Dinner Party at the Fields’ III: Skeletons in the Closet (1990s-2009)

This is the third – and final – part of the compilation of what different sources have said about the story known in Alger Hiss case history as “the dinner party at the Fields” – shorthand for a much-contested story about a meeting between Alger Hiss and Hede Gumperz (Massing) that allegedly took place in the Washington, D.C. apartment of Noel and Herta Field sometime in the mid-1930s. The story was told variously by four different sources – each of whom, like in the famous Kurosawa’s Rashômon movie, told it to different “audiences” at different times: Hede Massing herself; Whittaker Chambers, Hiss’s accuser; Noel Field, an American with a convoluted history of Communist and Soviet espionage associations who spent many years in solitary confinement in Communist Hungary; and Alexander Vassiliev, a former KGB officer and journalist who had access to Soviet intelligence files in the mid-1990s.

Here, we will look at how different interpreters in the last two decades have sifted the evidence and handled the story. First, there was the Hungarian historian Maria Schmidt who gained access to files on Noel Field in the early 1990s and said they indicated that Hiss had been a spy. Then there was Alexander Vassiliev, a former KGB officer and journalist, whose notes on the KGB foreign intelligence documents he saw in mid-1990s were used as the basis for three different books by American authors: Allen Weinstein’s revised version of his 1978 book Perjury (1997); Weinstein’s later book, The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America – the Stalin Era (1999), which he co-authored with Vassiliev; and John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr’s 2009 book, Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America, they co-authored with Vassiliev. These books must be compared to a draft that Vassiliev himself wrote in 1996, while he was working with Weinstein, entitled The Sources in Washington.

At the end of the day, it is up to the reader to decide what part of the record, if any, is true.

See also “Dinner Party” at the Fields’ I: Whittaker Chambers’s and Hede Massing’s Accounts (1939-1948)

“Dinner Party” at the Fields’ II: Noel Field’s Account, with additional comments by Hede Massing and others (1948-1954)

Early 1990s, Budapest, Hungary:

Maria Schmidt, a 34-year-old Hungarian historian, gains access to some part of the Noel Field files at the Hungarian Interior Ministry – and finds statements by Field that seem to directly implicate Alger Hiss in espionage.

October 11, 1992:

Maria Schmidt presents her findings in what she termed Noel Field’s 1954 “pre-release interviews” at a seminar sponsored by New York University’s Institute for the Humanities.

October 15, 1992:

In an Op-ed piece in the New York Times, writer Sam Tanenhaus claims that Maria Schmidt’s findings contain “unimpeachable” evidence that will “seal the case against Alger Hiss.”

April 1993, New York:

Sam Tanenhaus publishes the story of Maria Schmidt’s findings in an article in Commentary magazine.

November 8, 1993, New York:

Lawyer Ethan Klingsberg disputes Maria Schmidt’s reading of Noel Field’s Hungarian dossier in an article in the Nation magazine – based upon his reading of the same dossier in Budapest.

1994-1995,  Moscow:

Alexander Vassiliev, a former KGB officer and journalist, gains access to some of the records of the KGB foreign intelligence. He makes handwritten notes and writes draft chapters for what was at the time planned as a Russian-American collaborative book project on the history of Soviet espionage in the United States in the Stalin era.

1997, United States:

American writer Allen Weinstein publishes the second edition of Perjury, his 1978 book about the Hiss-Chambers case – incorporating notes made in 1994 by Alexander Vassiliev, a former KGB officer and journalist, on KGB foreign intelligence files. The revised edition of Weinstein’s Perjury cites a somewhat confusing discussion by Soviet operatives about Alger Hiss approaching Noel Field to recruit him for the Communist cause, and the approach’s aftermath. As cited by Weinstein, the episode looks like a total dating confusion – either through Weinstein’s inaccuracy or through some original confusion at the source. But nobody seems to notice.

1999, United States – The Haunted Wood evidence:

Practically the same account appears in The Haunted Wood – a book by Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, which is based on Vassiliev’s research in KGB foreign intelligence files. Here too, the narrative is a total dating and factual confusion – due either to Weinstein’s carelessness or to some original confusion at the source. Again, nobody seems to notice.

