John Lowenthal

John Lowenthal (1925–2003) was a 20th-century American lawyer, civil servant, law professor, and documentary filmmaker, who defended the name and reputation of family friend Alger Hiss almost all his life.

[1][5] In the 1970s, after the release of suppressed FBI documents about the case, Lowenthal, by then a Rutgers University law professor, published an analysis of what this new evidence revealed.

Russian archivists responded by reviewing their files, and in late 1992 reported back that they had found no evidence Hiss ever engaged in espionage for the Soviet Union nor that he was a member of the Communist Party.

In 2007, Svetlana Chervonnaya, a Russian researcher who had been studying Soviet archives since the early 1990s, argued that based on documents she reviewed, Hiss was not implicated in spying.

[14] In May 2009, at a conference hosted by the Wilson Center, Mark Kramer, director of Cold War Studies at Harvard University at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, stated that he did not "trust a word [Kobyakov] says.

"[15] At the same conference, historian Ronald Radosh reported that while researching the papers of Marshal Voroshilov in Moscow, he and Mary Habeck had encountered two GRU (Soviet military intelligence) files referring to Alger Hiss as "our agent".

(In 2003, U.S. Air Force historian Eduard Mark published a rebuttal, also in Intelligence and National Security that used VENONA 1822 to trace "ALES" as working for State (1945), with relatives (Donald Hiss, brother) also working in the federal government, had been a GRU agent since the mid-1930s (with Whittaker Chambers in the Ware Group, had attended the Yalta Conference, and had returned from travel to the US by 30 March 1945 – all descriptions which fit Alger Hiss.

In January 2003, Frank Cass's lawyers offered Alexander Vassiliev to settle the monetary claim for more than 2,000 British pounds and promised not to republish the John Lowenthal article.