To this day, Alger Hiss—who was convicted of perjury, not treason—remains a conundrum, his guilt or innocence still hotly debated along ideological lines. When the Venona decrypts were declassified in the 1990s, some saw smoking-gun proof of his guilt, while others argued that the case had only entered an even murkier stage. In the end, Hiss will likely be seen as a perplexingly mixed bag: a fundamentally loyal American who had associated with left-wing circles in Washington and was not entirely forthcoming with Congress, but was never a serious threat to national security.
