Alger Hiss

Biography in: "American National Biography". Supplement 1, pp. 272-274. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

US State Department official accused of passing secrets to the Soviet government. Convicted of perjury in 1950.

Nevertheless, Hiss was indicted for perjury and went on trial in June of 1949. That trial ended in a hung jury. At a second trial in November of that year he was convicted and sentenced to federal prison, where he served 44 months.

In August 1948 former Communist Whittaker Chambers accused Hiss of being a fellow member of an underground Soviet spy cell named The Ware Group, which Chambers claimed was founded by the son of American Communist Party co-founder Ella Reeve. Hiss denied the allegation but was eventually convicted of perjury and sentenced to five years in federal prison.

In 1946 during testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee investigating alleged Communist "infiltration" in government, Hiss was accused by former Communist Party member Whittaker Chambers of being a Communist and of passing atomic secrets to the Russians. Hiss denied ever being a Communist and said that he had never even met Chambers.

Baltimore-born Alger Hiss was a graduate of Harvard Law School. He was a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and a protégé of renowned legal scholar Felix Frankfurter. He was a counsel to the Nye Committee in Congress when it was investigating the munitions industry in 1934, and in 1936 he was made an aide to the Assistant Secretary of State, specializing in Far Eastern affairs, and later became director of that office in the State Department.