FBI Files on the JFK Assassination

[John Simkin]

George Orwell: "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear".

One of the reasons that some people believe that JFK was killed as part of a conspiracy is the reluctance of the FBI to release all the available files on the case. However, it is possible that there might be other reasons why these files are not being released.

I have recently been researching the case of Alger Hiss who was found guilty of two counts of perjury and on 25th January, 1950, he was sentenced to five years' imprisonment. In other words, the jury believed the testimony of Whittaker Chambers and Hede Massing, that Hiss had been a Soviet spy.

On his release in November, 1954, Hiss began his campaign to prove that he was not guilty of being a spy. He argued that he was a victim of Joseph McCarthy and his attempt to show that Roosevelt’s New Deal was some kind of communist conspiracy.

Hiss and his supporters argued that he had been framed by the FBI. To prove this they demanded the FBI release all its files on the case. When the FBI refused to do this, this belief became stronger. This was the argument of Fred Cook's book, The Unfinished Story of Alger Hiss (1958).

The controversy over the FBI’s possible role in the assassination of JFK, increased this belief. This was reflected in a series of articles that appeared in Nation Magazine in the 1960s. These were often written by William A. Reuben and Victor Navasky. These journalists also called for the release of the FBI files.

In the 1970s there were a series of books and articles written by those on the left arguing that Hiss was innocent and that he had been framed by J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon, Whittaker Chambers and Hede Massing. This included John Chabot Smith’s book, Algar Hiss: The True Story. In the book he argued that Hiss had been framed by Whittaker Chambers, who had typed the copies of the stolen documents himself. Smith claimed that in the spring of 1935 Chambers stayed at Hiss's "empty apartment" when it was "still full of its owner's furniture." Smith suggested that this included the Woodstock typewriter and therefore enabled him to use it to type up the stolen government documents."

In April 1976, the journalist, Philip Nobile, published an article on Alger Hiss in Harper's Magazine. He argued the prosecution's failure "to link Hiss to the actual typing of the documents" and "the lack of any witness supporting Chambers's party association with Hiss," Nobile felt, "troubled many open minds." Hiss told Nobile "the same old story of an unsound informer, forgery by typewriter, ruthless enemies of the New Deal, anti-Communist hysteria, and a poisoned jury." Nobile asked: "Why would he be peddling this tired line of defense... if it weren't true." Nobile was able to quote a number of well-known figures, including Abe Fortas, Lillian Hellman, Carey McWilliams, Arthur Miller, Victor Navasky and Robert Sherrill, claiming they were certain that Hiss had been framed.

However, in 1978, the historian, Allen Weinstein, published Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case. Weinstein told Hiss that “when I began working on this book four years ago, I thought that I would be able to demonstrate your innocence, but unfortunately, I have to tell you, that I cannot; that my assumption was wrong.” Weinstein’s conclusion that Hiss was guilty was based on interviews with people involved in the case and reading his defense files. However, he was unable to provide any real evidence that Hiss was guilty.

This was pointed out by Victor Navasky, the editor of Nation, who made a bitter attack on Weinstein: "Whatever his original motives and aspirations, Professor Weinstein is now an embattled partisan, hopelessly mired in the perspective of one side, his narrative obfuscatory, his interpretations improbable, his omissions strategic, his vocabulary manipulative, his standards double, his corroborations circular and suspect, his reporting astonishingly erratic.... His conversion from scholar to partisan, along with a rhetoric and methodology that confuse his beliefs with his data, make it impossible for the non specialist to render an honest verdict in the case."

Alexander Cockburn published an article in Village Voice on 28th May, 1979, where he reported that Samuel Krieger had successfully sued Weinstein over his allegations in his book that he was a fugitive from arrest for a murder. "Weinstein's scholarship and research procedures have been plainly damaged by the whole Krieger affair." Weinstein argued that Chambers had recruited Samuel Krieger (alias Clarence Miller) into the American Communist Party. He then went onto say that Clarence Miller had escaped from jail in North Carolina in 1929 and became a fugitive in the Soviet Union. He wrote: "Krieger became an important Communist organizer during the Gastonia textile strike of 1929. After being jailed by local authorities, Krieger and several other union leaders fled to the Soviet Union." What the author did not know was that there were two communists using the name "Clarence Miller". It was the other one who fled to the Soviet Union. Krieger had admitted to being a Communist organizer but had been misidentified as a fugitive."

As a result of all the books and articles that had been written on the Hiss case, by the end of the 1980s, most people’s views on his guilt or innocence was based mainly on their political views.

The situation did not change until the fall of communism in the Soviet Union. In the early 1990s several American academics were given access to KGB files. This included Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes. Their book, The Secret World of American Communism was published in 1995. The book was a collection of 92 documents from the 1930s and 1940s, with commentary by the authors. The documents consisted of communications between members of the American Communist Party and officials in Moscow. The authors argued that these documents conclusively demonstrated that the party's actions and policies were being directed by Joseph Stalin. Klehr and Haynes were unable to find Hiss's name on any documents, they did find plenty of evidence to support the testimony of Whittaker Chambers.

