Alger Hiss: The Pumpkin Papers, Woodstock N230099 and Venona's Agent ALES

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Alger Hiss sat behind Franklin Roosevelt at Yalta and served as the first acting secretary general of the United Nations, then was convicted of perjury within a few years. Born in Baltimore in 1904, he lost his father Charles to suicide after the 1907 financial panic when Alger was two, a fact the family hid from him. He later lost his older brother to Bright's disease and his sister to suicide. He excelled at Johns Hopkins, caught Felix Frankfurter's eye at Harvard Law School and clerked for Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. In the New Deal he worked in the Agricultural Adjustment Administration and questioned the DuPonts about war profiteering for the Nye Committee. At Yalta in 1945 he drafted memos opposing Stalin's demand for 16 votes in the United Nations, a fact the episode weighs against later espionage claims.

In 1948 Whittaker Chambers, a Time editor and former communist courier, told HUAC that Hiss had belonged to the Ware Group in the 1930s. Hiss denied knowing him, then said he had known a writer called George Crosley, to whom he sublet an apartment and gave a used Ford roadster. Richard Nixon, fed information from FBI files, pressed the case. When Hiss sued Chambers for libel, Chambers produced 65 pages of retyped 1938 State Department cables and notes in Hiss's handwriting, then led investigators to five rolls of microfilm hidden in a hollowed-out pumpkin on his Maryland farm. The statute of limitations had run out on espionage, so Hiss was tried for perjury, and after a hung jury he was convicted in 1950. The 1995 release of the Venona decrypts and later archival work reopened a debate that remains unresolved.

• FBI experts testified that the documents were typed on the Hiss family's Woodstock typewriter, serial N230099, and Hiss told the judge that forgery by typewriter would someday be revealed.
• He served about three and a half years at Lewisburg, sold stationery in New York after being disbarred, and in 1975 became the first lawyer readmitted to the Massachusetts bar after a major criminal conviction.
• Microfilm released in the 1970s included one blank roll and Navy instructions about painting fire extinguishers.
• Russian archivist General Volkogonov said in the early 1990s that he found no evidence Hiss was a spy, then retracted his certainty after admitting he had searched for only two days.
• A March 1945 Venona cable describes an agent ALES who attended Yalta and went on to Moscow, though skeptics note the agent was tied to Soviet military intelligence, the GRU.