Page  525 . I Y 'r. i- y. '. c: ' a I Appendix 525 years. The Eastman Kodak marking for films produced in 1944 and 1945, according to Robinson, differed from the 1937 markings: "The symbols used showing time of manufacture and slitting for the year 1944 [were] a small triangle followed by a small square; for the year 1945, a small square followed by a small circle.. " The actual markings on the Eastman Kodak strip of State Department microfilm, when I inspected it at the Justice Department in 1976, showed neither of the above markings, but rather that of film produced by the company in 1937, a small square-without a circle or a triangle. As for Nixon's role in the case, the FBI files confirmed my earlier interviews with Stripling and Nicholas Vazzana, described in Chapters V and VIII. Nixon, who never admitted this fact, was told in advance by both men about Chambers's l4aving turned over stolen typed documents to Hiss's attorneys. Not waiting to see what a HUAC subpoena for additional documents might uncover, the cautious Nixon fled Washington on a cruise-ship vacation. Once HUAC staff members had obtained the microfilm and determined its importance, Nixon hurried back to steal the headlines and to claim credit for the coup: "opportunistic" behavior surely, but hardly conspiratorial. 3. The Radical Right: Isaac Don Levine and the "Cabal" Until his death, Alger Hiss argued the notion that the incriminating evidence against him had been manufactured under the auspices of a far-ranging conspiracy of "right-wing antiCommunists" mobilized by the journalist Isaac Don Levine. Hiss first mentioned Levine as the source of earlier charges of Communist involvement against him in an interview with the FBI several years before the case broke, and he returned to the theme in his 1959 conversation with historian C. Vann Woodward. On that occasion, according to Woodward's notes, Hiss named Levine as the chief culprit, along with Chambers, in having forged a Woodstock typewriter: "I have a theory here and a good deal of evidence to support it though nothing conclusive." Levine, according to Hiss, "was known to have visited Chambers," which was true, "and was also known to have been associated with several cases involving forged or suspicious documents." Later, Peter H. Irons expounded on the theory of Levine's possible culpability as part of a more broadly based plot against Hiss. Irons's analysis emerged in a series of letters and articles-mainly unpublished, but copies went into the Hiss defense files and also appeared in the December 1975 letters column of Commentary. There Irons noted "the assertion by a former private investigator hired by Hiss's lawyers in 1948... that he had been hired [earlier] by a high OSS official to arrange the fabrication of a forged typewriter in the Hiss case." The detective in question, Horace Schmahl, allegedly made that claim only to one Hiss investigator, Manice de F. Lockwood, whose letters record an assertion Schmahl later denied. (Conspiracy Theory Number 5, in the pages that follow, examines the tangled role of Horace Schmahl in the Hiss case.) In 1974 letters to Hiss (on April 26, May 24, and May 20, the latter enclosing Irons's "tentative... hypotheses for future exploration" in the form of "Notes on the Origins of the Hiss Case") and in letters and conversations with me in the mid-197os. Irons described the outlines of what appeared to be a far less "tentative" theory, one he elaborated in greater detail in a 25 -page essay titled "Pumpkin Papers and Watergate Tapes" and in 15 pages of "Notes on the Roles of Horace W. Schmahl, Adam Kunze and William. Donovan in the Hiss Case." Briefly-since the plot is intricate and the conspirators many-Irons speculated that Schmahl and perhaps others had been hired by General William Donovan, former head of the OSS, between the end of World War II and the August 1948 HUAC hearings to build the phony Woodstock for later use against Hiss. The documents used in the scheme, Irons theorized, might have come from the Amerasia papers (a return to an older theory), and the general purpose of the plot-in which purported "China Lobby" and other right-wing elements figured-was to stir anti-Communist sentiment by destroying the career of Hiss, who suppos

Page  526 526 Appendix edly had been identified in the public mind as a symbol of both New Deal social reform and a policy of Soviet-American friendship culminating in the Yalta "sellout." Robert Sherrill's 1976 review picked up on ns's cast of ossible conspirators: Schmahl, Donovan, Adam Kunz ean alle dl ro-Nazi t writer-store o r Isaac Don Levine, HUAC staff member Ben Mandel, several "reactionary" security officers at State, and various China Lobby and other right-wing anti-Communists-all of whom were potential actors in the plot to frame Alger Hiss. Sherrill carried Irons's "tentative... hypotheses" even further, implicating in the scheme Chambers, Nixon, Hoover, Henry Luce, the FBI, HUAC, Time, and the Communist Party. The absence ofn evidence encoura ed rather than restrained, the "conspirac fever" of both writers. Neither Irons nor Sherri has produce a comprehensive study of the Hiss case. Irons' s views have been made known largely through writings deposited in the Hiss defense files, in a brief law-journal paper on the FBI files, and in the letters columns of several magazines. In the November 1976 issue of Law Library