Alger Hiss

The case that turned spying into a domestic political fight. In August 1948 the former communist Whittaker Chambers told the House Un-American Activities Committee that Hiss, a former senior State Department official who had gone to Yalta with Roosevelt, had belonged to a Communist underground. Hiss denied it under oath, and a young congressman, Richard Nixon, pressed the case. Chambers then produced the Pumpkin Papers, microfilm hidden in a hollowed-out pumpkin on his Maryland farm. Espionage charges were time-barred, so Hiss was convicted of perjury in January 1950 and served nearly four years. He denied it until his death in 1996; later releases are widely read as confirming his guilt, though defenders still dispute it.