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The Mystery of Ales (Expanded Version)
Hiss arrived in Washington on Thursday, February 22, and went to his office to catch up on the backlog of preparations for the San Francisco conference.36 Almost immediately he fell ill with the flu.37 He spent the next five days — including the weekend — at home, going back to work on Wednesday, February 28. “Alger Hiss returned to the office yesterday afternoon for the first time,” wrote R. W. Hartley, one of his colleagues in the State Department’s Office of Special Political Affairs.38 Despite his bout of flu, Hiss stayed involved throughout that time — as he explained in a March 3 letter to Secretary Stettinius sent to Mexico with the evening pouch: “Although I missed several days at the office, I have had talks with Mr. Grew, Julius Holmes, Ed Wilson, Jack Ross and others, and I think that things are in fairly good shape.”39
Behind these words was a brewing international crisis, stemming from sudden French and Chinese demands concerning which countries would be the “inviting parties” to the upcoming San Francisco conference. This dispute had already pushed back the date on which official invitations to the conference would be sent. Originally the invitations were scheduled to go out on February 24 — which is why Hiss had to leave Mexico City to be back in Washington by February 22.40 The invitations to the San Francisco conference were unquestionably Hiss’s top priority at this time. In a phone conversation from Mexico City on February 22, Stettinius told another State Department official that Hiss would be dealing with the situation.42 Both the U.S. Department of State and the Soviet People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs in Moscow were in continuous communication on this issue with their respective embassies. The Soviets felt that any “acceptance of the amendments proposed by the French government [amounted] to changing the decisions of the Crimean Conference on the International Security Organization.”43
It is important to understand that the Soviets knew that Hiss was the State Department’s point man on the San Francisco invitations. At Yalta, it was Hiss who had twice “handed over” to Ambassador Andrei Gromyko the U.S. draft of the invitation for the conference.44 By March 1, the situation had reached a crisis point. The Soviets were anxious that the invitation should be issued as agreed at Yalta — and they knew that Hiss would be the man to resolve the issue.
In any case, Hiss was back in his office on Wednesday and Thursday — but he had a relapse on Friday and stayed at home with a temperature. The following day, March 3, he went to the State Department and prepared for that evening’s live radio show.45 In the late afternoon, he went to the radio studio for a rehearsal of the official release of the invitations. At this point, the Soviets and Americans still had not agreed on when to issue the invitations, and it wasn’t until Sunday that the State Department settled on Monday as a revised date for the long-anticipated announcement. The event was finally scheduled for noon at the State Department; Hiss was to brief reporters at the news conference.46
At 7:00 on Saturday evening, Hiss was one of the three State Department officials to appear on a nationwide NBC broadcast titled Building the Peace. Assistant Secretary of State Archibald MacLeish led the discussion, which focused on the recent “plans for a world organization” stemming from the Dumbarton Oaks and Yalta conferences. Hiss was introduced as the “Deputy Director of the Office of Special Political Affairs.” Because “Mr. Hiss has just returned from the Crimea Conference,” MacLeish directed many of his questions to him.47 The next morning, March 4, Washington’s Sunday Star reported on the radio show in an article headlined, “State Department Radio Show Gives ‘Oaks’ Plan in Plain Talk.” The article named Hiss as a participant. The New York Times ran a similar a story the same day, and it too mentioned Hiss.48
Clearly, if Anatoly Gorsky (the “Vadim” of the March 5 and 30 cables), the NKGB’s man in Washington, was doing his job, either he or his assistants were listening to the radio and reading the Times or the Star49 — the capital’s largest-circulation paper in 1945. Gorsky, age 38, was a sophisticated and experienced operative. In 1939, when stationed in London, Gorsky had been running 18 agents, including Kim Philby of the famous “Cambridge Five.”50 In Washington, his main job as the Soviet Embassy’s first secretary was that of a press officer, which involved, with the help of his press aide Antonina Koltsova daily monitoring of the press, reports of information agencies, and radio broadcasts. Each month he sent lengthy “press diaries” to both the Soviet Commissariat of Foreign Affairs Press Department and the All-Union Society for Cultural Contacts (VOKS), whose authorized representative he was.51
In the Russian diplomatic and VOKS files, Anatoly Gorsky’s alter ego Anatoly Gromov looks nothing like an obscure intelligence operative lost in the American jungle, relying for his information upon a no less obscure “Rouble.” On the VOKS front, he served as a sort of communication center between the Soviets and the Americans in the then vast sphere of “contacts.” As we see in the VOKS files, “Gromov” corresponds, meets, and talks with famous writers, artists, and musicians; he discusses postwar plans for exchanging concert artists and other attractions; he takes part in various public and cultural events. His contact list included American government agencies and institutions such as the Armed Forces Institute and War Department, the Office of War Information, the Department of Agriculture, the Federal Security Agency, National Research Council — plus the United Nations Information Office.
