Whittaker Chambers, A Biography, by Sam Tanenhaus, published by Random House, 1997

Whittaker Chambers captivated the attention of America when, on August 3, 1948, he informed the House Un-American Activities Committee that he had been an underground member of the Communist Party for thirteen years. Under questioning, he identified key members of the communist underground including Alger Hiss, a former State Department official and Carnegie Endowment president. Alger Hiss, under oath, subsequently denied knowing Chambers and denied being a communist. Hiss then sued Chamber for slander.

Ironically, Whittaker Chambers, an editor for Time magazine, had initially furnished information concerning the communist underground nine years previously. On August 24, 1939, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed a nonaggression pact. Chambers, who had "defected" from the underground in 1938, recognized that Nazi Germany was now in a position to share the labors of the communist underground. Chambers approached Adolf A. Berle, Jr., President Roosevelt's intelligence liaison, and informed him of the identities of communist agents working in a Washington espionage ring. One of the names furnished was Alger Hiss.

During discovery proceedings in the slander suit, Chambers revealed that he possessed evidence that would implicate Hiss as a member of the communist underground. The evidence included handwritten notes, 65 typed sheets of paper, 2 strips of developed microfilm totaling 58 frames, and 3 metal cylinders of undeveloped microfilm. Photostats were made of the notes and typed papers but Chambers held on to the undeveloped microfilm for self-protection.

Under questioning, Chambers revealed that he had acted as courier for the communist underground and had received State Department documents from Alger Hiss which he had then conveyed to Boris Bykov, a Soviet agent. Hiss denied ever meeting Bykov and denied typing the documents. Hiss argued that the handwritten notes may have been stolen from his State Department office by Chambers. As for the typed documents, although comparison tests confirmed that they had been typed on the same Woodstock typewriter once owned by Hiss and his wife, Priscilla, the defense maintained that the Woodstock typewriter had been "sold" before the documents had been typed.

Up to this point, Chambers had been reluctant to reveal the existence of the microfilm evidence. Fearful that "communist agents" might raid his farm house in Maryland, Chambers had gone out to his garden, retrieved a pumpkin, scooped it out, and secreted the microfilm. When Chamber's eventually decided to produce the "Pumpkin Papers," it changed everything. In view of the new evidence, the slander trial was suspended (later dismissed), and Hiss was indicted for perjury.

The perjury trial was a sensation ending in a hung jury. The second trial swung in favor of the prosecution and Hiss was found guilty. On January 25, Hiss was sentenced to five years in Federal penitentiary on two counts of lying to a grand jury. Chambers went on to write Witness, a bestseller, published in 1952, revealing his struggles with communism. Hiss followed up with his own book, In the Court of Public Opinion, published in 1957. Chambers died of a heart attack at age 60 on July 9, 1961. Hiss died at age 92 on November 15, 1996. But the debate lingered on. Even if Hiss had been found guilty, loyalists still supported him, especially those who opposed the role played by the House Un-American Activities Committee and, in particular, that of a Republican Congressman from California named Richard M. Nixon.

It wasn't until the collapse of the cold war that the culpability of Alger Hiss was reassessed in the light of further evidence. For a brief period, a window of information was opened by both Moscow and Washington. In 1995, the National Security Agency began releasing selected Soviet cables intercepted by American counterintelligence during the 1940s under the "Venona" program. One batch of cables confirmed the existence of an underground network operating out of Washington, D.C. Specifically, Alger Hiss was implicated in a cable dated March 30, 1945 as a well-placed Soviet agent in the State Department, identified by his code name Ales, who had attended the Yalta Conference and later traveled to Moscow to participate in the post-war negotiations. This could only be Alger Hiss.