GENTLEMAN AND A SPY?

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Summoned as a witness, Hiss denied he had ever been a communist or had known Chambers. When Nixon arranged a meeting of the two men in a New York City hotel room on Aug. 17, Chambers repeated his charges, and Hiss his denials. Then, bizarrely, Hiss asked Chambers to open his mouth. After peering at his accuser's discolored teeth, Hiss allowed that he might have briefly known Chambers in 1934 as a free-lance journalist named George Crosley. That was a damaging admission. Only a close friend could have known Chambers as Crosley, which was the pseudonym he had used in writing homoerotic verse during the '20s. Chambers subsequently produced 65 pages of State Department cables, along with four memos in Hiss's handwriting. Later, with two HUAC aides as witnesses, Chambers dramatically dug up several rolls of microfilm he had hidden in a pumpkin patch on his Maryland farm; they contained confidential State Department documents. All this material, Chambers said, had been given to him by Hiss to pass along to the Soviets.

Because the statute of limitations on espionage had run out, Hiss was charged with perjury. His first trial ended in a hung jury. Hiss was found guilty at a second exhausting trial, and eventually served 44 months at the federal prison in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. Barred as a felon from practicing law, he worked as a stationery sales- man after his 1954 release and assisted the loyalists who sought new evidence that might overturn his conviction. That never happened, although the Massachusetts Supreme Court restored his right to practice law in 1975. Hiss's two memoirs, In the Court of Public Opinion (1957) and Recollections of a Life (1988), dryly record his side of the story but provide few clues to his motives or mind-set.

Hiss believed his vindication had finally come in 1992 when, after the fall of the Soviet Union, a Russian general in charge of intelligence archives declared that they contained no evidence Hiss had ever been a spy. He subsequently recanted his assertion, however. And four years after, researchers digging through U.S. intelligence documents found intercepts of Soviet transmissions that suggested an American known as "Ales," perhaps Hiss, had been spying on the U.S. during that era.

To Chambers, Hiss's stoic intransigence was actually persuasive evidence. Chambers thought it indirect proof that Hiss was a communist, through and through. For how could a man sustain himself in the vale of so much tragedy unless he was driven by some inner faith, even a perverted one?