The Arrogance of Power by Anthony Summers
Hiss’s accuser produced his first surprise—copies of State Department documents, stored until then in a dumbwaiter shaft, in November 1948, having insisted until then that although Hiss had been a fellow Communist, no espionage had been involved. When word of the material reached HUAC, at a time the Hiss probe seemed moribund, Nixon reacted oddly. Far from being excited at what seemed a big break in the case, he seemed nervous and irritable. When investigator Stripling suggested driving at once to see Chambers, Nixon talked instead of leaving with Pat the next day on an ocean cruise.
“I’m so goddamned sick and tired of this case,” he told Stripling in early December, “I don’t want to hear any more about it, and I’m going to Panama. And the hell with it, and you, and the whole damned business!” Hours later, after Nixon did agree to go to see Chambers again, the witness intimated that he had a second bombshell. Surely, Stripling asked Nixon, he would now postpone his vacation plans? Nixon retorted, “I don’t think he’s got a damned thing. I’m going right ahead with my plans.”
He left on the cruise the following morning, having grudgingly told Stripling to subpoena Chambers for any documents still in his possession. Within twenty-four hours, with flabbergasted HUAC staffers standing by, Chambers produced several rolls of microfilm of State Department documents from the famous hollowed-out pumpkin. Informed by radiogram aboard ship, Nixon decided to return to Washington at once. He did so in theatrical fashion, transferring from his liner to a coast guard seaplane, then flying to Florida to be met by a posse of reporters.
The photograph of the young congressman emerging from the seaplane, accompanied by his declaration (made before he had even seen the new evidence) that Chambers’s cache would “prove once and for all that where you have a Communist you have an espionage agent,” was flashed across the nation. Back in Washington, after only a cursory look at the latest discoveries, Nixon announced to the press they were “conclusive proof of the greatest treason conspiracy in this nation’s history . . . proof that cannot be denied.”
Two factors may explain Nixon’s odd behavior, and the truth may embrace both. His overwrought condition before the trip may have been in part a reaction to too much pressure and a marriage under strain. After a canceled summer vacation, he said, he had promised Pat he would not postpone another. “He was so exhausted,” his secretary asserted, “that we talked him into a vacation.”
Other information, however, suggests that the interrupted vacation scenario was in fact staged. Nixon had phoned one of Director Hoover’s closest aides late the night before his departure, to ask the FBI to stay away from the new development, as he would be holding hearings in two weeks. Telling Stripling he would be back after Christmas, he also tried to put HUAC on hold. Yet it seems he already knew he would be back far sooner than that.
In the early hours of the day he was to leave on his cruise, Nixon had happened to meet the House doorkeeper, William Miller, in a corridor of the House of Representatives. To the congressman it was a casual conversation with a lowly functionary, unlikely ever to be reported. Unfortunately for Nixon, though, Miller later wrote a memoir in which he recalled that as they greeted each other in the corridor, Nixon said: “I’m going to get on a steamship, and you will be reading about it. I am going out to sea, and they are going to send for me. You will understand when I get back. . . .” The puzzled Miller thought the congressman looked “very elated and keyed up, as if he were dancing on wires.”
Three days later, with Nixon on his way back to Washington, Miller recalled, “Finally I knew what he meant about the trip. The [newspaper] story said he had been aboard the steamship when the call came to return to Washington. I thought to myself, ‘That clever guy—he knew all the time.’ . . . I had been in on the start of something very peculiar.” Coast guard logs also reportedly suggest that arrangements for Nixon’s return had been made even before his ship left harbor in New York, which would confirm suspicion that the trip was a charade to ensure maximum publicity.
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With the Pumpkin Papers in hand, however, things moved apace. Concerns about Chambers’s credibility were put aside, and by Christmas Hiss had been indicted for perjury. The big issue now was the need to link Hiss to the copies of the compromising documents with hard evidence. “Attempt,” Chambers had told HUAC investigator Stripling, “to locate the typewriter . . .” And they did find a typewriter.
When Hiss came to trial in the summer of 1949, an antiquated office machine sat on a table in the courtroom in full view of the jury. Its keys clacked noisily as an FBI agent demonstrated that it still functioned. The Woodstock machine, vintage circa 1929, serial no. N230099, became one of the prosecutor’s “imutable witnesses” against Hiss.
“It had a powerful psychological impact,” the accused man remembered long afterward, “. . . sitting there like a murder weapon.” “The typewriter evidence,” Nixon said, “was a major factor in leading to the Hiss conviction.”
Document examiners for both sides judged that the purloined State Department documents had been retyped on the same machine as old letters known to have been typed on the Woodstock the Hisses had once owned. They had given the machine away, however, and just when they did so it became a crucial issue in the case. For if the Woodstock had been no longer in the family’s possession before the earliest date on the papers in Chambers’s hoard, then Hiss was surely innocent.
The Hiss defense team and the FBI hunted eagerly for the family’s old typewriter, tracking the chain of possession from person to person. The Hiss group found it first—or believed they had—when they recovered Woodstock N230099 from a junk dealer. However, its discovery brought the defense no comfort, for again experts for both sides were in agreement: The type on the salvaged Woodstock matched that on both the stolen government documents and the Hiss family correspondence, hard evidence that appeared to be devastating.
