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The Mystery of Ales (Expanded Version)
THE FBI AND WILDER FOOTE
One episode more recently associated with Alger Hiss seems to fit Foote better than it does Hiss. Allen Weinstein writes in The Haunted Wood of an encounter between Gorsky, the NKGB’s man in Washington, and Ruble on April 2, 1945. Citing his Russian collaborator Vassiliev’s notes from Soviet intelligence files, Weinstein reports that Ruble “summoned” Gorsky to come to his Treasury Department office. Weinstein assumes that Ruble is Harold Glasser. In the presence of another Treasury Department official, Ruble slips a note to Gorsky while shaking hands. Weinstein cites the note. It warned Gorsky that an FBI agent had recently observed that a bundle of documents had been brought to New York, photographed, and then returned to Washington within 24 hours. “Judging by the character of the documents, only three people had access to them. One of these people is ‘Ales.’ . . . According to Stettinius, the FBI agent told him such operations with documents had already gone on for 18 months, that in this manner ‘hundreds and hundreds’ of documents were withdrawn. Stettinius asked the FBI agent whether these documents were going to PM [the radical New York daily newspaper], to which the latter answered, ‘No, much lefter than this.’” (Presumably, this means more left-leaning than PM.) “Concluding his conversation with [Ales] about it, Stettinius told him, ‘I hope it is not you.’”154
Weinstein asserts that Ruble (Glasser to him) could only have heard this story directly from Ales, the man to whom Stettinius had in dismay said, “I hope it is not you.” Weinstein assumes that Hiss was Ales. But this ignores something Stettinius wrote in his 1949 book: “I never heard of any questioning of Mr. Hiss’s loyalty from anyone inside or outside of the State Department or from the FBI during my time of service in the Department.”155 Clearly, Stettinius seemed to think he had no reason to question Hiss’s integrity. Given what we know of Foote’s special relationship with Stettinius, the story now fits Foote better than it does Hiss.156
The timing of this April 2, 1945, conversation suggests that the bundle of leaked State Department documents may have been connected to the Amerasia case. In the spring of 1945 the FBI discovered through wiretaps that the offices of Amerasia magazine contained hundreds of classified State Department documents. Affiliated with the left-wing Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR), Amerasia was for a time financed by Frederick Field, Foote’s Harvard classmate. (In the 1930s, Foote’s other Harvard Crimson colleague, Joseph Barnes, was also affiliated with the IPR.157)
In early June 1945 the FBI arrested Amerasia’s editor, Philip Jaffe, and several of his colleagues. Eventually, Jaffe and a government employee, Emmanuel Larsen, pleaded guilty to unauthorized possession of government documents. They were fined $2,500 and $500 respectively.158
In connection to this case, the State Department had the FBI investigate 15 to 20 of its employees — including Alger Hiss.159 But Hiss was never implicated in the Amerasia leaks. Although Foote’s name was never associated in public with the case, he was investigated by the Security Division of the State Department in 1945, with an FBI follow-up.160 In the early 1950s the FBI reported that Foote had been associated with “a former State Department employee” who belonged to “the group who cooperated in obtaining information from the files of the Federal Government for the use of Russian agents.”161
It appears that this employee was John Stewart Service, who was arrested on June 6, 1945, with five other individuals associated with the Amerasia case. Service is usually referred to as “a prominent State Department China Hand.”162 He returned from China in mid-April 1945 when the suspects in the Amerasia case had already been under FBI surveillance for leaking confidential information. (Service was never indicted and after years of investigations was cleared with the help of the U.S. Supreme Court of any wrongdoing.) If Service was the person the FBI said had associated with Foote, it is interesting that Foote did not discontinue the relationship in the face of Service’s persecution. Foote’s name appears as a co-editor of Service’s book The Amerasia Papers: Some Problems in the History of US-China Relations.
