Terror tactics

New York

With the exception of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg — whose circle of defenders and sympathisers have just come together at the Museum of Jewish Heritage here for a new documentary celebrating their martyrdom — there is no greater Cold War icon than Alger Hiss, the patrician, high-ranking state department official who passed government secrets to the Soviet Union. Hiss was exposed 60 years ago and did time for his crimes. The Left, however, always insisted he was framed despite the overwhelming evidence of his guilt.

I sat next to Hiss once during a Spectator lunch and caught him red-handed telling a whopper about Bill Buckley and myself. As he was already quite old — this was 25 years ago — I let it pass. Hiss spent 52 years waging a campaign of vindication, which partly succeeded because he made common cause with Sixties radicals and Nixon-haters. (Nixon was the man who went after him.) With Soviet military intelligence files now open, Hiss’s guilt is indisputable. He was a Soviet agent who got caught, pure and simple.

As were the Rosenbergs. The reason their case ignites passions is that they fried. The Cold War was really heating up in 1953, and Ike simply could not commute the death sentence — a death sentence which Philby, Burgess and Maclean surely deserved, and perhaps even Blunt. Treason is treason, but nowadays it has been deconstructed into something like a bi-polar condition or, better yet, lack of self-esteem. (What can I tell you, Doc? I thought so little of myself I passed secret documents to Joe Stalin in order to feel better about myself…)

This does not sit very well with my good friend Garri Karolinsky, whose father and mother died in the Gulag and who also did time there for anti-Soviet activities.