Thus, Gorsky would have to have been incompetent not to know that Alger Hiss had returned from Mexico City. Moreover, the embassy staff members knew that Hiss was the point man in the State Department on the preparations for the San Franciso conference.52 Thus, Gorsky and his Soviet Embassy colleagues would have been particularly interested in Hiss’s activities at the State Department on March 5, when a morning press and radio news conference took place at the Old Executive Office Building.53
At the press conference, after the introductory address by Acting Secretary of State Joseph Grew and a few questions, Hiss went to the rostrum to “explain some of the technical aspects of these points concerning the functions of the Security Council” and to answer the correspondents’ questions.54 The press corps turned out in force to hear the announcement. Even if Gorsky as press officer did not attend the event, he would have been listening to it on the radio and would also have been informed by Laurence Todd, an American journalist who covered the Department of State for the Soviet news agency TASS from 1927 to 1952. Moreover, we know that early that morning Acting Secretary Grew “telephoned the Soviet Ambassador [Gromyko] . . . and said that at 12:00 o’clock today we were issuing the invitations to the U.N. conference.”55
Still, some might speculate that Vadim could have written and sent his cable first thing in the morning on March 5 — without looking up the Saturday or Sunday papers or listening to the morning press conference radio broadcast. But this is unlikely given standard Soviet intelligence working procedures in the United States during World War II. In the 1940s, the office of the Washington NKGB residency occupied a room on the top floor of the old Russian Embassy building on 16th Street. For security reasons, it had walled windows concealed behind partially closed gray wood shutters. NKGB operatives, after completing their day jobs, would normally go up to this office only after 5:00 or 6:00 p.m. or later; this was their allotted time for writing reports to Moscow. At the close of the Washington workday, Moscow’s workday was just beginning, which made late afternoon and night the best time for communication. Moreover, on March 5 there was an additional circumstance that probably delayed Vadim in writing his Moscow-bound cables. As has been established from the State Archives of the Russian Federation, on that day Gorsky was busy writing numerous cover letters and packaging hundreds of items to dispatch to Moscow in the diplomatic pouch.56 Only with Anatoly “Gromov’s” work done, would “Gorsky” finally go upstairs to the residency’s room and draft his March 5 cable reporting that Ales “has not yet come back” from Mexico City.
If Ales had been Hiss, Gorsky would not have needed Ruble to know of Ales’s whereabouts. Remember that Gorsky wrote of Ales in the March 5 memo, “Our only key to him — ‘Ruble.’’ ‘Rouble’ himself travels on business (Italy) — [it is] difficult to run [supervise] ‘Ales’ through him.”
In the decrypted Venona cables, the name Ruble (as “Rubl’” and “Rouble”) appears nine times;57 the NSA identifies Ruble as “probably Harold Glasser” in five cables58 and as “Harold Glasser” in four.59 Weinstein and most other historians who have dealt with the Venona materials have accepted the NSA’s identification and today assert with confidence that Glasser, a Treasury Department official, was Ruble.
There is a problem, however, with this identification. Treasury records show that Glasser was indeed in Italy — but in the spring of 1944, not in March 1945. In early 1945, British officials encouraged the U.S. Treasury Department to send Glasser to Italy, but an extensive search of Treasury records shows quite definitively that Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. decided in late February or early March that “Mr. Glasser could not be spared to go to Italy.”60 (We also have numerous memos placing Glasser in Washington throughout that winter and spring.) Clearly, Glasser was not traveling to Italy (or anywhere else) in the winter of 1944–45 and did not do so in the spring of 1945.
We do not claim to know the identity of Ruble. To complicate matters, various Venona cables suggest that this code name may have been used for more than one agent or source. Two Venona cables dating from July 1943 use the code name Ruble and the NSA’s decryptors allege in these instances that Ruble is Glasser.61 But as it happens, Glasser was posted to North Africa from January to September 1943, and though the Soviets theoretically could have contacted Ruble in Algiers,62 this seems unlikely in view of the decrypted text.
Yet another Venona cable dated May 30, 1944, openly refers to Harold Glasser without a code name, strongly suggesting that Glasser’s name had not made it onto the NKGB agent list and that therefore he had not been a recruited agent as of the spring of 1944.63 If he had not been an agent in 1944, it is not likely that Glasser could be Ruble.64
In any case, all the scholarly speculation about Ruble’s identity only matters here if it is possible to link Ruble to Ales. Much more archival work is needed before anyone should leap to any conclusion.
When the NSA chose to declassify the Venona decrypts in 1995, historians such as Weinstein, who have long argued that Hiss was a Soviet spy, assumed that the NSA identification of Ales was confirmation of Hiss’s prewar espionage. But of course it was more than that. Venona cable 1822 was used not only to confirm Whittaker Chambers’s original accusations, but also to up the ante on Hiss, transforming him into a long-term spy (a decade of espionage instead of less than two years) and one so valuable to the Soviets that they went out of their way to convey their gratitude to him by informing him that he had been decorated by the Soviet government. These allegations are far more serious than the charge of prewar espionage. Despite the fact that Venona cable 1822 and the March 5 Gorsky cable contain significant clues, and perhaps because Hiss’s guilt has been so widely accepted, no one has until now made a serious effort to investigate whether anyone other than Hiss fits the profile of the mysterious Ales.
IF NOT HISS, WHO?
In reopening the mystery of Ales, we recognize that we are addressing two questions: who was Ales and what was Ales? Our report deals mainly with the first question, but with regard to the second it needs to be said plainly that neither of the two Gorsky cables establishes Ales as a recruited or controlled Soviet agent. An emerging post–Cold War understanding of the complex nature of the conversations and interactions between Americans and Russians during World War II has room in it for a wide spectrum of roles, many of them honorable and patriotic.