Tony Hiss has claimed that by 1995 Alger Hiss's body was "almost completely worn out" making him "a prisoner of his own physical frailties." In March 1996, Hiss was distressed when the newspapers carried stories of a cable that that had been sent by Anatoli Gromov, on 30th March, 1945, had been intercepted by the National Security Agency (NSA). Gromov was the controller of Washington-based NKVD agents. The cable included details of a conversation that had taken place between Iskhak Akhmerov and an agent with the codename Ales. The cable claimed that Ales had worked for the Neighbors (GPU) since 1935 and that he had been to the Yalta Conference and afterwards visited Moscow. An analyst at the NSA had written on 8th August, 1969, that Ales was "probably Alger Hiss".

Eric Breindel, writing in the Wall Street Journal, described the cable as "the smoking gun in the Hiss case". He went on to argue: Folks who refuse to recognize this document's implications, are likely to be the sort who would insist on Mr. Hiss's innocence even if he confessed." Hiss was contacted by journalists but he was too ill to be interviewed. However, his son Tony, denied his father was "Ales" and had only spent a brief time in Moscow after the Yalta Conference.

Alger Hiss died on 15th November, 1996. Evan Thomas, writing in Newsweek, suggested that Hiss "probably was a Soviet spy" and that in protesting his innocence he "was just a very good spy, deceitful to the end." However, some commentators, such as Peter Jennings on ABC News, had concentrated on the early statements of Dmitri A. Volkogonov, claiming that he had been vindicated by the Russians. Robert Novak pointed out that Volkogonov had retracted his statement and referred to a "deep-seated reluctance within the American liberal establishment to acknowledge that Hiss was a xxxx, spy, and traitor."

In 1999 Allen Weinstein published The Hunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America (1999). He had spent several years examining the KGB archives and came across a considerable amount of material that showed Alger Hiss was a Soviet spy. This included a memorandum sent by Hede Massing, a Soviet spy based in New York City, to Moscow. It concerned her attempts to recruit Noel Field. According to Massing's report he had been recently approached by Alger Hiss just before he left to attend a conference in London: "Alger Hiss (she used his real name because she was unaware of his codename) let him know that he was a Communist, that he was connected with an organization working for the Soviet Union and that he knew Ernst (Field) also had connections but he was afraid they were not solid enough, and probably, his knowledge was being used in a wrong way. Then he directly proposed that Ernst give him an account of the London conference." This was a similar account to the testimony given by Massing in the perjury trial.

Even with the publication of this book, many of Hiss’s supporters refused to accept they had been wrong. George Will, writing in the Washington Post, denounced Hiss and his supporters: "Alger Hiss spent 44 months in prison and then his remaining 42 years in the dungeon of his grotesque fidelity to the fiction of his innocence. The costs of his unconditional surrender to the totalitarian temptation was steep for his supporters. Clinging to their belief in martyrdom in order to preserve their belief in their "progressive" virtue, they were drawn into an intellectual corruption that hastened the moral bankruptcy of the American left."

The FBI now released their files on the case. These files revealed that they knew Alger Hiss was a spy for a very long time. In August 1939, Isaac Don Levine arranged for Whittaker Chambers to meet Adolf Berle, one of the top aides to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. After dinner Chambers told Berle about NKVD agents working for the government. This included Alger Hiss, Harold Ware, Nathaniel Weyl, Laurence Duggan, Lauchlin Currie, Donald Hiss, Noel Field, Harry Dexter White, Nathan Witt, Marion Bachrach, Julian Wadleigh, John Abt, Henry H. Collins, Lee Pressman and Victor Perlo.

Berle, who was in effect the president's Director of Homeland Security, raised the issue with Roosevelt, "who profanely dismissed it as nonsense." The list was not passed to the FBI until 1943. Whittaker Chambers was interviewed by the FBI but J. Edgar Hoover concluded, after being briefed on the interview, that Chambers had little specific information. However, this information was sent to the State Department security officials. One of them, Raymond Murphy, interviewed Chambers in March 1945 about these claims. Chambers now gave full details of Hiss's spying activities.

The FBI sent a report on Hiss to the Secretary of State James F. Byrnes in November 1946. It concluded that Hiss was probably a Soviet agent. Hiss was interviewed by D.M. Ladd, the FBI's Assistant Director, and denied any associations with Communism. The State Department security officials restricted his access to confidential documents, and the FBI wire-tapped his office and home phones.

Dean Acheson came under pressure to sack Hiss. Acheson refused to do this and instead contacted John Foster Dulles, who was on the board of directors of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Dulles arranged for Hiss to become president of the organization. At first Hiss refused to go and said he would rather stay and answer his critics. However, Acheson insisted and suggested that "this is the kind of thing which rarely, if ever, gets cleared up."

The FBI had not framed Hiss. Instead they protected him. They should have arrested him for spying in 1943. On 3rd August, 1948, Whittaker Chambers appeared before the House of Un-American Activities Committee. During his testimony, he named Alger Hiss, as a spy. This was extremely embarrassing for the FBI. Rather than admit their mistake, they decided to keep the Hiss files secret.

