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TIME - Man of the Year
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CompactPublishing-TimeMagazine-TimeManOfTheYear-Win31MSDOS.iso
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1993-04-08
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THE WEEK, Page 21NATIONProving a Negative
A Russian official finds no evidence that Alger Hiss was a spy
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.