Writing History When the Crime Is Stranger Than Fiction

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How difficult it seems, gazing back just seventy years to the late 1940s and 50s, to truly appreciate what a confusing and fraught era it was for our grandparents. The Soviet Union, recently an ally in the Second World War, was increasingly viewed as a threat with Stalin’s imposition of the Iron Curtain and acquisition of an atomic bomb. While on the home front, and quite suddenly—or so it seemed at the time—congressional inquiries and headline grabbing confessions of ex-Soviet spies were turning up KGB agents everywhere. Spy fever, it was called, especially after the “Red Spy Queen” Elizabeth Bentley went to the FBI in 1945 and named nearly 150 agents working for the Soviet Union, 37 of them in the federal government, including Alger Hiss. Many, like Hiss, were Washington insiders, high ranking officials in the State Department, Treasury, and even the White House. Soon, another ex-Soviet spy, Whitaker Chambers (then an editor at Time Magazine) would be debriefed by the FBI and add his own names to Bentley’s list, including Alger Hiss and his brother. Understandably, the American public was shocked.  Could these ex-Soviet agents be believed? Had Communist subversion reached into the Roosevelt White House? And so the scene was set for the divisive McCarthy era and the “Red Scare” of the mid-1950s.

These issues crystalized in the most famous spy trial in American history, when Alger Hiss was accused in 1949 of lying about passing top-secret State Department documents to Whittaker Chambers, then an agent for Soviet military intelligence, in the late 30s. The trial, like the Dreyfus affair in France fifty years before, divided the country between those who believed the upstanding civil servant Alger Hiss (Harvard Law, friend and confidant of Presidents and Secretaries of State) to be innocent and those who believed he was a spy—and worse, an agent of influence who sat at Roosevelt’s right hand at Yalta. The Hiss trial was a sensation, stranger than fiction, involving a controversial Woodstock typewriter on which the FBI claimed Priscilla Hiss had copied stolen documents, where the star witness for the government, onetime GRU (Soviet military intelligence) agent, Whittaker Chambers, was dismissed by the Hisses as someone they’d never known. Although Hiss was convicted of perjury, for lying about passing top-secret State Department documents, the outcome continued to divide the nation for the next fifty years, dividing families and friends, and provoking furious arguments between those who believed the testimony of Whitaker Chambers, and those who passionately claimed that Hiss had been framed by the FBI and enemies of the New Deal.

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As a writer of literary/historical fiction, this imbroglio seemed like a fascinating project to take on, especially exploring how the controversy might have played itself out in one American family. I considered many ways of telling this story. Possibly setting the action in the past, the 1950s, and narrating it through the eyes of Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers, the two great protagonists and onetime friends (or not, if you believed Hiss)—whose different recollections of the same events riveted the nation for years. Not unlike, it occurred to me, the famous film, Rashomon, with its kaleidoscopic points of view, all differing slightly, but tellingly. I finally chose to narrate the tale primarily through the eyes of a twenty-something Princeton astrophysicist, George Altmann, who is summoned by his grandfather, Edward Dimock (the Judge), the man who defended Alger Hiss in the infamous trial, to help finish his long-delayed memoir. And so, George, to his dismay, finds himself embarking on a quest for the truth—for the real story behind the Hiss affair. Through the “voice” of the unfinished memoir and cagey conversations with his grandfather, George is slowly drawn into the many mysteries surrounding the trial, not the least of which are a series of unexplained deaths (a KGB specialty) and disappearances of potential witnesses against Hiss. The memoir’s captivating account of times past and the Judge’s sometimes selective memory prove a Pandora’s box, providing not only clues to historical events but secrets that have devastated three generations of the Dimock family.

