J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (54 page)

Other memos followed, as Bentley’s interrogation continued. On November 27 Hoover sent Truman, again via Vaughan, a seventy-one-page report entitled
“Soviet Espionage in the United States.” The president having failed to respond to his November 8 memorandum, Hoover made sure this one wouldn’t be ignored, by sending copies to Secretary of State James Byrnes, Attorney General Tom Clark, and the heads of several other agencies. The November 27 report contained additional information about White and numerous others Bentley had named, as well as the Gouzenko disclosures. It also mentioned, for the first time, the name Alger Hiss.

The names Hiss and White were not new to the FBI.

On September 2, 1939, one day after the German invasion of Poland and less than two weeks after the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact, a disillusioned former Communist named Whittaker Chambers told Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle and the writer Isaac Don Levine that the two Hiss brothers, Donald and Alger—both of whom were employed by the State Department—were secret Communists.
^*
Chambers mentioned the Hisses at the end of a long list of people who he said either belonged to or were in sympathy with the party. He said nothing about espionage, however, and he made no mention of Harry Dexter White. This was an intentional omission, Chambers would later claim: he didn’t name White, he said, because at the time he thought he’d persuaded White to break with the party and only later found that he hadn’t done so.

Although it seemed unimportant at the time, Chambers also told Berle that he had left the party in 1935.

White’s name did surface two years later, however. According to Ernest Cuneo, who served as liaison between the British Security Coordination and the White House, one weekend in 1941 Lord Edward Halifax, the British ambassador to the United States, asked to see President Roosevelt on “a most urgent matter.” Roosevelt made time. “Mr. President,” Halifax told him, “there is a highly-placed Russian agent in your organization.”

“Who?” FDR asked.

“Harry Dexter White,” Halifax responded.

“Why,” Roosevelt replied, “I’ve known Harry White for a long time. He’s impossible. Now, what did you want to see me about?”

Cuneo, who was informed of the conversation by the British, presumed that Roosevelt passed this information on to J. Edgar Hoover. If he did, nothing was done about it.
¹³

In October 1941 Congressman Dies of the House Un-American Activities Committee sent Attorney General Biddle a list of 1,124 alleged Communists, fellow travelers, and Communist sympathizers. Both Alger Hiss and his brother Donald were mentioned as being members of a radical group called the
Washington Committee for Democratic Action. However, as often happened with HUAC, the information was in error: it was their wives who had belonged. This did lead, however, to Alger Hiss’s first interview with the FBI, in February 1942, at which time he told the agents that he was not and had never been a Communist.

That May it was Whittaker Chambers’s turn—by now at least one other ex-Communist had named him as being a party member—and, although he repeated most of the allegations he’d made to Berle three years earlier, there was still no mention of espionage activities or of White, while the references to Alger Hiss took up only three sentences in the eight-page report on the interview that the New York office sent to the FBI director.

Chambers told the agents that he had left the party in early 1937.

Hoover was unimpressed with Chambers’s tale, observing that “most of his information is either history, hypothesis, or deduction,” and that December the case was closed.
¹⁴

Not until three years later was Chambers again interviewed, and this time the interview was conducted by Raymond Murphy of the State Department security office, to whom Hoover had sent the earlier interview reports. In March 1945 Alger Hiss had been named temporary secretary general of the United Nations—he would preside over its organizing conference in San Francisco—and the name apparently set off warning bells in the FBI, Hoover himself being both opposed to the new organization and suspicious of anyone connected with it.

By the time of the Murphy interview, Alger Hiss was no longer at the tail end of the long list of secret Communists named by Chambers. “The top three leaders of the underground,” Murphy quoted Chambers as saying, “were 1. Harold Ware.
^*
2. Lee Pressman. 3. Alger Hiss. In the order of their importance.”

