Today , January 21, 2007, is the 57th anniversary of George Orwell's death and I want to take this opportunity to point out a coincidence I noticed a couple of years ago. It turns out that Alger Hiss - one of President Roosevelt's advisors and the first Secretary General of the United Nations - was found guilty of being a Communist spy and thrown into prison on the same day Orwell died - January 21, 1950.

Orwell, one of Communism's greatest enemies, would have been pleased about that. See ORWELL'S CRYPTO-COMMIE LIST

I don't have time right now to go into the whole story of Alger Hiss and so instead will just quote from where I first noticed the date. It's from a glossy booklet entitled SCANDALS: GRIPPING ACCOUNTS I bought in England. It has good overviews and pictures of conspiratorial world events, including the following chapter on Alger Hiss. ~ Jackie Jura

In 1947 Alger Hiss was an ascending star. The Harvard graduate was a well-educated and talented lawyer and negotiator who had been closely identified with Franklin Roosevelt's "New Deal" in the 1930s. Experience in international diplomacy had brought him the honour of temporary secretary-generalship of the United Nations, and he had just become president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Suddenly it was claimed that this talented and respected man was a spy, sending the Russians sensitive information from the hightest levels of American politics. The allegations came from the mouth of Whittaker Chambers, a senior editor of Time magazine, and a tortured ex-communist eager to expose those with whom he had plotted in his past. Chambers was testifying before Senator Joe McCarthy's House Un-American Activities (HUAC). This was the Republican anti-communist witch-hunting committee which claimed numerous actors, politicians and officials were secretly communist plotters. These damaging allegations were often extracted from colleagues under investigation who found it expedient to name a few names to divert the spotlight away from themselves....

Chamber's version of events was that Hiss and several other named people were members of a communist group during the 1930s. This was a particularly damaging allegation to someone in Hiss's position, and the lawyer sued the journalist for libel.

Chambers now expanded his claims by saying that Hiss had acted as a spy for the Russians. According to him, Hiss had brought State Department documents home, had them re-typed by his wife, and passed these copies to Chambers while the originals were returned. Chambers had photographed the papers and sent them to a Russian agent....

Further evidence was produced by Chambers after a visit to his Maryland farm, when he returned to HUAC with 35mm film stored, he claimed, in a hollowed-out-pumpkin. On the film were various State Department documents. Both men were now called before a grand jury investigating these claims of espionage....

If Hiss was a spy, the repercussions were endless. He had attended the post-war Yalta Conference in 1945, rubbing shoulders with Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill. The same year he was made director of the office of special political affairs, responsible for forumlating plans for the United Nations and other aspects of the peace settlement. The Russians would have benefited enormously from tip-offs about American thinking at this time, and from the other inside information that passed across Hiss's desk. Now the Cold War had set in and America feared none more than the communists, and here was an Ivy League man who had helped the enemy. If this was true, it was a major scandal.

A key piece of evidence was the typewriter on which Mrs Hiss was said to have typed the documents. The prosecution produced forensic evidence showing it was the machine on which the copies produced by Chambers were typed....

The jury at the first trial failed to reach a verdict, but a second trial found Hiss guilty on 21 January 1950. He received a five-year sentence. Alger Hiss was released on 27 November 1954, and has protested his innocence ever since.

If he was guilty, he paid a very low price for someone who had given state secrets to a foreign power. There are those...who believe Hiss was guilty, and that Chambers was an American hero. Indeed, in 1984 President Reagan posthumously awarded Whittaker Chambers with the Medal of Freedom, saying the ex-communist "personified the mystery of human redemption in the face of evil and suffering"....

...Most historians now accept that Alger Hiss fed secrets to Soviet agents...Hiss was the elegant diplomat who sat behind President Franklin Roosevelt at his Yalta meeting with Stalin and managed the conferences that created the United Nations.

In 1948 his once warm friend Whittaker Chambers called him a Communist before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. The accused, Hiss, was a suave, handsome and highly credentialed government official; Whittaker, the accuser, was a fat, rumpled ex-Communist with bad teeth and a gnarled personality. Hiss haughtily dared Chambers to repeat his charge in a legally unprotected setting, never suspecting that Chambers possessed proof of their sying. But Chambers promptly complied and Hiss was compelled to sue for libel, forcing the accuser to present evidence. Chambers confessed to previously being a spy and produced copies of documents that he had stashed away 10 years earlier to protect himself against retribution by Stalin's agents. The documents had provably crossed Hiss's desk at the State Department and been copied on Hiss's typewriter, by his wife, Priscilla. The evidence prevailed at a second trial.

"If Hiss had disappeared after 44 months in prison", says author Edward White, "he would have been just one other undercover agent who had lied, betrayed his country and gotten caught". But steered by Hiss, his loyal son, Tony, and ardent supporters, undeterred even by damning discoveries in Soviet communications, Hiss sold himself to gullible college audiences. He acquired credibility as his pursuers, including Joseph McCarthy, lost theirs. By the time of his death in 1996, Hiss had regained much of his footing, including his government pension and even his license to practice law in Massachusetts....

Hiss: A New book finds him Guilty as Charged. Time, Feb 1978
...As evidence, Chambers produced four memorandums in Hiss's handwriting and 65 pages of retyped State Department documents, all but one of them undeniably produced on Hiss's old Woodstock typewriter. A few weeks later, Chambers led HUAC investigators to a hollowed-out pumpkin, where he had hidden five rolls of film, two of them containing photographs of confidential Government dispatches that he said had been given to him by Hiss....

*USA President Harry Truman receives menorah from State of Isreal, 1948

George Orwell dies ("1984" was written in between periods spent in hospital). BBC, Jan 21, 1950-2007

VISITING ORWELL'S HOSPITAL (...As we walked away from the hospital toward our next destination we passed a bookstore on the corner. There, on a pedestal in the front window, was a biography of Vladimir Lenin, with a picture of his face on the front cover. More symbolism. Where freedom dies, slavery thrives.)

ORWELL NOT A FABIAN and ATOMIC BOMB SCIENTIST COMMUNIST and SOVIET DEFECTOR IGOR GOUZENKO and STALIN'S LIAR IN NEW YORK and S0LZHENITSYN WARNS AMERICA

MCCARTHY'S UN THOUGHTS and MCCARTHY GLIMPSED VISCIOUS TRUTH and COMMUNISTS COINED MCCARTHYISM and JFK DEFENDS PATRIOT MCCARTHY and HEROES HUEY LONG & JOE MCCARTHY

CORPORATE COMMUNISM and GOLDSTEIN'S OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM and BIG BROTHER SYMBOLISM

1.Winston's Diary and 35.The Brotherhood and 2.Big Brother and 5.Pyramidal New World Order and 6.Superstates and 7.Systems of Thought and 9.Keeping Masses Down