Was ALES Alger Hiss?
Nathaniel TapleyOver the last decade, despite the concerns of some, it has become common to refer to AlgerHiss as having been the ALES referred to in VENONA 1822.This identification was originallytentatively put forward by the FBI in 1950, and was gladly seized upon by Allen Weinsteinand others whose careers depended on Hiss' being a Communist spy.The VENONA transcripts were particularly important for these 'historians', because theyappeared to show that not only was Alger Hiss (if indeed he was the person referred to asALES) a spy when Whittaker Chambers accused him of being one, but he was also one bothearlier and later, up until 1945 at Yalta.In order to make this interpretation fit, ALES'handler RUBLE was deduced to be Harold Glasser.In the summer of 2007, a paper in The American Scholar, by Kai Bird and SvetlanaChervonnaya suggested not only that Alger Hiss was not the most likely candidate to beALES, but that he could not be.He was not where ALES was on March 5, 1945. He was not,and yet one one of the other candidates was. They argued that Wilder Foote was muchmore likely to be ALES.This led to one of the most persistent Hiss-bashers, John Earl Haynes to write a response.In this response he claims to assess the evidence for who ALES was, and comes to theconclusion that Alger Hiss fits six or seven of the criteria, whereas Foote fits at most one.However, his methodology is remarkablyt flawed.he depends for his verification on pointsof fact on the repeated and persistent liar, Whittaker Chamber.Indeed, when what hewishes to assert contradicts Chambers, he ignores that and suggests that it is a slight lapsein memory, and utterly forgivable.He does not accept that it in anyway has any bearing onhis argument which appears to be: 'It is true because it is corroborated by Chambers,except when it is not, but one can hardly expecrt Chambers to remember things like thatafter ten to fifteen years.'Fortunately, at the same time, Haynes decided, whilst having talked about very little elsefor a decade, that it didn't really matter whether or not Hiss were ALES: "One could go onlisting other evidence regarding the Hiss matter, but the point ought to be clear that theAles messages, as interesting as they are, are but a few stones on a large rock pile of evidence." Unfortunately, the rest of that evidence consists of precisely three things: thestatements of an inveterate fantasist; the forged typewriter evidence; and the PumpkinPapers which were apparently photographed on film made seven years after it was used.He fails to assess many of the factual things the VENONA transcripts claim about ALES, andthe seven he does claim to assess are judged only on the oft-changed testimony of Whittaker Chambers, an interested party, to say the least.Here, then, I propose toexamine all of the factual statements in the available documents (VENONA 1822, Vassiliev'snotes, GRU transmission of Sept 28 1943), simply to see who better fits the case.In the following assessment I have not assumed that RUBLE is Harold Glasser.Indeed, Ihave assumed that he has not, and Glasser was not in Italy when we know that RUBLEwas.To identify RUBLE as Glasser is to assume that Soviet Intelligence very rarely knewanything worth knowing at all - they did not know where wither Hiss or Glasser was, despiteHiss' appearing on television and on the radio, and Glasser's movements being well-documented.
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