Consider for a moment an important but still little-known document produced in court by Alexander Vassiliev in his 2003 London libel trial, this one a seemingly verbatim translation of a fall 1944 memo from the NKGB’s Vassily Zarubin to Vsevolod Merkulov, head of the NKGB. Zarubin, who had just returned to Moscow after a 1942–1944 stint in the United States as the NKGB’s “chief resident in North America,” described in detail his efforts to look into the background of the “Victor Perlo Group,” an alleged Communist “information” cell with members in a number of wartime agencies.65 Zarubin concluded that the Perlo Group had been used “blind” — meaning without its knowledge: “After this ‘Helmsman’’s66 explanation it became clear that, even if this group had been used by ‘Storm’67 for the neighbors [that is, the GRU] in the past, it went only by the compatriot [that is, the CPUSA] line and none of the group’s participants knew about it, it was not connected directly with the neighbors and the latter don’t know the people of the group.”68
Zarubin, by the way, reached a similar conclusion after investigating the background of Harry Dexter White (who according to Whittaker Chambers had been a member of the same GRU agent group as Alger Hiss).69 Without speculating, it is clear that Ales, too, might have filled any number of roles in his dealings with the Russians. Given the strained relationship between the Soviets and Earl Browder (“Helmsman”) by March 1945, Gorsky hardly had any chance before composing his cables to ascertain the intricacies of Ales’s true relationship with the “neighbors” dating back to mid-1935. Recall that in Gorsky’s March 5 cable, Ruble describes Ales as one who is “fully aware that he is a Communist, [and] is underground.” Although the English translation is “underground,” it is clear from the Russian phrasing — “nakhoditsja na nelegal’nom polozhenii” — that Gorksy was in fact referring to Ales’s concealed Communist Party membership. Russian files routinely use two words to describe such “off-the-books” memberships: “nelegal’ny” and “neglasny,” both of which mean “the opposite of open.”70 This same characterization could also fit Zarubin’s description of the people in the Perlo Group.
So the possibility exists that Ales may have been used “blind” by Soviet intelligence. Recall that, in Venona 1822, Gorksy writes that he has “ascertained” that Ales had been working with the neighbors since 1935. But in what capacity it is impossible to say from the evidence available. He might have been a controlled agent. Alternatively, Ales could instead have been a “back channel,” someone knowingly sanctioned by both the United States and the Soviet Union to engage in unofficial exchanges of information. History suggests that on the Soviet side such channels were more often operated by the GRU than NKGB.
With no particular candidate in mind for who Ales might be when we started this investigation, we spent hundreds of hours in the U.S. National Archives and the Moscow archives searching for clues to find out his identity. We gathered dozens of different State Department and Russian Foreign Ministry lists of all the Americans who traveled to Yalta, Moscow, and Mexico City in February 1945 — and later that spring to San Francisco. By our count, at least 439 American officials attended at least one of these four conferences.
But only nine American officials attended the Yalta conference and then traveled to Moscow. These included Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius; Edward J. Flynn; Major Terence L. Tyson, Secretary Stettinius’s military aide and medical doctor; Alger Hiss; H. Freeman Matthews; Wilder Foote, assistant to the secretary of state for drafting; and Stettinius’s secretariat of Lee B. Blanchard, George Th. Conn, and Ralph L. Graham.71
Ales must have been one of these men.
We immediately decided to drop the secretary of state as an improbable candidate. As we shall see, Ales is elsewhere described as an “Assistant to the Secretary,” so this also rules out Stettinius.
Next, we dropped Edward Flynn — former chairman of the Democratic Party National Committee and President Roosevelt’s close political adviser, whom Roosevelt sent to Moscow with a special mission and who stayed back in Moscow after Stettinius and his party flew out on February 14.
Now we must drop Alger Hiss.
We also have to drop Freeman Matthews, who flew back from Mexico to Washington with Hiss aboard the secretary’s airplane.72 In any case, Matthews — then director of the Bureau of European Affairs — had a diplomatic career that placed him abroad throughout most of the 1930s, making it improbable that he could be the Ales described in the two Gorsky cables.
At this point, we are left with a list of five Americans who went to Yalta, then traveled to Moscow, were in Mexico City on March 5, and then attended the San Francisco conference. These include Major Tyson; the members of Stettinius’s secretariat, Blanchard, Conn, and Graham; and finally H. Wilder Foote, assistant to the secretary of state for drafting.
Does any one of these five men fit the profile of Ales?
Tyson was a physician drafted into the Medical Corps in World War II who was only chosen to accompany Stettinius in early 1945. Other than accompanying the secretary to the three conferences and to Moscow, as a medical doctor, he does not fit the profile of Ales. From 1934 until 1949, except for two years off for military service in WWII, Tyson worked as an assistant in the Department of Medicine at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City. In 1949 he was promoted to instructor in the same department and resigned this position on September 30, 1970.73
Now we come to the three members of Stettinius’s secretariat, Blanchard, Conn, and Graham. Previous researchers habitually wrote them off as improbable due to their secretarial positions.74 However, we were mindful of the known preference of intelligence services for assets in secretarial positions, compared to those in leadership positions and public figures. According to KGB spymaster Lt. Gen. Pavlov, “Our preference would always be for a lower-level individual. . . . An individual in a position of leadership may possess more information in some specific field. . . . However, his assistants, secretaries, shorthand reporters, code clerks have an access to the total volume of information passing through his office.”75
The members of Stettinius’s secretariat fall into just this category.
