Ales

A code name that was used in operational correspondence by the NKGB foreign intelligence during World War II to describe a long-time source of its sister service, the GRU. This code name was revealed for the first time in a cable sent from the NKGB station in Washington, D.C. to Moscow on March 30, 1945, which was decrypted in the course of the Venona operation and released by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) in 1996. This cable, also known as Venona 1822, discussed an agent of the NKGB’s “military neighbors” hidden behind the cover name “Ales,” who had attended the Yalta Conference and then gone to Moscow on a brief visit, where he was “thanked” by a high Soviet official. The NSA released its English translation of the cable with a footnote saying that Ales was “probably Alger Hiss.” Later, this code name appeared in a few early 1945 NKGB documents released in the early 1990s by the Russian foreign intelligence service (SVR) for a never-completed joint Russian-American book project; these and other releases later became the basis for The Haunted Wood (1999), by Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev.

Click here to read more about the story of the identification of “Ales” as Alger Hiss.