“Was His Middle Initial L?”

A Tell-tale Question in the Alger Hiss Case

A brief essay by Peter Irons

[Author’s Note: This brief essay on a crucial issue in the Alger Hiss “spy” case presumes that the reader is generally familiar with the basic elements of the charges by Whittaker Chambers in August 1948, during sworn testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), that Alger Hiss had been a dues-paying member of the Communist Party while employed as a lawyer during 1934 and ’35 in a New Deal division of the Agriculture Department. At his first HUAC appearance on August 3, 1948, Chambers made no allegations of espionage against Hiss; that charge only came after Hiss sued Chambers two months later for libel for having called him a Communist. This essay will show that Hiss was truthful when he testified on August 16 that he had known Chambers during those years as a supposed freelance writer named George Crosley, and never knew him at any time by the single name of “Carl” (Chambers’ supposed underground “Party name”). To quote Shakespeare’s Juliet: “What’s in a name?” In this case, a name became convincing evidence to me of Alger Hiss’s truthfulness and innocence, and of Chambers’s fatal mistake in choosing the wrong alias to cover his alleged spying.     

This essay is more than an obscure footnote in the Hiss case record for, if unrefuted with credible evidence, it proves the impossibility of a man with two names at the same time, using both in relations with the same person. Short of an unlikely transmogrification, Chambers could not suddenly morph from a supposed impecunious journalist named George Crosley into an espionage courier only named Carl, as he insistently claimed. This essay includes a never-before-seen document (a 2001 obituary) corroborating the verbatim proof that Chambers had not only used the Crosley alias, but also that HUAC member Richard Nixon knew at the time of Chambers’s deception on this essential aspect of the case but concealed that knowledge in his zeal to nail Hiss as a Communist in the Truman administration, just three months before the unpopular president faced the voters. This essay is also a challenge to the remaining band of Hiss Accusers to refute, if they can, any of the facts on which it is firmly based, and the inescapable conclusion it must reach]  

Serious poker players intently scrutinize their opponents when cards are dealt and picked up, looking for slight changes in expression (raised eyebrows, flared nostrils, a muscle tic, among others) that could be tell-tale signs of whether a card is wanted or not; these give-away signs are called “tells” for that reason. Less observant players will likely miss these tells, or exhibit those of their own. Having a “poker face” is definitely an advantage in high-stakes games, when an unconscious tell could prove costly. A verbal tell can be equally revealing in disclosing something inadvertently that could give away hidden and potentially damaging knowledge to an observant player, whatever the game, even during a courtroom trial.

The relevance of my poker analogy to the Hiss case, and its significance to the outcome, can be found buried in the transcript of a lengthy HUAC hearing on August 16, 1948, when the committee’s chief investigator, Robert Stripling, was grilling Hiss about his acquaintance with Chambers (whom Hiss had not yet admitted knowing by that name). Hiss had just testified that a man calling himself George Crosley had appeared in Hiss’s Senate committee office in late 1934 or early ’35, posing as a freelance journalist, planning a series of magazine articles on the munitions industry; Hiss was then serving as chief counsel to a Senate committee investigating World War One profiteering in that industry; he also handled press inquiries and had been the subject of press accounts of his own aggressive grilling of financier Bernard Baruch, an FDR confidant. This August 16 hearing was the first at which Hiss had cited “George Crosley” as his visitor’s name.

 As testimony droned on in the hot, humid hearing room, after hours consumed by the minutia of a supposed gift by Hiss to Chambers of a dilapidated 1929 Ford, Stripling asked an out-of-the-blue question about George Crosley: “Was his middle initial L?” Hiss, quite obviously not a skilled poker player, did not pick up on Stripling’s verbal tell. Although likely puzzled by the question, Hiss did not ask why Stripling had posed it, although HUAC witnesses often asked questions of their interrogators, unlike in courtrooms. Nixon posed the middle-initial question again, Hiss again professed ignorance, and the question died there, unremarked in press reports of the hearing, or a score of later books on the “Case of the Century.”

