Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (15 page)

The final reference to "Ales" in Alexander Vassiliev's notebooks comes
in a KGB Washington cable to Moscow in June 1945: "Vadim [Gorsky] reported that he established a connection with M. at the beginning of June.
Several years ago, M. worked as a courier between "Peter" ("Storm") and
the latter's people. M. knows "A." through this work."44 The cable is part of the KGB file for "Mole," the cover name for Charles Kramer, a productive source who came to the KGB via the Perlo group. ("M." was Vassiliev's abbreviation in this note for "Mole.") "Peter" and "Storm" were
both cover names for Josef Peters. Here Gorsky was reporting that in the
193os Kramer had worked as a courier between Peters and various members of the Washington Communist underground. Gorsky also noted that
"M. knows `A.' through this work." Vassiliev made a marginal notation in
his notebook for this message, "`Ales'-Hiss," indicating that "A." was
his abbreviation for "Ales" and that "Ales" was Hiss. Kramer was a member of the Ware group and would have known both Hiss and Peters.

Aside from Vassiliev's annotation, "Ales" is not explicitly identified as
Alger Hiss in Vassiliev's notebooks, but the overwhelming weight of the
evidence of "Ales's" characteristics described by the documents in the
notebooks, particularly "Ales's" relationship with "Karl"/Chambers and
"Ruble"/Glasser, points to Alger Hiss and only Alger Hiss as the Soviet spy
"Ales."

The final set of KGB documents involving Hiss comes from the period
after his exposure by Whittaker Chambers. These documents unambiguously designate Alger Hiss as a Soviet spy, albeit under a new cover
name.

By late 1948 Soviet intelligence operations in the United States were
in disarray. Beginning in 1945 a series of defectors-Igor Gouzenko, Elizabeth Bentley, Louis Budenz, Hede Massing, and Whittaker Chambers
-identified Soviet intelligence officers and scores of their American
agents and sources. The KGB and GRU hastily withdrew their most experienced and skilled professional officers from the United States and
Canada, put existing networks and sources "on ice," severed contact with
exposed agents, stopped recruitment of new sources, and devoted much
of their efforts to damage control (see chapter 9).

No espionage case had a higher profile than that of Alger Hiss. By
the end of 1948 it had become a media firestorm with dueling congressional testimony by Chambers and Hiss, grand jury investigations, subpoenas and libel suits, and the melodramatic retrieval of microfilm of
stolen State Department documents from a hollowed-out pumpkin on
Chambers's Maryland farm-all culminating in Hiss's indictment for perjury. The relentless media coverage impressed the American public with the threat of Soviet espionage more than anything that had surfaced up
to that time. Thrashing about for away to minimize the damage, the KGB
Washington station suggested to Moscow Center forging documents and
then having someone

"'find' a file on `Karl' in the German archives revealing that he is a German
agent, that he worked as a spy for the Gestapo in the U.S. and, on a mission
from them, had infiltrated the American Comparty. If we print this in our
newspapers and publish a few `documents' that can be prepared at home, it
would have a major effect. This report would be seized upon not only by foreign Comparties, but also by the progressive press in all countries, and, as a
result, the position of the Committee on the investigation of Un-American
Activities, the Grand Jury, and other agencies would be seriously undermined.

We could also claim that `Karl' was known to the Committee, the Grand
Jury, and oth. American agencies as a Gestapo agent, but that because the leaders of these institutions were vehement opponents of the USSR, the Comparty,
and the progressive movement in general, they had represented the matter as if
`Karl' and others had been spying for the USSR rather than Germany."45

Moscow Center quickly rejected the plan, pointing out that it would
likely demoralize the very agents the KGB wanted to protect:

"The station's proposal to manufacture and publish documents in our newspapers about the fact that the traitor Chambers is a German agent, conducted
espionage work in the USA on assignment from the Gestapo, and on German
instructions, infiltrated the CPUSA-cannot be accepted. The publication of
such `documents' would undoubtedly have a very negative effect on our former agents who were betrayed by Chambers (A. Hiss, D. Hiss, Wadleigh, Pigman, Reno) and oth., because, knowing that they had worked for us, but having `turned' into German agents, these people could, for example, choose to
cooperate with the authorities, give them candid testimonies, etc. Moreover,
the transformation of these individuals from alleged Sov. intelligence agents
into established agents for a country that had been at war with the USA would
certainly not help them from a purely legal standpoint."

Two senior officials prepared this December 1948 negative report for the
chairman of the KI, as the KGB was then termed. These Soviet intelligence officers, using real names, designated as "our former agents" Alger
Hiss, Donald Hiss, Julian Wadleigh, Warren Pigman, and Franklin Reno.
All five were persons Chambers identified as part of his GRU-linked apparatus of 1936-38. This Moscow Center's report also eschewed using the cover name "Karl" and in plain text referred to "the traitor Cham-
bers."46

Late in 1948 the KGB's foreign intelligence directorate prepared a
summary damage assessment for the agency's leadership on the state of
intelligence work in America. The report noted, "Intelligence work in the
USA was completely deactivated in November/December 1945 and did
not resume until September 1947," and placed the chief blame on the
"betrayals of Gouzenko, "Karl" [Chambers], "Myrna" [Bentley], and
"Ruben" [Budenz], as well as of "Berg" and "Art" [Alexander and Helen
Koral], lamenting that "these traitors handed over 62 of our former agents
to Amer. authorities, which is to say, practically our entire network in the
USA that was working on the polit. line."47