The youngest of them, Graham, born in 1919, was only 16 in 1935 and a high school student in Philadelphia, and therefore far too young to have been the Ales who allegedly began “working” in 1935.
Blanchard, born in 1914, was 21 years old in 1935 and a university student in Arizona until 1937. From 1937 to 1940 he worked as secretary for a broadcasting company and from 1940 until 1944 he worked for manufacturing companies. He entered government service as “secretary to Under Secretary of State” in March 1944 and transferred to the UN on July 1, 1945.
Conn, born in 1913, graduated in 1934 from George Washington University in Washington, D.C. In 1934–35 he worked as an editorial clerk for a publishing firm, and from 1936 to 1941 he was an administrative assistant in a trade association. Neither occupation seems very lucrative for intelligence gathering. However, Conn joined government service in 1941 (with the Lend-Lease Administration — a known target of Soviet intelligence), transferring to the Department of State in 1944 and to the United Nations on July 1, 1945.76
The last person on our list of five, Wilder Foote, was 39 years old in 1945, and though he served as an “assistant to the Secretary for drafting,” he has always been lumped into the impossible-to-be-Ales category. In his 2003 essay on Ales, Air Force historian Eduard Mark briefly described Foote as “a more plausible suspect” than Stettinius’s other clerks. However, he decided that “it is unlikely that Foote was so engaged while he rusticated in the farther reaches of New England.”77
It makes sense to eliminate Graham because of his youth and Blanchard because he was in Arizona until 1937 and, more importantly, did not enter government service until 1944. That left us with just two candidates, George Conn and Wilder Foote, both of whom went into government service in 1941, worked for the Lend-Lease Administration, transferred to the Department of State in late 1944, and later worked at the United Nations. Admittedly, Conn seems on the young side to have been “working” in 1935, and nothing about his jobs before going into the government would make him of interest to the Soviets as a potential spy. But Foote, who had worked in Vermont until late 1941, also seemed unlikely to fit the Ales profile.
At this point in our research, a sudden piece of evidence turned up in Moscow.
THE BOLSHOI CENTRAL BOX
Venona Cable 1822 reports that Ales was contacted in Moscow by a high-ranking Soviet official who “passed onto him their gratitude and so on.” Using both American and Russian archival papers, we have established the daily schedules of the members of Stettinius’s party during their two-day layover in Moscow. All of them stayed in Spaso House, the official Moscow residence of the American ambassador.78 Based on an hour-by-hour inspection of their whereabouts, the best opportunity any Soviet official would have had to convey his gratitude to Ales would have been on the evening of February 13, 1945, when the American delegation went to the Bolshoi Theater for a performance of Swan Lake.
A document from the Russian archives strongly suggests that it was on this occasion that Ales was thanked. The document is the working Soviet diplomatic protocol list of people invited to the Bolshoi central box on that evening.
According to the protocol list,79 11 Russians and 13 Americans were to sit together in the central box — a grand box right in the center of the house, nearly three tiers in height and draped in red brocade curtains. Once designed for the tsar’s family, it can seat two dozen or more officials in its four rows of heavy red plush-and-gilt armchairs. Moscow was still in blackout because of the war, and the glittering gold and purple of the Bolshoi with its sparkling crystal chandeliers was in stark contrast to the cold and darkness of the Moscow streets.
The American list included Stettinius, Harriman and his daughter, Generals D. Dean, Hill, Roberts, and Spaulding, Admiral Olsen, Matthews, Hiss, Page, Foote, and Kennan. It included neither Conn nor Blanchard — and hence eliminates them from our list of candidates for Ales.
The Russian list began with V. M. Molotov, whose name was obviously added in ink and numbered “No. 1a,” with Vyshinsky listed as “No. 1.” Molotov must have been added in order to upgrade the status of the Russian party. The list also included three of Molotov’s deputies, Vyshinsky, Dekanozov, and Litvinov; Ambassador Gromyko; Tsarapkin, the head of the U.S. department of the NKID (the foreign affairs commissariat); two other NKID officials, Chuvakhin and Fomin; and the chairman of the Moscow City Soviet, Popov. The only Russian in military uniform to match four U.S. generals and one admiral was Colonel-General Fyodor Kuznetsov — the director of the GRU of the General Staff of the Soviet Army from March 1943 to September 1947.
Tellingly, the Russian list has a handwritten addition at the bottom of a column explaining that Andrei Vyshinsky, the first Deputy of the People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs, had given last-minute instructions that someone named “Mil’sky” should be seated with the Americans.