 What made Stripling’s seemingly innocuous question on August 16 a give-away tell is evident in the transcript of a closed-door HUAC hearing nine days earlier, on August 7, two days after Hiss had voluntarily appeared to indignantly denounce Chambers as a liar for calling him a Communist Party member. At the August 7 session, Nixon asked Chambers for the name Hiss supposedly knew him by, and this colloquy ensued: “He knew me by my Party name of Carl.” Nixon: “Did he ever question the fact that he did not know your last name?” Chambers: “Not to me . . . [b]ecause in the underground Communist Party [functionaries] shall not be known by their right names but by pseudonyms or Party names.” Nixon then referred to the supposed “Ware Group” of Communists in the Agriculture Department, in which Chambers had charged Hiss with active (and dues-paying) membership, asking if they “all knew you as Carl?” Chambers: “That is right.” Chambers said this with no equivocation, but also with no corroboration of Hiss’s alleged Communist membership in that or any other Party group, including swearing to three different and completely incompatible stories about collecting the Hisses’ Party dues; Chambers said he never looked in the dues envelopes Hiss allegedly handed him, but assumed it contained dues for Priscilla Hiss as well, although Chambers provided no corroboration for any of his shifting stories that either Hiss had been a Party member. And Soviet intelligence, KGB and GRU alike, required sources to be Party members and subject to Party discipline, and also to keep spouses out of espionage operations, in case a later bitter divorce might spill the beans on an entire spy network. 

 Fast-forward to August 16. Having not picked up on Stripling’s middle-initial question (nobody else at the time did, either), Hiss had no clue as to its meaning or relevance, if any. But it should have sounded strange that Stripling picked that particular letter out of 26 in the alphabet, and without revealing the basis for that knowledge, if any. Investigators rarely ask questions with nothing on which to base them, risking exposure as factually ignorant or being on a “fishing expedition.” But Stripling did have a basis for his question, which, fortunately for him and Nixon, did not emerge until after Alger Hiss was released from forty-four months in prison in 1954. 

Here’s what really happened. In 1956, a former Treasury Department economist, George Eddy, developed an interest in the Hiss case, eventually writing a book that was never published (the manuscript is in the Harvard Law School library, finally disclosed in 2025 by Jeff Kisseloff in his ground-shaking book on the case, Rewriting Hisstory: A Fifty-Year Journey to Uncover the Truth About Alger Hiss). Eddy was, in a sense, seeking payback for his own dismissal from the Treasury Department in 1954 as a “security risk.” A noted economist with a Harvard MBA, Eddy’s real crime was his past close working relationship with Harry Dexter White, the Assistant Secretary accused of passing secret Treasury documents to the Soviets; Eddy was later cleared by the Loyalty Board and reinstated with back pay, but resigned to dig into the White and Hiss cases, having told the Loyalty Board he considered Hiss the innocent victim of a frameup. 

Poring over HUAC transcripts, Eddy wondered what Stripling knew about a George Crosley, including his middle initial (but not his full middle name). On a hunch, Eddy picked up a current DC telephone book, something Stripling had likely also done in 1948. Lo and behold! Eddy found a George L. Crossley. Not Crosley, but the extra “s” made only a slight difference in pronunciation. So Eddy dialed the number and got George Leslie Crossley on the phone, who told him this amazing story: For three straight days in August 1948, most likely 11, 12, and 13, someone had called during the day, while he was at work (his 1939 marriage license listed “news stand distributer” as his occupation) but would not leave a name or number. But on the 14th, a Sunday (two days before Hiss was scheduled for another HUAC session), he got a call from Stripling, who identified himself and asked Crossley three questions: had he ever owned a Ford, had he ever written for American magazine, and had he ever lived on 28th Street in DC. When Crossley answered no to each, presumably not quizzing Stripling about the reason for his call, Stripling hung up and Crossley, who remembered the call in detail, thought nothing of it until Eddy called eight years later.

So how did this dry-hole call become Stripling’s “tell” on August 16? The answer should be obvious: Because Chambers had already, at least by August 11, told him that George Crosley had been his alias with Hiss, and also that Hiss had “given” him a ’29 Ford (worth 25 bucks as scrap), had told Hiss he was writing articles for American, and had stayed in Hiss’s 28th Street apartment for some time. Think about this and ask yourself: Where else could Stripling have gotten this name and details that showed Chambers (going by George Crosley) and Hiss had some kind of relationship over some period of time? Keep in mind that Hiss didn’t mention the name George Crosley until nine days after Chambers claimed to have been simply Carl.  And where could Hiss have gotten this previously undisclosed name? Certainly not by picking a name at random in the phone book. Hiss had, he said, remembered and written the name on a notepad on the train from New York to Washington for the hearing (sadly, it no longer can be found). The answer is now obvious. He could only have gotten it from Chambers. But if that is so, then (logic tells us) he could not have been the spy Carl at any time he knew Hiss. It’s simply inconceivable that Chambers would one day say to Hiss, “Alger, you’ve known me for a couple of years as George Crosley. But now we’re going to do some spying for our Soviet comrades, so from now on you’ll know me as Carl.” Ergo, Hiss told the truth about knowing Chambers as the supposed journalist George Crosley, and Chambers lied about being known to Hiss only as Carl, the one-name spy courier. Put in simplest terms: No Carl, no espionage by Hiss.