Foote’s FBI file suggests that the bureau was wiretapping his phone while he was attending the May 1945 San Francisco conference on the founding of the United Nations. The wiretaps took place at the same time the bureau was investigating the suspects in the Amerasia case. (The FBI reported that Field, Foote’s Harvard classmate, had phoned with a request to interview him for an article in the Communist Party’s Daily Worker. Foote declined, saying he had the flu.)163
In 1947, when dozens of State Department employees were forced out under suspicion of being Communists — Foote transferred to a position in the secretariat of the United Nations, one FBI “reliable informer” reported that “there had been persistent rumors around the office to the effect that [Wilder Foote] was in grave danger of losing his position.”164 Beginning in 1949, right-wing political forces mounted a campaign to purge American employees at the UN Secretariat who were suspected of having left-wing backgrounds.
Eventually, the FBI also found a slender thread linking Foote to the “Perlo Group,” the alleged Communist “information” cell with members in a number of wartime agencies, which in late 1944–45 came under NKGB control. FBI agents told J. Edgar Hoover that “the files of this office also contain information from [excised] to the effect that an individual named Wilder whose last name was unknown but could perhaps have been Foote, contacted [excised], subject of the Silvermaster case, in June 1947, and discussed the divorce proceedings then going on between [excised.]”165 The divorce reference clearly applies to Victor Perlo, chief of the aviation section of the War Production Board. Perlo and Nathan Gregory Silvermaster, who also worked on that board, were both suspected by the FBI of passing information to the Soviets — and both are named in the Venona cables.166
In the mid-1940s the Perlos were going through a nasty divorce and child custody dispute. An angry and alienated Katherine Perlo wrote a letter in 1944 to the U.S. government, denouncing her ex-husband as a spy. If the “Wilder” mentioned in the above FBI memo is indeed Wilder Foote — and “Wilder” is an unusual name — the FBI must have been intrigued to learn that Foote could have known Silvermaster and Perlo. Foote was asked about the two, but he denied knowing either man.167 In any case, the FBI evidently found no wayllow up this tantalizing thread.
In 1945, after Gouzenko’s revelations in Canada, it appears that the FBI briefly suspected that the spy who was an “Assistant to the Secretary” might well be Foote. But the bureau later shifted its suspicions to Alger Hiss, because Whittaker Chambers was willing to testify against him. The FBI briefly investigated Foote again in 1948–49, but this time it was in connection with the case they were trying to build against Hiss.
In sum, Foote was the target of intermittent FBI investigations from 1941 through 1952. The Civil Service Commission’s Investigations Division called a number of witnesses to testify about Foote in 1944 at the International Organizations Employees Loyalty Board. Those who testified included Lauchlin Currie, a White House aide and then a major influence at the Foreign Economic Administration, and Abraham Feller, an OWI official. But in none of these investigations did the FBI find anyone who could testify to any wrongdoing by Foote. Even so, Foote would have to endure one more investigation.
In the autumn of 1952, Sen. Alexander Wiley (R-Wisc.) complained to Secretary of State Dean Acheson of what he called “a continued heavy infiltration of members and ex-members of the Communist Party and other subversive American individuals in the Secretariat of the United Nations.”168 Soon afterward Republican senators charged that someone in the State Department had helped a number of purged department officials find sinecures in the newly established United Nations bureaucracy. Early in 1953 the Eisenhower administration appointed Scott McLeod, a former FBI agent, as the State Department’s new security chief. That spring McLeod told a congressional committee that he was vigorously investigating “whether there was any evidence to show that these subversive Americans on the staff of the Secretary General of the United Nations had gotten their jobs as a result of complicity on the part of subversive Americans.”169 A grand jury was convened to investigate the charges.
