Presswatch: Hissteria
Corry, John
"Presswatch: Hissteria" by John Corry Hissteria The Cold War was fought on many fronts before the West finally won it. Spies and traitors, fellow travelers and dupes, and rogues and scoundrels operated in...
...The Times, however, could hardly ignore the intercepted Soviet cables...
...Alger Hiss is still innocent, and the discovery of another spy at Los Alamos can be ignored...
...We know that's hard to believe...
...It did not want to deal with all the unpleasantness...
...The paper has become too perverse...
...JOHN CORRY is The American Spectator's senior correspondent...
...And produces a rich, natural sound quality comparable to audio systems costing thousands of dollars...
...This is happening already...
...In fact, all this was irrelevant...
...The Times is now his principal defender, a role once played by the leftist Nation...
...He did, however, quote one expert by name, a historical consultant to the National Security Agency, who said, "How they identified Ales as Alger Hiss, I don't know...
...They had been collected under the top-secret Verona project that was begun by the Army's Signal Intelligence in 1943, and then continued by the National Security Agency until 1980...
...Weiner was only playing games, stalling until he reached the main issue...
...Weiner did not identify the intelligence officials, but assuming he did not make them up, it is hard to imagine where he might have found them...
...The Times did not have to concern itself about what it all meant then...
...But Weiner also reported that "senior intelligence officials" had said the "footnote was no proof against Hiss...
...If it did, it might have to re-evaluate some of its most cherished positions on American history and politics...
...But it failed to describe the nature of any of the links, much less any treasonous activities...
...Meanwhile, the Times did its best to knock its own story down...
...Indeed, the Times reported that the cables "depict a Soviet spy ring bigger and more ornate than anything known...
...Hiss will always have his defenders, and the Times will be among them, no matter what the evidence...
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...A cable to Moscow from Soviet intelligence headquarters in Washington on March 30, 1945, said: "Ales has been working with the Neighbors continuously since 1935...
...The British sentenced Fuchs to prison for fourteen years in 1950, although Hall's activities did not become known until Michael Dobbs of the Post reported them in February...
...Hiss's innocence even if he confessed...
...God forbid that historians in the future should have to use what once was considered the paper of record as source material...
...Spies and traitors, fellow travelers and dupes, and rogues and scoundrels operated in high places...
...they also uphold Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley...
...They were also "uncorroborated," and easily misunderstood...
...46 May r996 • The American Spectator ment who accompanied President Roosevelt to Yalta, and then flew on to Moscow...
...The unit holds a compact disc player (or cassette), AM/FM radio, and Bose's patented acoustic waveguide speaker technology...
...Weiner also said it was unclear why he would be code-named Ales...
...The cable proved that Hiss had been working for Moscow at least seven years longer...
...The group, the cable said, was made up mostly of Ales's relatives...
...Steel assured him, presumably with great amusement, that Lippmann was not a Soviet agent...
...At 18, he was a cum laude Harvard graduate, who had been enlisted as a spy by his roommate, who was also a Soviet agent...
...Mere liberal bias is not enough of an explanation...
...Moreover, Chambers had identified himself as a GRU agent when he and Hiss were in the Communist underground together...
...Weiner was only muddying the waters...
...The hidden part of the Cold War is one of them...
...Documents from Soviet archives showed, among other things, that John Reed, who wrote Ten Days That Shook the World, received more than $1 million from Moscow, and that Armand Hammer laundered money for the Soviet government...
...For as Eric Breindel wrote in an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal: This, in short, is the smoking gun in the Hiss case —not that the evidence introduced in court by the government during Mr...
...Still, folks who refuse to recognize this document's implications are likely to be the sort who would insist on Mr...
...Because, like the system itself, it is only available ..._49z75...
...From Los Alamos, Hall and Klaus Fuchs each passed on a rough outline of the atomic bomb to Moscow...
...it, even though the book was obviously news...
...The Times, though, has its own skewed perspective...
...Consider the recent disclosure in the Washington Post that Theodore Alvin Hall, an American physicist now living in Britain, was once a top Soviet spy...
...In KGB: The Inside Story, former KGB colonel Oleg Gordievsky, who surely had not read the Verona cables, said that Hiss's Soviet code name was Ales...