There is corroboration for Hiss’s claim of knowing Chambers as Crosley. Under repeated questioning (read “badgering”) by FBI agents who derided her in official reports as “a typical mammy type,” the Hisses’ long-time maid, Cleide Catlett, recalled only one visit to the Hisses’ apartment on P Street in Georgetown by someone introduced to her as “Crosby, or something like that” (presumably not Bing). She was adamant that she had never seen him at any of the Hisses’ later residences, where she worked six days a week. 

More significantly, a New York publisher, Samuel Roth, contacted Hiss’s lawyers before the trials and stated, in a sworn affidavit on September 3, 1948, that he had known Chambers in the 1920s as a budding poet, and had published a couple of poems under Chambers’s name in one of his magazines. (One that I tracked down on the internet, thanks to AI, was a poem titled “Tandaradei” in the June 1926 issue of Two Worlds Quarterly, these worlds being straight and gay. The poem’s title came from the refrain of a thirteenth-century homo-erotic poem, Under der Linden, about a lovers’ meadow tryst, protected from discovery by their feathered observer: “Tandaradei, sweetly sang the nightingale.” Chambers left no doubt of the poem’s sexual imagery: “As your sap drains into me in excess / like the sap from the stems of a tree that they lop.” I mention this not only as trivia but because it displays Chambers’ own homosexuality—only a gay person would write that poem—as far back as 1926, in contrast to his later claims of not having gay sex until he allegedly went “underground” in 1933 or ‘34, giving up that shameful “perversity” when he allegedly left the underground in 1937 or ’38 (take your pick). The Party at this time treated homosexuality as a dangerous perversion, opening gay members, especially underground agents, to possible arrest by “vice squad” cops and potential exposure as spies, although Chambers knowingly violated this edict in his losing battle with his “uncontrollable urges” to engage in furtive sex with total strangers.

But in addition to poetry published under his own name, Roth stated, Chambers had later submitted more erotic poetry with homosexual imagery, asking Roth to use the name George Crosley if any were published. Unfortunately, Roth had not kept the poems or Chambers’s submission letter. But this was sworn evidence, which potential jurors might find telling (pun intended) on Chambers’s credibility. More unfortunately, Hiss and his lawyers rejected Roth’s offer to testify in person, since (as his affidavit listed) he had several convictions for purveying pornography (he was even jailed for selling pirated copies of Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover). As had Hiss in rejecting his step-son Timothy Hobson’s offer to testify that he had never seen Chambers during any of his supposed 100-plus visits to the Hisses’ homes, fearing (perhaps rightly at the time) that prosecutors would let jurors know, even through insinuation, that Tim was gay, Hiss likewise nixed Roth, who had confessed to selling “smut” and served time for it. These two blunders on Hiss’s part, in my opinion, reflected the Victorian attitude toward sex Hiss shared with most of the public (he was a virgin on his wedding night, he confessed), and could each have further exposed Chambers as a liar, although that effect is speculative but provocative, seeking answers from Hiss’s accusers, who have uniformly ignored this issue. Tellingly again, his accusers also ignore the fact that it was Hiss himself who first mentioned his gift of the Ford to Chambers in sworn testimony, and also Chambers’ gift to him of a Persian rug, about which much debate ensued, with Hiss (whose memory of these events was shaky after a dozen years) coming across as evasive and suspect. And they gloss over the fact that Hiss’s defense team “discovered” and put in evidence at his trials the Woodstock typewriter the prosecution used to convict him as the “immutable witness” in the courtroom, later exposed as a forgery designed to incriminate Hiss, which the prosecution concealed. Needless to say, none of these acts point to devious concealment by a guilty defendant. But that’s a hotly disputed issue for Hiss’s accusers, who uniformly denounce him as a liar, a spy, and a “traitor,” all of which Chambers confessed to being. 

