Hiss, Alger 1904-96
US state department official

Born in Baltimore, Maryland, and educated at Johns Hopkins University and Harvard Law School, he began his career as secretary to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and joined the state department in 1936. He was actively involved in organizing the United Nations, attending the Dumbarton Oaks conference and advising President Franklin D Roosevelt at the Yalta Conference (1945). From 1946 to 1949 he served as president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He stood trial twice (1949, 1950) on a charge of perjury, having denied before the House Committee on Un-American Activities that he had passed secret state documents to Time magazine editor Whittaker Chambers, an agent for an international communist spy ring, in 1938. He was convicted at his second trial and sentenced to five years' imprisonment. The suspicions of the public, intensified by the subsequent Klaus Fuchs case in Britain, were fully exploited politically, not least by Senator Joseph McCarthy. In 1992, after the collapse of the USSR, a high-ranking Russian general and military historian announced that his examination of KGB files had discovered no evidence that Hiss had ever been a spy, though he later added that he could not claim to have examined the entire KGB archives.