One last fling at Establishing Hiss?s innocence came in 1992, when selected Moscow archives were unlocked and opened to researchers. At the request of Alger Hiss, then aged eighty-eight, General Dmitri A. Volkogonov, chairman of the Russian government?s military intelligence archives, authorize a search of KGB ?files and then sent Hiss a letter exonerating him on the basis of available files, none of which indicated Hiss had ever spied for Soviet intelligence. Within weeks, however, Volkogonov sheepishly admitted his search had been cursory and many relevant files had been destroyed. He did not offer to check again. Other Russian researchers, diligently combing intelligence files, privately reported that after Volkogonov?s blunder officials had scoured the archives and removed all files pertaining to Chambers and Hiss.9
But documentation on Hiss did turn up in a Communist archive. In 1993 Maria Schmidt, a Hungarian historian working in the files of the Interior Ministry, in Budapest, came upon the dossier of Noel Field, who had been imprisoned in Budapest in 1949 after his defection behind the Iron Curtain. Released in 1954, Field was debriefed by Communist police, to whom he gave a detailed accounting of his secret work in the United States and of his close friendship with Alger Hiss, a fellow agent. According to Field, Hiss had tried to recruit him into the underground
in 1935—the same incident Hede Massing had recalled. ?I knew from what Hiss told me that he was working for the Soviet secret service,? said Field. Surprised by Hiss?s overture, Field ?carelessly told him I was already working for Soviet intelligence.? When Field reported his blunder to Hede Massing, ?I received a stern rebuke from her. . . . A little later she told me I had done greater damage than I would believe and that because of me the whole network had to be reorganized.?10
Not long after this new revelations emerged from the U.S. government. First, in 1993 the State Department declassified documents relating to a security investigation in 1946 that disclosed Hiss had procured top secret reports he was not authorized to see—on atomic energy, China policy, and other matters relating to military intelligence. The investigation was concluded in late November 1946. Two weeks later Hiss notified John Foster Dulles he was available, after all, to head the Carnegie Endowment.11
Then, in the summer of 1995, the National Security Agency began to release the Venona traffic, a total of more than two thousand cables sent from U.S.-based Soviet agents to the home office in Moscow. The messages had been intercepted in the 1940s by American counterintelligence officers and in the next years were painstakingly decoded. The most important batch of cables, released on March 6, 1996, confirmed that there had been a large espionage network centered in the federal government. Among those implicated were Harry Dexter White, Victor Perlo, Laurence Duggan, and Alger Hiss, who was implicated in a single cable, dated March 30, 1945.
In the cable Anatoly Gromov, the NKVD rezident in Washington,, reports on a conversation with another Soviet handler, Ishkak Akhmerov, ?the leading NKVD illegal? in the United States. Akhmerov had recently interviewed a well-placed unnamed GRU agent within the State Department. The official told Akhmerov he had attended the Yalta Conference and then flown on to Moscow, where he was thanked by Soviet diplomat Andrey Vyshinsky for his devoted service.
The Yalta delegation included only four members of the State Department, all of whom flew on to Moscow. The four were Secretary of State Stettinius; his assistant, Wilder Foote; the director of the Office of European Affairs, H. Freeman Matthews; and the deputy director of the Office of Special Political Affairs, Alger Hiss. In Moscow the contingent met with Vyshinsky. Only Hiss was ever suspected of being a Communist.
The American agent further told Akhmerov he had been working for Soviet intelligence since 1935 and ?for some years . . . has been the leader of a small group? of agents, ?for the most part consisting of his [family] relations.?
All this led American counterintelligence officers to conclude that the agent, identified only by his code name Ales, was ?probably Alger Hiss.?12 (Etc.)
9. AH cleared: see NYT, Oct, 29, 1992; Tanenhaus, ?The Hiss Case isn?t Over Yet,? NYT, Oct. 31, 1992; Volkogonov retraction: NYT, Dec. 17, 1992; researchers; Sergei Zhuravlev letter to Alan Cullison, n.d., c. January 1993 (in author?s possession).
10. See Schmidt, ?Behind the Scenes,? p. 26. The Budapest archive also casts new light on Field?s letter to AH, sent on July 21, 1957, in which Field offered to sign an affidavit challenging Hede Massing?s testimony at the second trial—(etc). Mrs. Schmidt found successive drafts of this letter in the Hiss dossier, which implies it had been screened by Communists. She comments: ?It is clear from the Field file . . . that [his] every letter, statement, etc., was thoroughly reconstructed before [being] permitted to be sent out? (p. 28).
11. See memo on ?SPA Survey,? Sept. 25, 1946: ?SPA Security Survey,? Oct. 2, 1946; J. Anthony Panuch memo to AH et al., Oct. 2, 1946, Klaus memo of conversation with AH. Oct. 4, 1946, various memos ?for the Files,? Nov. 26, Nov. 17, Dec. 9, 1946; memo, Feb. 11, Feb. 24, 1947; undated, unsigned memo to the attorney general (probably March 1947); Charles M. Hulton letter to John Peurifoy, March18, 1947. All documents are in Record Group 059 Lot 64D551, Box 103, Office Files of Samuel Klaus (NA); for a summary of the investigation, see Tanenhaus, ?new Reasons to Doubt Hiss,? The Wall Street Journal, Nov. 18, 1993.
VENONA (no reference no.), March 30, 1945; for Yalta-Moscow, see Stettinius, Roosevelt and the Russians, pp. 30, 284-88; Weinstein, Perjury, p. 354; ?leading?: Andrew, KGB, pp. 286. Andrew (p. 287) identifies Akhmerov as AH?s wartime handler.