This might be the case with the FBI files on the JFK case. If these files are ever released, it will be interesting to see if researchers react in the same way as in the Hiss case.

You can read more about the Alger Hiss case here:

http://spartacus-educational.com/USAhiss.htm

[Dawn Meredith]

Interesting post John. In 1979 I saw a wonderful documentary called The Trials of Alger Hiss that convinced me he was framed. I have searched for years to find this film but it has totally disappeared. I would need more proof before I believe "FBI files" . Since when is the FBI trustworthy?

Dawn

[John Simkin]

Interesting post John. In 1979 I saw a wonderful documentary called The Trials of Alger Hiss that convinced me he was framed. I have searched for years to find this film but it has totally disappeared. I would need more proof before I believe "FBI files" . Since when is the FBI trustworthy?

Dawn

The film was made by John Lowenthal, a friend of Alger Hiss. The point about the FBI files is that they back up the testimony provided by Whittaker Chambers and Hede Massing in the perjury trial. The NKVD (KGB) files also support their testimony. Several messages sent back to Moscow by Soviet agents, did not use codenames. For example, Massing did not know Hiss's codename and so used his actual name.

In a review of Allen's Weinstein's book, The Hunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America (1999), Thomas Powers argued: "Much additional evidence about Hiss's involvement with the Soviets has turned up since the voluminous and explicit claims by Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley in the 1940s, claims which no serious scholar of the subject any longer dismisses... while the excesses of McCarthyism may be fairly described as a witch hunt, it was a witch hunt with witches, some in government.... What Whittaker Chambers had claimed was true, and it was convincingly and obviously true by the time Hiss went to jail for perjury. Hiss's denial, and his persistence in it for decades, and his support in it by so many otherwise smart people, was one of the great intellectual contortion acts of history. The evidence now... is simply overwhelming."

Powers went on to ask the question: "What continues to astonish and bewilder me now is why Hiss lied for fifty years about his service in a cause so important to him that he was willing to betray his country for it. The faith itself is no problem to explain: hundreds of people shared it enough to do the same thing, and thousands more shared it who were never put to the test by a demand for secrets. But why did Hiss persist in the lie personally? Why did he allow his friends and family to go on carrying the awful burden of that lie?"

G. Edward White, the author of Alger Hiss's Looking-Glass Wars (2004), attempts to answer this difficult question: "Alger Hiss can no longer be seen as a figure of ambiguity. This is so even though his psychological makeup was highly complex, and his motivation resists easy characterization. The ambiguity associated with Hiss was created by his regularly asserting things about himself and his life that were not true, and by others - for their own ideological reasons and because of Hiss's extraordinarily convincing persona - choosing to believe them.... In short, many Americans found qualities in Hiss they could identify with or admire. And many found qualities in Hiss's antagonists that, retrospectively, they found distasteful. The anti-Communism of the Cold War era appeared to many as simple-minded and repressive. Richard Nixon demonstrated that becoming president of the United States did not divest a person of mean-spiritedness and a lack of principles. J. Edgar Hoover's carefully constructed image as a virtuous G-man came apart under closer scrutiny. When one totaled up Hiss's favorable associations and the notoriety of his enemies, his continued professions of innocence took on to some an air of nobility."

[Paul Brancato]

An interesting post, but I don't think it has any bearing on the JFK case.

[Mark Knight]

An interesting post, but I don't think it has any bearing on the JFK case.

I disagree. I see the possible parallels in the two cases, in the manner John Simkin has suggested.

[Pat Speer]

I would need to go through the files myself before coming to a decision. Quoting George Will etc on Hiss is like quoting Arlen Specter on Mark Lane. The Republican Party from Nixon on down has claimed a moral superiority to the New Deal Democrats, in spite of all the facts. They claim their policies help the poor, via trickle-down. They claim their international policies make the world a safer place--at the cost of millions of lives of poor people, of course. And they believe this evil nonsense because, by golly, Nixon and Hoover (two of the most discredited individuals in history) were right about Alger Hiss. Yup.

And, oh yeah, JFK had sex with a few women that were not his wife.

I am not a Democrat. But I have been alive and aware for over half-a-century. And it's clear as day that the Republican Party and its true believers will cook up any lie, and fake any piece of evidence (like the recent dinosaur bones found in a forest) to sell their insane belief they are the chosen ones, and that God has singled-them out to be RICH.

That doesn't mean that everything has been faked, of course. If it was all a charade Bush 43 would have found some WMD's in Iraq, and have killed Bin Laden in a knife fight.

Edited June 18, 2014 by Pat Speer

[John Simkin]

I am not a Democrat. But I have been alive and aware for over half-a-century. And it's clear as day that the Republican Party and its true believers will cook up any lie, and fake any piece of evidence (like the recent dinosaur bones found in a forest) to sell their insane belief they are the chosen ones, and that God has singled-them out to be RICH.

That doesn't mean that everything has been faked, of course. If it was all a charade Bush 43 would have found some WMD's in Iraq, and have killed Bin Laden in a knife fight.

