On November 27, 1954, Alger Hiss was released from prison after serving 44 months for perjury stemming from a case where he was accused of being a Soviet spy.

Alger Hiss was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and graduated from Johns Hopkins University and Harvard Law School. Hiss worked with future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter and became secretary for Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. Hiss later joined law firms in Boston and New York. In 1933, Hiss left private practice and entered the public sector as an attorney with the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, a New Deal program set up by President Franklin Roosevelt to assist farmers hurt through the Great Depression.

Hiss went on to work in the Justice Department as a special assistant to the Solicitor General, in the State Department as a special assistant to the Assistant Secretary of State, and as a member of the U.S. delegation to the 1945 Yalta Conference where the “Big Three” (e.g. President Franklin Roosevelt, Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin, and Britain’s Prime Minister Winston Churchill) met to develop a strategy to defeat Hitler, create new boundaries in post World War II Europe, and set up the United Nations. Hiss later served as Secretary-General of the United Nations Conference on International Organization, Director of the Office of Special Political Affairs, and other government roles. In short, Alger Hiss worked in many influential roles throughout the federal government.

In August 1948, Whittaker Chambers, a senior editor at Time magazine and self-proclaimed former Communist Party member, testified before Congress at the House Committee on Un-American Activities that Alger Hiss had been a Soviet spy and member of the Communist Party while Hiss worked for the federal government. Hiss denied all the allegations and filed a defamation lawsuit against Chambers. However, the injury had been done to Hiss and he was indicted by a grand jury.

The Hiss-Chambers issue quickly became a hot topic in America, but President Truman publicly dismissed the case as a “red herring.” Truman stated that the Hiss case was unsubstantiated and simply roused people’s fears of McCarthyism in a Cold-War atmosphere.

Hiss’ first trial resulted in a mistrial. So, Hiss was tried a second time. Hiss was subsequently convicted of perjury in his second trial and sentenced to five years in jail in which he eventually served 44 months. Hiss was released from jail on this day, November 27, 1954.

Whittaker Chambers’ testimony during the Hiss trials was inconclusive at best, as he changed his story several times. Chambers had also committed perjury during his testimony against Hiss, but Chambers was not prosecuted because he was one of the government’s main witnesses.

In 1992, Russian historian, Dmitry A. Volkogonov, stated that Hiss was not a Russian spy. Volkogonov reviewed an extensive collection of official Russian government documents with information on Soviet intelligence operations, including military and KGB files, and found no proof of Hiss’ involvement with the Communist Party.