This time Chambers did mention White, whom he described as “a member at large but very timid.” His main role, Chambers said, had been finding underground members jobs in the Treasury Department. (Bentley later expanded on this, saying White’s assignment had been to infiltrate the entire government with Communist spies.) Chambers did not identify White as an active espionage agent: this revelation he saved until 1948, after White was dead. Chambers told Murphy that he had left the party at “the end of 1937.”
¹⁶

By now Hoover had begun to take Chambers’s allegations seriously, and on
May 10 FBI agents interviewed him for eight hours, resulting in a twenty-two-page report.
^*

In September, Gouzenko defected. In October he told the FBI about the mysterious Soviet agent who, that May, had been an assistant to Secretary of State Stettinius. On learning this, Hoover almost immediately presumed that Gouzenko was referring to Alger Hiss. There were several problems with this presumption. Hiss was not and had never been one of Stettinius’s assistants, though the secretary thought highly of him. He was director of the office of special political affairs, and in May 1945 he had been in San Francisco presiding over the founding of the U.N.

In November the FBI interviewed Elizabeth Bentley, who recalled hearing from one of her sources about “a man named Hiss, who was employed in the Department of State,” who was active in a network different from the ones she serviced. She’d later learned from one of her Russian contacts, she said, that “the Hiss in question was an advisor to Dean Acheson of the Department of State named Eugene Hiss.”
¹⁷

There was no Eugene Hiss in the State Department. State Department officials assumed Bentley had the first name wrong and was referring to Donald Hiss, who had worked under Acheson. Hoover was sure, however, that the individual referred to was Alger.

With Attorney General Clark’s authorization, Hoover wiretapped Alger and Priscilla Hiss’s home phone. He also placed both under surveillance, put on a mail cover, conducted an extensive background investigation of each (as well as of Donald Hiss and his wife), and even developed their maid as an informant, while State Department security monitored Alger’s activities at work. Similar tactics were employed against numerous others Chambers and Bentley had named, including White and others in the Treasury Department.

The Bureau also did a bag job on Nathan Silvermaster’s home, finding that there was indeed a darkroom in the basement. But this was the
only
tangible evidence supporting Bentley’s story, and it was, of course, legally inadmissible.

Nor were the taps and surveillances much help. All they proved was that a number of the people knew each other, which was never in dispute. The tap on Hiss would remain in place for twenty-one months, from December 1945 to September 1947, but, as the FBI later admitted, reluctantly, in a confidential report, “no espionage activities by Hiss were developed from this source.”
¹⁸

One possible explanation for the absence of incriminating activity was that the Soviets had closed down most of their espionage networks immediately after the defection of Gouzenko. But it was a temporary shutdown, as the FBI soon learned.

There was still another explanation, which Hoover never admitted, at least
not on paper, but which must have concerned him nonetheless: that Hiss wasn’t a Soviet agent or, at the very least, that he was no longer functioning as such (Chambers’s allegations all dated back to the 1930s).

Hoover had rushed to the president with only the accusations of Chambers and Bentley. A year later he still lacked any support for these two very shaky limbs. Even an attempt to reactivate Bentley, this time as a double agent, failed; she met once with Gromov, on a Manhattan street corner, but she was given no further assignments.

Soviet agent or not, Hiss was, at least in Hoover’s eyes, a security risk, and the FBI director was determined to get him out of the government.

This was not easy. Unlike the FBI, the State Department was under civil service. Before Hiss could be fired, there would have to be a hearing, and Hoover was opposed to this because, as he explained to Clark, “the material against Hiss was confidential and if it were not used there would not be enough evidence against him.”
¹⁹
In fact, the only evidence Hoover had, confidential or otherwise, was Whittaker Chambers’s allegations.

Instead Hoover chose another approach, to leak the accusations; he thereby hoped to put enough pressure on Hiss to force him to resign. William Sullivan handled the leak, repeating the charges to selected members of Congress, as well as to a Catholic priest, Father John F. Cronin.

