The hunt in Red August, 1948: The case of Alger Hiss, Soviet spy

The smash hit “Oppenheimer” is taking moviegoers back to the Manhattan Project and how some Americans were lured into serving the Soviet cause. 

Seventy five years ago this month, another Soviet spy was caught in a series of lies. His name was Alger Hiss. 

The Hiss Case, as it became known, was a complicated back-and-forth of mystery, intrigue, revelation, misunderstanding, political chicanery and even a suicide attempt. Still today, it evokes and provokes a range of opinions about the scope of communist infiltration into government institutions in the 1930s and 40s. 

On Aug. 3, 1948, Whittaker Chambers — a disheveled Time Magazine editor and himself a former spy for the Communist Party — appeared before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) and accused Hiss, president of the Carnegie Endowment and one-time senior State Department official, of being a communist. 

In and of itself, harboring communist sympathies is certainly not illegal — nor was it then. But distributing secret U.S. government documents to an adversarial communist power certainly was and is illegal. And the HUAC and Justice Department investigations would eventually expose that Hiss was part of a communist spy ring that did just that in the 1930s. 

Chambers’s accusations, delivered under oath, created a fire. Hiss responded to Chambers’s testimony two days later. He was besmirched, or so he claimed, and he demanded a chance to clear his name. 

With drama like that of the scenes in “Oppenheimer,” Hiss appeared before HUAC and dazzled his national audience, forcefully and effectively challenging the committee’s mandate, rejecting any connection to the Communist Party and rebutting Chambers’s accusations. 

“I’m afraid the committee has been taken in by Chambers,” Rep. Christian Herter (R-Mass.) said. Rep. Ed Hebert (D-La.) suggested that the committee “wash our hands of the whole mess.”

But one first-term Congressman and member of HUAC wasn’t convinced. 

“[W]hile Hiss had seemed to be a completely forthright and truthful witness, he had been careful never to state categorically that he did not know Whittaker Chambers,” Richard Nixon later wrote. “If Hiss were lying about not knowing Chambers, then he might also be lying about whether or not he was a Communist.”

Nixon began to investigate. Chambers, as it turned out, possessed a photographic memory and relayed in excruciating detail how well he knew Hiss, including his nicknames, hobbies, details of his home furnishings and the kennel at which the Hiss’s boarded their cocker spaniel.

When Nixon asked Hiss about his hobbies, Hiss ensnared himself in a trap by listing his fondness for birdwatching, becoming animated at having seen a rare prothonotary warbler — and in the process confirming what Chambers had told Nixon.  

The committee forced Hiss to confront Chambers, and it did not go well for him. Over the following weeks, Hiss’s gradually changing story and half-hearted denials eroded his once iron-clad credibility. 

Ultimately, the proof was in the pumpkin. 

Faced with skepticism from the Truman Justice Department, Chambers attempted suicide before producing dozens of secret State Department documents from his own time spying for the Soviet Union. 

Chambers had kept this cache of stolen documents in a dumbwaiter shaft in his wife’s nephew’s mother’s apartment building — and, more famously, stashed five rolls of microfilm for 24 hours in a hollowed-out pumpkin on his farm.  Many of these documents were later determined to have been typed on Hiss’s Woodstock typewriter. 

These bombshells exposed Hiss not only as a one-time member of the Communist Party, but as party to a spy ring of U.S. government officials.

Hiss was never tried for treason, because the statute of limitation was, amazingly, only three years. The Justice Department instead indicted and tried Hiss on two counts of perjury. After a mistrial, he was tried again, convicted, and sentenced to five years in federal prison, of which he served three years and eight months. He would live a quiet life as a salesman and author (and short-lived political commentator, criticizing Nixon in 1962 as part of an infamous and premature ABC News special, “The Political Obituary of Richard Nixon”). 

From the moment the charges made national headlines until his death in 1996, Hiss maintained his innocence, and many others championed his cause. But there is ample evidence in the Soviet archives, revealed during Russia’s flirtation with democracy in the 1990s, that Hiss had indeed been a spy for Soviet intelligence.

Chambers’s autobiography, “Witness,” was a huge bestseller. He died in 1961. 

It is clear that Nixon was right in 1948, and the historical record proves him right today. The Hiss Case launched Nixon’s career: He would leapfrog from the House to the Senate, to the vice presidency and presidency, and come to define an entire age in American history.  

Jim Byron is president and CEO of the Richard Nixon Foundation.