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- THE WEEK, Page 21NATIONProving a Negative
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- A Russian official finds no evidence that Alger Hiss was a spy
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- Of all the cold war mysteries, none was as perplexing as the
- espionage case against Alger Hiss. A former State Department
- official, he was accused in 1948 of spying for the Soviets,
- tried before a House committee led by Congressman Richard
- Nixon, and served a four-year term for perjury. Yet he has
- staunchly maintained his innocence, even in the face of
- microfilm evidence produced by former TIME editor Whittaker
- Chambers. Now comes word from an unlikely but authoritative
- source that Hiss, 87, may not have spied. After researching "a
- great amount of materials," General Dmitri Volkogonov, chairman
- of the Russian government's secret military-intelligence
- archives, announced he could find no evidence that Hiss had
- spied for Russia. That, skeptics note, doesn't mean Hiss is
- innocent -- just that Volkogonov didn't find anything, which is
- a bit different from finding there was nothing.
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