Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: asenna1 who wrote (168238)	8/7/2001 12:29:50 AM
From: gao seng	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

Look lookey I found one! A real live commie! And on SI even! woohoo I want my SI t-shirt for that one. Let's see, which one of your heroes shall I dismiss first. I think a president who has a communists spy as Secretary of State is fair game. How about this little gem from encarta: Hiss Case, the investigation, trial, and conviction of Alger Hiss, a former high official in the United States Department of State. The case lasted from 1948 to 1950. As the result of his testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1948 and 1949 and subsequent investigations by the U.S. Department of Justice, Hiss was convicted of perjury for denying his involvement in a Soviet spy ring. The case was part of a general inquiry into Communist activity in the United States that began during the Truman administration and continued through the so-called McCarthy era, when Senator Joseph R. McCarthy became the primary force behind the inquiry. Hiss, who was president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in 1948, had previously served as a lawyer or administrator in the U.S. Departments of Agriculture, Justice, and State. He was secretary general of the conference that organized the United Nations in 1945. Hiss's accuser, Whittaker Chambers, was an American writer and for several years an editor of the weekly newsmagazine Time. Both men were well known and respected by their colleagues. In 1948, however, Chambers testified before the Committee on Un-American Activities that he had been a Communist in the 1920s and 1930s and a courier in transmitting secret information to Soviet agents. He charged that Hiss was also a Communist, and that he had turned classified documents over to Chambers for transmittal to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Hiss denied the charges and challenged Chambers to repeat them when he was open to prosecution for libel. Chambers repeated the accusations on a radio broadcast and in a newspaper interview, and Hiss brought two suits for slander against him. In defense, Chambers produced microfilm copies of documents that were later identified as classified papers belonging to the Departments of State, Navy, and War, some apparently annotated by Hiss in his own handwriting. The Department of Justice conducted its own investigation, and Hiss was indicted for perjury. The jury failed to reach a verdict, but Hiss was convicted after a second trial in January 1950. At both trials, Chambers' sanity was one of the predominant issues. Hiss was sentenced to a five-year prison term and was paroled in 1954, still maintaining his innocence. Both men involved presented their own versions of the case, Chambers with Witness (1952) and Hiss with In the Court of Public Opinion (1957). The political circumstances surrounding the investigations of Communism at the time led many public figures to support Hiss, at least in the early stages of the case. Prominent in pressing the case against Hiss was Richard M. Nixon, a Republican member of the House Committee on Un-American Activities and future president of the United States, to whom the case became a stepping-stone to national recognition. In 1992 Hiss asked officials from the former USSR to check their newly opened archives for information about the case. Russian General Dmitri A. Volkogonov, a historian and chairman of a commission on the files of the Soviet secret police (KGB), announced that he could find no evidence in KGB files that Hiss had been involved in Soviet intelligence operations. Volkogonov acknowledged, however, that such files could either have been destroyed or were in archives to which he had no access. In March 1996 the U.S. National Security Agency/Central Security Service, which specializes in code making and code breaking (see Cryptography), appeared to implicate Hiss when it released transcriptions from the VENONA Project, a secret U.S. effort to collect and decrypt secret Soviet KGB and military intelligence messages from the 1940s. A transcript of a message from March 30, 1945, describes a conversation with a Soviet agent who, the transcription says, was "probably Alger Hiss." "Hiss Case," Microsoft® Encarta® Encyclopedia 2000. © 1993-1999 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.