Journal Irons retreated a bit from his conspiracy theory, at least in this erroneous but suggestive passage: The FBI and State Department files also demonstrate conclusively that the impetus for the charges against Hiss, and for Chambers' August 1948 appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee, came from the leaders of the China Lobby. In fact, the leading forces behind Chambers' testimony were China Lobby leaders on the staffs of the Un-American Activities Committee and the National Catholic Welfare Conference, both [sic] of whom were close associates of both Congressman Nixon and informants of the FBI. This historical evidence does not, of course, bear on Hiss' guilt or innocence, but it does illuminate the genesis of the campaign against Hiss, which was based on his role at Yalta and in formulating Far Eastern policy in the State Department during the war, a policy perceived as a sell-out by the China Lobby. Irons was wrong about the "genesis" of the HUAC hearings (see Chapters I and X). Also, several times in 1948-49 Hiss described himself as a strong supporter of the Nationalist Chinese government while serving as Hornbeck's adviser' during the war, and he disassociated himself from any connection with those advisers inside China who urged a coalition government including the Communists. Under the circumstances, he made a curious target for General Donovan and the many others whom Irons termed "China Lobby leaders." 4. Chambers as Paranoid: The Revenge Motif "Was there any evidence of homosexuality involving Chambers?" Alger Hiss was asked at the 1959 gathering recorded by C. Vann Woodward's notes. "Very definitely yes," he replied. "In fact my lawyers had witnesses who were fully prepared to testify to Chambers's advances to them which they repulsed. But the lawyers decided not to introduce this evidence for fear of the jury reaction and public relations." Hiss's reply distorts the circumstances under which McLean and Stryker decided not to use the one witness who would testify to this effect, an exCommunist whose motives might have been thought suspect by jurors. Most important, Hiss's attorneys in 1949 worried about the inevitable prosecution counterassault, which might have placed Timothy Hobson on the stand. For those reasons, and for those reasons only, did the defense lawyers and analysts reluctantly abandon Rosenwald's proposal to make homosexuality a major issue in their attack on Chambers's credibility. Hiss's hostess at the 1959 reception pursued her inquiry into the theme: "Did Chambers have any homosexual impulses toward you?" "Chambers never made any homosexual advances to me. His attitude toward me, however, and his relations were strange and I did not understand them. There were many evidences of his identifying himself with me... My guess is that he had some obscure kind of love attachment... about me, and he came to hate my wife." "Then how would he come to wish to injure and ruin you?" asked his questioner, raising the theme of Chambers's alleged motivation for having perjured himself about Hiss, a question that had surfaced first in the inquiries of HUAC members eleven years earlier.

Page  527 528 Appendix venge motif," and John Chabot Smith used their psychoanalytic conclusions in his own book, also researched in close cooperation with Alger Hiss. (Philip Nobile provided a description of the manner in which Smith replaced Alden Whitman as Hiss's biographer in the June 1976 issue of More.) Once again in 1976 Hiss himself returned to the theme, claiming that Chambers was "a spurned homosexual who testified... out of jealousy and resentment." (In September 1948 Hiss had written to McLean about Chambers: "I have a vague impression of boastful kinds of sexual exploits but no hint of any unnatural sex interests.") But attempting to "smear" Chambers as a homosexual today, Rosenwald's strategy of 1949, may prove less persuasive to Hiss's sympathizers in the 199os than it did a half-century ago. 5. Thl Double Agent: Horace Schmahl, Mystery Man Horace Schmahl, whose activities on behalf of Edward McLean are chronicled in Chapters V, VIII, and XI, worked for McLean from October 1948 to sometime in February 1949 (evidence in the defense files contradicts Hiss's assertion that Schmahl worked without written directives from McLean). Beginning in December 1948, Schmahl told several people whom he interviewed-including Harry Martin, Martin's lawyer, and Grace Lumpkin-that (in Martin's words) "there is some doubt in his [Schmahl's] mind as to Hiss's innocence since.. Hiss's story concerning the typewriter and 'several other points' has been found to be inaccurate.... Schmahl did state that if Hiss were proven wrong on 'one more thing' his firm would withdraw from the case." That same month, December 1948, McLean at least twice offered the Bureau Schmahl's services in the search for the Hiss typewriter and samples of Priscilla's typing. FBI agents turned down this offer of cooperation. Encouraged by McLean, however, Schmahl made direct offers of such assistance to FBI agents in Philadelphia, where his wellpublicized "investigation" crossed paths several times with the more discreet Bureau inquiries, but again the FBI kept him at arm's length. In January and February 1949 Schmahl spent most of his time not searching for the Woodstock (as Hiss and his supporters later claimed) but (as the defense files