Most notably, Weinstein and Vassiliev say the “dinner party” episode took place at some time during the winter of 1935-1936 – the same dating that  Hede Massing gave when she broke the story in her December 7, 1948 interview with the FBI. (In her December 8, 1948 testimony to the grand jury, she gave an alternative dating as “the winter of 1934-1935” – and kept to that earlier dating in her testimony at Hiss’ second perjury trial.)

Neither the FBI and the grand jury, in 1948, nor Weinstein, in the 1990s, bothered to check the U.S. State Department records for Noel Field’s itinerary – to see that both dates were impossible. In October 1934, Noel Field sailed for London as secretary for the U.S. delegation to the London Naval Limitation Conference – to return to Washington only sometime in January of 1935. In late November of 1935, he sailed for London again– to spend the period from December 1935 through March of 1936 as technical secretary to the U.S. delegation at the second Naval Limitation Conference. Both in 1934-1935 and in 1935-1936, Herta Field accompanied her husband. ¹

Weinstein simply ignored the many inconsistencies in the fragments he cited.

1999, United States – Hiss Case grand jury transcripts unsealed:

In October 1999, the Hiss Case grand jury transcripts are finally unsealed – to reveal Hede Massing’s December 8, 1948 testimony about her “dinner party” story.

Summer 2005, New York:

Jeff Kisseloff, New York writer and managing editor of the Alger Hiss website, obtains Hede Massing’s FBI file in response to his FOIA request. Among the 800+ pages in the file, he discovers a record of Massing’s interview with the FBI agents on December 7, 1948 – the first time that she told her story of her encounter with Alger Hiss at the Fields’ apartment  in Washington, D.C.

2005, Berlin – Der Fall Noel Field published:

A comprehensive compilation of Noel Field documentation from the archives of Hungary and other Eastern and Central European countries is published in Germany – providing easier access to the Noel Field corpus of documentation. ²

May 2007, Hoover Archives, Stanford University, California:

Jeff Kisseloff discoveres a 240-page Russian manuscript in the recently unsealed Allen Weinstein Papers at the Hoover Institution Archives, which I identify as Alexander Vassiliev’s draft of a considerable part of The Haunted Wood.  The manuscript is called The Sources in Washington. At long last, we see a Russian original of the confusing “dinner party” story presented in the second edition of Weinstein’s Perjury and later in The Haunted Wood.

Click here to compare accounts of the so-called “dinner party at the Fields’ ” episode in The Haunted Wood and in Vassiliev’s Sources in Washington draft manuscript.

[In Vassiliev’s account  based on his reading of a file of Laurence Duggan, another State Department official and Noel Field’s friend, the story appears as part of a discussion of security problems which the NKVD “illegal” operatives encountered while cultivating Duggan as a recruitment prospect. In the absence of Vassiliev’s notes on any primary source file (the most logical would have been the personal files of Noel Field or Hede Massing, which Vassiliev apparently did not see), we are left with second-hand sources once or twice removed.

That is, we learn about Noel Field’s alleged encounter with Alger Hiss not from any contemporary account by Field himself, but from an ex post facto account that Hede Massing (at that time still known under the name of Gumperz and referred to as “Redhead”) wrote for her Soviet handlers. We are also dealing with the Soviet New York “illegals”’ reports to Moscow Center or with the Center’s messages to its New York field station – again, mostly sourced to Hede Massing’s account of the events. This makes Vassiliev’s notes on the episode not just a second-hand source (which all Vassiliev’ s notes are, by virtue of being third-party notes and not Xerox copies), but a second-hand source once or even twice removed. To any trained historian, a long transmission line like this is about as reliable as a game of telephone.

In addition to this probably garbled transmission line, a careful content analysis of Vassiliev’s notes on the_„episode suggests some confusion – if not deliberate misleading – by the source, that is, “Redhead”, or Hede Massing.

