Annie Lee Moss (August 9, 1905 – January 15, 1996) was a communications clerk in the US Army Signal Corps in the Pentagon and alleged member of the American Communist Party.

Her family moved to North Carolina, where she left high school to work as a domestic servant and a laundress.

[8] The next year, when Moss was promoted to communications clerk at the Pentagon, she was reinvestigated by the Army's Loyalty-Security Screening Board.

[8] In September 1951, the FBI notified the General Accounting Office of evidence Moss had been a member of the Communist Party in the mid-1940s, but at that time the army did not reopen the case.

She reported regularly to the FBI, gave them copies of party documents, membership lists, and detailed accounts of meetings and activities.

McCarthy had made headlines with the case, claiming that Moss was "handling the encoding and decoding of confidential and top-secret messages".

[13] This was incorrect, as the Army pointed out: Moss handled only unreadable, encrypted messages, and had no access to the Pentagon code room.

[13] McCarthy left the hearing room shortly after Moss's testimony began, leaving his chief counsel Roy Cohn to handle the rest of the questioning.

Moss was a small, soft-spoken, and seemingly timid woman who appeared to be a far cry from the intellectuals and political activists who were usually the target of McCarthy's investigations.

When Cohn asserted that he had corroboration of Markward's testimony from a confidential source, Senator John McClellan rebuked him for alluding to evidence he was not actually presenting.

Senator Stuart Symington then suggested that, as with Rob Hall, the case against Moss might be a matter of mistaken identity.

A cameraman from Edward R. Murrow's television show See It Now had filmed the Moss hearing, and the case was the subject of the episode broadcast on March 16, 1954.

[18] The public's response to both shows was highly favorable, and because of them Murrow is widely credited with contributing to the eventual downfall of McCarthy.

[13][25] In 1958, the Subversive Activities Control Board investigated a related case and confirmed Markward's testimony that Moss's name and address had appeared on the Communist party rolls in the mid-1940s.