of the UN organizing conference at San Francisco.
Although it is unclear when he was recruited by the Soviets, Hiss may have been working for them as early as 1933. While at the State Department, he routinely passed documents to Whittaker Chambers, an American communist working for Soviet intelligence, who photographed them and delivered the film to the Soviets. In 1938, Chambers stopped working for Moscow and, after the announcement of the Hitler–Stalin Pact, secured an appointment with Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle and told him of the espionage ring's activities. At the time, however, the government was more concerned with German and Japanese threats. The FBI did not interview Chambers until 1942, and it was not until after the war that it took Chambers's story seriously enough to begin an investigation. Although the inquiry did not produce enough evidence to prove that Hiss was a spy, it raised enough questions that Hiss was forced to leave the State Department in 1946.
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