Vassiliev’s Russian account is clear that “Redhead”’s memo was written in April 1936 – based on a story that Noel Field “told her a day before his departure to Europe.” Noel and Herta Field left for the League of Nations in Geneva, Switzerland around mid-April, 1936, after a brief stay in Washington, D.C. following their return from London around April 1. This provides the time-frame for Vassiliev’s account on “Redhead”’s April 1936 memo. According to it, Field tells to the “Redhead” that Alger Hiss has attempted to solicit from Field “a report on the London conference.” This appeal takes place “about a week before his [Noel’s] departure from Washington.” This could only refer to Field’s departure for the League of Nations in Geneva in April 1936, and not his previous departure for the Second Conference on the Limitation of Naval Armament in London in late November, 1935, because in the same memo Field is reported to say to Hiss “that he had already reported on a conference.” ³

This statement is followed by the “Redhead”’s remark: “When Alger, whom, as you probably remember, I had met through “Ernst”[LINK to “Ernst”] [that is Field]…”

Vassiliev’s account of  “Redhead”’s April 1936 memo provide no leads to the dating of that earlier meeting between the “Redhead” and Hiss. “Redhead”’s wording – “as you probably remember” – does not suggest that the alleged meeting could have happened within the brief time span between Noel Field’s arrival from London around April 1 and his subsequent departure for Geneva.

A tentative dating is suggested in the April 26, 1936 report to Moscow by the “Redhead”’s Soviet handler, Boris Bazarov, that was apparently sent to Moscow along with her memo. Vassiliev quotes Bazarov informing Moscow that “Redhead and Hiss… got exposed to each other more than two months ago” – thus circumstantially dating the meeting some time in February of the same year.

In Vassiliev’s account of the follow-up communiqués between Moscow Center and its New York operatives, the above-mentioned meeting between the “Redhead” and Hiss is referred to as something that had happened a rather long time ago.

In its May 3, 1936, response to “Redhead”’s memo, Moscow Center expressed its puzzlement at “the motives behind ‘Redhead’’s meeting with Hiss,” who by that time appeared under the cover name “Jurist.” Moreover, it was the Center’s understanding that the meeting had taken place after its instruction that “Jurist” was connected with the “neighbors”, that is, Soviet military intelligence, and had to be kept at a distance. For any such “hands off” instruction to be sent, there should have been some previous report from the field operatives, which would then be followed with an inquiry sent to the sister service. All this may have requested more time than Noel Field’s brief stay in Washington in April 1936 would have allowed.

The plot thickens when we read Vassiliev’s account of the response to Moscow’s May 3 communiqué, which was written on May 18 by another “Redhead”’s handler in the United States, Iskhak Akhmerov [emphasis added]:

“‘Redhead’ had met ‘Jurist’ only once throughout all the time of her stay in this country, and this took place in winter. She went to that meeting with c.[omrade] Nord’s knowledge. After you had informed us that he had a contact [“svyaz’] with the neighbors, we did not see him, that is ‘Jurist’….”  ⁴

Since, as we have already seen, the Fields were in London from late November 1935 till the end of March 1936, there could be no meeting at the Field’s apartment – as Hede Massing used to describe her only encounter with Hiss –in the winter of 1935-1936. As to the winter of 1934-1935, on April 26, 1936, Bazarov was apparently referring to a meeting that took place only “more than two months” before that date.

How could the two Soviet “illegal” operatives happen to be so inaccurate in their reporting to Moscow? The reason for their dating disconnect can only be Hede Massing’s fuzzy reporting. According to her testimony to the grand jury on December 8, 1948, Hede Massing came to the United States in October 1933. She “could not exactly establish the date” when she “had met Noel Field” for the first time, hesitating between 1934 and 1935, but Noel Field definitely dated their initial meeting “in the year of 1934.” ⁵

–  In her April 1936 memo, Massing dated the initial encounter between Hiss and Field as taking place “approximately a week before” Field’s “departure for Europe,” which, as we have ascertained earlier, could only be fot the League of Nations in Geneva. ⁶ However, Field himself cited different timing for his encounter with Hiss that should have logically preceded the follow up Massing-Hiss meeting.

As discussed in the “Dinner Party” at the Fields’ II (Noel Field’s Account, July 6, 1954, Budapest), Field told his Hungarian interrogators that he first “broke discipline” and revealed himself to Alger Hiss “approximately in the summer of 1935” – and subsequently moved the date two months forward to the fall of the same year. ⁷ Both dates leave sufficient time for this encounter between Field and Hiss to have taken place before Field sailed for Britain on or just after November 29, but leave no chance of a follow up winter Hiss-Massing meeting. Nor do they explain Massing’s apparent dating of Hiss’s approach to Field as some time in April 1936.

