A graduate of Johns Hopkins University and Harvard Law School, Hiss joined the U.S. State Department in 1936, and in 1946 he was appointed president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Two years later he was identified as a fellow Soviet spy by Time journalist Whittaker Chambers, but when he sued for libel, he lost the action and was himself imprisoned for libel, serving four years at the Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary in Pennsylvania.
Hiss always protested his innocence but the release of VENONA texts in July 1995 proved that a spy code-named ALES had been recruited by the GRU in 1935, along with much of his family, and supplied information from inside the State Department. Significantly, ALES was described as having attended the Yalta Conference in 1945, and then having traveled on to Moscow.