In the end, Stripling’s revelatory, albeit unintentional, “tell” of his concealed knowledge of Chambers’s false denials of being George Crosley had no effect on the second jury’s guilty verdict. But, in that concealment, Stripling added a heavy boulder to the veritable mountain of lies, concealment, and perjury that fell on Alger Hiss like a deadly avalanche. The seemingly insignificant issue of what name or names Hiss may have known Chambers by turns out, in fact, to be determinative of Hiss’s innocence, since Chambers could not have been George Crosley and Carl at the same time, and now we know that he was known as Crosley by both Hiss and Sam Roth, precluding a later clandestine Carl. It’s notable that after learning of Roth’s affidavit, Chambers began hedging his denials of ever having been George Crosley, admitting several times, including sworn FBI statements, that it was “entirely possible” he had used this alias. But the jurors who convicted Hiss never learned of this almost-but-not-quite confession that would have exposed Chambers as a liar.

As an addendum, after reading in Jeff Kisseloff’s book about George Eddy’s unpublished interview with George L. Crossley in 1956, I recently (February 2026) googled that name, just from curiosity, and came up with an obituary of George Leslie Crossley Sr., a DC resident who was born in 1913 and died in 2001. He was married in 1939 and would have been 36 when Stripling called in 1948. In my opinion, George Eddy deserves a posthumous tribute for uncovering what I consider a “smoking gun” in the Hiss case. Like so many others, that smoke had all but wafted away over the years, only to be revived by the 2025 publication of Jeff Kisseloff’s gripping and compelling book, which masterfully marshals evidence and argument for Hiss’s exoneration, and from which I learned of George Eddy’s unreported discovery of the George L. Crossley who wasn’t Chambers’ George Crosley, but close enough to elicit Stripling’s obvious-but-missed tell. Who knows what might have happened had Hiss responded: “Do you have a particular George Crosley in mind, with that middle initial, Mr. Stripling?” But that did not happen, and George Leslie Crossley likely never learned of his brush with history. And Alger Hiss paid with forty-four months in prison, and infamy as Joe McCarthy’s Exhibit A of a “traitor” in the top ranks of the State Department, personally responsible for the “betrayal” of Poland at Yalta and the “loss” of China to the Communists. 

To restate Juliet’s question: “What’s in a name?” If your name was George Crosley, you could not be the espionage courier named simply Carl. If that fact does not create at least a “reasonable doubt” of Hiss’s guilt, if not his outright exoneration, then credible facts will have lost to inflexible ideology rooted in Cold War fears of “the enemy within,” more dangerous than the Kremlin’s despotic rulers as an outwardly normal Fifth Column of spies and subversives. 

Finally, readers of this essay, some seven decades after Alger Hiss was convicted of what most Americans then considered “treason,” might keep in mind President Donald Trump’s frequent use of “the enemy within” to vilify and demonize opponents he accuses of being “radical left lunatics, Marxists, communists, and fascists,” and of committing “treason,” precise terms used by the McCarthyites of that time and the present. We cannot forget this Cold War history as we face a renascent McCarthyism in Trumpism, lest current “enemies from within” become the falsely charged descendants of Alger Hiss. Should his accusers, to whom this essay is first directed, admit that Hiss was truthful on this critical issue, perhaps new generations will view that history in a new light. But, given the grip of Cold War ideology on those accusers, whose mantra is “Don’t confuse me with the facts, my mind is made up,” I do not expect any such admissions, a sad commentary on their lack of professional and personal integrity. But, just perhaps, honesty might finally prevail. Let us hope so. 

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As I note above, this essay is first directed at the Hiss Accusers, my term for those writers who continue to insist that Hiss was guilty of espionage. Their writings, unfortunately in my view, have offered readers a distorted, one-sided view of the case, mostly focusing on long-debunked claims that Soviet-era files show that Hiss Chambers supposed defection in 1937 or ‘38 (again, take your pick), until he left the 

State Department in 1947. Jeff Kisseloff convincingly rebuts these claims in his book, so I won't repeat them here, except to say that Alexander Vassiliev, the former KGB agent whose hand-written notes were the major basis for these post-Chambers charges, testified at his disastrous libel suit in London that “I never saw a document where Hiss would be called Ales or Ales may be called Hiss.” Consequently, all speculation, absent documentary proof, that Soviet files show that Hiss was “Ales” is just that, only possible by misconnecting the dots of circumstantial evidence. Look it up, if you wish.