document) pursuing leads on McLean's behalf concerning Chambers's alleged homosexuality. Schmahl then left McLean's employ, he told FBI agent J. T. Hilsbos on February 15, because "there was insufficient money involved... he did not believe in the case, and differences with [the detective agency head] on other investigative matters." Schmahl admitted to Hilsbos "that actually [he] has no papers reflecting his investigations other than copies of his expense accounts...," but he offered to furnish the Bureau "any information within the bounds of ethics." But Hilsbos advised his superiors against accepting Schmahl's offer, "as it is not believed that he can furnish any information" except possibly news concerning defense pretrial strategy. Moreover, alluding to the FBI's problems with Schmahl the previous December, Hilsbos noted that "at no time has he volunteered any information of value." New York FBI Field Office Director Belmont agreed with Hilsbos in a marginal notation to this February 16 memo: We should not encourage him [Schmahl] in any way in this case. The defense attorneys could charge us with unethical tactics. He has no info of value from what we know. Although Bureau agents avoided Schmahl, he again offered his help the following month, conceding that his information "was not too important." Schmahl had phoned on March 22 to state that McLean had asked him to undertake one final, routine assignment, but the agent with whom he dealt observed that Schmahl had not been "pressed to disclose anything concerning his relations with McLean." Prosecutor Thomas Murphy proved less fastidious. He interviewed Schmahl in June, at which time the detective told him about the Hiss lawyers' rental of a Woodstock from the Kunze ewriter firm earlier in the year. (Had Schmahl and Kunze conspired to flrame Hiss, as one conspiracy try asserts, Schmahl's action in volunteering this tidbit would have been supreme folly.) On September 22, an FBI memo described

Page  528 Appendix 529 this minor item as "the most significant information revealed by Schmahl," stark corroboration of the man's insignificance as a government informant. In 1950 Harold Rosenwald and Manice de F. Lockwood, both assisting Chester Lane on his motion for a new trial, tried to obtain from Schmahl an affidavit stating that Harry Martin told him the Fansler Woodstock had been purchased in 1928. Schmahl was reluctant to sign the affidavit and told Rosenwald that all of his reports on the case were in the custody of "Steve" Broady, whose detective firm had employed him at the time. Rosenwald returned the next month and Schmahl reported the visit to the FBI on December 7, 1950. According to Schmahl, when he again declined to sign the affidavit, Rosenwald said "that they might get rough with him, also indicating that Hiss had some very important people backing [him], and mentioned that Senator Lehman was interested." While Chester Lane prepared his motion for a new trial, he recorded a memo on January 29, 1952, about a telephone call he had received earlier that day from a man who identified himself only as "Morrow" (not Chambers's friend Felix Morrow). The man said he was passing along information on behalf of someone else "who is anxious for you to have these facts." According to "Morrow," Horace Schmahl had made a deal with the FBI shortly after he began working for the defense. In return for dropping pending charges against him for impersonating an FBI agent (Schmahl actually had never been indicted for such an offense), "he agreed to turn over his investigative reports in the Hiss case to them. In fact, every report he made to the defense was turned over by him to the FBI." Also, more ominously, "Morrow" continued: "I think if you look into this you will find that Schmahl was implicated with the typewriter." The report of Lane's anonymous informant remained in the Hiss defense files, unexplored for over a decade. Then, in the "mid-196os," according to a September 12, 1973, unsigned memo in those files, "a retired investigator named Bretnall said he had been on Broady's staff assigned to the Hiss investigations. He reported that he found that his colleague, Schmahl, was helping the other side and so he [Bretnall] got out of the assignment. Bretnall said he had learned that the fake typewriter [i.e., the one found by McLean in April 1949] had been produced in Adam Kunze's shop and he claimed Schmahl had helped." But "Bretnall" remained as elusive a figure as "Morrow" had been, and his supposed allegations were unsupported by any documentation, so that not even an affidavit or separate memo on the "interview" with "Bretnall" appeared in any of the Hiss defense files I examined. The September 12, 1973, memo continued: "Kunze's widow... reported to a representative of Hiss's that the FBI had 'found' the typewriter in her husband's shop." The assertion referred to a report by undercover investigator Elizabeth Grey Hamilton, who conducte e than a dozen interviews under false pretenses with Bessie Meade ( rs. aniKunze) while an investigator for Hiss and Manice de F. Lockwood in 1965. The results of Hamilton's interviews with Meade, outlined in her reports, fail to provide even the clear-cut hearsay referred to in the 1973 memo, as Hamilton herself acknowledged. But the unsigned September 12, 1973, memo continued "documenting" the case against Horace Schmahl: "In the latter part of August