Term Paper on "Alger Hiss"

Term Paper 14 pages (5142 words) Sources: 1+

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Alger Hiss

There have been many controversial issues throughout history and especially during the uncertain yeas of the Cold War. The American and the Soviet information apparatus were rather well established mechanisms of information gathering and contributed in large parts to the evolution of the political scene in the 20th century. However, their entire activities were based on the human performances of different agents infiltrated in the adversary's intelligence offices and their continuous and regular reporting. Their existence was ultimately discovered and it did steer in many occasions great public display of accusations and counter arguments. One such case was the Alger Hiss spy scandal which pointed out a series of problems the American intelligence community faced during the Cold War years. On the one hand, it outlined the deep infiltrations of the soviet espionage influences into the American system of intelligence and, on the other hand, it proved the concrete performance of the American justice system which, although on its second attempt, convicted for perjury a high ranked official, despite his well defined and coveted defense. Romestein and Breindel.() make a similar point by arguing the importance of Chambers and the case itself; they consider that "his revelations, based on service as a courier for the soviet spy apparatus during the 1930s would be one of the most important testimonies about soviet spy craft in America (...) Chambers' experience also illustrates just how tightly interlocked the American Communist party was with the Soviet spy service."

Taking the particular case of Alger Hiss, indeed, it represented a milestone in the judicial practice of the U.S. courts, especially because it relied on official documents to support and make its decision. In determining Hiss's guilt, there were however certain key elements which brought about his final conviction. These included a set of released files from the U.S.'s secret project designed to gather information on the U.S.S.R.'s activities and interception of information known as the Venona files, a series of documents, the so called Pumpkin Papers, concerning the activities of the American official governmental structures whose existence in the end incriminated Hiss and contributed to his conviction. Lastly, an important role was played by the prosecutor's emphasis on certain last minute technical details which weighted decisively in Whittaker Chamber's favor and in the final outcome of the Alger Hiss trial.

Despite the fact that due to special legal provisions, "the statue of limitations shielded Hiss from a substantive espionage charge," Alger Hiss did not stand trial for espionage, the basis of the trial and the support of the accusations brought to justify the perjury charges proved the fact that, indeed, in his activity he did engage in espionage for the Soviet Union against the national interests of the U.S., as they were considered at the time.

Nonetheless, the impact of his case must be considered from different angles and most importantly in the context that represented the ideological confrontation between the western liberal political system and the Russian communist pressure.

The historical and political background evolved inside a set of well defined coordinates. The period between the two world conflagrations was determined by a clear tendency of confrontation between two political ideologies on the one hand and economic systems on the other. Russia was an emerging political power, as the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and the subsequent 1922 proclamation of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics placed the communist threat in the frontline of political debates and polemics especially in the western world which was facing an increasing ideological pressure from the socialist pole. On the other hand, the communist system promoted a different type of economic development and scheme which also consisted into a possible threat for the western liberal economies. The eventual negative impact of such competitive forces would have reverberated onto others sectors of the national operational mechanism such as military capabilities and political supremacy. Therefore, it was considered by the American administrations in this period that measures needed to be taken in order to limit and control any development and possible degeneration of the situation concerning the spread of the soviet line of thought. Accordingly, "the U.S. Army's Signal Intelligence Service, the precursor to the National Security Agency, began a secret program in February 1943 later codenamed Venona. The mission of this small program was to examine and exploit Soviet diplomatic communications but after the program began, the message traffic included espionage efforts as well." Therefore, from one point-of-view, the background was defined by the existence of an information gathering system which made use of every possibility to intercept any sort of data relating to the unofficial conflict in which the U.S. And the U.S.S.R. were engaged.

As a consequence of this reality, there was the constant doubt of the power and influence of structures specific to the soviet system activating inside the U.S. The real scare for the American politicians dedicated to the core principles of liberalism was the eventuality that "many idealistic American anti-fascists eager to gain elite status in the Communist underground" would adopt the "scientific socialism" as "an attractive alternative to Depression-era capitalism. Few of these true believers accepted payment for their services," and therefore they were considered to be a threat to the stability of the political equilibrium in America.

These worries were somewhat entitled, as there had been little action prior to the Second World War and the U.S. intervention in Europe to counteract the soviet interferences in the American society. Tim Weiner (1999) describes the political and social environment as being rather "fertile." According to him "there was no American counterintelligence to speak of before Pearl Harbor, and the romance of American communism was strong in the few years between Hitler's rise and Stalin's purges. Underground networks proliferated like hothouse plants, but agents quickly became ensnarled, with three separate strands of intelligence gathering -- the KGB, the GRU (military intelligence), and the Communist Party of the United States -- intermingling to ill effect."

The passage of time and the eventual disappearance of the historical implications of the acts of different persons made it possible certain names of espionage agents to be both made public and found out. Thus it is now known that persons such as Michael Straight, a close friend of the Roosevelt presidential family had been a part of the soviet intelligence during his academic years at Cambridge University. Similarly, important public officials such as Samuel Dickstein, congressman of New York, were proven to have collaborated with the soviet intelligence by providing secret information especially related to the U.S.'s war plans and projects. Other examples presented by Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev (1998) include the daughter of America's ambassador to Germany, Martha Dodd who offered confidential official documents related to the State Department, the White House and the Embassy system's activities to soviet espionage.

Therefore, there were certain forces that acted both inside the American society such as the Communist Party and different pressure groups, and from outside the U.S. borders especially the Soviet espionage; as Weiner notes, "the Soviet spies in the United States did what they could to buy or steal American secrets -- scientific, technical, military, and political information." In the ends he also concludes that indeed, the soviet espionage relied greatly on "the help of American agents." One f these agents was Alger Hiss, who although convicted for perjury would be later on proven to have engaged in espionage activities for the Soviet Union.

In order to understand the entire implications of the case at hand it is important to consider the full development of the issue, from the first accusations Chambers brought to the attention of Adolf a. Berle Jr., Assistant Secretary of State in 1939 to the final outcome of the second trial against Alger Hiss on December 7, 1950.

The main characters of the events are considered to be in total opposition. This was quite obvious, from the physical appearance to the social and professional background. "Alger Hiss was (a) tall, handsome... with an impeccable pedigree. Whittaker Chambers was a short, stocky, and rumpled Columbia drop-out (...) from a poor and troubled Philadelphia family."

The press offered a rather comprehensive coverage of the news, especially considering the fact that one of the parties was directly involved in the activity of Time Magazine. Therefore, the same publication gave a detailed description of the events in its February 13th 1950 cover story. Thus, on the one hand, Alger Hiss was "an honor graduate of Johns Hopkins University and a graduate cum laude of Harvard Law School (...) he had won the coveted apprenticeship job of law-clerking for Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. He married Priscilla Fansler Hobson." Professionally speaking, he was a man of great political success considering his important position as "as executive secretary of the Dumbarton Oaks Conference, as a technical adviser at the Yalta Conference and as secretary general of the founding convention of U.N." Most importantly however, he enjoyed the large support of influential persons such as Secretary of State James Byrnes or… READ MORE

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