I must admit that as a novelist, this strategy of keeping the action in the contemporary mode (set in the fall of 2002, a year after 9/11) was appealing both as a technical challenge—to reach into the past through the near-present, and perhaps more importantly, stage the search for the truth in a way that would appeal to a younger generation unfamiliar with the specifics of the trial. This also plays into my belief that literature, like the great novels of Tolstoy, Melville, and Proust, provides a vivid, sometimes gut-wrenching window into to the heart of the past, and on the deepest level puts us in touch with the nature of time and memory: how the setbacks and triumphs of the past are writ large in our family connections.So, although Gods of Deception is about a historical event and its participants, it is, in essence, a meditation on time and memory—about how the past shapes who we are, often in strange and magical ways that we overlook at our peril.  A past that whispers down the wind of joys and sorrows that cut to the bone.  Because time heals, especially when we find ourselves opening to difficult or quixotic characters like Captain Ahab, King Lear, or Anna Karenina and Vronsky. And yes, Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers.

In writing Gods of Destruction, I wanted my two protagonists—and lovers—to come at the truth from two very different angles. And how better than through the eyes of George Altmann, an astrophysicist who has turned his gaze from the stars to the contemporary art scene, who unexpectedly teams up with the artist and alpinist, Wendy Bradley, the youngest woman to climb Mount Everest, with a degree in literature and painting from Yale in her backpack. These two dynamic souls—and their mismatched love story—seemed the perfect choice to mirror and explore the traumas of the Hiss trial that split the country for two generations (not unlike the split around the OJ murder trial of more recent memory). While confronting on their journey some of the dicier aspects of human nature. Along with problematic correlations and suspicious patterns that for an astrophysicist like George Altmann are eerily reminiscent of the possibility of parallel universes, if not the unseen existence of Dark Matter. For Wendy Bradley, it is the human toll that matters: the lives lost, the lies unrefuted, the unexplained suicides that weren’t suicides—things that weigh in the balance as she plumbs the riddle of her own parent’s death in a climbing accident.

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“For the temper of Stalin’s mind requires a strategy of multiple deceptions, which confuse the victim with the illusion of power, and soften them up with the illusion of hope, only to plunge them deeper into despair when the illusion fades, the trap is sprung, and the victims gasp with horror, as they hurtle into space.” From Witness by Whittaker Chambers

As Chambers wrote, and my title suggests, deception was the modus operandi of the KGB and the Communist Party underground in the United States: it was not just a strategy of disinformation but a way of life, a secret life lived in the shadows, where lying was second nature, and pretending one thing while doing another was considered the height of trade craft. In doing research for the novel, it became clear to me that with the turn of the century—the early 2000s—the controversy about the guilt or innocence of Hiss began to fade. This had less to do with the dying off of many of the antagonists, than with the release by American intelligence of the Venona cables, Soviet communications gathered by Army intelligence during the Second World War. The painstaking decryption of these cables, starting in the late 40s, took decades, but when they were finally published and made available to scholars, it was revealed that hundreds of Soviet spies had indeed infiltrated the US government in the 1930s and 40s. Adding to this treasure trove of data were Soviet era intelligence files that, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, were briefly opened to journalists and scholars during Boris Yeltsin’s presidency of Russia.  Information in these files not only confirmed much of what had been gleaned from the Venona cables but confirmed without a doubt that Alger Hiss had indeed been a spy for Stalin. For the history on this, I recommend: Spies, The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America, by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev; Yale University Press, 2009.

As Spies makes clear, there were over 500 Soviet and/or Communist Party assets deployed throughout the country as Stalin’s willing agents. Most were in government positions or defense industries stealing secrets to be passed on to their KGB handlers, most infamously by the spy ring run by Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, which succeeded in stealing the secrets of the atom bomb from Los Alamos, and hastening Stalin’s acquisition of nuclear weapons by years. It is something of an irony that Alger Hiss was convicted for lying about passing top-secret State Department papers to Whittaker Chambers in the late 30s—of little substantive value, when the real damage he did was as an agent of influence in the highest reaches of the State Department. Hiss sat at Roosevelt’s right hand at Yalta, where he was debriefed by his Soviet handler each morning about the US position in these crucial negotiations on post-war Europe and the Far East. We now know from Venona that after Yalta, Hiss flew on to Moscow with elements of the US delegation, and there, in a secret ceremony, was taken aside and given the Order of the Red Star by the head of Soviet intelligence.

