The Arrogance of Power (12 page)

The FBI's future domestic intelligence chief, William Sullivan, served in Washington in 1948 and his work included the Hiss case. Interviewed years later, he was quoted as saying that “to the best of my knowledge . . . the FBI did have the typewriter before it was found by the Hiss defense. . . .”
⁵
He was not certain “whether it had been located by the FBI or brought to the Bureau labs by Nixon.”

To the delight of Hiss's defenders, moreover, Nixon also repeatedly drew suspicion on himself regarding the typewriter. In his book
Six Crises,
he noted: “On December 13, 1948, FBI agents found the typewriter.
*
 . . . On December 15 an expert from the FBI typed exact copies of the incriminating documents on the old Woodstock machine. . . .”

Pressed for an explanation when
Six Crises
was published, Nixon offered only a superficial explanation for the discrepancy. His spokesman claimed the passage was all a researcher's mistake based on the
World-Telegram
story and—ludicrously—insisted that Nixon had not been close to the case at the time.
⁶

Yet Nixon again seemed to implicate himself in an Oval Office conversation he had with senior aides on March 10, 1972, recorded on a tape released in 1996 and monitored during research for this book. The subject was the uproar over a press story that International Telephone and Telegraph had committed a huge cash donation to the Republicans, a payoff for government intervention in an antitrust suit against the company. The story was based on a typewritten memo written by an ITT lobbyist, and Nixon wanted the memo declared a forgery. In the course of the discussion, the tape shows, Nixon harked back to the Hiss case and the Chambers documents, and stated: “
I found
the typewriter . . . [author's italics].”
⁷

John Dean's memoir,
Blind Ambition,
has given Hiss loyalists their choicest morsel of all. The White House counsel quoted what, he said, Charles Colson told him after another talk in which Nixon drew a parallel between the ITT matter and the Hiss case. “The typewriters are always the key,” the president told Colson, in Dean's version. “We built one in the Hiss case.”

When Dean's book was published, Colson protested that he had “no recollection” of Nixon's having said the typewriter was “phonied,” and Nixon himself characterized the claim as “totally false.” Dean, however, insisted that his contemporary notes confirmed that Colson had quoted the president as he indicated and seemed serious when he did so.

Can we take seriously the notion that Hoover and the FBI or Richard Nixon, separately or in alliance, might have framed Hiss by forging a typewriter? In this author's view, only an intelligence organization would have had the resources and the experience to carry out such a plan. The World War II feat of forgery described earlier in this chapter was part of a joint British-FBI operation. Hoover himself had visited the secret installation in Canada where typewriter fabrication and similar acts of wizardry were perfected. (The operation was sited there to facilitate easy access by FBI agents and OSS staff.)

If forgery was used to ensure that Hiss was found guilty, there may have been a rationale more powerful, more historically compelling than Hoover's obsession with the Red menace or his frustration about foot-dragging on the part of the Truman administration.

New information, reported in the pages that follow, suggests that by 1948 Hoover and other U.S. intelligence chiefs may have received information on Hiss from Soviet cable intercepts that seemed to leave no doubt that the man was guilty. Coupled with the flow of data about Hiss that had been reaching the intelligence agencies for several years, it may have seemed the clinching piece of evidence.

The existence of such evidence, though, could not be revealed because the very fact that the United States had broken the Soviet cipher was one of the most closely kept secrets of the century. Yet other parts of the government's information on Hiss also had come from secret sources. Could there have been some twisted reasoning along the lines that since Hiss was now apparently clearly guilty, but the real proof of it had to remain concealed, it was justifiable to fabricate another sort of “proof”?

