Alger Hiss

Christina Shelton

• 17 april 2012
• 9781451655452

Samenvatting:

During the late 1940s, a high-level State Department official named Alger Hiss was accused of spying for the Soviet Union by a senior editor of Time magazine. For two years, the political drama of the Hiss trials made headlines throughout the country. But to most people today, the Hiss case is unfamiliar. Now, retired intelligence analyst Christina Shelton makes this fascinating story accessible, and in the same tradition as New Deal or Raw Deal?, makes a key part of history relevant.



Shelton views the Hiss story as much more than a spy case; she goes beyond the case itself, taking it to a much larger level. She highlights the many missed opportunities and poor judgments in Hiss"s case, and discusses them in the context of wide-scale Soviet infiltration and espionage. Shelton explains that the Hiss story represents a huge American counterintelligence analytic failure and provides details on how our country"s academia still defend Hiss and other malcontents from the era. Alger Hiss remains a symbol, an iconic figure of the left—more concerned about what he stood for rather than what he did—which is still a hot topic in politics today.