of this year, Schmahl spent some hours with a Hiss representative, was affable and friendly and talked at length. He now lives in Port Everglades, Florida." Schmahl ran a boatyard there and, though the memo does not mention this fact, the "Hiss representative," Lockwood, visited Schmahl several times under the pretext of conducting business connected with the boatyard (Lockwood sent reports of these 1973 interviews to Hiss on August 1o, August 12, and October 5). According to Lockwood's account, summarized in the September 12 memo, Schmahl told this story (subsequently Schmahl broke off contact with Lockwood and denied the tale): He said he had been a "consultant" on Kunze's fabrication of a Woodstock typewriter. He said OSS had framed Hiss and that Donovan and Leisure [the law firm of General William Donovan] had ordered the Kunze job. He didn't know if it was completed because Kunze went "font blind." He said he had found the real Woodstock that was produced at the trial. He expressed surprise when

Page  529 5 3 o Appendix told that the serial number did not correspond to the machine Hiss had owned. He said Chambers, not HUAC, had framed Hiss.... He claimed to have "monitored" Chambers in 1946 for OSS.... He expressed some interest in writing a book or a magazine article about his career. (General Donovan's only known contact with the Hiss case came in October 1949 when Claude B. Cross interviewed him about Noel Field, who had been an OSS agent briefly; nor has any evidence linked his firm to Kunze or Hiss.) One of Schmahl's other comments to Lockwood at their initial 1973 meeting was less helpful to Hiss, according to Lockwood's account. Schmahl said that the owner of the Smithtown house rented by Chambers, who claimed that Hiss had visited there, told Schmahl "that he had a picture of the Hiss's [sic] and Chambers's [sic] together" (see Chapter VI). Hiss denied making this visit. By the time Lockwood visited Schmahl in October 1973, the latter's story had become even more muddled. Thus Lockwood's memo noted: "I asked again for the date of Kunze's work and he replied it was at about the same time he had Chambers's farm under surveillance, when he saw all the 'government cars' going in and out prior to the discovery of the 'Pumpkin.'" (Chambers had told HUAC investigators in December 1948 that he handed over the microfilms partly because he thought his farm was being watched.) Schmahl then avowed that the date was "probably later than [1946]," his earlier claim. As to the reason Donovan's firm wanted a Woodstock manufactured in 1946, Schmahl said he knew only that it had been "an experiment." Lockwood, however, sensed his host's deepening suspiciousness: "Schmahl asked me why I was so interested in the Hiss case now and I replied that it seemed highly topical in view of the present headlines from Washington. We parted on what seemed to be a less friendly tone than last time. No lunch offered. My efforts to interest him in a German yacht broker from North Carolina... did not seem to elicit more discussion of Horace's business. I will follow up with him but may need more background material such as could be supplied by the G2 man. M. Lockwood." The reference to the "G2 man" remains unexplained, unless it referred to some other undercover operative working for Hiss. Lockwood had suggested to Schmahl that the latter should have a professional writer prepare his story, obviously with the Hiss case information prominently featured. After considering a most unlikely candidate-Hannah Arendt-the two men settled on New Yorker writer Thomas Whiteside, whose meeting with Lockwood to discuss the Schmahl story was recorded in a November 12, 1973, letter from Lockwood to Hiss. Whiteside apparently left unconvinced that Schmahl's alleged statements had any merit, and the story idea lay dormant until 1976, when (according to Hiss) he persuaded Jim Bishop-who had met Schmahl as an insurance adjuster assessing damages on Bishop's sunken boat-to question Schmahl about his alleged role in the Hiss case (both Hiss and Peter Irons told me they prepared questions for Bishop to use). The pursuit of Horace Schmahl entailed considerable effort by supporters of Alger Hiss. Lockwood's contacts with Schmahl were under the guise of conducting legitimate business"Lockwood was talking business with the man," Hiss noted in an interview on June 21, 1975, "and he showed Lockwood his books"-and that same year Lockwood told me that Schmahl was being watched by investigators operating from a panel truck outside his home. Several attempts by journalists to approach Schmahl, including Jim Bishop's alleged effort, were made in cooperation with the Hiss defense since the mid-197os, all presumably in the hope of finding some usable evidence for the notion that Donovan ordered Alger Hiss "framed" through construction of a phony Woodstock two years before the HUAC hearings opened. More than one thousand pages of released FBI material on Schmahl's role in the Hiss case and on his subsequent activities contain no hints of such a plot, nor do any of the reports by Schmahl in 1948-49, or those about Schmahl since that time. All we know is that Schmahl conducted a short but thorough investigation for Edward McLean. The evidence also shows that Schmahl became persuaded of Hiss's guilt and quit the investigation. After that, he passed information on the defense efforts to the FBI.