Years of American scholarship have focused on the question of when and how Vyshinsky could have thanked Ales on behalf of the military. In fact, as a diplomat, Vyshinsky would never have agreed to decorate an intelligence source. According to interviews with retired KGB officers and diplomats, the GRU would have brought in its own operational officer to do this.80 And that is what happened. The GRU did the job all by itself, in a most elegant setting and in the presence of the GRU director himself. It was here that the “military NEIGHBORS,” as Venona No. 1822 describes the scene, “passed on to him their gratitude and so on.”
“Mil’sky” was the cover name for Colonel Mikhail Abramovich Milstein, age 44, who was without question one of the GRU’s most competent and sophisticated officers. Milstein would go down in the history of Soviet military intelligence as one of its best experts in agent intelligence. “Mil’sky” was the name he used from 1935 to 1938 as an operative and later as the “rezident” or station chief in New York City. Under the same alias, he had also visited Canada, the United States, and Mexico in the summer of 1944.81 In 1941 and 1942, as head of the Intelligence Department of the Red Army Western Front, he had organized intelligence operations against the advancing Nazis. By the time this experienced spymaster entered the Bolshoi central box, he was deputy head of GRU’s strategic intelligence directorate.82
Milstein had attended the Yalta conference. One of his colleagues at the Military Diplomatic Academy in Moscow later recalled, “I clearly remember that he went to Yalta and was continuously present in the meeting room, since he had on contact a highly valuable source of information. . . . For Yalta and soon after it Milstein was awarded — as far as I remember — with the Order of the Patriotic War.”83
Garrulous, articulate, and athletic, Milstein was a likable man, a great storyteller, and the heart of any party, where he could drink anyone under the table. After his retirement at the rank of lieutenant general, he had a long and successful academic career. (He died at the age of 82.) He was perfectly suited to convey the GRU’s commendation to Ales.
But whom did he thank?
With Conn not in the box, we were left with just a single candidate — Wilder Foote.
One more clue points to Foote. Soviet documents tellingly suggest that it was the Russians who got Foote’s name added to the list of those allowed into the Bolshoi’s central box.84 Foote later made a point of denying that he sat there. Part of his job throughout the Yalta trip had been to keep handwritten notes in a black, leather-bound diary, which has never been found. But when Stettinius wrote his 1949 memoir of Yalta — Roosevelt and the Russians: The Yalta Conference — Foote was evidently asked to consult his notes for colorful details. Foote obligingly dictated several long memos “from notes in his small black notebook.”85
Foote described their visit to the Bolshoi in one such memo, dictated in 1949: “There were four acts to the ballet and it was without doubt the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. . . . At one time I counted at least 60 dancers.” Foote then reported, “Mr. Stettinius, as the guest of honor, was in the center box in the rear of the theatre together with Molotov, Vyshinski, Litvinov, Dekanosov, Gromyko, Tsarapkin, Chuvakhin, General T. Hill, General Sidney Spaulding, head of the Supply Mission; Mrs. George Kennan, wife of the Minister; Miss Kathleen Harriman, Ambassador Harriman, Mrs. Edward Page, Mr. Matthews, Mr. Hiss, Major Tyson and General Kuznetsov.” Note that Foote’s list does not match the Soviet list: he adds three Americans (including Major Tyson, one of the original Ales possibilities) and omits three Russians (including Milstein). Most important, Foote omits his own presence in the central box: “The rest of us [the State Department team] sat in the orchestra surrounded by men and women in the uniform of the Red Army, and a few civilians.”86
If Foote had sat in the central box and had a conversation with “Mil’sky” — and if he was Ales — he would later have had every reason to obscure this fact when helping Stettinius put together his 1949 memoir. The working Soviet protocol list, a contemporary record, seems a more reliable guide to the occupants of the central box than the memo Foote assembled four years later, based on his 1945 notes. Of course, Foote might have sat in the central box for one or more acts (in those years Swan Lake had three intermissions) and then moved to the orchestra seating later in the performance. The important point is that the Soviets had him on the protocol list to sit in the central box, where he was likely to have encountered Milstein.87
Even if the two sat together, while GRU Director Kuznetsov sat up front, we still could not say with any certainty whether Wilder Foote was Ales. Confronted with the fact that our months-long research left us with just one candidate for Ales, we went back to the archives to learn more about Wilder Foote.
FOOTNOTES
36 On that same day, the files have recorded a memo from Mr. Sandifer, SPA to Mr. Alger Hiss, SPA, about a need for a direct wire to San Francisco for the Conference. In fact, the question was raised some time prior to Alger Hiss’s return, but Sandifer had been waiting for Hiss to “discuss the matter with him”—which he did on February 22, thus designating Hiss’s arrival day. [“Mr. Witt of the Telegraph Room called me to inquire whether we would have need for a direct wire to San Francisco for the Conference. [...] I told him that I would discuss the matter with you on your return and that we would let him know what should be done.” SPA— Mr. Sandifer to SPA— Mr. Hiss, Feb. 22, 1945. RG 59, Alger Hiss files, Subject Files of the Office of Special Political Affairs, 1940–46, Box 6 (Grace Jeff Kisseloff), NA, College Park, MD.
37 “I was sick for about a week or ten days after getting back,” Hiss recalled later that spring for a group of his State Department colleagues, “because we worked pretty hard at Yalta and on the way back I picked up a flu-bug.”— Consultants Meeting (transcript), May 30, 1945, 5:00 p.m., Folder “Special Political Affairs Staff Meetings”, RG 59, Alger Hiss files, Box 26, NA, College Park, MD.