I am no fan of the Republicans either. When I first started my website in 1997 I wrote a great deal about McCarthyism. I thought at the time that people like Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White were innocent of the charges of being Soviet spies. I thought people like Whittaker Chambers, Elizabeth Bentley and Hede Massing were lying and were in the pay of the Republicans.

However, after reading Allen Weinstein’s book, The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America (1999) I changed my view on the subject. Weinstein’s book is based completely on research in the Soviet archives. He quotes extensively from documents and there is no doubt that a significant group of officials in the Roosevelt government in the 1930s were Soviet spies. This included Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, Lauchlin Currie, Laurence Duggan, Nathan Witt, Julian Wadleigh, Henry H. Collins, Lee Pressman, Victor Perlo, Nathan Silvermaster, Ludwig Ullman, George Silverman, Charles Kramer, Frank Coe, Harold Glasser and John Abt.

These were all very idealistic young men who believed that capitalism had failed and that the only choice was between communism and fascism. They thought the best way of making sure fascism was defeated was by providing government secrets to the Soviets. I think that judgement was wrong but I can see the moral argument for this position. I am also more sympathetic to characters such as Laurence Duggan who stopped spying for the Soviets because he did not believe the confessions of the so-called “Trotskyists” during the Show Trials. Duggan was in a minority and most of them were Stalinists.

As you know I am on the left. However, I believe if you find documentary evidence that shows that those with very different political opinions are right about some aspect of the past, it is your moral duty to change your mind on the subject.

[John Simkin]

A friend has pointed out to me that Jim DiEugenio has posted this on the Deep Politics Forum:

Simkin is actually writing about the Hiss case. What he is saying is that the Venona files--he calls them NSA taps--were accurate about Hiss. And therefore he was really a spy and Chambers was right.

Kai Bird has done some very good work on these Venona taps, and he shows they do not prove what people like Weinstein say they do.

Further, using Thomas Powers,(Richard Helms' official biographer) as Simkin does, to back Weinstein, is sort of like using Hugh Aynesworth to back up someone like James Phelan on the JFK case.

Read this article about Weinstein, its clearly revealing about his methods. His publisher paid the KGB for access to Soviet Cold War docs. And then he would not let anyone else see them. His translator then disagreed with how Weinstein described them in his book, The Haunted Wood:

http://www.thenation.com/article/arc...llen-weinstein

Further, even though he promised to give all his tapes and transcripts of interviews from his 1978 book on Hiss to the Truman Library, as of the date of that article, 2004, he still had not done so.

And I cannot help but note how Simkin casts off the fine film from 1978 about the Hiss case. The climax of that film is one of the jurors being shown the documents proving that the FBI planted the wrong tyepwriter, on the prosecution to connect Hiss to the ridiculous documents Chambers said he got from Hiss. THe defense never challenged the typewriter in court. If they had, the case would have exploded right then and there and Hiss would have been granted a mistrial. Because some think the FBI actually manufactured the typewriter.

I don't know how he can say the FBI was protecting Hiss. The declassified record shows that the FBI served as a private investigation service for the prosecution. And the typewriter was not the only thing they faked and planted. There were also records of a car sale that Chambers said he and Hiss exchanged. These records were later exposed as ersatz and very likely faked by the Bureau.

To compare the Hiss case with the JFK case is really far out there. They are not at all similar. Everything we get from the FBI shows more and more that Oswald was a patsy. Including the substitution of CE 399.

I am not aware of this new stuff he is talking about released by the FBI. But at this late date, I would look upon it with a jaundiced eye. And to say Chambers is now supported is, to me, pretty hard to accept. Chambers told so many outright lies on the stand, its breathtaking. One of the best books on that case is by the English barrister, The Earl Jowitt. It was one of the first out, in 1953. He exposed Chambers as a pathological xxxx to such an extent that it permanently impacted my view of that case.

Finally, John ignores the fact that Weinstein was not just exposed as using faulty research, and having his witnesses later deny what he wrote about them, but he later got his ticket punched. The Republicans made him chief archivist at NARA ( in other words he held sway over the JFK collection) and he worked with the CIA through his own group, the Center for Democracy, with the National Endowment for Democracy. This latter was the group that has spent tens of millions in places like Ukraine to ring the USSR with NATO allies. Clearly, his book was a put up job for career advancement. Which he got.

Hiss may or may not have been a spy. But the case is much more ambiguous than he depicts it.

OTOH, Oswald had nothing to do with the killing of President Kennedy. And we can prove that today in spades, nine ways to Sunday.

Jim says on his post on the Deep Politics Forum: “Simkin is actually writing about the Hiss case. What he is saying is that the Venona files - he calls them NSA taps - were accurate about Hiss. And therefore he was really a spy and Chambers was right. Kai Bird has done some very good work on these Venona taps, and he shows they do not prove what people like Weinstein say they do.”

I do mention one Venona file that was released in March 1996, but I do not discuss what Weinstein said about it. This is what I said: “In March 1996, Hiss was distressed when the newspapers carried stories of a cable that that had been sent by Anatoli Gromov, on 30th March, 1945, that had been intercepted by the National Security Agency (NSA). Gromov was the controller of Washington-based NKVD agents. The cable included details of a conversation that had taken place between Iskhak Akhmerov and an agent with the codename Ales. The cable claimed that Ales had worked for the Neighbors (GPU) since 1935 and that he had been to the Yalta Conference and afterwards visited Moscow. An analyst at the NSA had written on 8th August, 1969, that Ales was "probably Alger Hiss".”

