November 9, 2005
Nonsense on Stilts, Part III Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 12:40 PM EST The third item on our list of historical magic acts concerns Alger Hiss. He occasioned some discussion here a couple of weeks ago, as a sidelight to a news story that seemed important at the time. The immediate question had to do with whether Hiss was the Soviet agent known as "Ales" in some decrypted messages. David Lowenthal, carrying on an argument begun by his late brother John, says that Hiss was not Ales; you can scroll down on this blog for a link to his paper. Others, notably John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, say that Hiss was Ales. You can read a brief summary of their argument at http://www.discoverthenetwork.org/Articles/
Professors%20of%20Denial.htm and some more recent notes on the case at http://www.johnearlhaynes.org/page43.html (see the last few links) I will freely admit that I don’t know anywhere near enough about this particular question to support or oppose either side on the facts. Their arguments are full of sentences like "The new KI not only combined the human intelligence arms of the former MGB and GRU, it also combined the MGB’s Fifth (cipher) Directorate with the GRU’s cipher arm to form the Seventh Department of the KI" and "There are 92 names in five clusters––the so-called ‘Karl’, ‘Redhead’, ‘Tambourine’ or ‘Buben’, ‘Sound–Myrna’, and ‘Berg’–’Art’ groups." I would just as soon try to resolve a dispute between two astrophysicists. Anyone who wishes to wade through all the documents is welcome to do so. For the rest of us it’s a matter of which historian or group of historians you trust more. And on that score it’s worth noting that John Lowenthal, David’s brother, who performed most of the research on which David’s paper is founded, was a longtime Hiss acolyte who had even acted as his lawyer. As late as 1980 he made a film that asserted Hiss’s innocence, and by all accounts he went to his grave still believing in it. Here see yet another example of the historian’s license to assume away inconvenient facts. You don’t need the Venona transcripts to know that Hiss was a Communist spy. You don’t need the decades of evidence accumulated by historians since he was exposed. All you need is the prothonotary warbler and the pumpkin papers to know that Hiss was a lying sack of garbage. In fact, the warbler alone is enough for that. As I say, it’s still possible that the Lowenthal boys are correct and Ales was not Hiss. A stopped clock is right twice a day and a blind pig finds an acorn once in a while and all that. To be sure, the historians on both sides know lots more about this case than I do. But Jerry Falwell knows a lot more about the Bible than I do, yet that doesn’t compel me to accept his interpretation. For those of us without the time to spend learning Russian and poring over archives, it comes down to which side you trust. For me, John Lowenthal’s high-handed lifelong dismissal of something that is blindingly obvious to any rational person calls his judgment and impartiality into serious question. So I know which side my money is on.
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