Category: Social Sciences, Military intelligence
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DIGITAL COLLECTIONS Biography Orlando Metcalfe Poe was born on the family farm in Navarre, Ohio on March 7, 1832. He attended several public schools and two years in Canton Academy in Canton, Ohio before ultimately attaining his dream – attending the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York. Poe excelled particularly in mathematics and graduated sixth in his class of 1856. After graduation, Poe sought to put his engineering skills to work for the military. He moved to Detroit to join the Topographical Engineers. Wartime duties for topographical engineers included surveying positions of the army and its enemy, sketching routes of the enemy and preparing maps of battlefields. In peacetime, they surveyed and charted the nation’s rivers and lakes.
This study concerns the controversial case of Alger Hiss, who was suspected of spying for Soviet Military Intelligence. It does not concern his guilt or innocence but whether the U.S. Army Military Intelligence used an undercover spy-catcher to penetrate Hiss’s defense and to plant evidence forged to secure his perjury conviction. If so, Hiss’s conviction—which ushered in the McCarthy era and thrust Richard Nixon to national prominence—represents an alarming intrusion of our military into civil affairs.