“It is the contention of the government,” the trial judge was to conclude as he summed up the evidence, “that this is the typewriter upon which the Baltimore exhibits were typed.” In fact, the prosecution had carefully contended no such thing. It was not just that there was ultimately uncertainty about whether the Hisses were still in possession of their machine at the time the State Department documents were purloined and copied, for the evidence on that issue has always been hopelessly muddled. There was also serious doubt about whether the Woodstock produced in court was really the old Hiss family machine. Its serial number, N230099, almost certainly indicated that it had been manufactured too late to be the Hiss typewriter. While the FBI had that information when the case went to trial, the defense did not.
Hiss spoke only two sentences in court after he had been found guilty. The first was to thank the judge. The second was to assert that one day in the future it would be disclosed how “forgery by typewriter” had been committed. “Even his most ardent supporters could not swallow such a ridiculous charge,” Richard Nixon scoffed in response to Hiss’s claim as late as 1976. “A typewriter, is, as you know, almost the same as a fingerprint. It is impossible, according to experts in the field, to duplicate exactly the characteristics of one typewriter by manufacturing another one.”
Nixon was wrong. Contrary to his claim, typewriters have been expertly forged, and with the government’s blessing, in a very relevant time frame. By 1941, as part of World War II liaison between American and British intelligence, operatives had developed machines that, according to one of the British officers involved, “could reproduce faultlessly the imprint of any typewriter on earth.” One successful anti-Nazi operation achieved precisely that by rebuilding an old Italian typewriter.
Who, though, might have performed such a feat in the Hiss case? And who else, then, might have had the means, motive, or opportunity to frame Hiss with a counterfeit typewriter? Who would have had access to the original typewriter in order to do so?
The machine was apparently recovered by the defense team a full five months after Chambers had produced his cache
The FBI’s future domestic intelligence chief, William Sullivan, served in Washington in 1948 and his work included the Hiss case. Interviewed years later, he was quoted as saying that “to the best of my knowledge . . . the FBI did have the typewriter before it was found by the Hiss defense. . . .”5 He was not certain “whether it had been located by the FBI or brought to the Bureau labs by Nixon.”
To the delight of Hiss’s defenders, moreover, Nixon also repeatedly drew suspicion on himself regarding the typewriter. In his book Six Crises, he noted: “On December 13, 1948, FBI agents found the typewriter.* . . . On December 15 an expert from the FBI typed exact copies of the incriminating documents on the old Woodstock machine. . . .”
Pressed for an explanation when Six Crises was published, Nixon offered only a superficial explanation for the discrepancy. His spokesman claimed the passage was all a researcher’s mistake based on the World-Telegram story and—ludicrously—insisted that Nixon had not been close to the case at the time.6
Yet Nixon again seemed to implicate himself in an Oval Office conversation he had with senior aides on March 10, 1972, recorded on a tape released in 1996 and monitored during research for this book. The subject was the uproar over a press story that International Telephone and Telegraph had committed a huge cash donation to the Republicans, a payoff for government intervention in an antitrust suit against the company. The story was based on a typewritten memo written by an ITT lobbyist, and Nixon wanted the memo declared a forgery. In the course of the discussion, the tape shows, Nixon harked back to the Hiss case and the Chambers documents, and stated: “I found the typewriter . . . [author’s italics].”7
John Dean’s memoir, Blind Ambition, has given Hiss loyalists their choicest morsel of all. The White House counsel quoted what, he said, Charles Colson told him after another talk in which Nixon drew a parallel between the ITT matter and the Hiss case. “The typewriters are always the key,” the president told Colson, in Dean’s version. “We built one in the Hiss case.”
When Dean’s book was published, Colson protested that he had “no recollection” of Nixon’s having said the typewriter was “phonied,” and Nixon himself characterized the claim as “totally false.” Dean, however, insisted that his contemporary notes confirmed that Colson had quoted the president as he indicated and seemed serious when he did so.
Can we take seriously the notion that Hoover and the FBI or Richard Nixon, separately or in alliance, might have framed Hiss by forging a typewriter? In this author’s view, only an intelligence organization would have had the resources and the experience to carry out such a plan. The World War II feat of forgery described earlier in this chapter was part of a joint British-FBI operation. Hoover himself had visited the secret installation in Canada where typewriter fabrication and similar acts of wizardry were perfected. (The operation was sited there to facilitate easy access by FBI agents and OSS staff.)
If forgery was used to ensure that Hiss was found guilty, there may have been a rationale more powerful, more historically compelling than Hoover’s obsession with the Red menace or his frustration about foot-dragging on the part of the Truman administration.
New information, reported in the pages that follow, suggests that by 1948 Hoover and other U.S. intelligence chiefs may have received information on Hiss from Soviet cable intercepts that seemed to leave no doubt that the man was guilty. Coupled with the flow of data about Hiss that had been reaching the intelligence agencies for several years, it may have seemed the clinching piece of evidence.
