Alger Hiss
Alger Hiss was accused of being a member of the Communist Party before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) while serving in the federal government, a charge he denied in testimony before the committee. He then filed a defamation lawsuit against his accuser, Whittaker Chambers. As the defamation case was being prepared for trial, Chambers introduced evidence which indicated that both he and Hiss had been working as spies for the Soviet Union. Hiss was tried twice for perjury before Congress – the first case ended in a mistrial – and convicted in 1950. Sentenced to five years in prison, he served three years and eight months. Chambers was not charged.
According to Chambers, Alger Hiss had worked within a group of communist party members known as the Ware Group. Hiss was implicated as being part of a Soviet espionage group which was attempting to acquire information regarding American nuclear weapons. Several independent sources implicated Hiss as being an active member of the Ware group in addition to Chambers, including other known Soviet spies in the United States and Canada.
A Roman Catholic priest from Baltimore, John Francis Cronin, approached HUAC member Richard Nixon. He informed Nixon that he had seen information in the FBI files about communist infiltration of labor unions on Baltimore’s docks which clearly indicated that Alger Hiss – who worked in the State Department – was an influential communist.
Chambers later provided photographic evidence of classified documents which had been concealed in a pumpkin on his own farm in Maryland. Chambers claimed that the documents had been provided by Hiss. By the time the evidence was presented, the statute of limitations had expired and Hiss was not charged with espionage. Years later, the pumpkin photos were found to be of non-classified materials.
Additional evidence – some of which appears to exonerate Hiss and some of which implicates him in other espionage activities – has surfaced since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. By 2001 a consensus among historians and investigators was that Hiss was indeed a spy for the Soviet Union, with much of the evidence against him still classified.