The one substantive piece of information indicating typewriter forgery features the OSS and its chief, William Donovan. In late 1948, when the Hiss defense and the FBI began the protracted hunt for the Woodstock typewriter, a man named Horace Schmahl joined the Hiss defense team as an investigator. Schmahl had worked for either the OSS or army intelligence during the war, then joined the Central Intelligence Group, the organization that operated in the period between the closedown of the OSS and the inception of the CIA.
⁸

After his stint for the Hiss side, Schmahl defected to the prosecution team. Still later, after Hiss had been jailed, his lawyer received a tip that “Schmahl was implicated with the typewriter.” An investigator who had worked with Schmahl, Harold Bretnall, subsequently told the lawyer that Schmahl had been involved in forging the Hiss typewriter. “Hiss,” Bretnall said, “was framed.”

Tracked down in 1973 in Florida, Schmahl admitted to a Hiss investigator that he had been a “consultant” on the typewriter forgery. He said that the
OSS had set Hiss up—just when was not clear—and that the orders had come through Donovan's New York law firm, Donovan, Leisure. (Schmahl later retracted his statements and declined further interviews.)

There the trail ends. The Schmahl lead never was officially investigated. Is it plausible that either the FBI's Hoover or Nixon would have been prepared to frame Hiss or to remain silent had they learned of it? The answer, the records suggest, is yes.

The damaging information on Hoover comes from his own files. A decade later, asked by the agent in charge in New York if the FBI laboratory could assist with the framing of a leading U.S. Communist, Hoover expressed no disapproval. He merely insisted that the job be well done—to “avoid embarrassment to the Bureau”—and added some advice. “To alter a typewriter to match a known model,” he counseled, “would require a large amount of typewriter specimens and weeks of laboratory work.” In the Hiss case in 1948 there were a great many specimens—and many weeks in which to achieve a forgery.

“Had Nixon asked the FBI to manufacture evidence to prove his case against Hiss,” opined former FBI Assistant Director Sullivan, “Hoover would have been only too glad to oblige.” As for whether Nixon would actually have gone as far as to frame Hiss, the later record includes disquieting instances of forgery or planting false information.

In 1971, for example, after announcing publicly that the American involvement in Vietnam was instigated by the Kennedy administration and by U.S. “complicity in the murder of [South Vietnamese President] Diem,” Nixon called for the examination of the files on the episode. When his aide Charles Colson found no hard evidence in State Department cables about Diem's death, Colson asked Howard Hunt to “improve” on the record. Hunt did so, using scissors and paste and a Xerox machine to fabricate a message “proving” that President Kennedy had effectively approved the murder. He and Colson then tried to get the forgery published in
Life
magazine.

Recently released White House tapes feature Nixon's telling John Ehrlichman, when this forgery was revealed at the height of Watergate, that no one had informed him of the scheme. “I'm not so sure that you weren't,” responded Ehrlichman, “. . . my recollection is that this was discussed with you.” Soon after, Haldeman noted in his journal, Nixon admitted he was really “the guilty one . . . he was the one that started Colson on his projects. . . . Apparently Ehrlichman told him he had evidence that the P [Haldeman's usual abbrevation for ‘President'] knew about the fake cable about Diem, and that the P was really the one who ordered all these acts. . . .” Ehrlichman later wrote: “I was aware of the Nixon-Colson-Hunt effort to produce the
Life
piece.”

A similar such incident occurred during the 1972 presidential campaign, after Alabama Governor Wallace had been shot in an assassination attempt. As reported in detail later, Nixon would at that time discuss with Charles Colson the notion of planting false evidence in the would-be assassin's
apartment—material that would smear him as a radical leftist. He appeared to approve the idea.

Would not the Richard Nixon who connived at such deceptions as president have been prepared, as a young, zealous congressman, to plot the framing of Alger Hiss? This scenario seems plausible if, as seems possible, he had already been assured confidentially but authoritatively that according to impeccable sources that could not be disclosed, Hiss was indeed guilty.

_____

In years to come, as Nixon's fortunes rose and disastrously fell, and as Hiss continued to pursue his crusade to prove his innocence, both men knew the ultimate key to the case rested in a place that was inaccessible, the files of Soviet intelligence. If Hiss had been a Soviet agent, then Soviet intelligence should have a record of it. So it was that after the Soviet Union collapsed, at a time both men knew their own days were numbered, Nixon and Hiss each relayed messages to Moscow.

