Word: hisses
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Eighteen months later, Chambers (then a senior editor of TIME) told HUAC that Hiss was a Communist. Not so, said Hiss, who also insisted that he had never known Chambers. But Chambers knew so many details about Hiss's life?including the fact that Hiss, an amateur ornithologist, had once spotted a rare prothonotary warbler on the banks of the Potomac?that his adversary was finally forced to reverse himself. Then Chambers made a more serious accusation: that Hiss had passed State Department secrets to him in the late 1930s...
...When did Hiss meet Chambers? Hiss initially agreed with Chambers that they met in 1934, then switched to a January 1935 date. But Radical Novelist Josephine Herbst told Hiss's lawyers that Chambers began trying to recruit Hiss for undercover work in July or August...
...Hiss insisted that he stopped seeing Chambers by mid-1936?about 18 months before the period when Chambers claimed to have received secret documents from him. But in interviews with Hiss and one of his lawyers, Weinstein learned that Pediatrician Margaret Nicholson recalled for the Hiss defense team that she encountered a heavyset, "very gruff man" at the Hiss home in January 1937. "You may not come in!" declared the man. Writes Weinstein: "From newspaper photographs in 1949, Dr. Nicholson recognized the man who had answered the door as Whittaker Chambers...
...Hiss a Soviet agent? Noel Field, a confessed Soviet agent in the State Department, and his wife Herta fled to Czechoslovakia in 1948 and were questioned by both Czechoslovak and Hungarian security officials. Czech Historian Karel Kaplan, who read the interrogation records 20 years later, told Weinstein that the Fields named Hiss as a Communist underground agent during the 1930s. Indeed, writes Weinstein, "Herta Field, when seized in Prague, initially believed that American intelligence agents had come to kidnap her and bring her back to give evidence against Hiss...
Chambers testified that he gave Hiss and three other agents Bokhara rugs in January 1937 as gestures of appreciation for their undercover work. Hiss admitted receiving a red oriental rug from Chambers, but said it was in 1935 and was partial payment for a debt. Two other recipients told the FBI that they had received their rugs in early 1931. Moreover, a rug expert hired by the defense established from a description on a sales slip that Hiss's rug was apparently one of four that had been bought by a Communist agent for Chambers in December...