Great Spies of the 20th Century

He was not actually convicted for espionage due to the fact that there were doubts about some of the facts that had happened before the war. Instead, he was found guilty of perjury. The prosecution alleged that he had lied, and as was seen in the Monica Lewinsky Affair, Americans take the issue of committing perjury before a judge very seriously.

The former government official was jailed in March 1951. Hiss constantly protested his innocence and was submitted multiple requests for a retrial, but always in vain. He was finally released in 1954 but was not admitted back to the Massachusetts Bar until 1975, after being struck off after his conviction.¹³

So what really happened? All indications are that Alger Hiss was a scapegoat. It is not impossible that he did flirt with the Communist Party and may even have been a member. But during the haunting climate of the witch hunts that prevailed in America after the war, he clearly panicked when he was accused. He even thought that he had got away with it to begin with, despite all the pressure. This was foolish though, as the other figures who had been accused alongside him chose to invoke the Fifth Amendment, which allows a US citizen to refuse to answer a question if he or she believes it might incriminate them. As a result, they avoided prosecution. But Hiss was stubborn and so went on the attack. In so doing, he allowed his accusers to mount a real war against him, although the case against him personally was not particularly important. The main purpose of the trial was to show that the Democratic Party had been completely infiltrated by the ‘reds'.

The plot worked perfectly and at the same time, allowed the young senator, Richard Nixon, to become vice-president only three years later, in 1952.

In 1996, a number of encrypted telegrams were published that had been sent between Moscow and its agents in the west: the Venona Papers. One of the documents, dated 30 March 1945, refers to an agent with the codename ALES, and who had worked for the Soviet secret services since 1935. Some experts immediately made the link to Alger Hiss and that he probably was ALES. ‘Probably', that is all. However, in 1993 the Russian historian, General Volkogonov, said he had found no trace of Alger Hiss after searching the KGB archives dating from the Cold War era.

Perhaps in the future we will know more. Indeed, the archives containing the Alger Hiss grand jury trial documents have been opened, despite the objections of the US government, and historians have plunged themselves into the thousands of pages of transcripts. Their work is not finished although some of them have been struck by Nixon's attitude during the trial. They describe him as a skilled manipulator and cite this rather extraordinary moment in particular:

In a theatrical gesture, Nixon provoked the jurors by waving the microfilm that contained secret information from the State Department, known as the pumpkin papers, warning the court that he would force them to listen to the recordings. Nixon then told the grand jury, 'I will not relinquish the film!’

Finally, showing that the Hiss trial was still of concern to Americans,Whittaker Chambers was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Ronald Reagan in 1984. Four years later, the farm where Chambers had supposedly hidden the secret papers in a hollowed-out pumpkin was designated a national historic site!

Chapter 3

Boulanger: Stalin’s Villain

This strange and nefarious tale is reminiscent in many ways of the story of Jean Moulin, and not just because it begins in Lyons during the war and involves the sinister Klaus Barbie. It is a story of the resistance and betrayal, but is even more gloomy than the legend of Jean Moulin due to the serious consequences that would occur within the French Communist Party. It is a story in which the secret services in particular played a very obscure role.

At the heart of this case is a mysterious spy network called ‘Service B', a key part of the communist resistance and the militia. Two journalists called Roger Faligot and Remi Kauffer uncovered part of this secret network in 1985, revealing what was one of the masterpieces of soviet espionage during the war. Alongside the famous Red Orchestra and the soviet networks in Switzerland, this secret network not only communicated with Moscow, but also occasionally with contacts in London and the American OSS.¹⁴ Bringing together dedicated and courageous militants recruited from all sections of the population, ‘Service B' played a leading role in the struggle against the occupying forces. It also ended the infighting within the international communist movement and helped Stalin to settle various scores in order to help him preserve the secrets of his particularly Machiavellian brand of politics. And so both before and after the Liberation, many men and women were willingly sacrificed for the cause.

It has often been said that Lyons was the capital of the Resistance. Until 1942 it was part of the unoccupied zone and the famous Resistance leader, Jean Moulin, was betrayed and arrested there by Klaus Barbie's men in 1943, a year before the events in this chapter took place.

In Lyons, the FTP¹⁵ operated in a highly organised and effective network controlled by the CMZ, the military committee of the southern zone. At the same time, ‘Service B' formed an intelligence branch of the FTP and was directed by an architect called Boris Guimpel. ‘Service B' was still relatively unknown and as it was essentially a communist network, the communists themselves were keen to keep it quiet. The network worked directly and primarily with Moscow and after the war, its agents, including those in the Red Orchestra, could be considered as spies, even though they were to all intents and purposes ‘resistors'. Nevertheless, these communist activists very quickly became suspects and some even found themselves in serious trouble.

In May 1944, a sudden vast wave of arrests decimated the CMZ, no doubt as the result of some betrayal. Between