Alger Hiss and Russia-gate
January 8, 2019
Jeremy Kuzmarov argues the Cold War case has enduring relevance to American
political culture and provides clues to the motives and machinations
underlying the new Russophobia.
By Jeremy Kuzmarov
In January 1950, Alger Hiss, a former State Department employee and director
of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, was convicted of perjury
and sentenced to five years in a federal penitentiary. The sentence, of
which Hiss served 44 months, culminated a frenzied political trial that
catapulted Richard Nixon to fame, undergirded the advent of McCarthyism and
heated up the Cold War.
Today, it is worth looking back at the Hiss case because it offers important
clues to the motives and machinations underlying the similarly politicized
Russia-gate investigations. In both cases, powerful political players appear
to have attempted to deflect acts of malfeasance by falsely accusing
political adversaries of treasonous behavior while igniting anti-Russia
hysteria and paranoid fears of subversion that threatened war between the
major nuclear powers.
Hiss testifying in 1950. (Wikipedia)
Hiss was the embodiment of the liberal, New Deal establishment, which had
promoted a major expansion of domestic social welfare programs. Educated at
Harvard Law School, Hiss clerked for Supreme Court Justices Felix
Frankfurter and Oliver Wendell Holmes, and worked for the State Department
before moving on to head the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Supportive of President Franklin Roosevelts policy of accommodation towards
the Soviets, Hiss had been present at the 1945 Yalta conference, which
resulted in a spheres of influence agreement.
Hiss had also worked as a legal assistant for the Nye Committee in the
1930s, a congressional investigation into war profiteering led by Gerald
Nye, a Republican senator from North Dakota. The investigation exposed
high-level corruption and connections between American companies and the
growth of the Nazi war machine.
For instance, it revealed how United Aircraft sold commercial airplane
engines to Germany for use in Luftwaffe fighter planes. It showed how Nazi
troops were armed with American guns, and how Union Banking Corporation had
engaged in a cartel agreement with the German chemical conglomerate, I.G.
Farben, soon to be gas maker for Holocaust gas chambers.
Because of his work on the committee, Hiss made many powerful enemies. The
Republican Party at the time was looking to revive its fortunes through red-
baiting tactics that would deflect attention from their anti-labor program.
The Justice Department also had begun to investigate alleged treasonous
activities by GOP power brokers.
Among them was Thomas McKittrick, a former agent of the Office of Strategic
Services (predecessor of the CIA) who was the wartime president of the Bank
for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland. He was also an
executive with Chase Manhattan Bank and a Marshall Plan administrator who
allegedly conspired with his friend, the future CIA Director Allen Dulles,
to move looted Nazi gold to Argentina.
The Dulles brothers.
Another official under DOJ investigation was Sen. Prescott Bush, a managing
director of the Union Banking Corporation, which helped provide financing to
Nazi industrialists in violation of the Trading with the Enemy Act during
World War II. Bush was the father of President George H.W. Bush and
grandfather of President George W. Bush.
The Dulles Diversion
The origins of McCarthyism predate McCarthy. In order to bury the war
profiteering investigation and undermine a wartime plan adopted by FDRs
Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau to deindustrialize Germany and break the
power of its banking cartel, Dulles and his associates began accusing New
Deal Democrats of being spies.
The first was Harry Dexter White, liberal postwar director of the
International Monetary Fund, who had pushed the German deindustrialization
plan, and then came Hiss.
The GOPs accusations of treason were part of a political counter-offensive
designed to protect the real traitors while bolstering the partys political
fortune. Hiss alleged treason provided the proof that the Roosevelt and
Truman administrations were dyed pink in Moscow. Hiss trial was in turn
politicized as much as the Soviet show trials.
John Foster Dulles, President Dwight Eisenhowers secretary of state, and
his brother Allen had worked as attorneys for Sullivan & Cromwell, which
according to journalist Stephen Kinzer, thrived on its cartels and ties to
the Nazi regime, and kept its business with its clients all the way through
the war.
After supporting Nixons campaign in Californias 12th Congressional
district against Democrat Jerry Voorhis in 1946, the Dulles brothers began
to accuse their enemies of communist subversion in order to bury
investigation into their nefarious war-time activities and to undermine
Morgenthaus plan to deindustrialize Germany and break the power of its
banking cartel.
The first target of their accusations was Harry Dexter White, liberal
postwar executive director of the IMF and an assistant to Morgenthau who
championed the German deindustrialization plan. President Roosevelt and
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill adopted the plan at the second
Quebec Conference in September 1944. Truman replaced it in 1947 with the
Marshall Plan, a robust program of economic aid that benefited U.S.
business.
