By Dick Bachert
While the name Alger Hiss may mean nothing to you, his legacy lives on through the United Nations.
A Harvard trained lawyer and former clerk for Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Alger Hiss was a U.S. State Department employees in the mid 1930s. Hiss was the assistant to Francis Sayre, son-in-law of one Woodrow Wilson (father of the League of Nations that quickly unraveled in the post WWI period). Hiss went on to become an assistant to U.S. Secretary of State Edward Stenttinius, Jr. and was later tapped as a special assistant to the Director of the Office of Far Eastern Affairs. In 1944, he moved on to become special assistant to the Director of the Office of Special Political Affairs charged with making policy involving postwar plans for international organization. In that position, he was executive secretary at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference where plans were formulated for what would become the United Nations.
Hiss attended the 1945 Yalta Conference between FDR, Churchill and Stalin. At Yalta, the “Big Three” nations ostensibly coordinated a strategy to defeat Germany, essentially drew what would become the map of postwar Europe (not incidentally consigning the bulk of central and eastern Europe to virtual slavery under Stalin’s Soviet tyranny and setting the stage for what came to be called the “Cold War”) and moved ahead with plans to establish what we now know as the United Nations. At Yalta, Hiss was charged with leading the work on the UN. At one point in the negotiations, Stalin demanded that the Soviet Union be given 16 votes (one for each of the arbitrarily created Soviet sub-divisions placed under Stalin’s boot heel by the Yalta map). It is believed that Hiss led the opposition to that demand and ultimately brought about the compromise of 2 additional votes for the USSR (a total of 3). In the later McCarthy House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, his having allegedly engineering that compromise was presented as evidence that Hiss WAS NOT the Soviet agent many in Washington and the country believed him to be.
Hiss’ activities at Yalta, and later, led many anti-Soviet hard-liners to believe that Hiss was, in fact, a Soviet agent and pointed to files ultimately made public concerning the VENONA project established to monitor encrypted Soviet message traffic with its agents (moles) in the West. Although Hiss denied it, based on similarities in travel patterns and other evidence, an agent code name “ALES” was believed by many in the intelligence community to be Hiss.
Hiss personally hand-carried the draft of the UN charter to the 1945 organizational meeting in San Francisco and served as the secretary-general of the conference there. He later became full Director of the State Department’s Office of Special Political Affairs.
Hiss left the State Department in 1946. His reward for his work on the utopian UN was to be named president of the equally utopian Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, lecturing through this period for the Quaker organization, the American Friends Service Committee. He remained at Carnegie until May 1949.
In December of 1948, Hiss had been indicted on two counts of perjury. Since the statute of limitations on espionage had run out, perjury was the only charge available to prosecutors for a man many suspected had, indeed, committed espionage. The first trial ended in a hung jury. At the second trial, Hiss was convicted and the Supreme Court upheld the conviction. Hiss was sentenced to 5 years in prison. He died on November 15, 1996 after spending the interim period in an unsuccessful attempt to clear his name in the face of further proof of his guilt trickling into the public domain.
The Yalta agreement set the stage for perhaps one of the bloodiest periods in world history. It is estimated by some historians that Stalin’s 1930s forced collectivization of agriculture led to the starvation deaths of 30 million Ukrainians and other Soviet citizens. His infamous pre and post-war purges sent millions more to Siberian forced labor camps. The lucky ones took a quick bullet to the brain in a prison corridor.
While there is an argument that the USSR was a key instrument in the defeat of Hitler, the rigid state socialist system imposed by Stalin was a miserable failure, requiring the West – mainly America – to institute programs such as Lend Lease to prop them up materially. Under Lend Lease, thousands of tons of food and technologically advanced U.S. weaponry were shipped to the Soviets. As we’re STILL awaiting those lease payments, the program SHOULD have been called “Free Stuff to Prop Up Your Miserable Failed System of Communism So We Who Wish The Same System World-wide Can Point To Its Wonders to Sell It Everywhere.”
One of the key provisions of the Yalta agreement to which the Big Three agreed was the forced repatriation back to the USSR of all Soviet citizens then located within the Soviet sector at the end of the war. In May and June 1945, tens of thousands of these refugees who had fled the USSR before and during the fighting were rounded up by the US Army and sent to collection points in Austria for transit back to the USSR. When the day arrived, US troops entered the detention barracks where -- in a number of documented cases -- they were greeted with the sight of people thrusting their heads through the windows, pressing their jugulars to the broken glass and cutting their throats, preferring to die there than to be sent back to Stalin’s tender mercies. Many of the Yugoslavian citizens returned were summarily shot within feet of the British soldiers who escorted them.
This, then, is the bargain the West made with the devil called Stalin.
I cite this bit of history with the USSR as an effort to drive home the historical FACT that nations – even those, like America, established on the principles of freedom and justice – often make deals with devils for what the leaders at the time view as proper and necessary and in the “national interest.”
Read that last paragraph as many times as required for it to sink in and imagine what YOUR world might be like if the internationalist double-domes succeed in erasing national borders – such as is now under way even as we speak between the U.S., Mexico and Canada.
In 1979, a family in East Berlin constructed a crude gas balloon and somehow made it over the Berlin Wall to the West. I did some radio commentaries about that and ended with the question “If America and what remain of the more-or-less free West fail – where will you fly YOUR balloon?”
Think about all of that as we move into a discussion of more recent events involving the United Nations.