The Rest of the Story

A little touch of forgotten history, and perhaps some education along the way.  Assuming, of course, that you’ve never heard of this man.

Alger Hiss

If ever there was an argument as to where the U.N. came from and who was behind it’s inner workings, just look up this man, an American lawyer, government official, author, and lecturer.

He was involved in the establishment of the United Nations, both as a U.S. State Department and U.N. official.  He was all of those things, AND a Communist Spy!

Hiss was accused of being a Soviet Spy in 1948 and convicted of perjury in connection with this charge in 1950.

On August 3, 1948, Whittaker Chambers, a former Communist Party member, testified under subpoena before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) that Hiss had secretly been a Communist while in federal service.  Chambers had previously testified under oath that Hiss had never been a Communist or a spy, and Chambers would admit, under oath, to other instances where he had committed perjury under oath. Called before HUAC, Hiss categorically denied the charge. When Chambers repeated his claim on nationwide radio, Hiss filed a defamation lawsuit against him.

During the pretrial discovery process, Chambers produced new evidence indicating that he and Hiss had been involved in espionage, which both men had previously denied under oath to HUAC.  A federal grand jury indicted Hiss on two counts of perjury; Chambers admitted to the same offense but, as a cooperating government witness, was never charged.  Although Hiss’s indictment stemmed from the alleged espionage, he could not be tried for that crime because the statue of limitations had expired.  After a mistrial due to a hung jury, Hiss was tried a second time.  In January 1950, he was found guilty on both counts of perjury and received two concurrent five-year sentences, of which he eventually served three and a half years.

(After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Alger Hiss petitioned General Dmitry Antonovich Volkogonov, who had become President Yeltsin’s military advisor and the overseer of all the Soviet intelligence archives, to request the release of any Soviet files on the Hiss case.  Both former President Nixon and the director of his presidential library, John H. Taylor, wrote similar letters, though their full contents are not yet publicly available.)

Russian archivists responded by reviewing their files, and in late 1992 reported back that they had found no evidence Hiss ever engaged in espionage for the Soviet Union nor that he was a member of the Communist Party.  However, Volkogonov subsequently stated he spent only two days on the search and had mainly relied on the word of  KGB archivists.  “What I saw gave me no basis to claim a full clarification”, he said.  Referring to Hiss’s lawyer, he added, “John Lowenthal pushed me to say things of which I was not fully convinced.”   General-Lieutenant Vitaly Pavlov, who ran Soviet intelligence work in North America in the late 1930s and early 1940s for the NKVD, provided some corroboration of the initial report in his memoirs, stating that Hiss never worked for the USSR as one of his agents.   In 2003, retired Russian intelligence official General Julius [Kobyakov] disclosed that it was he who had actually searched the files for Volkogonov.  [Kobyakov] stated:

…Mr. A. Hiss had never had any relationship with the SVR or its predecessors.

In 2007, Svetlana Chervonnaya, a Russian researcher who had been studying Soviet archives since the early 1990s, stated that Hiss’ name was absent from Soviet archives.  In May 2009, at a conference hosted by the Wilson Center, Mark Kramer, director of Cold War Studies at Harvard University at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, stated that he did NOT “trust a word [Kobyakov] says”. 

At the same conference, historian Ron Radosh reported that while researching the papers of Marshal Voroshilov’s in Moscow, he and Mary Habeck had encountered two GRU (Soviet military intelligence) files referring to Alger Hiss as “our agent“.

But this doesn’t end there!

It is said that Hiss’ friends in the media (the same MSM we all know and love) were out to get Nixon over the Hiss case.  And years later they did! 

So…  The UN (the anti-American organization who resides in NYC today) was put together (on our behalf) with the help of at least one Communist (no wonder it is what it is), AND years later, Alger Hiss (the name you never knew), cost the United States of America a President.  We the People, were not had once, but twice!

And now you know the rest of the story.