 However, the point of this addendum to my essay is that, with only two exceptions, none of the Hiss Accusers has addressed in their writings the crucial issue of what name or names Hiss knew Chambers by. Five out of seven prominent Accusers have nothing to say about this, or the evidence in this essay that Hiss was truthful in identifying Chambers as George Crosley. They include his grandson, David Whittaker Chambers, who in his review of Kisseloff's book in the July 30, 2025, issue of the right-wing Washington Examiner, accused Kisseloff of being  “a pro- Hiss partisan, not a historian,” proudly boasting that “I am a historian,” and then committing a historical blunder by falsely labeling the supposed Ware Group in the Agriculture Department (never a formal name for an informal Marxist political study group) of being a “spy ring,” which even Chambers grand-pere did not claim, and of which Hiss was not a member anyway, according to the sworn testimony of Lee Pressman, a former Communist and acknowledged member during the time he and Hiss both worked in the Agriculture Department, along with such non-Communists such as Adlai Stevenson, Frank Shea, and Jermone Frank. Look it up, if you wish. But Chambers says nothing about his grandfather’s many false names, including George Crosley.

 Harvey Klehr, a retired Emory University history professor, and his collaborator, John Earl Haynes, a retired Library of Congress historian, devote the first chapter of their 2009 book, Spies:The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America, to the Hiss case, ending it “Case Closed,” a giveaway to their “Hiss was guilty” conclusion. They say nothing, however, about the naming issue in this essay, relying almost exclusively on the so-called Vassiliev notebooks and the Venona decrypts of KGB documents, none of which, as noted above, clearly identify Hiss as a Soviet agent code named “ALES” (a Czech nickname for Alexander), a designation that only fits Wilder Foote, a State Department press officer, and not Hiss; the naming of “ALES” as “probably Alger Hiss” was added to the decrypted Soviet cable years later by FBI agent Robert Lamphere, admittedly guesswork on his part. Look it up, if you wish. But not a word from Klehr and Haynes about the all-important, make-or-break names issue, the indispensable entry gate to the case. Nor, in his dyspeptic “review” of Kisseloff’s book in the May 2025 issue of Hiss-hostile Commentary magazine, does Klehr address the issue. Nor does Haynes in a 57-page review in the March 2026 issue of the Harvard-sponsored Journal of Cold War Studies, a reliable anti-Hiss outlet. Like his fellow Accusers, Haynes takes Hiss’s guilt for granted, with no new research, basing his review—to which Kisseloff is preparing a detailed response—almost solely on Witness and Perjury, without the slightest hint of doubt. 

 Another Hiss Accuser, John W. Berresford, an “independent scholar” and retired communications industry lawyer, recently weighed in (literally) with a 131- page self-published “review” of Kisseloff's book that simply ignores the naming question, following Klehr and Haynes in  regurgitating Witness and Perjury in concluding that Hiss “was indeed a Soviet spy and traitor.” Kisseloff has posted his own response to Berresford's review on this website, which I recommend to readers of this essay.

 George Edward “Ted” White, a Yale history PhD and Harvard Law graduate, is a noted judicial biographer at the University of Virginia law school (his most recent is a biography of former Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson). His 2004 book, Alger Hiss’s Looking-Glass Wars: The Covert Life of a Soviet Spy,  is notable in its unconcealed venom toward Hiss, an example of what I call “psycho-smear,” the use of pop- and pseudo-psychology (by non-psychologists) to paint their subjects as somehow mentally disturbed; in White's diagnosis (never having met Hiss, who welcomed all interviewers) as leading a double life as spotless public servant and covert Soviet spy. White, who never addresses the name issue, remains rock-solid in his attack on Hiss as “contemptible” for allegedly enlisting his step-son Timothy Hobson, and his son Tony Hiss, as witless “dupes” in supporting his innocence, without ever meeting his libeled victims, an ad hominem slur I find contemptible on White’s part. When I chided him in an email for what I considered unprofessional behavior, his reply astounded me: Speaking of Tim (later a noted surgeon), White wrote that “I can't think of anyone who had a greater incentive to believe their father innocent and a scapegoat.” White then turns to me. “And no end of tireless research on your part,” he sniffs, “will convince me that Hiss was other than a quite clever, dedicated Soviet agent who had a marvelous capacity to convince people he was other than that.” He slams the door shut on responding to critics like me and Kisseloff: “I made a conscious decision some time ago not to respond in print to critical comments about my work or to defend scholarly arguments I have made. . .” So we'll never know how White responds to my essay, or any other evidence of Hiss's truthfulness on the name issue. Scholarly integrity calls for openness to criticism, not White’s “Out of Business” sign.

