New claims support Alger Hiss

NEW YORK – Scholars probing anew into the Cold War’s most famous espionage case suggested Thursday that another U.S. diplomat, not Alger Hiss, was the Soviet agent code-named Ales.

Meanwhile, a stepson of Hiss said his chief accuser invented the spy allegations after his sexual advances were rejected.

The two claims, presented at the daylong symposium “Alger Hiss & History” at New York University, provided startling new information that, if true, could point toward a posthumous vindication of Hiss, who was accused of feeding U.S. secrets to Moscow and spent nearly four years in prison for perjury. He died in 1996 at age 92.

Kai Bird, an author who has done new research on the 60-year-old case, said that though Hiss was accused of feeding secrets to the Soviet military intelligence agency GRU under the code name Ales, there was new evidence to suggest the real spy was another U.S. official named Wilder Foote.

Bird said that he and co-researcher Svetlana A. Chervonnaya had identified nine possible suspects among U.S. State Department officials present at the U.S.-Soviet Yalta conference in 1945. A process of elimination based on their subsequent travels to Moscow and Mexico City excluded eight of them, including Hiss, he said.

“It left only one man standing: Wilder Foote,” Bird said.

Foote, a member of a well-known Boston family, died in 1974.

Also Thursday, Timothy Hobson, an 80-year-old retired surgeon who was Hiss’ stepson and grew up in the family home in Washington, D.C., said that Whittaker Chambers, whose bombshell allegations against Hiss broke the case open, had lied about his personal relationship with Hiss and had never visited the home as he claimed.

“It is my conviction that he was in love with Alger Hiss, that he was rejected by Alger Hiss and he took that rejection in a vindictive way,” Hobson said.