Anyone who thought that the opening of Cold War–era government files about Communist espionage
 inside the United States would put to rest conspiracy theories about it underestimated the capacity of true believers to come up with ever-more refined and bizarre explanations for inconvenient evidence. Reams of documents demonstrating that Julius Rosenberg was an important Soviet spy and that his wife assisted his recruitment of the Manhattan Project machinist David Greenglass have not persuaded Ro-senberg’s children. Admissions by Soviet KGB officers lamenting their inability to recruit Robert Oppenheimer have not disabused some conservatives of the notion that Oppenheimer had been a spy—even as abundant evidence that he was a secret member of the Communist Party of the United States has been blithely ignored by his biographers and award-winning film directors.

So it is hardly a surprise that Jeff Kisseloff, a freelance writer who has literally spent half a century denying that Alger Hiss was a Soviet spy, still refuses to face reality despite numerous indications in files from Russian archives that Hiss had worked for Soviet military intelligence. Kisseloff, who first went to work for Hiss while in college, has now published Rewriting Hisstory: A Fifty-Year Journey to Uncover the Truth About Alger Hiss, his comprehensive account of what he is convinced is the most consequential cover-up in American history. The Hiss frame-up was, in a hyperbolic claim typical of his work lo these many decades, the pivot that led to “McCarthyism, Vietnam, the Iran hostage crisis, and even certain acts of terrorism.”

Alger Hiss, convicted in 1950 of two counts of perjury for lying about spying for the Soviet Union was, Kisseloff is sure, totally innocent. Not only was he never a spy or a Communist; he was not even a radical. Meanwhile, in Kisseloff’s telling, Hiss’s chief accuser, Whittaker Chambers, was a paranoid fantasist and serial liar, and virtually all of Chambers’s stories about his own life and activities, let alone Hiss’s, were invented.

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In Kisseloff’s rendering, Chambers supposedly exaggerated his Communist Party activities, including being “a pretend member of the [Communist] underground” after 1932. The author subjects any statement supporting Chambers’s account of his own life to meticulous rebuttal, but he gives credence to bizarre and unverified claims about Chambers—including that the author of one affidavit on behalf of Hiss had been a bodyguard for Chambers while he was guiding Trotskyists to Mexico to meet Trotsky. Another anonymous source supposedly told investigators working for Hiss that Chambers had been given a low-level job in the Communist underground on orders from Communist Party bigwig Gene Dennis, because Chambers was suspected of being an informer and the Party wanted to keep an eye on him—information that Kisseloff does not dispute.

Kisseloff will credit any scrap of misinformation that can tar Chambers. He admits that a document in the Communist Party’s own files about Chambers being readmitted into the CPUSA and the announcement of his appointment as editor of its newspaper, the New Masses, would seem to support (to put it mildly) Chambers’s story about his Communist credentials. But he quickly adds that his mentor in the Hiss-was-framed cult, Bill Reuben, quickly informed him that the document simply has to be a forgery. And that is good enough for Kisseloff.

But why and how did such a forgery from 1932 get into the CPUSA’s own records and finally into the Tamiment Library in 2006? What’s more, Gene Dennis could not have been involved in Chambers rejoining the CPUSA because Dennis held no leadership position in 1932; he was abroad, working for the Soviet Union’s international wing until the middle of the decade.

While Kisseloff is at pains to minimize the role that Chambers played in the CPUSA’s underground in the 1930s and his work with the GRU—the Soviet military intelligence arm—he ignores copious evidence of Chambers’s active involvement in Soviet espionage. To take just one example, Nadia Ulanovskya was part of a husband-and-wife team of Soviet intelligence officers active in New York in the 1930s. After emigrating to Israel, she wrote a long memoir detailing Chambers’s work with her cabal.

Abundant evidence of Chambers’s involvement in the Communist underground and espionage is available in the Vassiliev Notebooks. These are several thousand pages of detailed notes and transcriptions made by Alexander Vassiliev, a former KGB officer given unprecedented access to its files in the early 1990s as part of a publishing deal and now reprinted on the Woodrow Wilson Center website. John Haynes and I worked with Vassiliev to produce a book called Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America, which was published in 2008; it included a chapter on Hiss entitled “Case Closed.”

Kisseloff discusses several of the documents we examined. He concedes that Vassiliev probably copied them accurately but insists that they do not add one iota to the proof of Hiss’s guilt. After all, he notes, Soviet officers stationed in the United States had incentives to exaggerate their achievements, and just because someone made a claim in a document that he had recruited someone as a spy, that is not proof that the claim was accurate. And it is true that Hiss, a senior official in the foreign-policy apparatus of the FDR administration, was a real catch and may have been worth lying about. But Kisseloff avoids discussing the context of the references to Hiss, distorts what they say, and simply ignores other damning documents.

