Alger Hiss was a former State Department officer accused of having supplied the Soviet Union with classified information during World War II. Though Hiss denied the accusations that first became public in 1948, he was convicted of two counts of perjury and he served 44 months in prison. Hiss spent the next 50 years seeking to clear his name, blaming the charges on anti-Communist hysteria. Many people embraced him, while others remained convinced that he had been a Soviet spy. The release of Soviet intelligence records in the 1990s appeared to confirm that Hiss had been a foreign agent.

Hiss was born on November 11, 1904 in Baltimore, Maryland. He graduated from Johns Hopkins University in 1926 and Harvard Law School in 1929. Following graduation, Hiss served as law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. He then worked in the U.S. Departments of Agriculture and Justice from 1933 to 1936. Hiss transferred to the...