During the Bureau’s early years, there had been few Catholics in the upper echelons of the FBI, although there was an abundance of Masons. Although Hoover denied being prejudiced, not until the mid-1940s did the FBI begin recruiting agent applicants at Catholic universities such as Georgetown, Fordham, and Notre Dame. Two things were responsible for the change: the FBI director’s realization that the Catholic church was strongly anti-Communist, and thus could be a valuable ally; and the need to replace the special agents who had defected en masse at the end of the war. In addition to soliciting Catholics as agents, informal liaison was developed with various church officials, such as Francis Cardinal Spellman,
^*
Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen, and Father John F. Cronin.

Cronin’s relationship with the FBI—and, later, with Richard Nixon—became especially close. An assistant director of the Social Action Department of the National Catholic Welfare Conference, Cronin was asked to prepare a confidential paper on communism in the United States for American Catholic bishops. Requesting assistance from the FBI, he received it in such abundance—much of it directly from classified Bureau files—that he became known as something of an expert on the subject.
^†
In his report to the bishops, which
was prepared in November 1945, Cronin mentioned Alger Hiss by name four times, as an underground Communist party member.

Hiss, however, didn’t resign. During most of January and February of 1946 he was in London with Eleanor Roosevelt and Adlai Stevenson, attending the first meeting of the UN General Assembly, and probably wasn’t even aware that he was being pressured.

In March, Hoover, Secretary of State Byrnes, and Attorney General Clark met in an attempt to find a solution to the Hiss problem. Byrnes, who also wanted Hiss out, to avoid possible future embarrassment to both the State Department and the administration, suggested several possible options, but Hoover found a reason to reject each. The FBI director did have one suggestion, however. Without informing the secretary of state that he had already done so, months earlier, Hoover suggested that Byrnes “contact several key men in the House and Senate and explain his predicament to them.”
²¹
Then he could call Hiss in and inform him that serious allegations were being made about him, by various committees on the Hill. That way Hiss would be unaware that the charges had come from the FBI or that Byrnes himself was seeking his removal.

Greatly impressed with Hoover’s backstage maneuvering, Byrnes jumped at the idea, unaware that the FBI director was mostly covering himself. This way there would be no need to produce the evidence against Hiss, which was flimsy at best. And, if the FBI director’s earlier leaks were to become known, Hoover could blame them on Byrnes.

On March 21 the secretary talked to Hiss, who expressed puzzlement at the accusations, some of which had apparently reached him from Washington cocktail party chatter. Hiss then, at Byrnes’s suggestion, attempted to make an appointment with the FBI director but instead got Mickey Ladd, who had been instructed to volunteer nothing but simply to listen and take down whatever Hiss had to say. Hoover expressly ordered Ladd not to mention Whittaker Chambers’s name.

Hiss denied either being a member of or sympathetic to the Communist party; reviewed several incidents in his past which might have caused such suspicions (for example, his association in the early thirties with the International Juridical Association, a group of leftish lawyers involved in labor law and civil liberties cases); and traced his career in government from his early New Deal years with the Agricultural Adjustment Administration through his work as counsel to the Nye committee (which was investigating World War I munitions profiteering), his recent UN assignment, and his present position in the State Department.

Hiss also noted that he had attended Harvard Law School, been elected to the
Law Review
his second year, become one of Felix Frankfurter’s protégés, and after graduation, on Frankfurter’s recommendation, clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes—admissions that were not likely to endear him to the FBI director.

It was a long, one-sided conversation. Ladd, on Hoover’s orders, asked few questions, thereby giving Hiss no clue as to who had made the charges or even how serious they were.

However carefully thought-out Hoover’s plan may have been, it backfired. Instead of resigning, Hiss left the FBI convinced that he had satisfactorily cleared up the matter.

Hoover then tried to increase the pressure, with more memos to the White House and the State Department, and more leaks, including one to Walter Winchell, who on September 29 reported, “It can be categorically stated that the question of the loyalty and integrity of one high American official has been called to the attention of the President” (an item which could have referred equally well to Harry Dexter White).
²²
Byrnes did his bit by removing Hiss’s name from the State Department promotion list and denying him access to sensitive materials. Not until December 1946, however, did Hiss finally resign, to accept an appointment as president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, at a greatly increased salary.
^*