38 “He looks a little shaky and has a rather bad cough.…I have only had the opportunity to talk with him very briefly about his experiences at Yalta. He is down at the office again today [Thursday, March 1, 1945].” R. W. Hartley to Mr. Leo Pasvolsky, March 1, 1945, Folder: “Security-folder 3,” RG 59, Alger Hiss files, Box 16.
39 Alger Hiss to The Honorable Edward R. Stettinius, Care of the American Embassy, Mexico, March 3, 1945. RG 59, Alger Hiss files, Subject Files of the Office of Special Political Affairs, 1940–46, Box 6 (Grace Jeff Kisseloff), NA, College Park, MD.
40 On February 16, 1945, while Alger Hiss was en route to Mexico City, in Washington, D.C., his Office [of Special Political Affairs] in its weekly Summary of Urgent Questions put the issue of “Invitations to the United Nations Conference” on top of its weekly agenda. This document was obviously prepared with Alger Hiss in view, for we see “Mr. Hiss” penciled in its upper right corner. —RG 59, Alger Hiss Files, Box 2, NA, College Park, MD.
41 Telephone conversation, February 22, 1945, Stettinius in Mexico City to State Department. —RG 59, Alger Hiss Files, Box 8, “Memorandums of Conversations”, NA, College Park, MD. Two days earlier, Acting Secretary of State Joseph Grew telephoned to Alger Hiss in Mexico to say “that with regard to the question of issuing invitations to the United Nations for the forthcoming conference in San Francisco, . . . I told Mr. Hiss when he inquired if we could get an answer by February 22 that I did not think we would be able to get an agreement from London and Moscow by that date….” —RG 59, Alger Hiss Files, Box 8, “Memorandums of Conversations”, NA, College Park, MD.
42 FRUS, Diplomatic Papers 1945, v.1, General, The United Nations, Washington, 1967; From Vyshinsky’s Diary: Reception of Ambassador Harriman, 26 February 1945 [original in Russian]— Archive of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation [hereinafter AVP RF], fund 0129, description 29, Por. 166, file 4, pp. 5–9; Sovetskii Sojuz na mezhdunarodnyh konferentsiyah perioda Velikoii Otechestvennoii Voiny 1941–45 gg. t. v, Konferentsiya Ob’edinennyh Natsii v San Francisco (25.04–26.06.1945g.), Sbornik dokumentov. Politizdat, 1980 [The Soviet Union at International Conferences of the Great Patriotic War Period 1941–45, vol. V, The United Nations Conference at San Francisco (April 25– June 26, 1945). Compilation of documents. Politizdat, 1980], Nos. 3– 12, February 26– March 5, 1945, pp. 54–61; AVP RF, fund 0129, descr. 29, folder 172, file 45.
43 The Soviet Union at International Conferences, Op. Cit., p. 57.
44 February 8 and 9, 1945, AVP RF, fund 06, descr. 7a, Por. 58, file 12, “Crimean Conference 1945”, pp. 16-17, Molotov Secretariat files at AVP RF. In the upper left hand corner of the February 8th draft document we see penciled in: “Hiss handed over to A. A. Gromyko 8 February 1945”; the text of the next (February 9th) draft has the typed notation: “Mr. Hiss (U.S. Department) handed over to A. A. Gromyko 9 February 1945.”
45 R. W. Hartley to Mr. Leo Pasvolsky, March 3, 1945. —RG 59, Alger Hiss files, Box 16, Folder: “Security-folder 3,” NA, College Park, MD.
46 Molotov to Harriman, 5 March 1945 in: The United Nations Conference at San Francisco, Op. cit, document 9, pp. 58–59; document 10, p. 60; Harriman to Molotov, 5 March 1945. Ibid., document 11, p. 61.
47 Department of State Press Release No. 199, March 3, 1945, Confidential Release for Publication at 7:00 p.m. RG 43, Box 6, Folder: International Organizations Voting,” NA, College Park, MD.
48 The Sunday Star, March 4, 1945; The New York Times, March 4, 1945.
49 Ibidem.
50 According to the intelligence historian Anthony Cave Brown, Philby thought Gorsky was “a bright little cracker.” [Brown, A.C., Treason in the Blood: H. St. John Philby, Kim Philby and the Spy Case of the Century. New York, Houghton Mifflin, 1994, p. 200-201.] Gorsky was station chief (resident) of NKGB intelligence in Washington, D.C. September 15, 1944–December 7, 1945. Gorsky operated in Washington under the name of Anatoli Borisovitch Gromov. His cover was First Secretary of the Soviet Embassy. For his work in the U.S. he was promoted into the rank of a Colonel and decorated with the Patriotic War Order. In 1946–1950, Gorsky was head of the 1st department of MGB Foreign Intelligence Directorate.
51 A complete text of Gorsky’s “diaries” of press clips (for July 10–31, 1945) was discovered in the files of All-Union Society for Cultural Contacts (hereinafter VOKS) at the State Archive of the Russian Federation [hereinafter GARF]: GARF, Fund 5283, description 14, file 184, pp. 23–54. Some of Gorsky’s 1945 press clips were discovered at the Russian Archive of Foreign Policy [AVP RF], fund 0192, description 12, folder 88, file 30.]