As you can see, it was an analyst at the NSA that said Ales was “probably Alger Hiss.”

I do use information from Allen Weinstein’s research to show that Alger Hiss was guilty. However, I make it very clear that this was taken from his book, The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America (1999). This book is about Weinstein’s research in the NKVD/KGB archives. It is not about the Verona transcripts.

Weinstein found several documents that showed Hiss was a Soviet spy. The most important of these were those concerning Hedda Gumperz (known as Hede Massing in America). Gumperz was a Soviet agent in America who left the party because of the Stalin’s purge of Bolsheviks in the 1930s and the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact (as did the other two witnesses against Hiss, Whittaker Chambers and Julian Wadleigh).

At Hiss’s perjury trial she told the story of how in 1935 and early 1936 she was trying to recruit Laurence Duggan and Noel Field into her NKVD network. Gumperz claimed in court that in April 1936, she met Alger Hiss who told her that that he was trying to recruit the two men for a rival network run by the GRU. In court Hiss denied this conversation ever took place. Duggan and Field both became Soviet agents. Duggan killed himself on 20^th December, 1948, after he became aware that the FBI was investigating his spying activities. Field fled to Czechoslovakia after becoming aware that he had been named as a Soviet spy. He later confessed to being a spy and this is confirmed by the Soviet archives.

While researching the Soviet archives Weinstein found the original memorandum that Gumperz had sent to Moscow about the Hiss meeting. As Hiss was not part of her network she actually referred to him by name rather than his codename (Lawyer). Also in the archives was a memorandum from Boris Bazarov, the NKVD station chief in New York. He also complains about Hiss’s behaviour and the “casual interlocking of agents from two completely distinct networks”.

Moscow replied to Bazarov that Hiss was definitely working with GRU and that NKVD agents should leave him alone as these meetings “may lead to undesirable results”. The memorandum goes on to argue that Hiss is an important agent and that he should not be contacted by Gumperz as “that her drawbacks include impetuousness”.

There is a memorandum dated May 3^rd, 1936, signed by Itzhak Akhmerov, Bazarov’s boss, that summarizes details of the relationship between Hiss and Gumperz. He quotes, Joszef Peter (the man that Whittaker Chambers identified as a Soviet agent in his testimony before the House of Un-American Activities Committee on 3^rd August, 1948) as saying: “You in Washington came across my guy (Hiss)… You better not lay your hands on him.”

This evidence proves conclusively that Hiss was a Soviet spy and that Gumperz and Chambers were telling the truth at his perjury trial. As far as I am aware, Nation Magazine has never apologised for his misguided campaign to prove that Hiss was not a Soviet spy and its relentless attempts to smear people like Allen Weinstein, who argued that he was guilty.

[Thomas Graves]

A friend has pointed out to me that Jim DiEugenio has posted this on the Deep Politics Forum:

Simkin is actually writing about the Hiss case. What he is saying is that the Venona files--he calls them NSA taps--were accurate about Hiss. And therefore he was really a spy and Chambers was right.

Kai Bird has done some very good work on these Venona taps, and he shows they do not prove what people like Weinstein say they do.

Further, using Thomas Powers,(Richard Helms' official biographer) as Simkin does, to back Weinstein, is sort of like using Hugh Aynesworth to back up someone like James Phelan on the JFK case.

Read this article about Weinstein, its clearly revealing about his methods. His publisher paid the KGB for access to Soviet Cold War docs. And then he would not let anyone else see them. His translator then disagreed with how Weinstein described them in his book, The Haunted Wood:

http://www.thenation.com/article/arc...llen-weinstein

Further, even though he promised to give all his tapes and transcripts of interviews from his 1978 book on Hiss to the Truman Library, as of the date of that article, 2004, he still had not done so.

And I cannot help but note how Simkin casts off the fine film from 1978 about the Hiss case. The climax of that film is one of the jurors being shown the documents proving that the FBI planted the wrong tyepwriter, on the prosecution to connect Hiss to the ridiculous documents Chambers said he got from Hiss. THe defense never challenged the typewriter in court. If they had, the case would have exploded right then and there and Hiss would have been granted a mistrial. Because some think the FBI actually manufactured the typewriter.

I don't know how he can say the FBI was protecting Hiss. The declassified record shows that the FBI served as a private investigation service for the prosecution. And the typewriter was not the only thing they faked and planted. There were also records of a car sale that Chambers said he and Hiss exchanged. These records were later exposed as ersatz and very likely faked by the Bureau.

To compare the Hiss case with the JFK case is really far out there. They are not at all similar. Everything we get from the FBI shows more and more that Oswald was a patsy. Including the substitution of CE 399.

