Presswatch / The Hiss Factor

...Well, perhaps, but it is possible Rhodes overlooked another footnote...

...The predisposition is consistent...

...Charges that Oppenheimer cooperated with Communists were beyond the pale, or, as Richard Rhodes wrote, "despicable allegations...

...In an exquisite show of befuddlement, it ran a piece on the op-ed page and not the news columns...

...Sudoplatov has offered an oral history, and while an oral history may be imprecise, it may also have large revelations...

...As it happens, this was also the year McCarthy began the so-called witch hunts...

...It also says there really were witches to hunt...

...Amy Knight, author of Beria: Stalin's First Lieutenant, wrote to the Times, too...

...Treason became an extraordinarily elastic word after the 1960s...

...Conquest is arguably the world's foremost scholar on the Stalinist era, and he cannot be taken lightly...

...Therefore, according to the Times, the general did not think Hiss had ever had any connections to the old Soviet Union...

...Putnam's Sons...

...Whatever the exact truth here, it is obvious that the Schecters have not tried to suppress information and that the chapter is not gumshoe braggadocio...

...This is a pity...

...It says: "Oppenheimer had sug42 The American Spectator July 1994 gested to the Roosevelt administration that it invite to America top-level scientists,from Europe...

...ndeed, Sudoplatov and the Schecters got all the worst of it from the commentators...

...apparently, he had no opinion about Hiss at all...

...Although he was a principal in the most fiercely debated spy case in American history, his name does not appear on the jacket flaps of Special Tasks...

...In fact, said Tony Hiss, who is a staff writer for the New Yorker, without Alger Hiss there would have been no Richard Nixon, whose "eagerness for a place on the world stage blinded him to Alger's candor and devoted loyalty to America...

...Sudoplatov says, for example, that by the end of the 1940s, Moscow had established a network of informers and agents at ports and military facilities on both the east and west coasts...

...Two years ago the Times said in a page-one story that Dmitri A. Volkogonov, the Russian general who was the new keeper of the old Central Committee archives, was unable to find any documents about Hiss...

...It does not turn up in the ads for the book, either...

...Rhodes, perhaps the most formidable of Oppenheimer's defenders, wrote that Sudoplatov "claims that Oppenheimer hired the physicist Klaus Fuchs" to work on the atom bomb...

...Special Tasks, though, does not just allege Communist penetration...

...government," the "witch-hunt atmosphere of the 1950s," and, of course, "McCarthyite hysteria...

...I can't speak to the credibility of the rest of this noxious book," Rhodes concluded triumphantly, "but the chapter on `Atomic Spies' is gumshoe braggadocio...

...He also says it is "perhaps the most important single contribution to our knowledge since Khrushchev's Secret Speech...

...In a way, he is an embarrassment...

...The real question may be, 'what do we do with what we find...

...Indeed, it also listed fourteen references to the CIA, and none at all for the KGB...

...Tony Hiss slyly asked...

...Apparently, Nixon asked the Russians in 1991 to look for documents about Hiss in their archives...

...T he week after Tony Hiss remembered Richard Nixon in Newsweek, Time published an excerpt from Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness, by Pavel Sudoplatov, once a Soviet spymaster, and Jerrold and Leona Schecter...

...Roald Sagdeev, once the director of the Soviet Institute of Space Research, and now a University of Maryland professor, ended his book review of Special Tasks in the Post by saying: "Pavel Sudoplatov can add one more outrageous effort to his life's work—the attempt to write history...

...Meanwhile, Hiss hangs on, our enduring symbol of the moral confusion that has afflicted so much of political life...

...A respectable argument may now be made that, ineffectual as he was, Joe McCarthy was closer to twentieth-century political truth than his vast legions of critics...

...His son's filial devotion was understandable, but praising Alger Hiss for candor was a bit much, especially as a reminiscence about Richard Nixon...

...Richard Rhodes, author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, wrote on the op-ed page of the New York Times that Sudoplatov had made "despicable allegations...

...The jacket on The Fifties points out, accurately, that Halberstam at one time or another has won all of journalism's top prizes...

...Predictably, Sudoplatov's disclosures touched off an angry response...

...When Hiss was accused at the end of the 1940s," Sudoplatov suggests, "his behavior followed instructions he may have learned in the 1930s: never admit anything...

...The New Republic published a story about the Hungarian disclosures, but it seems to be the only major publication that did...

...Hiss was convicted of perjury in 1950—the statute of limitations on espionage had expired—and few who have looked seriously at the case since then doubt that he was, at least, a very great liar...

...Few did so, however, without a reference to "paranoid" or "paranoia...

...In 1950, explosive experts stood by in America while Moscow debated blowing some facilities up...

...0 The American Spectator July 1994 43...

...Fuchs, who later confessed to being a Soviet spy, "was part of a British contingent over which Oppenheimer had no control"—a point Priscilla Johnson McMillan also raised in the Post...

...Or was he doubting the one moment in his life he'd previously considered unimpeachable...

...The critic Hilton Kramer noted last year that the index to David Halberstam's fat best-seller The Fifties listed thirty-seven references to McCarthy, McCarthyism, and the John Corry is The American Spectator's regular Presswatch columnist and author of the new book, My Times: Adventures in the News Trade (Grosset/G.P...

...In its introduction to the excerpt, Time mentioned the "hysteria over alleged Communist penetration of the U.S...

...Moscow archives may be a mess, but they are still a rich source for historians...

