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Four days later, before that sensation had died down, came the testimony of Time editor Whittaker Chambers. He too was a former Communist, and his startling claim is debated to this day.

Chambers claimed that Alger Hiss, a distinguished former State Department official, was also a secret Communist, one of several in a cell formed specifically to infiltrate the government. Hiss denied the charge, but Chambers produced a mass of classified documents that, he claimed, Hiss had passed to him.

Whatever the truth of the Bentley-Chambers allegations, the brutal outcome was that many lives were ruined, and four men died. White was felled by a heart attack after defending himself passionately before the committee. William Remington was bludgeoned to death in prison after being convicted of perjury. Laurence Duggan, a former State Department official smeared by Chambers, died in an unexplained fall from the sixteenth floor of a New York office building. Marvin Smith, a Justice Department attorney involved in the Hiss case, committed suicide, and Chambers himself tried to.

Alger Hiss was eventually convicted of perjury – the jury believed he lied when he said he had not passed documents to Chambers. He served three and a half years in prison and protested his innocence until his death, aged 92, in 1996.1

Edgar’s attitude to White and Hiss had been distinctly downbeat – until it became timely to embarrass President Truman. The Director had known about the Hiss allegation as early as 1942, and had dismissed it then as ‘either history, hypothesis, or deduction.’ Elizabeth Bentley’s trips to Washington, supposedly to pick up secrets from traitors, had gone unchallenged for years, in spite of the fact that Jacob Golos, her lover – a long-exposed Communist operative – was a prime target for FBI surveillance.

In 1948, when White’s possible guilt became a public issue, former Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau asked Edgar privately whether he thought White was guilty. Morgenthau’s son, the future New York District Attorney, kept his father’s contemporaneous note of Edgar’s response, scribbled on an old envelope. Edgar’s opinion, according to the note, was that there was ‘nothing to it.’

Edgar knew, but did not mention publicly, that the key source in the entire espionage investigation, Soviet defector Igor Gouzenko, had specifically said White was not one of the American traitors. Yet it was reportedly Edgar who leaked the White allegations in the first place, by feeding information to the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. He did so through his aide Lou Nichols, a man so adept at passing information for Edgar that he became known as ‘the cleanest leak in Washington.’

Alger Hiss was sent to jail on the basis of only one piece of hard evidence: a Woodstock typewriter said to produce type that matched both the copies of official documents produced by Chambers and letters known to have been typed on the Hiss family typewriter. Hiss, backed by some of the expert witnesses, claimed the machine was doctored specifically in order to frame him.

We may never know whether Edgar did stoop to such tactics to set up an innocent man. But documents now available show that, in 1960, he was open to the notion of using forgery to neutralize a Communist Party member by ‘exposing’ him to colleagues, fraudulently, as an FBI informer. His only admonition to his agents was to make certain the deception ‘insures success and avoids embarrassment to the Bureau.’

Told that the scheme involved typewriter forgery, Edgar raised only a mild objection, but not to the idea itself. ‘To alter a typewriter to match a known model,’ he advised, ‘would take a large amount of typewriter specimens and weeks of laboratory work.’

Whether the FBI framed Hiss or not, it is clear that milking the affair for political purposes meant more to Edgar than seeing justice done. He had been working covertly to leak the accusations as early as 1945, long before Chambers went public. The word was