I am not aware of this new stuff he is talking about released by the FBI. But at this late date, I would look upon it with a jaundiced eye. And to say Chambers is now supported is, to me, pretty hard to accept. Chambers told so many outright lies on the stand, its breathtaking. One of the best books on that case is by the English barrister, The Earl Jowitt. It was one of the first out, in 1953. He exposed Chambers as a pathological xxxx to such an extent that it permanently impacted my view of that case.

Finally, John ignores the fact that Weinstein was not just exposed as using faulty research, and having his witnesses later deny what he wrote about them, but he later got his ticket punched. The Republicans made him chief archivist at NARA ( in other words he held sway over the JFK collection) and he worked with the CIA through his own group, the Center for Democracy, with the National Endowment for Democracy. This latter was the group that has spent tens of millions in places like Ukraine to ring the USSR with NATO allies. Clearly, his book was a put up job for career advancement. Which he got.

Hiss may or may not have been a spy. But the case is much more ambiguous than he depicts it.

OTOH, Oswald had nothing to do with the killing of President Kennedy. And we can prove that today in spades, nine ways to Sunday.

Jim says on his post on the Deep Politics Forum: “Simkin is actually writing about the Hiss case. What he is saying is that the Venona files - he calls them NSA taps - were accurate about Hiss. And therefore he was really a spy and Chambers was right. Kai Bird has done some very good work on these Venona taps, and he shows they do not prove what people like Weinstein say they do.”

I do mention one Venona file that was released in March 1996, but I do not discuss what Weinstein said about it. This is what I said: “In March 1996, Hiss was distressed when the newspapers carried stories of a cable that that had been sent by Anatoli Gromov, on 30th March, 1945, that had been intercepted by the National Security Agency (NSA). Gromov was the controller of Washington-based NKVD agents. The cable included details of a conversation that had taken place between Iskhak Akhmerov and an agent with the codename Ales. The cable claimed that Ales had worked for the Neighbors (GPU) since 1935 and that he had been to the Yalta Conference and afterwards visited Moscow. An analyst at the NSA had written on 8th August, 1969, that Ales was "probably Alger Hiss".”

As you can see, it was an analyst at the NSA that said Ales was “probably Alger Hiss.”

I do use information from Allen Weinstein’s research to show that Alger Hiss was guilty. However, I make it very clear that this was taken from his book, The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America (1999). This book is about Weinstein’s research in the NKVD/KGB archives. It is not about the Verona transcripts.

Weinstein found several documents that showed Hiss was a Soviet spy. The most important of these were those concerning Hedda Gumperz (known as Hede Massing in America). Gumperz was a Soviet agent in America who left the party because of the Stalin’s purge of Bolsheviks in the 1930s and the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact (as did the other two witnesses against Hiss, Whittaker Chambers and Julian Wadleigh).

At Hiss’s perjury trial she told the story of how in 1935 and early 1936 she was trying to recruit Laurence Duggan and Noel Field into her NKVD network. Gumperz claimed in court that in April 1936, she met Alger Hiss who told her that that he was trying to recruit the two men for a rival network run by the GRU. In court Hiss denied this conversation ever took place. Duggan and Field both became Soviet agents. Duggan killed himself on 20^th December, 1948, after he became aware that the FBI was investigating his spying activities. Field fled to Czechoslovakia after becoming aware that he had been named as a Soviet spy. He later confessed to being a spy and this is confirmed by the Soviet archives.

While researching the Soviet archives Weinstein found the original memorandum that Gumperz had sent to Moscow about the Hiss meeting. As Hiss was not part of her network she actually referred to him by name rather than his codename (Lawyer). Also in the archives was a memorandum from Boris Bazarov, the NKVD station chief in New York. He also complains about Hiss’s behaviour and the “casual interlocking of agents from two completely distinct networks”.

Moscow replied to Bazarov that Hiss was definitely working with GRU and that NKVD agents should leave him alone as these meetings “may lead to undesirable results”. The memorandum goes on to argue that Hiss is an important agent and that he should not be contacted by Gumperz as “that her drawbacks include impetuousness”.

There is a memorandum dated May 3^rd, 1936, signed by Itzhak Akhmerov, Bazarov’s boss, that summarizes details of the relationship between Hiss and Gumperz. He quotes, Joszef Peter (the man that Whittaker Chambers identified as a Soviet agent in his testimony before the House of Un-American Activities Committee on 3^rd August, 1948) as saying: “You in Washington came across my guy (Hiss)… You better not lay your hands on him.”

This evidence proves conclusively that Hiss was a Soviet spy and that Gumperz and Chambers were telling the truth at his perjury trial. As far as I am aware, Nation Magazine has never apologised for his misguided campaign to prove that Hiss was not a Soviet spy and its relentless attempts to smear people like Allen Weinstein, who argued that he was guilty.

John,

In my humble opinion, you are to be complimented for your open mindedness.

--Tommy

[Thomas Graves]

deleted

Edited June 20, 2014 by Thomas Graves

[Thomas Graves]

A friend has pointed out to me that Jim DiEugenio has posted this on the Deep Politics Forum:

Simkin is actually writing about the Hiss case. What he is saying is that the Venona files--he calls them NSA taps--were accurate about Hiss. And therefore he was really a spy and Chambers was right.