Hiss was the second major target to fall victim to Dulles plot. Like
Russia-gate, which has deflected attention from the Democratic Party
failings, Hiss case became a media sensation that derailed critical
scrutiny into treasonous wartime activity by plutocratic interests and
provided proof for GOP voters that the Roosevelt and Truman
administrations were dyed pink in Moscowmuch as Donald Trump is portrayed
as a Moscow puppet.
Trump: Portrayed as Moscow puppet.
Like the allegations against Trump, Hiss actual connection to Soviet
espionage remains unproven. He never left any traces of even being a
socialist. The documents Hiss is alleged to have smuggled were mundane and
would have done nothing to harm national security. They included blank and
illegible microfilms along with synopses about economic conditions in
Manchuria, German trade policy in Braziland, unclassified manuals for
operating naval rafts, parachutes and fire extinguishers; information that
could have been found in the New York public library.
The Hiss case was marred by prosecutorial misconduct and illegalities. Hiss
was entrapped by prosecutors who benefited from FBI surveillance of his
witnesses and the sharing of that information with the prosecutions leading
witness, Whittaker Chambers, a Time magazine editor who said he had known
Hiss in the mid-1930s. Allegations of biased FBI misconduct against Trump
are similarly rife.
Like proponents of Russia-gate, Chambers had questionable credibility. His
credibility was undermined by contradictory statements, dubious claims about
the spy-craft trade and false testimony. William A. Reuben, who spent four
decades researching the Hiss case, found that the first thing to note about
Whittaker Chambers confessions of communist underground work is that it has
never been corroborated, either by documentary evidence or by the word of
any other human being.
KGB: Hiss Never an Asset
Years after the case, Oleg Kalugin, a former KGB general and longtime chief
of Russias foreign intelligence operations, stated that Russian
intelligence service has no documents proving that Alger Hiss cooperated
with our service somewhere or anywhere, while retired KGB Maj. Gen. Julius
Kobyakov said Hiss never had any relationship with Soviet intelligence.
Hede Massing, an Austrian actress and confessed former Soviet spy inside the
U.S., was another key witness for the prosecution who was threatened with
deportation if she did not testify against Hiss. The government claimed that
Hiss was part of an underground spy cell called the Ware Group.
However, Lee Pressman, a labor attorney who was a law school classmate of
Hiss and a member of the group, testified that this was a Marxist study
group in the 1930s and that Hiss was not a member. Pressman was later
accused of being a Russian spy.
It was claimed that Chambers and Hiss had been introduced by Josef Peters,
alleged brain of the entire communist underground. But there is no record of
this, and Peters was mysteriously deported to Hungary on the eve of the
trial, so he could not testify and said he never met Chambers, except
possibly once in the 1930s.
Chambers: Dubious witness.
Hiss wife, Priscilla, allegedly typed some of the smuggled State Department
documents on a typewriter that was traced back to the Hiss family. However,
later it was found that the FBI had suppressed a lab report showing she
could not have typed the documents. The Woodcock typewriter, serving as key
government evidence, was also possibly reproduced by the CIA or U.S.
military intelligence, echoing the way the CIA has been alleged to be behind
Guccifer 2 in the alleged Russian hack of the DNC computers.
Nixon alluded to this when he told aide Charles Colson, as recorded in White
House tapes: The typewriters are always key. We built one in the Hiss
case.
Hiss opponents believed they had their smoking gun years after the trial
when encrypted Soviet cables, released following the opening of the Soviet
archives in 1991 (known as the Venona files), exposed a State Department spy
code-named Ales, whom they believed to meanAlger.
However, a 2007 American Scholar article by Kai Bird and Svetlana
Chervonnaya argued that a more likely candidate was Hiss colleague, Wilder
Foote, because a KGB operative placed Ales in Mexico City when Hiss was
known to be in the U.S and the information came from someone inside the
Office of the Lend- Lease Aadministration, where Hiss never worked.
The Soviets showed little interest in the political information Hiss could
provide, since the Cambridge Five (famed British spies) leaked the major
secret documents related to Yalta. Ales hence does not appear to have
violated the Espionage Act, which requires specific injury to U.S. national
interest.
More Parallels With 2016
The Hiss case exemplifies the abuse of the judicial system and manipulation
of public opinion by opportunists such as Richard Nixon and elements of the
Deep State during the Cold War. One can see parallels with Russia-gate here
too, with opportunists such as Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) and his
uncorroborated leaks coming from intelligence sources.