For a novelist, the most intriguing aspect of this disaster for American foreign policy, is how a spy like Alger Hiss was not only able to get away with his deceptions—proclaiming his innocence to his dying day, but how he was able to so convincingly maintain his guise as the aggrieved party to both those who knew him best and the country at large.  While his contemporaries, the Cambridge spies like Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, and Donald Maclean were beset by the furies of the damned for their treason, so terrified of being exposed for betraying their class and country that they fled behind the Iron Curtain, ending their days in Moscow where they died of alcoholism. Not Hiss, who maintained his equanimity and self-righteous stance for decades after serving seven years in prison for perjury. Hiss was the Iago of mid-century America and a character of cosmic if hidden depths.  

Perhaps even more tempting as a character for the novelist is Hiss’s accuser, Whittaker Chambers, who wrote a memoir, Witness, about his days as a Soviet agent in the underground, much of it focusing on his deep friendship with Alger Hiss and wife Priscilla, who typed copies of the top-secret documents that her husband brought home each evening from the State Department, to be later picked up and photographed by Chambers and handed off to the Soviets. Witness, written after the trial, is a masterful literary work in its own right, detailing not just an insider’s account of the Soviet underground in the 1930s but delving into spiritual matters as well—much along the lines of Augustine’s Confessions: how the siren song of Soviet communism undermined many traditional American values, including Christian ideals—or more precisely, the Quaker ethic of simplicity, equality, integrity and peace. A calling professed by both Alger and Priscilla Hiss and their doppelganger, Chambers. For a novelist, Chambers’ often loving and poignant portrait of Alger and Priscilla Hiss holds deep fascination. In its pages, we see the two ideological attuned couples drawn together as close friends and confidants: vacationing together, parenting together, bird watching together, and spying together. As a novelist, I wanted to bring these characters to life and explain their ultimate falling out. And perhaps delve into yet one more mystery: how, for almost five decades, many of the best and brightest in this country could deride Whittaker Chambers and dismiss Witness—with its wealth of telling details and scintillating character sketches—its passionate confessional mode—as only the fabrication of a pervert and fabulist out to destroy the reputation of Alger Hiss.

There is a particularly fraught scene in Witness where Chambers goes to Alger and Priscilla’s home at Volta Place in Georgetown (Washington, DC) to tell them that he has broken with the Soviet underground—aghast at Stalin’s atrocities, with the hope of breaking them too. At the end of dinner, Chambers realizes that he has no hope of convincing the couple to leave the underground and that their friendship is at an end. As they part on the doorstep, he notes that Alger has tears in his eyes, even as Chambers knows that Hiss has already informed on him (a phone call at dinner), and that he and his family are in mortal danger. “Stalin plays for keeps,” Alger had once ominously noted to Chambers. Indeed, he does. Days later, Chambers buys a gun, packs his family into their Ford, and escapes to a hideout in Florida before the KGB goons can find him.

In Gods of Deception, astrophysicist George Altmann is haunted by this scene because it begins to echo so many pained conversations with his grandfather, the Judge, and the uncertainties that cry out from the pages of his unfinished memoir. Everywhere he looks, George finds alarming patterns and coincidences that emerge to turn his life upside down, not the least of which is the suspicious death or suicide of his maternal grandfather and namesake on Christmas Eve, 1949, in a fall from Woodstock’s Fishkill Bridge. The once famous painter, once a member of the communist party, had been working as a courtroom artist during the Hiss trial. Correlation or causation? Yet another in a series of suspect falls (again, a KGB specialty) of potential witnesses against Hiss.  

In Gods of Deception, the truth, indeed, turns out to be even stranger than fiction.

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