Correspondence: Exchange on Vassiliev Notebooks and Alger Hiss

Abstract

Editor’s Preface: An overwhelming amount of evidence has emerged over the past twenty years from the archives of the former USSR and from other former Soviet-bloc countries conarming that Alger Hiss was both a secret member of the American Communist Party and a Soviet spy in the 1930s and 1940s. The case against Hiss was already very strong on the basis of vast quantities of declassiaed U.S. documents, and it has grown immeasurably stronger with the release of materials from the former Eastern bloc. The late Eduard Mark published his anal article in the Summer 2009 issue of the JCWS (a special issue on Soviet espionage in the United States during the Stalin era) amassing further evidence that Hiss was a Soviet spy and rebutting an article published by two of the small number of Hiss’s remaining defenders. After the special issue appeared, the journal received a commentary from David Lowenthal, the brother of John Lowenthal, who tried for many years to convince people that Hiss was innocent. David Lowenthal does not respond to the devastating evidence presented by Eduard Mark; instead, he raises other points about the use of Alexander Vassiliev’s notebooks that, to varying degrees, were already addressed in the special issue and in the complementary book by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev, Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). We agreed that we would publish Lowenthal’s commentary as a letter to the editor with a response by Haynes and Klehr, which Lowenthal has not seen.