The dating morass gets thicker when we go back to Hede Massing’s own description of the circumstances under which she first heard from Noel Field that a friend of his, Alger Hiss, was “trying to win him” [recruit him for the Soviet cause]. On December 8, 1948, Hede Massing told the grand jury that she could “remember exactly when it was” – meaning “not the date, but the occasion, the situation.” The “occasion” was “on a boat with the Fields on the river… in Washington,” when Field’s wife Herta went swimming while Hede and Noel “had this discussion.” ⁸ A boat trip and swimming fit with Field’s “summer of 1935” dating and may be O.K. for a nice early fall weekend, too. But this more certain dating is a total disconnect with Hede Massing’s and her Soviet handlers’ reporting in the spring of 1936.

In her testimony at the second Hiss trial (1949-50) and then in her 1951 memoir, This Deception, Hede Massing expanded on her early testimony, adding that she met Hiss on instructions from her Soviet handler, “Boris” (Boris Bazarov) – and dating her meeting with Hiss at Noel Field’s apartment in the fall of 1935. Noel Field had never mentioned any meeting between Hede Massing and Alger Hiss subsequent to the one-on-one encounter he described between himself and Hiss. Moreover, he told his Hungarian interrogators in 1954 that he never told Alger Hiss anything about his Communist contacts, saying, verbatim: “Of course, I did not tell Hiss anything about the Massings.” ⁹ This, by implication, rules out any subsequent meeting between Hiss and Hede Massing – whether “in the fall,” “in winter” or at any other time.

One may ask if this evidence of Noel Field’s should be dismissed, since it was given while still in solitary confinement and under the duress of a series of 25 interrogations. But this part of Field’s story looks no less – and no more – credible than the other part of his story about “compromising himself” to Hiss. One must either believe his story as a whole – or dismiss it altogether. If we believe Field, then by implication the story of Hede Massing’s encounter with Alger Hiss would be the fruit of the imagination of an exalted and impetuous woman with an obvious inclination to add drama to her stories – a person, as her Soviet handlers described her, “who was unable to educate not only an agent, but [even] herself.” ¹⁰ As for the “dinner party” dialogue attributed to Hiss and Massing, which has for decades been part of many accounts of the Alger Hiss case, it is probably best left for history’s dustbin.

At the end of the day, we are left with two stories: one as it appears in Vassiliev’s notes on NKVD intelligence communiqués, at least part of which is contaminated at the source and part possibly garbled in the transmission process; and another as told by a man who had spent more than five years in solitary confinement, under the duress of a long series of interrogations – at pains to prove his alibi against charges of being an American spy. From the standpoint of the analysis of historical sources, both accounts are on too shaky ground for jumping to any conclusions, leaving the case open until there are further disclosures from Soviet intelligence annals.

May, 2009:

The Yale University Press releases  Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America, by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr and Alexander Vassiliev, based on a second use of Vassiliev’s notes from the mid-1990s. Simultaneously, Vassiliev’ s notebooks with his hand-written notes are posted on the website of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. ¹¹

To Haynes and Klehr, Vassiliev’s American co-authors, Vassiliev‘s “notebooks offer contemporaneous KGB documentation that cor­roborates all of the main elements of the story” that was provided in the late 1940s and early 1950s by Hede Massing, Noel Field  and Whittaker Chambers, whom the two historians term “three participants in this episode” without any qualification. ¹² Strictly speaking, only Noel Field was a direct participant, with Hede Massing, who probably never met with Hiss at all, as a second-hand source. As for Chambers, it is difficult to determine the degree of his personal knowledge of the episode in the absence of any independent documentary corroboration,

On careful reading, Vassiliev’s notes are nothing like a “contemporaneous documentation,” as his co-authors would have it, but rather seem to be an ex post facto discussion of certain  earlier reports, mostly sourced to such an unreliable witness as Hede Massing. Haynes and Klehr apparently did not bother to carefully correlate the conflicting pieces of evidence in Vassiliev’s notes themselves, nor to crosscheck them with either the testimony given by Hede Massing in 1949-1950 or with exactly what Noel Field said and wrote in 1954 – not to mention checking Noel Field’s itinerary in 1935 and 1936. As a result, their assertions fall apart upon crosschecking.

