Notes from the underground

For the first time: the only known contemporaneous written record of Whittaker Chambers's thoughts during the trial of Alger Hiss. In 1948, Chambers, a former Communist agent, and a Time magazine editor, fingered Hiss, a senior State Department official, as a Soviet spy - triggering the most famous espionage trial in American history. Ralph de Toledano, the Newsweek reporter covering the Hiss trial (technically for perjury), quickly became close friends with Chambers. The two men began exchanging letters in 1949 and continued for the rest of Chambers's life. Now, in Notes from the…