Kai Bird has done some very good work on these Venona taps, and he shows they do not prove what people like Weinstein say they do.

Further, using Thomas Powers,(Richard Helms' official biographer) as Simkin does, to back Weinstein, is sort of like using Hugh Aynesworth to back up someone like James Phelan on the JFK case.

Read this article about Weinstein, its clearly revealing about his methods. His publisher paid the KGB for access to Soviet Cold War docs. And then he would not let anyone else see them. His translator then disagreed with how Weinstein described them in his book, The Haunted Wood:

http://www.thenation.com/article/arc...llen-weinstein

Further, even though he promised to give all his tapes and transcripts of interviews from his 1978 book on Hiss to the Truman Library, as of the date of that article, 2004, he still had not done so.

And I cannot help but note how Simkin casts off the fine film from 1978 about the Hiss case. The climax of that film is one of the jurors being shown the documents proving that the FBI planted the wrong tyepwriter, on the prosecution to connect Hiss to the ridiculous documents Chambers said he got from Hiss. THe defense never challenged the typewriter in court. If they had, the case would have exploded right then and there and Hiss would have been granted a mistrial. Because some think the FBI actually manufactured the typewriter.

I don't know how he can say the FBI was protecting Hiss. The declassified record shows that the FBI served as a private investigation service for the prosecution. And the typewriter was not the only thing they faked and planted. There were also records of a car sale that Chambers said he and Hiss exchanged. These records were later exposed as ersatz and very likely faked by the Bureau.

To compare the Hiss case with the JFK case is really far out there. They are not at all similar. Everything we get from the FBI shows more and more that Oswald was a patsy. Including the substitution of CE 399.

I am not aware of this new stuff he is talking about released by the FBI. But at this late date, I would look upon it with a jaundiced eye. And to say Chambers is now supported is, to me, pretty hard to accept. Chambers told so many outright lies on the stand, its breathtaking. One of the best books on that case is by the English barrister, The Earl Jowitt. It was one of the first out, in 1953. He exposed Chambers as a pathological xxxx to such an extent that it permanently impacted my view of that case.

Finally, John ignores the fact that Weinstein was not just exposed as using faulty research, and having his witnesses later deny what he wrote about them, but he later got his ticket punched. The Republicans made him chief archivist at NARA ( in other words he held sway over the JFK collection) and he worked with the CIA through his own group, the Center for Democracy, with the National Endowment for Democracy. This latter was the group that has spent tens of millions in places like Ukraine to ring the USSR with NATO allies. Clearly, his book was a put up job for career advancement. Which he got.

Hiss may or may not have been a spy. But the case is much more ambiguous than he depicts it.

OTOH, Oswald had nothing to do with the killing of President Kennedy. And we can prove that today in spades, nine ways to Sunday.

Jim says on his post on the Deep Politics Forum: “Simkin is actually writing about the Hiss case. What he is saying is that the Venona files - he calls them NSA taps - were accurate about Hiss. And therefore he was really a spy and Chambers was right. Kai Bird has done some very good work on these Venona taps, and he shows they do not prove what people like Weinstein say they do.”

I do mention one Venona file that was released in March 1996, but I do not discuss what Weinstein said about it. This is what I said: “In March 1996, Hiss was distressed when the newspapers carried stories of a cable that that had been sent by Anatoli Gromov, on 30th March, 1945, that had been intercepted by the National Security Agency (NSA). Gromov was the controller of Washington-based NKVD agents. The cable included details of a conversation that had taken place between Iskhak Akhmerov and an agent with the codename Ales. The cable claimed that Ales had worked for the Neighbors (GPU) since 1935 and that he had been to the Yalta Conference and afterwards visited Moscow. An analyst at the NSA had written on 8th August, 1969, that Ales was "probably Alger Hiss".”

As you can see, it was an analyst at the NSA that said Ales was “probably Alger Hiss.”

I do use information from Allen Weinstein’s research to show that Alger Hiss was guilty. However, I make it very clear that this was taken from his book, The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America (1999). This book is about Weinstein’s research in the NKVD/KGB archives. It is not about the Verona transcripts.

Weinstein found several documents that showed Hiss was a Soviet spy. The most important of these were those concerning Hedda Gumperz (known as Hede Massing in America). Gumperz was a Soviet agent in America who left the party because of the Stalin’s purge of Bolsheviks in the 1930s and the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact (as did the other two witnesses against Hiss, Whittaker Chambers and Julian Wadleigh).

At Hiss’s perjury trial she told the story of how in 1935 and early 1936 she was trying to recruit Laurence Duggan and Noel Field into her NKVD network. Gumperz claimed in court that in April 1936, she met Alger Hiss who told her that that he was trying to recruit the two men for a rival network run by the GRU. In court Hiss denied this conversation ever took place. Duggan and Field both became Soviet agents. Duggan killed himself on 20^th December, 1948, after he became aware that the FBI was investigating his spying activities. Field fled to Czechoslovakia after becoming aware that he had been named as a Soviet spy. He later confessed to being a spy and this is confirmed by the Soviet archives.