In 1991, seeking definitive corroboration of what he had long believed, Nixon sent an emissary to General Dmitri Volkogonov, an adviser to President Boris Yeltsin and the chairman of the commission on the KGB and military intelligence archives. The director of the Nixon presidential library, John Taylor, followed suit, as, some months later, did Alger Hiss. In October 1992 Volkogonov wrote to Hiss with what sounded like an unequivocal response. “Not a single document—and a great amount of material has been studied—substantiates the allegation that Mr. A. Hiss collaborated with the intelligence services of the Soviet Union. . . . You can tell Alger Hiss that the heavy weight should be lifted from his heart.”

The
New York Times
featured the story on its front page, and it was covered prominently by the international media. “It's what I've been fighting for for forty-four years,” said Hiss, by then nearly ninety years old. Nixon, at home in New Jersey, refused to speak to the press, but privately he exploded. “Hiss was a goddamned spy, and they still don't want to admit that I was right.” He remained furious for weeks.

Dimitri Simes, the Russian affairs specialist who had delivered Nixon's original letter, hurried back to confer with Volkogonov. A month later the general issued new statements conceding that his search had perhaps not been thorough enough. By then, however, the media was taking little notice, leaving Nixon to splutter that “they put the lies in headlines, but the truth they bury back in corset ads.”

Before Nixon died, however, there came what appeared to be a measure of vindication. Even as Hiss was triumphing in his “not guilty” headlines, a historian was turning up damaging information about him in Hungarian secret police files. These documents recorded the responses under interrogation of Noel Field, an American who had known Hiss and worked with him at the State Department and whom Chambers had also linked to Communist espionage. Field
had fled behind the Iron Curtain after the war, only to spend five years in prison on charges that he was an
American
spy. According to the Hungarian files, he told his captors Hiss had confided that he was “working for the Soviet secret service” and had tried to recruit him “for espionage.” Field insisted that he had demurred, explaining that he was already working for Soviet intelligence.

Are these assertions credible, given that they were made in jail, where Field claimed he was starved and beaten, and at a time when he was desperate to prove that his loyalties had always been to the Soviets?
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Perhaps not. Field's claims seem to dovetail with similar statements made in 1948 by Hede Massing, a courier for a Soviet spy ring and one of Field's associates.
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They are also consistent with messages reported by Allen Weinstein, a veteran writer on the Hiss case, to have been located recently in previously unseen Soviet files.

Weinstein, the author of
Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case,
followed up on the Volkogonov fiasco by seeking access to old files of the NKVD, a forerunner of the KGB. After help from the current Russian intelligence service and its former director, Yevgeny Primakov—later Russia's prime minister—Weinstein discovered at least ten messages purportedly sent from the United States to Moscow and vice versa in 1936 and 1938.
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All appear to refer to Hiss.

One, sent by Massing, tells in detail how Hiss had asked Field to gather information for the Soviets. The name Hiss appears here in clear text—as it does in two other messges sent by an NKVD agent. Others, referring to “Lawyer,” said to have been one of the code names for Hiss,
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debate the problems caused by Hiss's contacts. Still another message discusses the risk that a recent recruit “might guess that Hiss belongs to our family.” Yet another refers to Hiss as having first been “implanted” into the State Department and “sent to the Neighbors later.” (“The Neighbors” is accepted code for the GRU, Soviet Military Intelligence. Chambers had testified that he and Hiss worked specifically for the GRU.)

In 1990 and 1994, although without supporting documentation, two former Soviet intelligence operatives further implicated Hiss. Oleg Gordievsky, a senior KGB defector who had worked on an in-house history of the agency, wrote that Hiss had been a Soviet agent. Pavel Sudoplatov, who held high positions in Soviet intelligence in the Stalin era, claimed in a memoir that Hiss had been “close to . . . our active intelligence operators in the United States” but that “there was no indication that he was a paid or controlled agent.” Sudoplatov too suggested Hiss was linked to the GRU.
¹³