The FBI opened an investigation of 21 U.S. citizens employed by the UN Secretariat — including Wilder Foote.170 (A dozen of these people in the secretariat would eventually lose their jobs.) A source “advised that [Foote] appeared before the Federal Grand Jury, Southern District of New York, on 10/6/52 and 10/7/52, at which time he denied Communist Party membership.” In the course of the investigation, Foote acknowledged that he was friendly with Alger Hiss, but he said that it was hard for him to believe that Hiss was guilty.171
The FBI was particularly interested to learn that Wilder Foote and Alger Hiss were good friends; they had first met in 1944 when Foote joined the State Department. Foote’s son remembers that Alger and Priscilla Hiss “were guests in our house on several occasions. My parents were distressed about what happened to them — and I do not think they ever accepted the guilty verdict as justified.”172
On one occasion, Wilder Foote told the FBI that, after he moved his family to New York to work for the UN, he stayed at the Hiss home while on a visit to Washington. He described Hiss as a man of firm character and found him to be totally reliable. It was Foote’s impression that Hiss was completely loyal in carrying out the administration’s foreign policy. Foote stated that he did not consider Hiss pro-Russian, nor did he believe Hiss attempted to influence pro-Russian policies. Foote stated that he was shocked at the allegations made against Hiss. He described Priscilla Hiss as “a very sensitive and idealistic person and believed she would be the last person to be sympathetic toward Communism because of her very nature.”173
Even after Hiss’s first trial, Foote did nothing to hide their friendship. One unnamed source told the FBI, “Wilder Foote is known by me to be a very intimate and very loyal friend of Alger Hiss. About two weeks before [blank] I observed Wilder Foote in close consultation with [Alger Hiss] in the Press Bar at Lake Success. I was flabbergasted at the brazen public display of friendship shown by Wilder Foote for a man who was almost convicted by one jury and was about to be tried by another.”174
Although the FBI redacted the name of this source in Foote’s FBI file, we found the name in an unredacted version of the same FBI reports in the National Archives. The source was Anne Triano, who had been a secretary at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations from May 1946 until 1949. Before that, Triano had worked “for eight years and a half” in the Criminal Investigations Division of the Internal Revenue Service. The strange and inconsistent story she gave of reporting to the FBI suggests a greater involvement with the bureau than she acknowledged.
Triano willingly testified against Foote at his 1953 Loyalty Board hearing, explaining that she had “felt that things were very wrong in the State Department and in the United Nations” for many years. However, after hearing Sen. Joseph McCarthy give a speech in early 1950, she “felt that it was really my duty to come forward and say something and let people who knew more about it, check into it and do something about it. . . . So along about February or March [1950], I sat down at home and typed out this memorandum. I gave it to a man that I knew would put it in the right hands. . . . He took my memorandum and turned it over to the proper authorities, and a copy went into the hands of the F.B.I., and they, in turn, started an investigation and found me.”
When talking to the FBI, Triano named people she considered to be “Communists or Communist sympathizers,” and added that “Wilder Foote has a reputation at the United States Mission and the United Nations of being pro-Communist or at least a very radical pro-Soviet left-winger.”175
But Triano, unlike Whittaker Chambers, produced no documents to substantiate her allegations. And since Triano was the only witness testifying against Foote at his Loyalty Board hearing, it became a case of one woman’s word against Foote’s.176 On questioning, Triano’s testimony turned so obviously flimsy that one wonders if the FBI hoped she might provoke Foote into making some kind of damaging admission. But Foote appeared unrattled. “I have no memory whatsoever of what she is talking about,” he testified. “The rumors around the office, a new Loyalty Program coming into force. . . . I have not the faintest recollection of any such thing.”
In Foote’s FBI file, the bureau noted that he had been “emotionally involved” and angry about the suicide at age 47 of Abraham Feller, an old friend he had first met at the OWI. Feller had later become general counsel to the UN, and when he was called before the McCarran Committee, he was aggressively questioned about his left-wing views. Shortly afterward, in late November 1952, Feller threw himself out of the window of his 12th-floor apartment overlooking Central Park. Foote had the courage and plain decency to openly blame the McCarran Committee for Feller’s death.177 A friend had died tragically, and he was unafraid to blame the politicians who were then inciting the witch-hunt.