...The "Neighbors" were identified as "probably the GRU"— Soviet military intelligence...
...Dept...
...They also showed that American Communism was an instrument of Soviet foreign policy, and that a great many party members were more loyal to the Soviet Union than they were to the United States...
...The Times ignored Dobbs's story...
...After all, Hiss served in the State Department...
...The newly declassified documents, Weiner reported, include a footnote by intelligence analysts identifying Hiss as "probably" a Soviet agent...
...One of the two sentences on Theodore Alvin Hall that the Times grudgingly inserted into a second edition of the paper pointed out that Hall had never been prosecuted...
...It buried the book in the daily paper, and said only that it "details links between Moscow and the American Communist Party from the 192os to 1945...
...The cable also referred to an agent in the State DepartWhy do they insist on distorting history...
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...But the Times did not tell its readers any of that...
...It may be small...
...Weiner said it was unclear why Hiss, if he really were Ales, would report to Soviet military intelligence...
...While in Moscow, he received a "decoration" from a "Soviet personage in a very responsible position...
...The Times does this quite often now, and on some matters it can no longer be trusted...
...Chambers had testified that he could be certain that Hiss was a Soviet agent only until 1938...
...direct from Bose...
...The Times's advance obit on Hiss—he is now 91—probably characterizes him only as "controversial...
...The cables indict Hiss...
...That was Alger Hiss...
...Some were more pernicious than others, but all caused a great deal of trouble...
...Chambers also had said that Hiss's brother, Donald, and his wife, Priscilla, were Soviet agents...
...In fact, Weiner reported, "one official said the evidence against him was inconclusive, and always would be...
...And the cable, of course, had said that Ales's group was made up mostly of his relatives...
...The story was on page ten, not page one, and Hall did not make the paper until the second edition, when he was mentioned only in a two-sentence insert...
...intelligence analyst said, "Ales: Probably Alger Hiss...
...They were treasonous...
...they had identified his secretary, May Price, as the agent...
...Why the Times gives us this kind of coverage now is a mystery...
...Hiss will always have his defenders, and the Times will be among them, no matter what the evidence...
...That meant Hiss was a GRU agent, too...
...So we're ready to prove it...
...For example, "one could be interpreted to suggest that Walter Lippmann, a pre-eminent journalist of the day, met regularly with a Soviet spy...
...It did not want to know that another Communist spy had been found at Los Alamos...
...It was as if the Times either was embarrassed or frozen into a state of denial...
...The cables might have depicted a "spy ring bigger and more ornate than anything known," but the cables were "in fragments...
...Hall, now 70, worked at the nuclear weapons center in Los Alamos, New Mexico, in 1944 and 1945...
...Everything was still okay...
...Recently Ales and his whole group were awarded decorations...
...Hiss's 1950 perjury trial left much room for doubt...
...P RESSWATCH by John Corry Hissteria The Cold War was fought on many fronts before the West finally won it...
...Better sound throucgh research® City State Zip Or mail to, Bose Corporation, The Mountain, Call 1-800-898-BOSE, ext...
...History ought not to absolve them, although certainly history will if the wrong people get to write it...
...Weiner, who covers intelligence matters for the Times, was being intellectually dishonest...
...Hiss, of course, had been with Roosevelt at Yalta, advising him while he met with Stalin...
...The New York Times is absolving the scoundrels, while presenting the Cold War as something other than what it was...
...Breindel was correct...
...A footnote on the cable by a U.S...
...W400...
...Weiner's story neglected to mention the most sinister part of the 1945 cable: that the agent from the State Department had accompanied Roosevelt to Yalta...
...When Yale University published The Secret World ofAmerican Communism last year, for example, the Times managed to ignore Breindel was correct...
...Obviously, nothing at the Times has changed...
...The Verona cables, however, had never said that he was...
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...His story was confirmed two weeks later, when the National Security Agency released a number of intercepted wartime Soviet cables: Hall was identified by the code name "Mlad...
...The American Spectator • May 1996 47...
...To show how absurd that was, the Times reporter, Tim Weiner, got in touch with Lippmann's biographer, Ronald Steel...
Vol. 29 • May 1996 • No. 5
