VENONA: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America - Review

Washington Monthly, July, 1999 by Davis Ignatius

VENONA: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America By John Earl Hatnes and Harvey Klebr Yale University Press, $30

I've never had much use for post-modern literary theories--which are always reminding you, usually in unreadable prose, of the rather obvious point that there's no "objective" meaning to a work of literature or historical event independent of its cultural context. That kind of theorizing makes me very glad I escaped graduate school before it was too late.

But these two books, both touching on the story of Alger Hiss, offer such radically different accounts that you can't help thinking that there really are different kinds of truth--conditioned by the different stances of the observers, derived from the differing nature of the evidence they cite, and ultimately incapable of speaking to each other. That's why some historical arguments never end, despite what one side regards as irrefutable factual support for its view. They can't agree on what "was" was.

Tony Hiss has written a loyal and loving memoir about his father, Alger Hiss, perhaps the most famous spy in modern American history. The book's title, "The View from Alger's Window," refers to the window in Greenwich Village from which the father would gaze, before he was sent off to Lewisburg Penitentiary on a perjury conviction, and from which the son would gaze during the 44 months his father was incarcerated. Tony Hiss calls it a "time funnel."

The memoir is based largely on the letters Alger wrote home to his family while he was in prison. Tony Hiss gathered the letters after his mother's death, and he has used them to recreate the kind of man his father really was--that is to say, the kind of man his son, through the letters, believes him to be. From a historian's perspective, they're the most subjective and unreliable record imaginable; since they represent Alger Hiss' attempt to explain himself to the people he loved. But they're endearing--if nothing else for Alger Hiss's absolute refusal to admit guilt, confess weakness, feel sorry for himself, or blame others.

Tony Hiss says of his father's letters: "They are a window flung open wide onto a life, a bird of the spirit springing into the air, a heart made plain." The son finds in the letters nothing whatsoever that would support any notion that his father was ever a communist, much less a spy. Instead, he finds a man who made up charming stories about the wily and resourceful Sugar Lump Boy to boost his son's spirits; a man who worked lovingly over those nearly four years in prison to teach his fellow inmates to read; a man whose greatest pleasure while in prison was the simple act of writing to his wife and son.

The Alger Hiss of these letters comes across as a starchy, WASP version of Roberto Benigni's character in "Life is Beautiful." It's almost as if he's inventing the world described in these prison letters to distract his wife and son from the horrific reality he was actually living through. It's touching, and you can see why Hiss' supporters stuck by him so doggedly over the years; he really does seem like a nice chap.

The son asks: How could such a man have been a spy? He tries to buttress his case with the recollections of his half brother Timothy, who remembered visits to the Hiss house in the 1930s by the man who later named Alger as a spy, the former communist turned red-hunter, Whittaker Chambers. Based on Timothy's highly personal and subjective testimony, Tony Hiss describes one of Chambers' key charges as "fabricated without even a seed of truth" and agrees with Timothy's conclusion that the whole spy story was "mostly poppycock"

The larger purpose of Tony Hiss' memoir, in addition to asserting his father's innocence, is to argue that prison may actually have been the best thing that ever happened to him. "Alger died a happier man with Lewisburg behind him. He got closer to other people, he got closer to his soul ... [J]ail is where Alger became a human being"

Perhaps the ultimate crime for a son is disloyalty to his father, and Tony Hiss has certainly escaped that fate. Indeed, what's weirdly admirable about this book is its doggedly loyal obliviousness to the factual evidence of his father's guilt. In that sense, Alger Hiss would be proud of his son, who has carried the refusal to admit guilt into the next generation.

The other sort of evidence--what most of us would regard as the "real" evidence, is contained in Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr. The book is a careful explanation of the greatest codebreak of the Cold War (at least, the greatest we know about) which was the National Security Agency's decryption of nearly 3,000 Soviet cables from the 1940s. These cables were encrypted with theoretically unbreakable one-time code pads (where the same code supposedly is never used twice). They were broken thanks to a ludicrous example of real life in Stalinist Russia--the need for code workers to increase their output when the Soviets entered the war against the Nazis. To meet the quota, the code workers apparently ended up duplicating some of the code pads. That doubled their output and got the commissars off their backs, but it rendered the codes vulnerable to decryption. The NSA spent more than 30 years decrypting these cables, tracking down the leads, and matching code names with real people. The existence of these intercepts became known to the public in the '80s, but amazingly enough the NSA didn't officially reveal the existence of the Venona Project until 1995.