A 1948 memo by Anatoly Gorsky, entitled "Failures in the USA
(1938-1948)," provided the details. ("Failure" was KGB jargon for any
agent or operative who had been exposed to hostile counterintelligence
or otherwise compromised.) Gorsky listed the cover names and real
names of the Soviet officers and American sources compromised by the
defectors. He began his recapitulation with twenty-one officers and
sources exposed by Whittaker Chambers:

Failures Mthe USA (1938-48)

"Karl's" group:

1. Karl-Whittaker Chambers, former editor in chief of "Time" magazine. Traitor.

2. Jerome-Barra Bukov (Altman), our former cadre employee. Currently in
the USSR.

3. Leonard-Alger Hiss, former employee of the State Dept.

4. Junior-Donald Hiss, former employee of the Dept. of the Interior

5. 104th-Henry A. Wadleigh-former employee of the State Department

6. 118th-F. V. Reno-former employee of the Aberdeen Proving Ground

7. loth-Henry Collins, former employee of Department of Agriculture, at
pres., director of the American-Russian Institute in NY

8. 114th-William W. Pigman, former employee of the Bureau of Standards

9. "Storm"-Joseph Peters (a.k.a. Isadore Boorstein), former member of the
Central Committee of the CPUSA

10. "Vig"-Lee Pressman, former legal adviser of the Congress of Industrial
Organizations

ii. 116th-Harry Azizov, former employee of a steel-smelting company in
Chicago

12. foist-Peter MacLean, journalist and photo reporter, not used since '37

13. 103rd-David Carpenter, newspaper employee

14. 107th-Felix Inslerman, place of employment unknown

15. 113th-Harry Rosenthal, employee of an insurance company in Philadelphia

i6. 1i5th-Lester Hutm, former employee of the Frankford Arsenal

IT . "Ernst"-Noel Field, former employee of the State Dept.

i8. "Rupert"-V. V. Sveshnikov, former employee of the War Dept.

ig. "Richard"-Harry White, former assistant to Sec. of the Treasury Morgenthau, died in 48

20. "Aileron"-G. Silverman, former chief of the Planning and Statistics Division of the AAF

21. "Ruble"-Harold Glasser, former director of the Monetary Division of the
Dept. of the Treasury.

Gorsky's report unambiguously designated Alger Hiss, by his real name,
as a Soviet agent betrayed by Whittaker Chambers. It also noted that by
this time, December 1948, Hiss had a new cover name, "Leonard."
Gorsky was also correct about the extent of the damage wrought by
Chambers's defection. Under questioning by the FBI, Chambers identified as involved in Soviet espionage almost everyone Gorsky named as
potentially compromised.48

The final KGB document in Vassiliev's notebooks that deals with
Alger Hiss, dated i6 March 1950, was a plan to reestablish a vigorous Soviet intelligence presence in the United States. In the course of laying
out what needed to be done, it included a summary of the setbacks of
the late 1940s. One of those specified was "the trial of the GRU GSh VS
agent "Leonard," the chief of one of the main divisions of the State Department and a member of "Karl's" group, ended in his conviction at the
beginning of 1950." ("GRU GSh VS" was the Chief Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces-that is, Soviet military
intelligence.) Not only was "Leonard" identified as Alger Hiss in Gorsky's
December 1948 memo, but Hiss was also the only former State Department official tried and convicted in 1950. "Leonard" was Alger Hiss, and
Hiss was a Soviet spy.49

Any reasonable person will conclude that the new documentation of
Hiss's assistance to Soviet espionage, along with the massive weight of
prior accumulated evidence, closes the case. Given the fervor exhibited by his loyalists, it is unlikely that anything will convince the remaining
die-hards. But to serious students of history continued claims for Hiss's
innocence are akin to a terminal form of ideological blindness. The evidence from a myriad of sources-eyewitnesses and written documents,
public testimony and private correspondence, fellow spies and Soviet intelligence officers, decrypted cables and long-closed archives-is overwhelming and conclusive. Alger Hiss worked for the GRU in the 19305
and 1940s. The KGB hoped to use him in mid-1945. He was identified
in Soviet intelligence documents by his real name and three different
cover names, each of which is clearly and demonstrably linked to him.
KGB officers and CPUSA underground leaders knew him as a member
of the Soviet apparatus. Several of his fellow agents, including Noel Field,
Hede Massing, Charles Kramer, Victor Perlo, and Harold Glasser, identified him as an agent in confidential communications that made their
way back to Moscow. And its own damage assessments confirm that Soviet intelligence knew that Alger Hiss belonged to it. Case closed.

n 1950 Klaus Fuchs, a senior physicist working on the British atomic
bomb project, confessed to authorities that he had been a Soviet
spy when he worked at Los Alamos in 1944 and 1945 as part of a
British contingent assisting the American atomic bomb program,
the Manhattan Project. That same year the FBI arrested David Greenglass, who confessed to being a Soviet source when he was at Los Alamos
working as a skilled machinist in the workshop that built special components for the implosion-design plutonium bomb. For decades most historians thought that was the end of the story. There were dissenters: some
on the left insisted that Greenglass had confessed to crimes he hadn't
committed while some on the right suspected that Robert Oppenheimer,
scientific chief at Los Alamos, had been a key Soviet source. However,
until the 199os a scholarly consensus limited Soviet atomic espionage to
Fuchs and Greenglass.