Hiss, Donald (1906-1989)

Donald Hiss with son Bosley

Donald Hiss with son Bosley

A Washington lawyer who specialized in international trade and tariff laws and a government official, Donald Hiss was the younger brother of Alger Hiss. Like his brother, he was implicated by Whittaker Chambers as an alleged member of the Communist underground in the New Deal years.

A native of Baltimore, Donald Hiss graduated from John Hopkins University in 1929 and from Harvard Law School in 1932. In September of that year, he became law secretary to retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes – and worked in that capacity until October 1933. (In serving with Justice Holmes, Donald Hiss was following in his older brother’s footsteps; Alger had also worked as Holmes’s legal secretary after his graduation from Harvard Law School in 1929.) From December 1933 to May 1934, Donald Hiss worked as a lawyer for the Public Works Administration (PWA), “preparing legal memoranda and rendering opinion.” From May 1934 to June 1936, he was an attorney for the Department of the Interior whose duties included preparing memoranda and representing the United States in court. From June 1936 to June 1938, Donald Hiss was an attorney for the Department of Labor, with duties identical to his duties at the Department of the Interior.

On February 1, 1938, Donald Hiss was hired by the Department of State as an Assistant to the Legal Adviser and assigned to the Office of Philippine Affairs, where his duties consisted of “assisting in final drafting of Joint Preparatory Committee reports on Philippine Activities.” Soon after, he began his teaching career: On September 30, 1938 he was appointed to the faculty of The Catholic University of America as an instructor in International Law. 1 According to FBI records, from August 1940 until February 1941 he was loaned to the Advisory Committee to the Council of National Defense – and from February 1941 until January 1942, to Dean Acheson, the Assistant Secretary of State. 2

However, according to State Department files, on November 24, 1941 Donald Hiss was named Chief of the Foreign Funds Control Division under Acheson, who was then Assistant Secretary of State for Economic Affairs. 3 According to the State Department Decimal File index, Donald Hiss worked on implementing foreign funds controls in Latin America. For instance, on March 30, 1942, he was “directed to proceed to Mexico City and Habana, Cuba in connection with Proclaimed List and local freezing laws.” He departed on April 8, 1942 and submitted a report on Cuba upon his return. On June 25, 1942, he was designated a member of the delegation “to represent the U.S. Government at the forthcoming Inter-American Conference on Systems of Economic and Financial Control.” On November 21, 1942, Donald Hiss was designated a “member of proposed additional staff to assist in conduct of civil affairs in areas occupied by U.S. armed forces and also to further assist various agencies for personnel.” On December 5, 1942, he was directed by Dean Acheson “to proceed to Algiers” as a member of an economic mission 4 – and to return to Washington, D.C. in March 1943.

On January 15, 1944, Donald Hiss was named Executive Assistant to Assistant Secretary of State Acheson, and on March 20 of that year he was promoted to the position of Deputy Director of the Office of Economic Affairs. 5 On February 1, 1945, he was promoted again – to a position as an Economic Adviser in the Office of Economic Affairs. 6 Among other things, Donald Hiss handled international loans and affairs. However, on March 26, 1945 he resigned this position “for health reasons.”

That same month, Donald Hiss entered the Washington, D.C. corporate law firm of Covington, Burling, Rublee, Acheson and Shorb (now known as Covington & Burling LLP), where his boss at the Department of State, Dean Acheson, would return to being a partner after leaving the government. In January 1947, Hiss became a partner of the firm. His expertise in international trade and tariff laws attracted many clients with needs in those fields. He practiced with the firm until his retirement in 1976. He was also a part-time professor of international law at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C.

In August 1948, testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), an ex-Communist and admitted former Soviet spy, Whittaker Chambers, publicly accused Donald Hiss of having belonged to the Communist underground in Washington, D.C. in the 1930s. Chambers said that he used to contact Donald Hiss from time to time to determine what the prospects were for procuring documents from the State Department; however, Chambers admitted that he had never received any documents from Hiss. Nevertheless, testifying before the Grand Jury in the Alger Hiss case in December 1948, Chambers described Donald Hiss as a “quiescent member” of the Washington group of the Communist “underground” who obeyed “the Party’s instructions to move into the State Department” – but who “never procured information in documentary form” or in verbal form. 7 Donald Hiss denied the charges before HUAC and later testified for the defense at both perjury trails of his brother, Alger Hiss. He was never indicted or prosecuted.

In early 1952, the FBI decided that Chambers’s allegations against Donald Hiss were “unsubstantiated” and “preeminent charges,” on the grounds that Chambers reiterated “on several occasions that he was unsuccessful in obtaining the services of the subject,” who “furnished no confidential information or documents to Chambers or … to anyone else.” The FBI resolved that “there has been no allegation of espionage at any time.” 8

The name of Donald Hiss does not appear in the Soviet intelligence communiqués of the World War II period that were partially decrypted in the course of the Venona operation and released in 1995-1996. However, recently his name has appeared in the notes on three documents reviewed in the early 1990s by Alexander Vassiliev, a Russian former KGB officer and later journalist who was conducting research in the KGB intelligence archives for a Russian-American collaborative book project. 9 Due to the controversial nature of the three documents on which Donald Hiss’s name was written, however, it would be premature at this stage to jump to any conclusions. 10

  1. Director, FBI memorandum for A. Devitt Vanech, Deputy Attorney General, December 3, 1951, p. 2, in the FBI FOIA Donald Hiss File #101-4300-13, PDF pp. 24-25. The FBI account says Donald Hiss worked for Justice Holmes “until Justice Holmes died.” However, the latter died not in October 1933 but in March 1935.
  2. Ibid., p. 3, PDF p. 26.
  3. RG 59, State Department Decimal File, 1940-1949, 111.017/493, 11.24.1941, NA, College Park, MD.
  4. Ibid., 111.565/7a, 03.30.1942; 740.001112a, 06.25.1942; 710 Consultation (3) b/76, 11.21.1942; 851r.01/17a, ; 11.12 Acheson, Dean/26a, 12.05,1942.
  5. Ibid., 111.017/711, 01.15.1944; 111.017/735, 03.20, 1944.
  6. Donald Hiss FBI file, Ibid, p. 2, PDF p. 25.
  7. Whittaker Chambers Testimony to Grand Jury, December 7, 1948 – from the Transcripts of the Grand jury in the Alger Hiss Case, pp. 3586-3587, 3589.
  8. SAC, WFO (101-607) to Director, FBI (101-4300), January 29, 1952, PDF p. 40.
  9. Vassiliev’s research later became the basis for The Haunted Wood (1999), which he co-authored with Allen Weinstein (The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America – the Stalin Era, by Allen Weinstein & Alexander Vassiliev, New York: Random House, 1999). In 2005, Vassiliev provided the notes from his 1990s research for a new collaborative project, which resulted in the book SPIES: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America, by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr and Alexander Vassiliev. Yale University Press, 2009.
  10. For instance, in a late 1949 document, Donald Hiss’s name appears below that of his brother, Alger Hiss, with the cover name “Junior,” which in the context of the document looks like a cover name that was used in MGB correspondence of 1948-1949. This correspondence discussed espionage investigations in the United States and resulting failures suffered by Soviet intelligence. (Gorsky report – to Savchenko S.R. 23 December, [19]49: Failures in the USA/ “Karl’s” Group.)