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The Shadow Dossier — The Pumpkin Patch Microfilm · The Shadow Dossier

• 0:00
  The Shadow Dossier. Act I. The Accusation. In
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  August 1948, a senior editor at Time Magazine
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  named Whitaker Chambers sat before the House
• 0:16
  Un -American Activities Committee and made a
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  claim that would consume American politic for
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  the next two years. That a respected State Department
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  official named Alger Hiss had, a decade earlier,
• 0:28
  been a fellow member of an underground communist
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  cell in Washington. Hiss was not an obscure figure.
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  He had helped organize the founding conference
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  of the United Nations and had accompanied President
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  Roosevelt to the Yalta Conference. He appeared
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  before the committee, denied ever knowing Chambers
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  by that name, and did so with the composed authority
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  of a man who had spent his career in rooms like
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  that one. For a while, it looked like Chambers'
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  word against Hiss' reputation, and reputation
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  was winning. A young committee member named Richard
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  Nixon pushed the investigation further, and Chambers'
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  story began to change in a way that made it more
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  dangerous, not less. Confronted with a defamation
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  lawsuit from Hiss, chambers produced typed copies
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  of state department documents and later strips
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  of microfilm containing photographed government
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  papers which he said hiss had passed to him for
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  delivery to soviet intelligence in the late 1930s
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  the microfilm became famous under an almost absurd
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  name chambers led investigators to his maryland
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  farm and retrieved several rolls of film that
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  he had hidden for safekeeping inside a hollowed
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  -out pumpkin in his garden. The press seized
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  on the detail immediately, and the evidence has
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  been known ever since as the pumpkin papers.
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  Because the statute of limitations on espionage
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  had expired, his could not be charged with spying
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  itself. He was instead charged with perjury for
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  denying under oath that he had passed documents
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  to Chambers and that he had seen him after a
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  specific date in 1937. His first trial in the
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  summer of 1949 ended in a hung jury. A second
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  trial began that November. In January 1950, the
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  second jury convicted Hiss on both counts of
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  perjury. He was sentenced to five years in prison
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  and served nearly four of them. He spent the
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  rest of his long life. He died in 1996, insisting
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  he was innocent, and the case became a permanent
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  fault line in American politics. A proxy argument
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  over whether the New Deal establishment had harbored
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  real Soviet infiltration or whether an anti -communist
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  movement had destroyed an innocent man's career
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  on the word of a self -confessed former communist.
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  For decades, the case remained formally unresolved
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  in the way these arguments often stayed unresolved.
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  Each side citing the same trial record and reaching
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  opposite conclusions. Then, in the 1990s, two
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  sources changed the picture. Deciphered Soviet
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  cable traffic from the Venona program. declassified
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  by the National Security Agency, starting in
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  1995, contained references to a Soviet source
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  codenamed Alesh, whom the decrypting analyst
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  assessed was probably Alger Hiss, based on travel
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  details matching his known movements around the
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  Yalta Conference. Separately, after the Soviet
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  Union's collapse, A Russian general briefly granted
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  access to KGB archives stated that he found no
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  record of Hiss as an agent, though the access
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  was limited and later closed off again. Most
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  historians who have reviewed the Venona material
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  now consider the case against Hiss substantially
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  stronger than it appeared to sympathetic observers
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  in 1950. Whitaker Chambers, for his part, Never
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  wavered from the account he gave the committee,
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  and he described the entire episode, in his own
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  memoir's title, as witness. Testimony to a betrayal
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  he believed history would eventually confirm.
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  This concludes declassified file number 063 of
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  his shadow dossier, the pumpkin patch microfilm.
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  What dangerous secrets await in our next file?
• 5:16
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• 5:22
  and YouTube so you never miss an official declassification.
• 5:28
  This is the Shadow Dossier. Thank you for listening.