U.S. ESPIONAGE ALLEGATIONS

Press, Volume LXXXIV, Issue 25678, 15 December 1948, Page 5

U.S. ESPIONAGE ALLEGATIONS

MR HISS OFFERS TO RESIGN POST MR CHAMBERS GIVES UP “TIME” EDITORSHIP (Rec. 8 P. 11.) NEW YORK, Dec. 13. Mr Alger Hiss to-day tendered his resignation from his 20,000 dollars a year post as president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The trustees decided not to act on the resignation and granted Mr Hiss three months’ leave of absence. Mr Hiss was accused by the former Communist, Mr Whittaker Chambers, of passing on State Department documents to Chambers while Hiss was employed in the State Department. Mr Chambers resigned last week from a senior editorship with “Time” magazine, at a salary 30,000 dollars a year. The secret Federal Grand Jury investigation continued to-day, when William Ward Pigman. a former Bureau of Standards employee, gave evidence that he also had been accused by Chambers of helping to deliver Government documents to Soviet agents. In Washington, the Un-American Activities Committee of the House of Representatives announced that it might ask the chief witnesses in its investigation to take lie-detector tests. Information supplied by Whittaker Chambers was partly responsible for the capture and subsequent execution of a Soviet spy in Britain in 1939, according to a New York “WorldTelegram” interview with Mr Isaac Don Levine, editor of the magazine “Plain Talk.” Mr Levine said that on the basis of information given him by Chambers and General Walter Krivitsky, a former Soviet military intelligence chief in Western Europe who had renounced Stalinism, he had gone to Lord Lothian, the British Ambassador to Washington, to warn him of a Soviet spy’s presence in the code room of the British Cabinet. Mr Levine said he later learned that the spy had been caught and executed. According to Mr Levine, General Krivitsky afterwards went to England to assist the British intelligence and helped to smash a Soviet spy ring. In 1941, General Krivitsky was found dead in a Washington hotel room in circumstances which were never fully explained.