By late spring of 1953, the FBI had uncovered information from abroad indicating that Foote might have some kind of Communist sympathies.178 Cables went out to U.S. embassies in various western European capitals asking for information about Foote. FBI requests for information continued well into 1954. In August 1953 in Paris, the FBI interviewed Lee B. Blanchard, who had served Stettinius in his secretariat and who had traveled with Foote from Yalta to Moscow to Mexico City and on to San Francisco. By 1953, Blanchard was a General Services Officer in the U.S. Embassy in Paris. He described Foote “as being somewhat aggressive, cynical and extremely active in his position as special press relations adviser to Mr. Stettinius.” Blanchard added that when Foote moved to the UN Secretariat in 1947, he “was even more critical and outspoken in his opposition to many of the U.S. policies.”179
Foote was outspoken and held passionate beliefs. In the autumn of 1945, he wrote a long letter to Hiss complaining about Washington’s decision to postpone the inaugural session of the UN General Assembly. He wanted Hiss to know “how profoundly shocked I am at the suggestion that the United States might stall, or allow matters to drift in such a way as to put off the first meeting of the Assembly until January 15th. I feel that such a policy would be a denial of everything we have stood for, publicly and privately. . . . It would be damaging to the future of the United Nations and to the reputation and career of ERS [Stettinius] himself. It would also be dishonest.”180
All of these threads provide a glimpse of a man who appears to have been energetic, intelligent, and downright courageous, particularly given the growing anti-left political atmosphere of the late 1940s. Like many other civil servants, Foote had to cope with the stress associated with the anti-subversive investigations conducted by federal, state, and municipal agencies during the early 1950s, a period dominated by Senator McCarthy’s headline-making searches for hidden Soviet agents. Foote’s continuing outspokenness must only have heightened the FBI’s suspicions about him. But in the end, the bureau’s investigators were unable to find anything that could cause Foote to be dismissed, let alone indicted. As a result, Foote was not among those who lost their jobs in the UN Secretariat. “McCarthyism was a problem for both my father and me,” says Foote’s son. “My father was on McCarthy’s ‘list’ but was never called to testify.”181
Available American and Soviet files cannot resolve the issue of whether Wilder Foote was Ales, and the archival portrait we have of Foote simply does not paint a garish, McCarthy- era-like picture of a hardened Stalinist spy. The possibility exists that his interactions with the Soviets were sanctioned by his patron, Edward Stettinius, or by some other American government authority. But even without official sanction, Ales might not have thought of himself as a spy. After all, the Soviet Union was a wartime ally and many otherwise patriotic Americans thought that their government should be doing everything possible to help the Russians in their war against the Nazis. Still, it is hard to imagine that the GRU would bother to place Milstein in the Bolshoi central box to commend a “blind” source and not an important asset.
A veteran GRU colonel, asked who Milstein met with at the Yalta conference, replied: “I emphasize: not an agent but a source of information, probably, a confidential contact at the Department of State who . . . had played a highly positive role in the development of Soviet-American relations.” When asked, if that source was Alger Hiss, the GRU colonel became visibly irritated and insisted, “I have never heard of Hiss as an agent of [the] Kremlin from anybody.”182 In a November 18, 2003, letter replying to a query from Alger Hiss’s son, Tony, the Russian Ministry of Defense stated that it “hasn’t got any data of an agent under the pseudonym ‘Ales,’ who supposedly worked for any of our military intelligence units at that time,” assuring the younger Hiss “that the condition of the archives of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation allows to consider these conclusions as reliable and final.” The letter deplored the “unfounded reckoning” of “Alger Heess [sic] in agents of Soviet military intelligence during the World War II.”183
Wilder Foote’s patron and champion, Edward Stettinius, who was not only secretary of state but also a former chairman of U. S. Steel, considered Foote to be a man of sound political judgment. Foote’s actions show him to have been a person of strong character. Friends described him as gracious, resolute, patient, hardworking, and modest in demeanor. He clearly believed himself to be a man of impeccable integrity, an idealist who dedicated most of his career as an international civil servant to building up the United Nations as a bulwark of world peace. If he was also a gentleman spy, he was excellent at his craft.
