The Venona papers left no doubt at all that Hiss, known by his soviet handlers as "ALES", was indeed a soviet spy, and such democrats as Daniel Patrick Moynihan said they left no doubt. The leftwing incredibly constinues to repeat the "political hysteria" mantra, over guilt that they supported for decades the most murderous, genocidal engine of death ever created by man - communism.
...sigh..guesswork is not proof.
I don't care if Alger Hiss worked for the Soviet Union or not, because many intelligent people in the middle 20th century realised that Hitler needed to be stopped at all costs..but...it seems that good scholarship and rigid intellectual discipline, hallmarks of Stalin's written work, seemed to have eluded todays half-educated political wannabees...
I suppose, you haven't read a single thing by Stalin, or Lenin, or Marx.
Am I correct ?
"...In 1995, the CIA and U. S. National Security Agency made public for the first time the existence of the World War II Venona project, which had decrypted or partially decrypted thousands of telegrams sent from 1942 to 1945 to the Soviet Union by its U.S. operatives. Although known to the FBI, the existence of VENONA had been kept secret even from President Truman. One document, Venona # 1822, mentioned a Soviet spy codenamed ALES who worked with a group of "Neighbors". An FBI special agent, Robert Lamphere, concluded that the codename "ALES" was "probably Alger Hiss".[58][59] In 1997, Allen Weinstein, in the second edition of his book Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case (originally published in 1976), calls the Venona evidence "persuasive but not conclusive."[7] The bipartisan Moynihan Commission on Government Secrecy, chaired by Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, however, stated in its findings that year: "The complicity of Alger Hiss of the State Department seems settled. As does that of Harry Dexter White of the Treasury Department."[60] In his 1998 book Secrecy: The American Experience, Moynihan wrote, "Belief in the guilt or innocence of Alger Hiss became a defining issue in American intellectual life. Parts of the American government had conclusive evidence of his guilt, but they never told."[61] In their numerous books, Harvey Klehr, professor of political science at Emory University, and John Earl Haynes, historian of twentieth-century politics at the Library of Congress, have mounted an energetic defense of agent Robert Lamphere's conclusion that ALES indeed referred to Alger Hiss.[62] National Security Agency analysts have also gone on record asserting that ALES could only have been Alger Hiss.[63] The Venona transcript # 1822, sent March 30, 1945, from the Soviets' Washington station chief to Moscow,[59] appears to indicate that ALES attended the February 4–11, 1945, Yalta conference and then went to Moscow. Hiss did attend Yalta and then traveled to Moscow in his capacity as adviser to Secretary of State Edward Stettinius.[64] Some, however, have questioned whether Venona cable # 1822 constitutes definitive proof that ALES was Hiss. For example, John Lowenthal pointed out the following:
* ALES was said to be the leader of a small group of espionage agents but, apart from using his wife as a typist and Chambers as courier, Hiss was alleged by the prosecution to have acted alone.[65]
* ALES was a GRU (military intelligence) agent who obtained military intelligence and only rarely provided State Department material. In contrast, during his trial, Alger Hiss, an employee of the State Department, was accused having obtained only non-military information and the papers he was accused of having passed to the Soviets on a regular basis were non-military, State Department documents.
* Even had Hiss been a spy as alleged, after 1938 he would have been unlikely to have continued espionage activities as ALES did, since in 1938 Whittaker Chambers had broken with the Communist Party and gone into hiding, threatening to denounce his Communist Party colleagues unless they followed suit. Had Hiss been ALES, his cover would thus have been in extreme jeopardy and it would have been too risky for any Soviet agency to continue using him.
* Recent information provided by Alexander Vassiliev places ALES in Mexico City at a time when Hiss was known to have been in Washington.[66]
Lowenthal posited that ALES in fact was not at the Yalta conference at all and that the cable instead was directed to Soviet deputy foreign minister Andrey Vyshinsky.[67] According to Lowenthal, in paragraph six of Venona # 1822, the GRU asks Vyshinsky to get in touch with ALES to convey thanks from the GRU for a job well done — which would have been unnecessary if ALES had actually gone to Moscow, because the GRU could have thanked him there in person.[57] The late Eduard Mark of the Center for Air Force History hotly disputed Lowenthal's analysis on this point.[68] In 2005 the National Security Agency released the original Russian of the Venona texts. At a symposium held at the Center for Cryptologic History that year, intelligence historian John R. Schindler concluded that the original Russian text of Venona # 1822, removes any ambiguity and shows that ALES was indeed at Yalta: "the identification of ALES as Alger Hiss, made by the U.S. Government more than a half-century ago, seems exceptionally solid, based on the evidence now available; message 1822 is only one piece of that evidence, yet a compelling one."[69]
Rebutting Lowenthal, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr argued that:
* None of the evidence presented at the Hiss trial precludes the possibility that Hiss could have been an espionage agent after 1938 or that he had only passed State Department documents after 1938.
* Chambers's charges were not seriously investigated until 1945 when Elizabeth Bentley defected, so the Soviets could in theory have considered it an acceptable risk for him continue his espionage work even after Chambers's 1938 defection.
* Vyshinsky was not in the U.S. between Yalta and the time of the Venona message, and the message is from the Washington KGB station reporting on a talk with ALES in the U.S., rendering Lowenthal's analysis impossible.[70]
An earlier Venona document, # 1579, had actually mentioned "HISS" by name. This partially decrypted cable consists of fragments of a 1943 message from the GRU chief in New York to headquarters in Moscow. The fragment reads: "... from the State Department by name of HISS ..." The name "HISS" appeared "spelled out in the Latin alphabet" (according to a footnote by the cryptanalysts). Since there is no first name, "HISS" could refer either to Alger or Donald Hiss, who both worked at the State Department at that time. Lowenthal maintained that had Hiss really been a spy the GRU would have been unlikely to have referred to him by his real name[57] in a coded transmission, since this was contrary to their usual practice.[62]
At an April 2007 symposium, authors Kai Bird and Svetlana Chervonnaya presented evidence that they claimed showed that not Hiss but Wilder Foote, a U.S. diplomat, was the best match to ALES, based on the movements of all the officials present at the U.S.-Soviet Yalta conference.[71] Bird and Chervonnaya noted that Foote had been in Mexico City at a time when a Soviet cable placed ALES there, whereas Hiss had left Mexico several days earlier (see above). Haynes and Klehr, however, note that Foote doesn't fit aspects of the description of ALES. Haynes and Klehr maintain that the author of the Soviet cable was someone who managed KGB assets rather than GRU assets like ALES - and could have been mistaken when he stated that ALES was still in Mexico City.[72][73]
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alger_Hiss
Comrade Stalin