Amy Knight - How the Cold War Began: The Igor Gouzenko Affair and the Hunt for Soviet Spies

W hen I first started my research on the Gouzenko affair, I did not expect that it would involve rethinking the sensational Alger Hiss case, which polarized American public opinion during the McCarthy era and aroused heated debate among historians in the United States in the past five decades. Ever since new documentation emerged in the 1990s, said to prove conclusively that Hiss was a spy, many historians have considered the Hiss case closed.

But a close scrutiny of this new evidenceprompted by my suspicion that the FBI distorted statements made by Gouzenko to help make their case against Hissled me to join the small minority of Cold War scholars who remained unconvinced that Hiss was a Soviet agent. The first supposedly definitive proof against Hiss was the now famous March 30, 1945 telegram from the Soviet intelligence chief in Washington, Anatolii Gorsky, to Moscow headquarters. Gorsky's message, deciphered by the U.S. National Security Agency (as part of a secret program called Venona) and made public in 1995, contained references to a spy code-named Ales, who was said to be Alger Hiss. As I explain in this book, there were actually far too many uncertainties of meaning in that fragmented message to come to any conclusions about the identity of Ales.

Since my book was published in Canada last year, the NSA has released the original Russian version of the decryption. Far from resolving the ambiguities, as many had hoped, the original makes it even more doubtful that Ales was Alger Hiss. To mention one example: the Russian text makes it clear that the group of spies run by Ales consisted of his family members. They had for many years provided such valuable military secrets to the Soviets that they were awarded decorations. It is highly improbable that Hiss's family could have had any military information worth sharing with the Soviets. Hiss's wife, Priscilla, was a stay-at-home mother, and his brother Donald a lawyer for the State Department.

The other much-cited evidence against Hiss appeared in a book called The Haunted Wood