The existence of such evidence, though, could not be revealed because the very fact that the United States had broken the Soviet cipher was one of the most closely kept secrets of the century. Yet other parts of the government’s information on Hiss also had come from secret sources. Could there have been some twisted reasoning along the lines that since Hiss was now apparently clearly guilty, but the real proof of it had to remain concealed, it was justifiable to fabricate another sort of “proof”?
The one substantive piece of information indicating typewriter forgery features the OSS and its chief, William Donovan. In late 1948, when the Hiss defense and the FBI began the protracted hunt for the Woodstock typewriter, a man named Horace Schmahl joined the Hiss defense team as an investigator. Schmahl had worked for either the OSS or army intelligence during the war, then joined the Central Intelligence Group, the organization that operated in the period between the closedown of the OSS and the inception of the CIA.8
After his stint for the Hiss side, Schmahl defected to the prosecution team. Still later, after Hiss had been jailed, his lawyer received a tip that “Schmahl was implicated with the typewriter.” An investigator who had worked with Schmahl, Harold Bretnall, subsequently told the lawyer that Schmahl had been involved in forging the Hiss typewriter. “Hiss,” Bretnall said, “was framed.”
Tracked down in 1973 in Florida, Schmahl admitted to a Hiss investigator that he had been a “consultant” on the typewriter forgery. He said that the OSS had set Hiss up—just when was not clear—and that the orders had come through Donovan’s New York law firm, Donovan, Leisure. (Schmahl later retracted his statements and declined further interviews.)
There the trail ends. The Schmahl lead never was officially investigated. Is it plausible that either the FBI’s Hoover or Nixon would have been prepared to frame Hiss or to remain silent had they learned of it? The answer, the records suggest, is yes.
The damaging information on Hoover comes from his own files. A decade later, asked by the agent in charge in New York if the FBI laboratory could assist with the framing of a leading U.S. Communist, Hoover expressed no disapproval. He merely insisted that the job be well done—to “avoid embarrassment to the Bureau”—and added some advice. “To alter a typewriter to match a known model,” he counseled, “would require a large amount of typewriter specimens and weeks of laboratory work.” In the Hiss case in 1948 there were a great many specimens—and many weeks in which to achieve a forgery.
“Had Nixon asked the FBI to manufacture evidence to prove his case against Hiss,” opined former FBI Assistant Director Sullivan, “Hoover would have been only too glad to oblige.” As for whether Nixon would actually have gone as far as to frame Hiss, the later record includes disquieting instances of forgery or planting false information.
In 1971, for example, after announcing publicly that the American involvement in Vietnam was instigated by the Kennedy administration and by U.S. “complicity in the murder of [South Vietnamese President] Diem,” Nixon called for the examination of the files on the episode. When his aide Charles Colson found no hard evidence in State Department cables about Diem’s death, Colson asked Howard Hunt to “improve” on the record. Hunt did so, using scissors and paste and a Xerox machine to fabricate a message “proving” that President Kennedy had effectively approved the murder. He and Colson then tried to get the forgery published in Life magazine.
Recently released White House tapes feature Nixon’s telling John Ehrlichman, when this forgery was revealed at the height of Watergate, that no one had informed him of the scheme. “I’m not so sure that you weren’t,” responded Ehrlichman, “. . . my recollection is that this was discussed with you.” Soon after, Haldeman noted in his journal, Nixon admitted he was really “the guilty one . . . he was the one that started Colson on his projects. . . . Apparently Ehrlichman told him he had evidence that the P [Haldeman’s usual abbrevation for ‘President’] knew about the fak
A similar such incident occurred during the 1972 presidential campaign, after Alabama Governor Wallace had been shot in an assassination attempt. As reported in detail later, Nixon would at that time discuss with Charles Colson the notion of planting false evidence in the would-be assassin’s apartment—material that would smear him as a radical leftist. He appeared to approve the idea.
Would not the Richard Nixon who connived at such deceptions as president have been prepared, as a young, zealous congressman, to plot the framing of Alger Hiss? This scenario seems plausible if, as seems possible, he had already been assured confidentially but authoritatively that according to impeccable sources that could not be disclosed, Hiss was indeed guilty.
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In years to come, as Nixon’s fortunes rose and disastrously fell, and as Hiss continued to pursue his crusade to prove his innocence, both men knew the ultimate key to the case rested in a place that was inaccessible, the files of Soviet intelligence. If Hiss had been a Soviet agent, then Soviet intelligence should have a record of it. So it was that after the Soviet Union collapsed, at a time both men knew their own days were numbered, Nixon and Hiss each relayed messages to Moscow.
In 1991, seeking definitive corroboration of what he had long believed, Nixon sent an emissary to General Dmitri Volkogonov, an adviser to President Boris Yeltsin and the chairman of the commission on the KGB and military intelligence archives. The director of the Nixon presidential library, John Taylor, followed suit, as, some months later, did Alger Hiss. In October 1992 Volkogonov wrote to Hiss with what sounded like an unequivocal response. “Not a single document—and a great amount of material has been studied—substantiates the allegation that Mr. A. Hiss collaborated with the intelligence services of the Soviet Union. . . . You can tell Alger Hiss that the heavy weight should be lifted from his heart.”