PARIS—One of the oldest practices in the world of espionage is the “need to know” rule. No one in an intelligence agency is given more information than he or she needs to do the job. As a result, defectors rarely know a spy’s name.
“At best they will know his code name,” as British investigative reporter and espionage historian Phillip Knightley wrote in 1988. “But they may be able to pick up clues to his identity, both from the type of information he sends and from gossip within the service. Much counterintelligence work consists in trying to find the person who fits all the clues.”
The Russia investigations of today have suffered from such difficulties. It’s rare that all the clues fit. And as the history of the hunt for Soviet spies in the 1940s and early 1950s suggests, once they go public and the worlds of counterintelligence and politics converge, politics tend to win out.
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Back then, J. Edgar Hoover at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and politicians like Congressman Richard Nixon and Senator Joseph McCarthy worked hard to extract from the puzzle of fragmented information the evidence needed to bring suspected Soviet agents to trial. And when that failed, they had ways of imposing their hunches as facts. They set out to destroy the reputations of alleged traitors, regardless of their provable guilt or, indeed, innocence. And if the suspects couldn’t be nailed for more heinous crimes, in some notable cases they were convicted of perjury.
As one Canadian scholar put it, to the anti-communist inquisitors there was only one way to absolve oneself: “Public renunciation of past sins and enlistment in the ranks of the inquisition, accompanied of course by the presentation of severed heads on a platter, or what is known in the trade as ‘the naming of names.’”
In fact there were Soviet spies (often referred to as Russian spies) and plenty of them. And while the investigations of ‘40s and ‘50s often were called witch hunts, and often were, it has to be said there were plenty of real witches to be found. The great irony, as we now know, is that the single most important Soviet spy was missed completely, repeatedly enabling Moscow to protect its most valuable assets.
In her 2005 book, How the Cold War Began, scholar Amy Knight (who is also a contributor to The Daily Beast) examined in close detail the impact of one particular character named Igor Gouzenko. As noted in the previous “Cloak and Dagger,” information provided by this lowly cipher clerk at the Soviet embassy in Canada in September 1945 shocked politicians who had come to think of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin as a vital ally in the just-ended war against the Nazis.
Weeks earlier, the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had proved to the world that with a single device the United States could destroy entire cities. “We have spent more than $2 billion on the greatest scientific gamble in history, and we have won,” President Harry S Truman declared.
Stalin wanted that kind of power, and Gouzenko provided conclusive evidence that the Soviet leader had for years urged the agents of the NKVD (forerunner of the KGB) and the Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) to work all out in pursuit of American atomic secrets.
But Gouzenko’s information pointed to only one rather peripheral figure actually passing the Kremlin worthwhile intelligence on the subject: the British scientist Alan Nunn May, who worked on the Allied atomic bomb project during the war and did indeed give the Russians some details about the research. He was arrested and convicted in 1946.
Eventually, Gouzenko supplied so many leads that the Canadian government set up a royal commission on espionage that finally prosecuted 18 people, although it was able to convict only half of them.
The Americans, meanwhile, were particularly interested in one mysterious figure initially mentioned in the Gouzenko debriefs as “an assistant to an Assistant Secretary of State.”
FBI Director Hoover thought that Gouzenko’s information about this person, based on what Gouzenko had overheard, could be fit very nicely with some puzzle pieces Hoover already had on his board.
In May 1942 and May 1945 the FBI had interviewed a deeply troubled but very talented writer named Whittaker Chambers, who was a communist and part of a Soviet spy ring in the 1930s before he had a sudden change of heart and began naming names. One of those was Alger Hiss, who was well known by the end of the war as a top assistant to then-Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, responsible mainly for helping to organize the United Nations.
Chambers did not say in those first interviews that Hiss was a spy, according to Knight, but that he had been part of an underground group in the 1930s organized by a communist named Harold Ware.
FBI Director Hoover smelled blood in the water. He had first made his reputation and built his power base after World War I by hunting down “Reds.” During World War II, when the Nazis were the big enemy and the Soviets were fighting hard against them at enormous cost, there was not much interest in the problem of communist spies. But now, in those very early days of the Cold War, with Stalin’s friends and defenders running for cover and paranoia rampant at the prospect of the Soviets getting “The Bomb,” the head of a senior figure at the State Department would be a tremendous prize.