...This sounds similar to the incident cited by Rhodes...

...t is certain there will be more disclo- sures about spies in the future...

...about why Oppenheimer acted as he did, and that he might have been responding to the suggestions of his Soviet handlers that he "establish a record of separation from his Communist friends," while he worked with Moscow's professionals...

...Sudoplatov, areprehensible man himself, described them as idealists...

...Even at age 90, Hiss has never admitted a thing, and he still benefits from the media assumptions about conservatives and old Commies...

...This is a reasonable conjecture...

...The story was absurd...

...Nonetheless, Special Tasks does not quite say that Oppenheimer "hired" Fuchs...

...On the other hand, in his secret memoirs, Khrushchev says Stalin told him the Rosenbergs did the Soviet Union valuable service...

...You may also find in Special Tasks more about Alger Hiss...

...They did so, however, not as grubby spies, or, in Sudoplatov's euphemism, as controlled agents, but as "fierce opponents of violence" who wanted to prevent a nuclear war...

...Did he still need to hammer home a point he'd nailed more than 40 years ago...

...In the seventies and eighties, it was hard to distinguish many congressmen and their aides from Fidelistas, Sandinistas, or honorary members of El Salvador's FMLN...

...Absurd, Rhodes said...

...Presumably he is right, and it means that much of the rest of Special Tasks will be overlooked...

...obert Conquest says in the foreword to Special Tasks that it is "the most ensational, the most devastating, and in many ways the most informative autobiography to emerge from the Stalinist milieu...

...She more or less accused Sudoplatov of fabricating the charges about Western scientists to sell his book...

...he suggested that Klaus Fuchs be included in the Los Alamos British team...

...Or, as seems more likely, was Nixon merely indulging an intellectual curiosity...

...In 1943...

...The footnote also says, however, that Sudoplatov was "unclear...

...Rhodes said he had "challenged" the Schecters with the information about Oppenheimer and, the security officer, and that "they were unaware it existed...

...Even if you are a top government official with the right to look at top-secret files," Sudoplatov says sourly, "the whereabouts of any single piece of paper requires searching through a jungle...

...Simon & Schuster has promised a book that will say the KGB recruited a former Carter administration official, and R. James Woolsey, the director of central intelligence, has said the CIA is conducting a number of investigations...

...and when American Rangers landed in Grenada, they found compromising material about Ron Dellums...

...He also said that, late in life, Nixon seemed to have second thoughts about Alger Hiss...

...The Time excerpt said that in the 1940s J. Robert Oppenheimer and other scientists knowingly passed on atomic secrets to the Soviet Union...

...After Aldrich Ames was arrested, any number of journalists recalled James Jesus Angleton, the old CIA spy-catcher...

...Moreover, a footnote on page 193 quotes one Aleksandr Feklisov, Fuchs's old KGB case officer, who wrote in a Russian Defense Ministry publication in 1990 that Oppenheimer "asked to include Fuchs as part of the British scientific mission...

...Sudoplatov says an old colleague from Soviet military intelligence told him that Hiss was connected to the Silvermaster spy cell in Washington in the 1930s...

...Oppenheimer even used the word "treason...

...Perhaps we will just try to wish the new disclosures away...

...We may be dealing with the imprecisions of oral history, but—generations of academics and intellectuals notwithstanding—it should be clear by now that the 'Rosenbergs really were spies...

...Last year, the Times discovered that Hiss was named in documents of the old Hungarian secret police, and simply did not know what to do with the information...

...It is on page 187, and it says that when a Communist professor suggested to Oppenheimer that he share technical data with the Soviet Union, he "not only refused, but called the effort outright treason," and reported it to the authorities...

...In defending Oppenheimer, Rhodes also cited an incident not mentioned in Special Tasks, in which the physicist once told a security officer at Los Alamos about a Communist attempt to contact some of his assistants...

...Indeed, General Volkogotiov backed away almost immediately from the Times story...

...shocked as well as enlightened...

...The first was from Tony Hiss, who said Nixon's career was built on the ill treatment of his father...

...McCarthy era, and only nineteen to Stalin...

...He also says that many readers may find it "the most striking and informative" chapter in the book...

...The implication, of course, was that this proved he was not passing on atomic secrets...

...Priscilla Johnson McMillan of Harvard's Russian Research Center, who is writing a book about Oppenheimer herself, said in the Washington Post that "Oppenheimer was a patriot," and that to accuse him now "is a bitter injustice...

...Sudoplatov says the Rosenbergs were only "minor couriers" in the spy game, a characterization duly noted by Time and other news organizations...

...Many familiar names also turn up in Special Tasks—Harry Dexter White, Lauchlin Currie, and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg among them...

...Certain words or phrases routinely are attached to certain topics...

...He defends the chapter on Oppenheimer, and dryly notes that it will leave "not a few readers...

...it says it really happened, and offers names and dates as evidence...

...Central Committee as well as Communist Party, KGB, and GRU archives are spread all over Moscow and beyond, while some of the most interesting archives from the Stalinist era have been destroyed...

...Apparently, Hiss may now be mentioned, as Newsweek did, only in connection with Nixon...

...Since Oppenheimer was the leader of the overall mission, it is reasonable to think his request carried weight...

...Angleton, it seems, was nutty enough to believe that moles might try to penetrate the CIA...

...Newsweek, however, was reaffirming the big-media predisposition: Treason is such an unpleasant subject, and besides, conservatives have done more damage than old Commies...