Nixon: Opportunistically seized the moment.
These resemblances to current events are unfortunately salient. The Deep
State always has wanted Russia as an enemy so huge military-defense budgets
can be maintained, and so Russia does not control Central Asias oil and gas
wealth. The main target of its political machinations today, farcically, is
a Republican president who is an arch-imperialist and embodiment of the
American dream in its valorization of wealth accumulation.
During the 2016 election, the party of Roosevelt ran a divisive candidate in
Hillary Clinton who undermined the progressive insurgent, Bernie Sanders,
through undemocratic methods. Instead of looking in the mirror, party
power-brokers sought to blame Russia for its embarrassing defeat and divert
the publics attention. They spread rumors of Russian electoral
manipulation, which, as in the Hiss case, have never been corroborated and
probably never could be.
The Russia-gate investigation so far has many of the footprints of a
politicized disinformation campaign, an amateur one at that, given that the
January 2017 assessment by only three intelligence agenciesreleased to
try to prove the charge of election hackingwas bereft of any evidence and
focused mainly on attacking English-language Russian television as an
alleged propaganda outlet.
Gross inconsistencies also have been apparent; in the refusal by Democratic
National Committee to allow the FBI to examine its computer server where the
alleged hack took place and in Special Counsel Robert Muellers refusal to
interview WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange or witnesses such as British
diplomat Craig Murray who met with the alleged leaker. Mueller also refuses
to engage with a study carried out by the Veteran Intelligence Professionals
for Sanity, or VIPS, that determined the DNC data was leaked, not hacked,
and that the data copying was performed on the East Coast of the United
States and exceeded internet capability for a remote hack.
Liberals as Rightists
Mueller: Indictment will never be tried. (White House/Wikimedia)
The timing of the indictment of 12 Russian spies by Mueller on the eve of a
summit between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump was also suspicious, along
with the indictment being presented as proof when it is unlikely the case
would ever be prosecuted.
Businessmen with ties to the Democratic Party, such as William F. Browder,
meanwhile have replaced the old Wall Street Republicans in pushing the
anti-Russia hysteria. They too aim to deflect attention from their
commission of white-collar crime. In Browders case it was tax evasion, for
which Putin prosecuted him. The methods of the New Cold Warriors are
generally reminiscent of the old GOP in the levying of baseless accusations
and adoption of methods of clandestine surveillance and attempted entrapment
to discredit or prosecute Americans suspected of collusion with Russia, as
had been the case with Hiss.
The Democrats and liberal media pundits on CNN and MSNBC and in journals
like Harpers Magazine and The New Yorker appear to be oddly in sync with
the extremist John Birch society, which accused Eisenhower in the 1950s of
leading a communist sleeper cell.
As Establishment Democrats and their fellow travelers drive much of the
Russophobic hysteria in an effort to undermine Trump, it has been important
for them to promote a useable past and distort the original history of the
Cold War. As a case in point, Seth Ackerman wrote a piece in the supposedly
left Jacobin magazine denouncing Roosevelts vice president, Henry Wallace,
who had advocated for détente with the Russians, as a communist dupe.
Ackerman then asserted in a July essay, which was at least somewhat
critical of the Democrats current Russophobia, that Hiss was a Soviet spy
who was reportedly awarded secret Soviet decorations in honor of his
service to Moscow. However, even serious scholarship of an anti-Hiss bent
has acknowledged that Hiss guilt remains speculative, and the opening of
the Soviet archives has not revealed any smoking-gun evidence apart from the
Venona files whose meaning is contested.
Joan Brady, in an important recent study of Hiss, Americas Dreyfuss,
notes that the red scare whipped up around the case became for America what
antisemitism had been to Germany [in the 1930s], a force to unify the people
and deflect attention from an economic re-arrangement that could not
function freely without chipping away at their rights.
Decades after the case against Hiss, he remains a bogeyman who continues
to serve as the embodiment what happens when we let our guard down.
These words resonate in our political climate where the Russian threat is
again being invoked as a force to unify the people against false enemies and
to steer attention from pernicious economic arrangements and criminal
malfeasance by political donors.
Spooked by insurgencies on both the right and the left in the 2016, the
Establishment is worried about growing social unrest, both of which have
been smeared as being influenced by Russia. New bogeymen are again being
created to sustain a dangerous confrontationist policy toward Russia whose
consequences may be even worse than the first Cold War.
Jeremy Kuzmarov is an historian and author, with John Marciano, of The
Russians are Coming, Again: The First Cold War as Tragedy, the Second as
Farce.
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