If we are to believe Haynes and Klehr, “the material” in Vassiliev’s notebooks offered “new details about Hiss’s relationship with Soviet intelligence.” However, on crosschecking, Vassiliev’s notes have turned out to be not much different from the account that Vassiliev submitted to his first co-author, Allen Weinstein, in 1996, which was the basis for the stories Weinstein told, first, in his revised edition of Perjury (1997), and then, in The Haunted Wood (1999).

Click here to compare the versions of this material as found in Vassiliev’s Yellow Notebook # 2 and in his draft manuscript, The Sources in Washington.

Click here to compare Allen Weinstein’s account of this episode in The Haunted Wood with its appearance in Vassiliev’s Russian manuscript, The Sources in Washington.

Limiting themselves to the plain meaning of Vassiliev’s notes on the reported meeting between Hiss and Field, Haynes and Klehr simply recount the Hiss-Field encounter thus: “Hiss, … approached his friend Noel Field in early 1936” in an attempt “to recruit him for his GRU-linked apparatus.” ¹³ As ascertained above, Noel Field could not have been approached “in early 1936” for the simple reason that he was continuously in London (except for Christmas, which he spent in Switzerland) until about April 1, 1936. Had they done that easy crosschecking, Haynes and Klehr would not have simply quoted Boris Bazarov writing to Moscow Center on April 26, 1936, that “Redhead and Hiss… got exposed to each other” “more than a couple of months ago” ¹⁴ – that is, during the time when Field was continuously in London.

In the same “plain reading” mode, Haynes and Klehr make an awkward attempt to validate Hede Massing’s story of her meeting with Hiss at the Fields’ apartment:

Hede Massing in testimony at the second Hiss trial (1949-50) and in her 1951 memoir related that Boris Bazarov, her KGB superior, in­structed her to meet with Hiss and evaluate him. Massing stated that in the fall of 1935 she met Hiss at Noel Field’s apartment, a meeting con­firmed in Akhmerov’s 1936 report above. She wrote that after dinner she and Hiss bantered about whose apparatus Field would join; neither one admitted which organization employed them. … Whittaker Chambers also testified about the incident at the Hiss trials and in his memoir, stating that Hiss had reported his meeting with Massing (confirming Akhmerov’s prediction to Moscow that Hiss “no doubt informed his superiors about the meeting”)… ¹⁵

As indicated above, Akhmerov’s May 18, 1936 report does not “confirm” anything, since it – improbably – dates the Massing-Hiss alleged meeting as “winter.”  As for Chambers, I have not seen anywhere that Chambers “testified about the incident at the Hiss trials.”

CLICK HERE to recall how Chambers described the incident in the expanded version of his stories in Witness. (“1952: United States”)

What is important here is that Chambers was clear that he had not heard about Hede Gumperz (Massing) from Alger Hiss. In Chambers’s account, after Alger Hiss “reported” to him “that Noel Field claimed to be connected with “another apparatus,” he queried J. Peters, a CPUSA functionary who at the time served as a liaison with the

Communist so-called “informational groups” in Washington, D.C.:

“It is probably the apparatus of Hede Gumperz” [Hede Massing], he said. I had never heard of Hede Gumperz. I asked who she was. “Oh, you know,” said Peters – a stock answer when no more will be said. …

Chambers was also clear that he had heard about the “dinner party” (which he described as a “supper”) story only from Hede Massing’s testimony at the Hiss second perjury trial – as well as from her This Deception book that was published in 1951. ¹⁶

It is difficult to prove (or disprove) that the story Chambers tells here was his own second-hand account of what he had once heard from Alger Hiss. Perhaps it was a simple reiteration of accounts Hede Massing had given earlier, at Hiss’s second perjury trial and in her book, which Chambers saw about a year before his own book, Witness, came out in print. At any rate, a report by Hiss on a meeting with Massing does not seem to be part of Chambers’s story. As for Field, he was clear, in 1954, as we have noted earlier, that back in the 1930s he knew nothing about Chambers, and only learned about him from the newspapers he read in Europe from 1948 to May, 1949, before his arrest.