52 The New York Times reported on February 20th, 1945, that Hiss had been appointed Director of the Office of Special Political Affairs, replacing Edwin C. Wilson in that post.
53 Department of State. Memorandum of the Press and Radio News Conference, Monday, March 5, 1945. —RG 59, Records of the Office of News and Its Predecessors. Memorandums of Press Conferences. Vol. 11, 1945, NA. College Park, MD.
54 Ibidem.
55 Memorandum of Conversation, Grew-Gromyko, 3/5/45. —RG 59, Decimal Files, 500.CC/3-5-45, NA, College Park, RG.
56 Gromov to Liberson, Lists for pouch sent to VOKS, Moscow on March 5, 1945. —GARF, fund 5283, descr.14, file 306, pp. 51–56.
57 New York to Moscow, No 1195, 21 July 1943; New York to Moscow, No 1206, 22 July 1943; New York to Moscow No 79, 18 January 1945; Moscow to New York, Nos.179–184, 25 February 1945; Washington to Moscow, No.1759, 28 March 1945; Washington to Moscow No 3598, 21 June 1945; Washington to Moscow No. 3600, 21 June 45; Washington to Moscow, No.3645, 23 June 1945; Washington to Moscow, No. 3688, 28 June 1945.
58 This tentative identification occurs in five cables (January 18, February 25, March 28, June 21, 1945 NN. 3598 and 3600.)
59 In four cables: Venona 1206, July 22, 1943; Venona 1195, July 21; and Venona 3645, June 23, 1945. Moreover, the latter additionally suggested that even this “probable” identification may be “incorrect.”
60 R. H. Brand letter to Morgenthau, 3/5/45, RG 56, entry 67A1804, Box 15, folder “Italy Directives,” NA, College Park, MD. Brand was a British official with the United Kingdom Treasury Delegation and he was writing to Morgenthau about his regret that Glasser could not be spared for a trip to Italy. Obviously, the decision must have been made many days prior to March 5, 1945.
61 One of the three Venona firm identifications of ‘Ruble’ as Glasser happen in a decrypted fragment of New York to Moscow cable No. 1206, July 22, 1943 where ‘Ruble’ “advises” something about “SZhIN DENIS,” “on whose behalf one could get in touch.”
62 There was a slim chance for the Soviets to meet ‘Ruble’ in Algiers where by that time NKGB had its residence and where in August 1943 they dispatched their weathered operative Ivan Aghayants from Tehran to establish a back channel to General De Gaulle. Aghayants was fluent in several languages, including English; had he been assigned to also meet “Ruble,” July 22, 1943, decrypt might be a fragment of a password. Still, this chance is an undocumented probability. [For Aghayants see, Essays on the History of Russian Foreign Intelligence, vol. 4, 1941–1945. Moscow: International Relations, 2003, pp. 298–300.]
63 Venona cable, New York to Moscow, May 30, 1944, # 769,771.
64 Still, we should add that in December 1949, Anatoly Gorsky, while preparing a report on the Soviet intelligence failures in 1938–48, listed ‘Ruble’ as last (No. 21) on “Carl’s group”— and identified him as Harold Glasser. However, Gorsky was obviously not that sure of Glasser’s affiliation, for against his name he put in brackets: (Dept of Justice?) Even less was Gorsky sure of “Ruble”’s background, for below Glasser’s name we see “aka “Moris”— written and then crossed out. To add to the confusion, a “Maurice” had reportedly been pre–WWII OGPU asset at the Department of Justice. Gorsky’s list of intelligence failures was compiled in late 1949, after the first Hiss trial, and at a time when many of the names listed were publicly named in various HUAC hearings or from grand jury hearings available at the time of his writing. In other words, Gorsky could easily be ‘claiming’ as agents people he merely knew from the American press as being named or investigated as Soviet agents.
65 Victor Perlo appears in this memo as “Eck,” a code name identified by Venona as Victor Perlo, and also seen on Gorsky’s “failures list” in his December 23, 1949, report to General S. R. Savchenko; it was an earlier code name for “Raid,” also identified by Venona as Victor Perlo, who during World War II was an employee of the War Production Board. For a discussion of various documents also produced by Vassiliev at his London libel trial, see the Alger Hiss Web site, www.algerhiss.com
66 [“Rulevoj”], NKGB cover name for Earl Browder, the leader of the American Communist Party.
67 “Storm” was one of the party cover names of Joseph Peters [J. Peters, Peter] whom Chambers described as the Communist Party contact “to the Soviet espionage apparatus in Washington.” [Whittaker Chambers. Witness (1952), p. 32.]
68 Translation of Alexander Vassiliev’s notes of Vassily Zarubine’s report to Vsevolod Merkulov, references to SVR File 35112, vol.9, pp.412–413. [Grace the late John Lowenthal.]
