I have in front of me Venona document No.1822, dated March 30, 1945. The message refers to an agent code-named "ALES," and in a footnote dated August 8, 1969, ALES is identified as "probably Alger Hiss." On its face, this looks incriminatory, although as I and others have noted, we are told neither who wrote the footnote nor on what basis the anonymous footnote writer made this judgment. Perhaps, in the twenty-four-year interim, some new evidence had come to light. Perhaps it was simply guesswork based on the similarity of the initials ALES and the letters in Alger's name. Or perhaps the fact that Hiss had served time did the trick, and the footnote was mere speculation by an agent out to make points with his famously and obsessively anti-Communist boss, J. Edgar Hoover. We have no way of knowing. In another Venona cable, however, this one a fragment that is otherwise incoherent, Hiss is mentioned by his own name. Yet, in the world of Venona, spies are supposed to be referred to only by their code names. Typically, Time, along with a battalion of columnists like George Will and Robert Novak and other media heavies who make no claim to having done their own independent research, neglects to mention this possibly exculpatory fact, concentrating instead on the possibly incriminating one.

The omission of inconveniently exculpatory material seems something of a pattern. Thus Allen Weinstein, the new factotum of the Hiss-was-guilty school, omitted from the new edition of Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case, his book about the Hiss case, the fact that a half-dozen key sources denied his claims in the first edition of Perjury that they had confirmed Chambers's version of what happened. (He did briefly mention the one who sued and won a settlement and an apology.) Weinstein and his former-KGB co-author, Alexander Vassiliev, refer to but do not reproduce in their methodologically challenged book about Soviet espionage in America, The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America--The Stalin Era, a message that says ALES was one of four members of the US delegation at the Yalta conference "who returned to the US via Moscow." Because Alger Hiss returned via Moscow on a plane with three others, none of them spy material, on its face this seems an incriminating fact. But The Haunted Wood neglects to mention that there were 110 Americans in attendance at Yalta and surely more than four of them stopped in Moscow on their way home. In 1993 a Hungarian historian claimed to have discovered an incriminatory "bombshell" in the files of Hungary's Interior Ministry. Typically, Sam Tanenhaus, who relies on Weinstein's research but like Weinstein neglects to mention the half-dozen critical sources who deny his account, printed all the incriminatory material from the Hungarian archives in his Chambers biography but omitted half of the exculpatory material, relegating the other half to a footnote. Along with most members of the "consensus," he quotes historian Maria Schmidt, one of two Hungarian scholars granted access to Noel Field's 2,500-page dossier (Field was imprisoned as a CIA spy in Hungary during the cold war), who read the file as implicating Hiss in spying; he doesn't mention that Ethan Klingsberg, an attorney and former executive director of the Soros Foundation's Institute for Constitutional and Legislative Policy, who saw the identical material, contends that at best the files are inconclusive. Similarly, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr in their book (Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America) quote former KGB officer Oleg Gordievsky, who said in a memoir that Hiss was a spy; but (as attorney, filmmaker and Hiss defender John Lowenthal has noted) they fail to quote another KGB officer, Gen. Vladimir Pavlov, who says in his memoir that Hiss was not a spy. And so forth.

When Gen. Dimitri Volkogonov, Boris Yeltsin's military adviser and overseer of all the Soviet intelligence archives, ordered a search of all Soviet intelligence files in response to a 1992 request from Hiss, he reached the conclusion that Hiss was never an intelligence agent for the USSR. Yet the counterrevisionists either ignored his finding or dismissed it as underresearched. This despite the fact that among others, he had enlisted in his search Yevgeny Primakov, then-director of the Foreign Intelligence Services and subsequently prime minister. When Volkogonov later agreed with a persistent reporter that perhaps he should have qualified his declaration of Hiss's innocence because it's impossible to prove a negative, the counterrevisionists proclaimed that Volkogonov had "recanted."

What is more noteworthy than their failure to consider inconvenient evidence is the counterrevisionists' condescension toward those who present it. Listen to Weisberg's voice in The New York Times Magazine, that beacon of objectivity, praising Tanenhaus for not bothering to deal with contradictory evidence: "Rather than obsess about those who fail to accept the obvious conclusion that Hiss was guilty, Tanenhaus ignores them. Instead, he concentrates on bringing to life a historical and human drama."

Only one more example, I promise. Weinstein asks how "to account for [KGB defector] Oleg Gordievsky's identification in 1988, over a half-decade before the decoded Venona cable was made public, of Hiss's Soviet alias as 'ALES'?" The answer to this rhetorical question may be at hand. As Eric Alterman pointed out in The Nation [April 29, 1996], Gordievsky's cited source was a New York Review of Books essay by Tom Powers, whose source was a counterintelligence agent who had seen the same Venona cable. So, perhaps Weinstein has the goods or perhaps he is using Venona to confirm Venona. We don't know which because even though Alterman's essay was out in time for Weinstein to include, and perhaps even try to refute, in the new edition of Perjury, he forgot to mention it. Help!

On the surface, the new Venona evidence appears to document that Julius Rosenberg, while no atom spy, may indeed have been involved in low-level espionage (in which Ethel was probably too ill to participate, had she been so inclined). Check it out! But Venona won't resolve, and shouldn't be expected to resolve, core questions, not to mention existential ones, such as, What was the essence of the Communist Party USA? Yes, as the counterrevisionist scholars argue, Venona half-documents that some CP leaders knew about and may have been middlemen for the receipt of secrets, and perhaps they even recruited some spies. But missing from Venona is the experience of 99.9 percent of the million comrades who passed through the CPUSA during the 1930s and early '40s--stay-at-homes who contented themselves with reading (and sometimes shouting at) the Daily Worker, demonstrators who sang along with Peter Seeger and social activists who organized trade unions and rent strikes in the North and fought lynching and the poll tax in the South.

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