Among other oddities in Haynes and Klehr’s reading of Vassiliev’s notes on the incident is their discovery of Alger Hiss’s “GRU cover name”:

A Moscow Center annotation on the letter specified Hiss’s cover name, “A. Hiss—‘Jurist,’” and noted that Hiss was an attorney in Washington. Likely “Jurist” was Hiss’s GRU cover name because the KGB had little reason to provide its own for someone who reported to GRU. ¹⁷

First, at that point the New York “illegals,” Bazarov and Akhmerov, were not themselves sure if Hiss “reported” to the military neighbors or to the “fraternal” (a cover name for the CPUSA. Second, NKVD foreign intelligence (there was no KGB until 1954) would have had no means of learning a cover name used by their military neighbors (at that time known as the RU, or Intelligence Directorate). Even if the foreign intelligence leadership in Moscow had queried the leadership of the sister service, the only report they would have received would have been whether a certain individual were an agent or, more generally, belonged to their sphere of interest. “Jurist” was definitely a cover name assigned by NKVD operatives for the purpose of their own operational correspondence.

In their effort to prove that all the existing evidence fits together nicely, with no room left for any confusion or uncertainty, Haynes and Klehr simply misread (or misrepresent?) the evidence. We have already seen that the context for Noel Field’s 1954 evidence was a “renewed investigation” into his case on charges of spying for the Americans. True, the investigation began more than a year after Stalin’s death, when the process of rehabilitating the victims of Stalinist terror was underway in the Soviet Union and had spread to Eastern Europe. Still, Noel Field’s interrogation records reveal that he had a grueling experience, often under great emotional pressure: throughout all those months, he was still in solitary confinement and had no contact with the outside world or even with his wife, Herta, who was confined in the same building.

Here is how Field’s Hungarian interrogators themselves described these circumstances – almost four months into the interrogation process:

… On the 15^th of June 1954, we began the renewed investigation in the case of Noel H. Field and Herta K. Field and their systematic interrogation. Field is suspected by us of the following offences:

a) … From 1941 to 1947, he had close contact to Allen Dulles and was spying during this time for American intelligence.

b) After the end of the Second World War he was spying in the People’s Republic of Poland and in Czechoslovakia for the Americans. ¹⁸

In the course of that investigation, Noel Field was subjected to 25 interrogations and was made to write several detailed personal histories and many memos in answer to his interrogators’ additional questions. Even after 23 interrogations, Hungarian security officers thought “it necessary to employ a cell agent” (that is, a stool pigeon) “to unmask the hostile activities of Noel Field,” who “emphatically denies having been a recruited agent of the American intelligence” and, instead, “emphasizes that he is a Communist and worked for the Communist cause.” ¹⁹

Haynes and Klehr’s description of the rehabilitation process is in stark contrast to Hungarian accounts of Field’s continuing psychological ordeal:

After Stalin’s death in early 1953, East European Communist authorities sought to undo the damage done to their regimes by the absurd purge by rehabilitating those falsely accused. Hungarian security police (and later the security authorities of other East European Communist regimes) asked Field, in prison in the Hungarian People’s Republic, to provide an uncoerced, accurate account of his activities to assist not only in his own rehabilitation but also that of those falsely accused in his ear­lier confessions…. The transcripts of his rehabilitation interviews were not made public until the 1990s, … ²⁰

Haynes and Klehr definitely did not take the trouble to read through the hundreds of pages of Noel Field‘s 1954 Hungarian dossier, which, in addition to Hungarian, is available only in German. Instead, they simply concur with Hungarian historian Maria Schmidt:

Field’s secret testimony conformed to Massing’s and Chambers’s testi­mony at the Hiss trials and in their memoirs, as well as the documents quoted in Vassiliev’s notebooks, with the exception that Field in 1954 re­membered Hiss’s approach having been in 1935 while the documents demonstrate that it was early 1936. ²¹

It is unnecessary to repeat that, rather than “demonstrate” anything, the documents on which Vassiliev took notes regarding the so-called “dinner party at the Fields” story only contribute to the existing confusion.

“Dinner Party” at the Fields’ I: Whittaker Chambers’s and Hede Massing’s Accounts (1939-1948)

“Dinner Party” at the Fields’ II: Noel Field’s Account, with additional comments by Hede Massing and others (1948-1954)