69 On June 4, 1944, Vassily Zarubin reported from Washington: “According to data, passed in his time by ‘Sound’ [“Zvuk,” code name of longtime U.S.-based OGPU-NKGB agent Jacob Golos], ‘Lawyer’ [the code name which according to Venona was used in NKGB correspondence for H. D. White until September 2, 1944] was not a neighbor’s [GRU] agent. The case was different: ‘Lawyer’ has a relative . . . , who in the past was connected with the neighbors. That doctor was allegedly getting data from ‘Lawyer’ and passed them to neighbors. ‘Lawyer’ knew that the doctor was a compatriot and supposed that data, provided by him, were going exactly to compatriots. Once the doctor hinted that he was working for us and would like to get ‘Lawyer’’s help. After this ‘Lawyer’ turned the doctor out and prohibited him to appear in his house. . . . If this information was not got in time, ‘our man— one of official representatives’ would have found himself in a situation the doctor-relative had been in.” (Referenced by Vassiliev to SVR File 70548, p.52; the quotation is from an English translation of Vassiliev’s Russian transcription of SVR documents.) Zarubin is clearly referring to the plans described in his earlier report of arranging a meeting between White and one of the Soviet “official representatives,” obviously a participant in Bretton Woods Conference (July 1–23, 1944).
70“Glasnost’,” a Russian word meaning openness, became well known in the English-speaking world during the Gorbachev era.
71 AVP RF, fund 057, Description 25, Por. 123, file 8, “The Visits of officials and government delegations to the USSR,” F.F. Molochkov to V.G. Dekanozov, February 11, 1945, p. 1.
72 Messersmith (Mexico City) to Nelson (State Department) 2/19/45, RG 59, Decimal File 1940–45, 111.11 Stettinius, Box 0430, NA, College Park, MD.
73 Reference of Stephen E. Novak, Head, Archives and Special Collections, Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library, Columbia University, 701 West 168th Street, New York, NY 10032 (Grace Jeff Kisseloff).
74 See, for example, Eduard Mark, “Who Was ‘Venona’s ‘Ales’? Cryptanalysis and the Hiss Case,” Intelligence and National Security 18, no. 3 (Autumn 2003).
75 Interview with Lt.-Gen. Vitaly Pavlov, April 22, 2002, Moscow.
76 1945 State Department Biographical Register.
77 Eduard Mark, Op. Cit.
78 Robert Meiklejohn, unpublished World War II Diary, “At London and Moscow,” March 10, 1941–Feb. 14, 1946, Vol. II, p. 631. In Averell Harriman Papers, Box 211, LOC; “Stettinius Stay in Moscow,” 14 Feb.– 15 Feb. 1945, in AVP RF, fund 06, descr. 7, Por. 44, file 688; “The Visits of Officials and Government Delegations to the USSR” – AVP RF, fund 057, descr. 25, Por. 123, file 8, pp. 1–4.
79 AVP RF, fund 057, descr. 28-v, Por. 458-a, file 1, p. 72; “Stettinius Stay in Moscow”, Op. Cit.
80 AVP RF, fund 057, descr. 28-v, Por. 458-a, file 1, p. 72; “Stettinius Stay in Moscow”, Op. Cit.
81 Amy Knight, How the Cold War Began: The Igor Gouzenko Affair and the Hunt for Soviet Spies. Carrol and Graff Publishers, New York, 2006, p. 22.
82 V. M. Lurie, V. Ya. Kochick. GRU: People and Deeds. OLMA-Press: 2003, pp. 164–165. Unfortunately, the lists of individuals who received decorations from the Soviet military intelligence are still restricted, which is why it is impossible to find documentation substantiating the claim in Venona No. 1822 that “Recently Ales and his whole group were awarded Soviet decorations.”
83 Interviews with a former GRU operative in Great Britain and the USA in 1942–1960 (now deceased) who asked to stay anonymous, February 23 and March 7, 2003. “He [Milstein] operated in close contact with Vyshinsky, the then Deputy Commissar of Foreign Affairs and had an official card of a member of the Soviet delegation’s work group signed by [another] Deputy Commissar of the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs Dekanozov.”
84 That morning Vyshinsky hosted a breakfast for Stettinius’s delegation. In preparation, the American Embassy sent the Russians a list of the Americans who would attend. Foote’s name was not on this typed list. But the Russians tentatively added his name (along with the name of a U.S. Embassy official), first in pencil and then outlining it in ink, suggesting that Foote was somehow added to the list at the last moment. Once on the breakfast list, one might speculate that Foote also made it onto the Bolshoi central box list.
85 “Toasts at Moscow Luncheon, February 13, 1945, dictated by Wilder Foote, from notes in his small black notebook, February 4, 1949.” Folder “Tuesday, Feb. 13, 1945 (Moscow),” Stettinius Papers, University of Virginia, # 2723, Box 279. [Courtesy of Bruce Craig.]
86 “Notes on our visit to Moscow, Tuesday, February 13, 1945,” a ten-page memo with no author identified. But the memo is contained in the same folder with other memos dictated by Wilder Foote in February 1949. [# 2723, Box 279, Folder, “Tuesday Feb. 13, 1945 (Moscow),” Stettinius Papers, University of Virginia. [Courtesy of Bruce Craig.]
87 It is noteworthy that the official report on the Bolshoi Theater event in “Izvestia” daily did not name Wilder Foote among those present in the central box. It goes without saying that Mil’sky also remained unreported. Izvestia, February 15, 1945.
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