Laurence Duggan

A State Department employee and a friend of Alger Hiss, Duggan was the subject of a passing accusation by Whittaker Chambers in his 1939 conversation with Adolf A. Berle (Berle's notes say "Duggan - cp?").

Chambers' friend, Isaac Don Levine, testified before HUAC on December 8, 1948 that Chambers had told Berle that Duggan had passed on classified information. Berle denied this. (Levine said the same thing about Hiss, and this was also contradicted by Berle.) Less than two weeks later, Duggan fell out of a window and died (there was no evidence of suicide or murder). Immediately after his death, HUAC released Levine's testimony, and committee member Karl Mundt said they would release names of others "as they jump out of windows." The resulting uproar from that comment forced Nixon and Mundt (and the Attorney General) to say there was no evidence of espionage against Duggan. 

Duggan was interviewed by the FBI on December 10, 1948. He said he knew Hiss but had no reason to suspect he was a Communist. He said in 1937 or 1938 he had been approached by Henry Collins to do some work on behalf of the Communists, but he had refused and the matter was dropped.