But it is important to remember that a decade ago a host of historians and intelligence officers rushed to proclaim the identity of Ales. It is clear to us now that they were premature. With this in mind, we must all be agnostics when it comes to Wilder Foote until the Russian archives open up. In the meantime, Wilder Foote’s son insists, “I am confident that the actions of my father will ultimately be proven to be above reproach.”184
Research for this article was supported by The Nation Institute.
FOOTNOTES
154 Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood. Random House, 1999, pp. 267-268.
155 Edward. R. Stettinius, Jr., Roosevelt and the Russians, p. 31.
156 Neither Weinstein nor any other scholar has found any documentary record in the U.S. National Archives to verify this April 2, 1945, meeting between Gorsky’s alias “Anatoly Gromov” and a Treasury Department official “Ruble,” whom Weinstein identified as Harold Glasser. Our thorough research in the Treasury Department files has also turned negative. Moreover, there are no records of any meetings, memos or conversations of Glasser on March 28–April 4.
157 “Q. Did you know that Barnes was active in the Institute of Pacific Relations?
Foote: Oh, yes, I knew that very well; I knew that….” – Exhibit “A.” Official Report of Proceedings before the International Organizations Employees Loyalty Board of the U.S. Civil Service Commission. Hearings Concerning the loyalty of WILDER FOOTE, Employee, pages 1 to 164, New York City, NY, Friday, September 11, 1953. In WILDER FOOTE Oversize Personnel Security Investigation Files, Op. Cit.
158 Harvey Klehr and Ronald Radosh, The Amerasia Spy Case: Prelude to McCarthyism, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1996. Klehr and Radosh do not mention Foote in their book.
159 Ibid., p. 139.
160 Director and SACS New York and St. Louis to FBI Wash Field, p.3; Director and SAC Albany to FBI Wash Field, 3/3/53, p. 1–2.
161 FBI Washington D.C. report, Feb. 16, 1951.
162 As, for instance, in John Earl Haynes and Harvey Kleher, Early Cold War Spies. The Espionage Trials That Shaped American Politics. Cambridge University Press, 2006, p. 25. See also E. J. Kahn’s The China Hands, Penguin Press, New York, 1976.
163 On May 30, 1945 “Confidential Informer of the San Francisco Office advised that [Frederick Vanderbilt] Field, who was in San Francisco for the purpose of covering UN Conference [for] the “Daily Worker,” called [Wilder Foote] at the Fairmount Hotel. Foote advised Field that he could not see him on that date inasmuch as he was ill with the flu. [FBI, Wilder Foote, April 10, 1951, p. 2, sourced to (64-5001-257; Source SF 1460 is a technical).
164 According to an FBI Informer who in “approximately May 1946 to July 1947” served as a secretary at the U.S. Mission at the United Nations, “there had been persistent rumors around the office to the effect that Foote was in grave danger of losing his position. It was at about that time that the President’s Loyalty Program was put into effect. [...] for some months before his announced resignation, Wilder Foote had had numerous telephonic and personal discussions at the office and at the United Nations with [ ] in connection with the appointment in that organization. FBI New York Field Office Report, 3/25/53, pp. 1-2.
165 SAC, WFO to Director, March 13, 1953, Wilder Foote FBI file.
166 Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood, p. 227.
167 “Q. Did you know Harry Dexter White?
A. Yes, I met Harry Dexter White. I did not know him. I was introduced to him. He was higher ranking than I was, but he was in Treasury, had a lot to do with Lend-Lease.
Q. You had no close association with him?
A. No.
Q. How about Laughlin Currie?
A. Yes, I met him. He was also very active on the Chinese Aid, Lend-Lease Program. . . .
[Ibid., Hearing, p. 100.]
[other names]
Q. Did you know Gregory Silvermaster?
A. Not to my knowledge, I don’t remember ever meeting him.
Q. Or Victor Perlo?
A. No.
Q. . . . Harold Ware?
A. No
Q. Henry Collins?
A. No.
[Exhibit “A”. Official report of Proceedings before the International Organizations Employees Loyalty Board of the U.S. Civil Service Commission. Docket No. In the matter of: Hearings Concerning the loyalty of WILDER FOOTE, Employee. Pages 1 to 164, New York City, NY, September 11, 1953, pp. 98–99.]