Take the story of Hede Massing, who worked as a recruiter for the KGB—separate from and even somewhat competitive with the GRU—in the United States in the 1930s. She testified at Hiss’s trial that, in November 1935, one of her recruits had been approached by Hiss, who wanted to recruit him for his own GRU apparatus. That recruit, State Department official Noel Field, admitted that he already had connec-tions with another espionage apparatus, while also hinting that Larry Duggan (yet another State Department official) was also connected to Soviet intelligence.

The encounter was extensively discussed in several cables in the Vassiliev Notebooks. But Kisseloff leaves out how both Iskhak Akhmerov, Massing’s KGB handler, and KGB headquarters in Moscow confirmed that Hiss was working for the GRU. Massing told Akhmerov that she and Hiss had politely sparred over which of them should run Field. Moscow was not amused about this loss of operational security. In a scathing cable, Central Headquarters complained to Akhmerov that her meeting with Hiss (whose code name was Jurist) “took place after our directive stipulating that ‘Jurist’ is the neighbors’ man [GRU] and that it is necessary to stay away from him.”

Another message has Akhmerov informing Moscow that at one of his periodic meetings with J. Peters, the CPUSA’s liaison with Soviet intelligence, Peters had told him that he had previously warned Massing to stay away from Hiss. Later Akhmerov mentioned that Peters “blurted out that Hiss was a member of the fraternal [CPUSA] organization who had infiltrated the Surrogate [State Department] and was then transferred to the neighbors [GRU].”

Boris Bazarov, head of the KGB’s illegal station in the U.S., told Moscow that Field “and Hiss have, in effect, been completely deprived of their cover before” Duggan—meaning that Duggan knew both his fellow officials were Soviet spies and was not supposed to know. In late 1936, Bazarov sent Moscow a just-released State Department directory and noted, “You will not find the neighbors’ ‘Jurist’ in the photograph directory because he has worked there only since September.” Hiss had begun work at State in September 1936. Enviously, he told Moscow that the KGB lacked “a suitable recruiting agent in the State Department; “there was ‘Jurist,’ but the neighbors snatched him up, as you informed us.”

In 1938, Akhmerov became alarmed when one of his sources in the State Department, Michael Straight, reported meeting Hiss, whom he described as “very ideologically progressive” (contra Kisseloff). Akhmerov cabled Moscow, worried that if he warned Straight to avoid Hiss, it might lead Straight to “figure out that Hiss is a member of our family” or that, unless Hiss was warned off, he might approach Straight to spy.

How does Kisseloff explain any of this? He doesn’t mention it. There is much more I could add, but Kisseloff is not interested in material that complicates his own conclusions.

Kisseloff also pooh-poohs Chambers’s fear of being killed by Soviet intelligence after his defection in 1938. The understandably paranoid Chambers believed that “people who had no such intention were out to do him harm.” From the mid-1930s on, Soviet assassins roamed Europe and the North American continent, eliminating traitors, most famously Leon Trotsky himself. Chambers had every reason to suspect that he would also be a target.

Kisseloff is not even sure that Chambers was ever a spy; he claims it was “not the fear of reprisal from his spy bosses (if he had any) that caused him to flee the Communist Party.” Nor is he convinced that Larry Duggan was a spy, despite numerous reports about Duggan from his handlers to Moscow during the 1940s, years after Chambers had defected. Kisseloff even suggests that Duggan’s death in 1948—he jumped out of a high-rise building—was probably related to his poor health; he fails to note information in Vassiliev’s notebooks that Duggan had plunged into despair after lying to the FBI when agents interviewed him about Hiss, after which the KGB had sent an officer to try to re-recruit him. Field’s admission to Hungarian intelligence that he and Hiss had been spies was, Kisseloff explains, extracted under torture and cannot be believed—even though the idea that the Hungarians would torture him to implicate Hiss as a Soviet spy is nonsensical.

Kisseloff would presumably dismiss any KGB messages about Hiss on the grounds that Chambers lied about his access to him and/or attributed material he received from other sources to Hiss. But that does not explain why Soviet intelligence continued to maintain contact with Hiss and refer to him as a source after Chambers broke with Communism. Harold Glasser reported in a biography he prepared for the KGB in 1944 that he had met with Chambers (using his pseudonym Karl) “on a more or less regular basis” from the spring of 1937 until early 1939, although he admitted that he was unsure of the latter date. When the KGB was urgently attempting to contact Hiss prior to the convening of the first United Nations conference in March 1945, it discussed him with Glasser, code-named Ruble, and commented that Glasser and Hiss “used to work in ‘Karl’s’ informational group, which was affiliated with the neighbors [GRU].”

Glasser described Hiss as “strong and strong-willed, with a firm and decisive nature, completely aware that he is a Communist in an illegal position.” But, because Chambers did not recognize a photograph of Glasser, Kisseloff dismisses the idea that he might have known him a decade earlier and never mentions this KGB document. 