Hiss was an elegant and articulate patrician. (In the highly fictionalized 1962 film Advise and Consent, the Hiss character was played by Henry Fonda.) He had graduated from Harvard Law School and gone on to clerk for Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. After several years in private practice, he joined the State Department in 1936, and began a sterling career in international diplomacy, eventually traveling to Yalta with President Franklin Roosevelt.
The second bit of the puzzle Hoover was moving around on his board, searching for a fit, was testimony by Elizabeth Bentley, a hard-drinking former Soviet agent who acted as an NKVD courier between Washington and New York. She had approached the FBI in the fall of 1945 not long after the Gouzenko defection in Canada (which was still secret at the time).
Hoover kept pressing Bentley for information about Hiss. She had not even mentioned him in her first debrief, which was fairly incoherent. After two and a half weeks of interrogation, however, she thought maybe she knew something about a “Eugene” Hiss who was an assistant to Dean Acheson (wrong Secretary of State).
So the FBI interviewed Chambers again in 1946. According to Knight, he “insisted he had lost all contact with [Hiss] after 1937 and could provide no further details.”
Knight cites an FBI memorandum written in 1953 to accompany a summary report on Hiss which noted that “up to the time Hiss left the government in January 1947, the Bureau had no evidence to prove a case against Hiss… No espionage allegations were received from Chambers regarding Hiss until November, 1948. … The Bentley espionage allegations involving Hiss in 1945 had not been proven, and Gouzenko’s allegation in 1945 regarding a Soviet agent in the State Department who was an assistant to an Assistant Secretary of State had not been identified as Hiss, although there was a strong possibility this person could have been Hiss.”
By the time that report was written, however, the United States was deeply divided on the case which had become very public, and partly televised in some of the first hearings Americans were able to watch on their little black and white screens.
In 1948, Chambers and Hiss were called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, where Richard Nixon played the role of grand inquisitor, and Chambers leveled his accusations.
When Hiss subsequently sued Chambers for slander, Chambers suddenly produced State Department papers Hiss was supposed to have passed to him in the late 1930s, some of them on microfilm that for a time was hidden in a pumpkin on Chambers’ farm. Hiss and his defenders claimed the so-called Pumpkin Papers were fabricated in some fashion, but many people were convinced they were genuine.
The statute of limitations had run out on espionage cases from the 1930s, so Hiss was tried for perjury. The jury deadlocked. He was tried again, convicted, and sentenced to federal penitentiary, where he was incarcerated for 44 months.
The CIA’s own history of the Hiss case, written in 1999, notes that, “From the time of Chambers's first testimony to HUAC, the question of whether Alger Hiss had been a Communist and a spy was a dominant news story, not unlike the murder trial of O.J. Simpson two generations later. The stark nature of the case also made it impossible for an observer not to take sides—either Hiss had been a spy or he had not, either he or Chambers had lied, and neither man ever deviated from his claims.”
Chambers, who died in 1961, became a hero of the American right wing. President Ronald Reagan awarded him the Medal of Freedom, posthumously, in 1984, and the farm where he’d hidden the pumpkin papers was designated a national historic landmark in 1988.
Hiss was the hero of progressives, who defended him against what they saw as wild-eyed red-baiters out to destroy the New Deal and its legacy.
(In today’s debates over the Russia investigation and allegations concerning President Donald J. Trump, the roles of progressive and right-wingers have been inverted. Progressives see Trump as Moscow’s useful idiot, if not an outright client, while the right wing tends to believe he can do no wrong.)
The Hiss case remained hugely contentious well into the 1990s. When President Bill Clinton’s former National Security Adviser Tony Lake was nominated to be Director of National Intelligence in 1996, he was asked on Meet the Press whether he believed Alger Hiss was a spy. “I’ve read a couple of books that have certainly offered a lot of evidence that he may have been,” Lake said. “I don’t think it’s conclusive.”
The remark, jumped on by Republicans, may well have made Lake’s confirmation impossible.
Is there a final verdict on Hiss about which all agree?
There was one bit of evidence so conclusive in the eyes of many historians that it appears virtually irrefutable. But it was based on one of the most complicated puzzle pieces of all, and was not revealed to the public until 1995.
The CIA history of the Hiss affair concludes this was a grave mistake. Guarding the secret “came at the price of a 40-year debate that contributed to the corrosion of the public's trust in government and faith in the honesty of its intelligence and law enforcement agencies.”
But the nature of that secret, and its validity as evidence, or not, is the subject of a future Cloak and Dagger.