168 Senator Alexander Wiley ltr. to Dean Acheson, September 25, 1952. – NA, RG 59, Reading Files of Samuel Boykin, 1931–53, Box 6, Folder “Loyalty UN”, NA., College Park, MD.
169 Scott McLeod “Statement to the Keating Committee on American Employees at the U.N.,” March 27, 1953. – RG 59, Box 48, Folder “FBI-UN Investigation”, NA, College Park, MD. In 1949 the United Nations Secretariat agreed to enter into a “secret arrangement” whereby the U.S. State Department funneled security information to the Secretariat about its American employees. The State Department eventually “commented adversely” on 40 American citizens employed in the Secretariat and 25 of these individuals were fired by 1952. (Wilder Foote was not on this list.) [Mr. Ingram to Mr. Hickerson, May 8, 1953, “Status Priority Cases: Executive Order 10422.” RG 59, Records of the Assistant Secretary of State for U.N. Affairs, Box 1, Folder “Reports on Individual Cases,” NA, College Park, MD.]
170 Samuel D. Boykin ltr. to J. Edgar Hoover, Feb. 2, 1953, RG 59, Box 6, Reading Files of Samuel Boykin 1931–53, Folder “Loyalty UN,” NA, College Park, MD.
171 Foote FBI file, 2/20/53 from SAC New York to Director, FBI.
172 Wilder Foote II e-mail to Kai Bird, 11/16/2005.
173 Wilder Foote FBI file, “Results of Investigation,” 3/13/53.
174 Wilder Foote FBI file, FBI memo, 3/25/53.
175 Wilder Foote FBI file, FBI memo, 3/25/53. The FBI also thought it significant that Foote’s wife Marcia was a friend of Mrs. Paul Robeson, and had given Mrs. Robeson a private tour of the United Nations. [Wilder Foote FBI file, A. H. Belmont to D. M. Ladd, FBI memo 12/3/53.]
176 Official Report of Proceedings before the International Organizations Employees Loyalty Board of the U.S. Civil Service Commission, Op. Cit.
177 Wilder Foote FBI file, A. H. Belmont to D. M. Ladd of FBI, memo dated Dec. 3, 1953
178 Mr. Ingram to Mr. Ylitalo and Mr. Ford, State Department memo on “Meeting with Mr. Meloy, Civil Service Commission,” June 9, 1953. —RG 59, Decimal Files 1953–60, Box 46, Folder “Civil Service Commission, 1953,” National Archives. This memo reports on whether “interim information on W. Foote should be forwarded to the Secretary General of the United Nations” and whether the transmittal of this information would involve a “disclosure of security information.” It was agreed that such information, including “substantially conclusive information pointing to Communist membership or definite Communist activities” should be given to the Secretary General.”
179 Neil McManus, Regional Security Officer, 8/28/53, American Embassy, Paris, a two-page memo on Henry Wilder Foote, Investigation, E.O. 10422, obtained by FOIA request by Kai Bird, released Feb. 5, 2007. The memo went on to tell, “Although there was almost constant daily contact over this period of years, Mr. Blanchard felt that he did not really know the Subject well nor did he ever hear him express his political convictions. . . . Mr. Blanchard stated that he never received any indication that the subject might possess communist or leftist political opinions.”
180 Wilder Foote to Alger Hiss, 10/24/45. RG 59, Alger Hiss Files, Subject Files of the Office of Special Political Affairs, 1940–46, Box 20, folder “Informational Letters” (2), NA, College Park, MD.
181 Wilder Foote II e-mail to Kai Bird, 11/16/2005.
182 2003 interviews with a GRU veteran, Op. Cit.
183 Maj.-Gen. V. Fedorov, Chief of Main International Relations Directorate of Defense Ministry of the Russian Federation, to Tony Heess [sic], November 18, 2002; original in English (Grace Tony Hiss.)
184 Wilder Foote (the son) e-mail to Kai Bird, 3/23/07.
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