The Faithful Traitor

THE obituaries of Alger Hiss and the commentaries that appeared in the weeks following his mid-November death caused less distress among students of the case than many had expected. Notwithstanding a few silly headlines and some television-disseminated misinformation, the mainstream media-by and large-accorded the overwhelming evidence against Hiss appropriate deference.

This evidence, of course, has only mounted in recent years. The Oleg Gordievsky and Pavel Sudoplatov memoirs, documents unearthed in Budapest by the Hungarian scholar Maria Schmidt, an archival finding in Prague by ex-USIA official Herb Romerstein and this writer, and-importantly-the newly declassified U.S. intelligence decrypts of wartime NKVD cables (the Venona papers) have combined to deal the myth of Hiss’s innocence a series of severe blows.

THE obituaries of Alger Hiss and the commentaries that appeared in the weeks following his mid-November death caused less distress among students of the case than many had expected. Notwithstanding a few silly headlines and some television-disseminated misinformation, the mainstream media-by and large-accorded the overwhelming evidence against Hiss appropriate deference.

This evidence, of course, has only mounted in recent years. The Oleg Gordievsky and Pavel Sudoplatov memoirs, documents unearthed in Budapest by the Hungarian scholar Maria Schmidt, an archival finding in Prague by ex-USIA official Herb Romerstein and this writer, and-importantly-the newly declassified U.S. intelligence decrypts of wartime NKVD cables (the Venona papers) have combined to deal the myth of Hiss’s innocence a series of severe blows.