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The Documents. In an open hearing before the committee he denied that he had known that Crosley was a Communist, or that he, Hiss, had any Communist connections, and challenged Chambers to make his charges outside of the hearing room where he could be sued. Chambers said flatly: "Mr. Hiss is lying." Chambers had no personal grudge, he said. "Mr. Hiss represents the concealed enemy against which we are all fighting. I have testified against him with remorse and pity." Two nights later Chambers repeated his charges over the radio. A month later Hiss brought a $50,000 (later increased to $75,000) suit against Chambers for libel. The case vanished briefly behind the closed doors of the New York grand jury, where Chambers appeared and seven times denied that any actual espionage had been involved; behind the closed doors of Hiss's lawyer's office in Baltimore, where Chambers began making pre-trial depositions in the libel suit.
One night Chambers left one of these meetings and went home to his Westminster, Md. farm convinced that "Hiss was determined to destroy me—and my wife, if possible." From the house of a relative in Brooklyn, he recovered a dusty manila envelope which had been hidden there for ten years. He had given it to the relative in 1938 when he broke from the party, with instructions to open it if anything should happen to him or his wife, Esther. In the envelope were 43 typed copies of State Department documents and four memoranda in Alger Hiss's handwriting. Several nights later, from a hollowed-out pumpkin on his farm where he had hidden them, Chambers produced five rolls of microfilm. When developed, they produced a three-ft. stack of highly confidential Government dispatches which Chambers said Hiss had given him.
The Indictment. Over this monumental evidence Chambers and Hiss faced each other. Chambers, after perjuring himself many times, now admitted everything.
From 1932 to 1938, he said, he had had a regular flow of documents from Communist sympathizers not only in the Department of State but in the Bureau of Standards, the Navy and at the Aberdeen Proving Ground. He had had them photo graphed on microfilm and had turned over the films to the Soviet spy apparatus. He said he had had two sources in the State Department: one, it developed later, was Henry Julian Wadleigh; the other, he said, was Alger Hiss.
Chambers resigned from TIME, stating: "When TIME hired me in 1939, its editors knew that I was an ex-Communist; they did not know that espionage was involved . . ." He was compelled now to "stand up" and tell the facts. "I cannot share this indispensable ordeal with anyone." He prepared himself to face the consequences.
Alger Hiss also resigned his Carnegie post, although the trustees declined to accept his resignation until some six months later. Either he had been criminally maligned, or he was carrying a terrifying burden of concealed guilt—in which case he was facing an ordeal even more unnerving than Chambers'.
He still admitted only to passing acquaintance with Chambers (or Crosley, as he still insisted). He was called back before the grand jury and asked two questions :