Another Hiss Accuser, Sam Tanenhaus (former editor of the now-defunct New York Times Book Review), devotes a chapter of his 650-page tome, Whittaker Chambers: A Biography to “A Man Named Crosley.” With no mention of the Crosley/Crossley evidence in my essay, he discounts the “George Crosley” claim by Hiss as fantasy. In my opinion, the Pulitzer Prize nomination for his Chambers biography is seriously tarnished by this omission, which Tanenhaus could have filled with closer attention to the HUAC transcripts that have long been available, on which I have relied in this essay.

The most puzzling Hiss Accuser may not be one, after all, although we have yet to hear his response to this essay. Cass Sunstein is a noted Harvard Law School professor: he was also a classmate in law school and a partner in my first-year study group of five, meeting weekly to exchange and discuss class notes, and a fellow editor of the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil liberties Law Review (I’ll use our friendship for first-name familiarity). I recently learned that Cass had written an essay on the Hiss case, The Enduring Relevance of Alger Hiss vs. Whittaker Chambers, published in January 2026 on Cass's substack and on the SSRN eLibrary website. Over roughly 4000 words, Cass cites only four books as sources  (quoting from none) for his verdict that he finds Hiss guilty “with a high degree of certainty...” His sources? Chambers’ Witness (“among the best” Hiss books), Allen Weinstein's Perjury (“essential”), White’s Looking-Glass Wars (“superb”) and Tanenhaus’s Whittaker chambers (also “superb”). Not a critical work among them, but with plenty of incestuous quoting of each other's work as conclusive evidence of its veracity. In reaching his guilty verdict, Cass dismisses in one word the crucial issue of Woodstock 230099, the typewriter cited by the prosecution as the silent, “immutable witness” in the courtroom to Hiss’s crimes, but later shown to be a forgery, a 1929 body onto which were soldered pre-1928 typefaces that were altered by filing to match the imperfections on the Baltimore Documents and Hiss Standards. His flippant response to this crucial and highly disputed issue: “Forgery by typewriter? Really?” That’s it. No reference to any of the post-conviction studies by document and metallurgical experts. The sniffy tone of that rhetorical question alone makes Cass’s essay useless to any inquiring reader.

To his credit, however, Cass does address the “Crosley or Carl” issue directly, albeit with a tone of faux befuddlement. Citing Hiss's naming of Chambers as George Crosley, Cass asks, “Was it possibly true?... Or was it all brilliant improvisation” on Hiss's part (a phrase he lifted from Witness)?  “If it was false, a made-up tale concocted under desperation, when did Hiss think about it, and how and why did he think of it? Was Hiss e-up. . . It seems too weird.” Was Hiss guilty? “In all probability, he was guilty.” But, to his credit and solely among the Hiss Accusers, Cass admits just a bit of doubt. “Still,” he says, “one might have a little voice in one's head saying, ‘I'm not absolutely sure.’ On ccasion, I hear that voice, and I do not like hearing it. One reason I hear it, I think, is Hiss’s persistent denials” of his guilt (ironically, it’s these same life-long denials that convinced White of Hiss’s guilt). This essay, in part, is intended to make that little voice in Cass's head (and anyone else who might harbor a secret doubt) a bit louder. Loud enough, in fact, to say, “I was wrong. Alger Hiss did show that he knew Whittaker Chambers as Crosley the supposed journalist, and not as Carl the supposed espionage courier.” To repeat this essay’s conclusion: No Carl, no espionage!

 Cass and his fellow Hiss Accusers have had ample time to read and reply to the draft of this essay I sent each of them. At this writing (April 2026) I have not received any replies to my “agree or disagree” challenge. If and when any do, I will add that reply to this post. But their silence thus far, in my opinion, speaks poorly of their lack of adherence, especially from fellow scholars, credentialed or not, to traditional and essential scholarly norms of openness and responsiveness to criticism. Should anyone point to serious flaws in my essay, hopefully with citations to quoted works, I will gladly and seriously consider those criticisms and respond to them. Barring that, I believe this essay adds considerably to the mounting evidence, most recently in Jeff Kisseloff’s Rewriting Hisstory, that Alger Hiss never passed secret State Department documents to Whittaker Chambers as the putative espionage courier claimed in ever-shifting stories.

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Peter Irons is Professor of Political Science Emeritus at the University of California, San Diego. He earned a PhD in political science from Boston University in 1973 and a JD from Harvard Law School in 1978, and is a member of the US Supreme Court bar and an active civil rights lawyer. His research on the Hiss case began in 1970 for his PhD dissertation, updated and published in 2025 as Cold War Crusaders: Harry Truman and the Architects of McCarthyism, which includes crucial documents on the political roots of the Hiss case.

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