Salant on Neutralizing "Ales" Without Compromising Venona: What Really Happened to Alger Hiss

Stephen Walter Salant, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, has published Neutralizing 'Ales' Without Compromising Venona: What Really Happened to Alger Hiss. Here is the abstract.

In the celebrated Alger Hiss case, the defendant was convicted on the basis of typed spy documents traced to his typewriter. Although Hiss always maintained he had been the victim of forgery by typewriter, judges were unpersuaded, saying "there is not a trace of any evidence that Chambers [his accuser] had the mechanical skill, tools, equipment or material for such a difficult task [as forgery by typewriter]." Moreover, "If Chambers had constructed a duplicate machine how would he have known where to plant it so that it would be found by Hiss?" These are reasonable questions and I answer each of them. What the judges, jurors, and Hiss himself did not know was that Army Military Intelligence (1) had become proficient during the War at forging documents to protect agents behind enemy lines, (2) had concluded (rightly or wrongly) from Venona decryptions of Soviet messages which could not be disclosed that Hiss was stealing military information for Soviet Military Intelligence and (3) had inserted into Hiss's legal team as its Chief Investigator an undercover Army spy-catcher (https://quod.lib.umich.edu/h/hiss/essay.html), as Special Agents of the Counter Intelligence Corps referred to themselves. The spy-catcher confided in the FBI that he was actually working for Military Intelligence. Hiss’s legal team assigned the investigator/spy-catcher to find the Hiss family machine, hoping to prove Hiss innocent. The spy-catcher secretly removed the rusty family machine in December. A few months later a fabricated one which had been used to type bogus spy documents was deposited in its place.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.