Venona and Alger Hiss

Abstract

Alger Hiss, the American diplomat tried in a US federal district court in New York and convicted in 1950 of perjury, remains a disputed icon of the Cold War, representing either infiltration of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations by Communist spies or an historic miscarriage of justice. This article shows that a ‘Venona’ document released by the US and the UK in 1996 tentatively identifying Hiss as an espionage agent is erroneous and irreconcilable with the evidence presented by the US at Hiss's trials; that KGB documents have been misconstrued as supporting the identification; and that another Venona document tends to exonerate rather than to implicate Hiss. Venona errors regarding Hiss raise questions about the accuracy and reliability of the entire Venona process and its products.