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Four years after Chambers first spoke to him, Berle turned his notes over to the Department of Justice. FBI agents called on Chambers. A State Department security officer, Ray Murphy, also interviewed him. Chambers told him his story, stating that "much confidential material" had been disclosed by a number of men in Government, among them Alger Hiss.
Persistent Suspicion. Still no action was taken on the charge made by Chambers. By 1946 Alger Hiss had reached a position of some eminence in the Department of State. He had served as executive secretary of the Dumbarton Oaks Conference, as a technical adviser at the Yalta Conference and as secretary general of the founding convention of U.N. Suspicion had brushed him, but the only basis for it was the unsubstantiated word of Chambers.
Secretary of State James Byrnes heard the disturbing rumor that some Congressmen were going to denounce Hiss as a Communist from the floor of the House. Byrnes felt constrained to ask Hiss what about it. When Hiss told him flatly that he was not a Communist, Byrnes advised him to go directly to the FBI and lay the story to rest. Hiss went to the FBI, which conducted a cursory interview.
Nothing came of it, but still the story was not laid to rest. In 1946 Hiss was elected the $20,000-a-year president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a job held previously by only two men, Elihu Root and Nicholas Murray Butler. The persistent whisper of Hiss's possible Communist affiliations prompted Carnegie Chairman John Foster Dulles to discuss the matter with him. But Hiss satisfied Dulles that there was nothing to it, and assumed office. A few months later, FBI agents called on Hiss. They asked him if he had ever heard of Whittaker Chambers. He had never heard of him,
Hiss said. There the situation rested until 1948.
Eventual Objective. In the spring of 1948 Thomas Donegan, a special assistant to the Attorney General, spread before a federal grand jury in New York an FBI report on Alger Hiss.