While researching the Soviet archives Weinstein found the original memorandum that Gumperz had sent to Moscow about the Hiss meeting. As Hiss was not part of her network she actually referred to him by name rather than his codename (Lawyer). Also in the archives was a memorandum from Boris Bazarov, the NKVD station chief in New York. He also complains about Hiss’s behaviour and the “casual interlocking of agents from two completely distinct networks”.

Moscow replied to Bazarov that Hiss was definitely working with GRU and that NKVD agents should leave him alone as these meetings “may lead to undesirable results”. The memorandum goes on to argue that Hiss is an important agent and that he should not be contacted by Gumperz as “that her drawbacks include impetuousness”.

There is a memorandum dated May 3^rd, 1936, signed by Itzhak Akhmerov, Bazarov’s boss, that summarizes details of the relationship between Hiss and Gumperz. He quotes, Joszef Peter (the man that Whittaker Chambers identified as a Soviet agent in his testimony before the House of Un-American Activities Committee on 3^rd August, 1948) as saying: “You in Washington came across my guy (Hiss)… You better not lay your hands on him.”

This evidence proves conclusively that Hiss was a Soviet spy and that Gumperz and Chambers were telling the truth at his perjury trial. As far as I am aware, Nation Magazine has never apologised for his misguided campaign to prove that Hiss was not a Soviet spy and its relentless attempts to smear people like Allen Weinstein, who argued that he was guilty.

John,

In my humble opinion, you are to be complimented again and again or your open mindedness.

--Tommy

PS Double post.

[Douglas Caddy]

Here is the CIA’s review of “The Haunted Wood”:

https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol50no2/html_files/BK_Soviet_Espionage_8.htm

Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers had a homosexual relationship while both were active agents of the Soviet Union. Both men made every attempt to keep this secret but without a doubt it was an overriding behind-the-scene factor in the entire controversy that arose later after Chambers made his allegations about Hiss being a communist. Chambers served for years on the editorial board of The National Review and when finally the tales of his trolling the streets of Baltimore in search of anonymous homosexual encounters became public, William F. Buckley expressed his astonishment. I once read that Nixon wondered about a Hiss-Chambers sexual relationship in the midst of the uproar about the Pumpkin Papers.

Alice Widener, an ardent anti-communist who infiltrated the Communist Party USA as Alice Berezowky, widow of the prominent orchestra conductor from Russia, and who reported her findings about the Party directly to J. Edgar Hoover at times, maintained that Senator Joseph McCarthy had his faults but that “everything would have much worse for the survival of America had he not engaged in what became known as McCarthyism.” I once told a retired FBI agent, a true patriot whose career for the FBI dealt with the communist movement in this country, of Alice Widener’s observation, and he remarked, “I thought I was the only one who believed this.”

[John Simkin]

Here is the CIA’s review of “The Haunted Wood”:

https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol50no2/html_files/BK_Soviet_Espionage_8.htm

Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers had a homosexual relationship while both were active agents of the Soviet Union. Both men made every attempt to keep this secret but without a doubt it was an overriding behind-the-scene factor in the entire controversy that arose later after Chambers made his allegations about Hiss being a communist. Chambers served for years on the editorial board of The National Review and when finally the tales of his trolling the streets of Baltimore in search of anonymous homosexual encounters became public, William F. Buckley expressed his astonishment. I once read that Nixon wondered about a Hiss-Chambers sexual relationship in the midst of the uproar about the Pumpkin Papers.

Alice Widener, an ardent anti-communist who infiltrated the Communist Party USA as Alice Berezowky, widow of the prominent orchestra conductor from Russia, and who reported her findings about the Party directly to J. Edgar Hoover at times, maintained that Senator Joseph McCarthy had his faults but that “everything would have much worse for the survival of America had he not engaged in what became known as McCarthyism.” I once told a retired FBI agent, a true patriot whose career for the FBI dealt with the communist movement in this country, of Alice Widener’s observation, and he remarked, “I thought I was the only one who believed this.”

Thank you for the link. Hiss's lawyers put out rumours that Whittaker Chambers could not be trusted because he was gay. Newspapers carried stories that said Chambers was a "sexual pervert". When he made his original confession to the FBI he told them he had been previously a "homosexual" and his religious conversion had turned him away from communism and homosexuality.

[Paul Brancato]

I still wonder what Mr. Simkin means when he says there may be a parallel between the Hiss case and the Oswald case. John, I too appreciate your open mind, and its true that doctrinaire thinking is to be avoided. But are you inferring that you think the Warren Commission got it right, or that further release of FBI files or KGB files might convince you of that in the future?

[Douglas Caddy]

John:

My source that Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers had a homosexual relationship while members of the Communist Party came from Marvin Liebman, a homosexual who was also a member of the Communist Party and who is mentioned in the Spartacus biography of me. Liebman told me it was well known that the two men engaged in oral sex, with Hiss being passive and Chambers being the active person. President Clinton engaged in oral sex with Monica Lewinsky inside the White House and later maintained that he "did not have sex with that woman" because oral sex in his opinion was not real sex. I shall leave the matter at that.