Several KGB documents from the period after the Hiss case be-came a cause célèbre do nothing to deflect Kisseloff. One, the so-called Gorsky memo, written by the former KGB station chief in the United States in 1948 while he was holding a senior intelligence position in Moscow, listed the sources exposed by various “traitors” such as Chambers and Massing. Under Chambers’s name, Gorsky included both Alger and his brother Donald Hiss. Kisseloff insists that Gorsky took this information from American newspaper reports, as if a high-ranking Soviet intelligence officer in Moscow, writing an internal report on his agency’s problems, would have had to rely on the American media to know who had been providing information to the Soviet Union.

Seeking a way to minimize the damage caused by Chambers’s testimony, the Washington station of the KGB suggested to Moscow that it forge a document revealing Chambers had been a Gestapo agent who had infiltrated the CPUSA. Moscow quickly vetoed the idea, noting that it would “undoubtedly have a very negative effect on our former agents who were betrayed by Chambers (A. Hiss, D. Hiss etc.).” And, in 1950,  an intelligence evaluation written in Moscow surveyed the setbacks that had rocked Soviet intelligence in the U.S. and determined that one of the most consequential was identified as “the trial of the GRU…agent, ‘Leonard,’ the chief of one of the main divisions of the State Department and a member of Karl’s group, [which] ended in his conviction at the beginning of 1950.” Nobody but Alger Hiss fits that description.

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While Kisseloff’s efforts to acquit Hiss are ludicrous and dishonest, his explanation for why Hiss was targeted exhibits the convoluted reasoning that animates many conspiracy theories. Kisseloff argues that Hiss, Harry Dexter White, Harold Glasser, Charles Kramer, and Noel Field—all of whom have been documented as Soviet sources within the American government—were supposedly targeted, not because several defectors named them as spies or because decrypted cables exposed their activities, but “for their accomplishments” in advancing the ideals of the New Deal. Representing the best of American liberalism, they were supposedly destroyed as part of a campaign by resentful conservatives to roll back FDR’s progressive agenda.

Kisseloff provides a lengthy list of the supposed liars who brought down Hiss. Surprisingly, he eschews some of the more popular suspects advanced over the years, such as the FBI, Richard Nixon, and the House Committee on Un-American Activities, all of whom just piled on. While he believes the FBI threatened witnesses, hid exculpatory evidence, and otherwise sandbagged the defense, he does not believe it forged documents (known to history as “the Pumpkin Papers”) that Chambers claimed had been typed on Hiss’s typewriter. Similarly, Nixon and HUAC got involved in the case too late to participate in concocting evidence. Turns out, even Chambers was just a pawn.

Instead, Kisseloff argues, Hiss was framed by two fanatical anti-Communists: the journalist Isaac Don Levine and Ben Mandel, a one-time Communist who later worked for anti-Communist investigative committees. They zeroed in on Hiss beginning in the 1930s—at a time when he was an obscure mid-level bureaucrat—because they despised the Roosevelt administration and saw him as emblematic of all that was wrong with the New Deal.

The Kisseloff conspiracy alleges that both Mandel and Levine had connections to forgers in the CIA (which barely even existed then) and U.S. military intelligence. Their sources may have included both Allen and John Foster Dulles (one the first civilian to head the CIA, the other later the secretary of state), who supposedly had ties with former Gestapo officers and experienced Nazi forgers they had helped escape to North America. Levine and Mandel were therefore able “to get hold of documents that had gone to Hiss’s office and retype them using Hiss’s own typewriter or one that was altered so that documents it produced matched anything produced on the Hiss machine when it was in possession of the [Hiss] family.”

And who did the retyping? Kisseloff reports having an “aha moment” when he realized that Mandel had worked as a high-school typing teacher before he was fired from the New York school system in 1932. Working under frantic pressure, in Kisseloff’s fantasy counter history, the conspirators used the documents Chambers falsely claimed he had hidden in a dumbwaiter in his nephew’s apartment to serve as the model for the typewriter they had to have forged. They then reproduced the documents so that Chambers could turn them over to the defense during depositions on Hiss’s libel suit.

Truly an outstanding and remarkable display of energy, technical wizardry, and chutzpah! Their feat was even more remarkable since they left no traces of the operation whatsoever!

The documents from KGB files that unequivocally demonstrate Hiss’s guilt demonstrate to Kisseloff only how cleverly the whole conspiracy was constructed. To sum up, Chambers lied about spying, lied about dealing with Hiss, lied about how he came into possession of State Department documents, lied to his Soviet superiors (if he had any), who subsequently lied to Moscow about material they supposedly received. Years after Chambers defected, Soviet spymasters in both America and the USSR didn’t realize they were being duped and continued to deal with Hiss, heard from other sources that Hiss was a Communist, and relied on American newspaper reports about who their agents in the United States were. And, until Jeff Kisseloff came along, no one had put it all together. This was truly a conspiracy so immense as to shake the whole course of American history. The only serious question left is why a university press published this work of delusional madness as a nonfiction book.

Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images

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