Alger Hiss was the most famous Soviet agent in the American government during World War II. Because he was Harvard and Johns Hopkins educated — and moved in the right social circles — people refused to believe Hiss could be a Soviet agent. 

Ultimately, he was exposed as a spy, and we now know from the Soviet archives that he (identified by his reported code name “Ales”) received a Soviet medal in February 1945. Some discredit the Hiss-Ales identification, but the FBI and NSA have reported it with near certainty for decades.

Robert Malley may prove to be the Hiss of our time. We don’t know yet whether he was a spy. He has, though, been the lead adviser for the Obama and Biden administrations on the Iranian dictatorship. He is a close friend of the secretary of state, Antony Blinken. They were classmates at École Jeannine Manuel in Paris in the 1970s. 

Mr. Malley is now on leave from the American Department of State while he’s being investigated for reportedly mishandling classified material and potentially hiring influence agents for Iran. Concerns have also been raised that he placed potentially dangerous people in the American government.

If the allegations are true, Mr. Malley has certainly had an impact. No serious analyst questions that Hamas’s biggest funder is the Iranian dictatorship. Further, the Biden administration has been consistently out-of-touch with reality about the Middle East. Consider that days before Hamas’ vicious assault on Israeli civilians, President Biden’s National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan said, “The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.”

How could an American administration be so catastrophically wrong about Hamas’ violent intentions — or capabilities?

Well, over two different administrations, Mr. Malley was in the middle of negotiating with the Iranian dictatorship. Despite constant chants of “death to Israel” and “death to America” from Iran and Hamas, Mr. Malley argued that the regime and its surrogate terrorist organization were really just misunderstood. 

As early as 2008, Mr. Malley said of Hamas: “It’s a mistake to only think of them in terms of their terrorist violence dimension… It has a charity organization, a social branch; it’s not something you can defeat militarily either and people need to understand that.

“There’s so much misinformation about them,” Mr. Malley added. “None of them are crazies. They may do things that we consider to belong to a different realm of rationality, but within their own system it’s often very logical.”

Apparently, from Mr. Malley’s perspective, killing 40 infants in a kibbutz (and beheading some of them) should simply be considered “a different realm of rationality.”

Gabriel Noronha, who served under the former Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, told Lee Smith for Tablet Magazine on October 1 that Mr. Malley and his negotiating team “purposefully funneled billions of dollars to [Iran] through lack of sanctions enforcement and provision of sanctions relief that has given them somewhere between $50 [billion] and $80 billion over the last two and a half years.”

Mr. Smith reported that more files indicate three of Mr. Malley’s top aides were tied to Iran’s Foreign Ministry. Finally, in a September 27 statement, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Michael McCaul, said: 

“Every day, the Rob Malley saga gets more alarming. Not only is the Special Envoy for Iran being investigated by the FBI after having his security clearance suspended, new reports allege an official responsible for supporting his Iran negotiating team was a core member of an Iranian-run influence campaign. Somehow this official was able to get a security clearance in spite of that, and now works in a senior position at the Defense Department.”

Mr. McCaul added that “Between these egregious violations of trust by Biden officials, their mind-boggling $6 billion hostage deal that enriched the largest state-sponsor of terror, and their refusal to enforce sanctions, the Biden administration’s weak Iran policy is emboldening a dangerous adversary. The American people deserve transparency on the Malley saga immediately.”

Mr. McCaul is right. The Congress must find the truth about the Iranian penetration of the Obama and Biden administrations — and the degree to which American policy has been subverted and corrupted to serve the interests of the largest supporter of terrorism on the planet.

This is serious. The Obama-Biden susceptibility to Iranian penetration may have directly led to the massacre and violence in Israel. As Congressman Daryl Issa of California recently said, this could be a much bigger, more dangerous scandal than Hiss.

The public has a right to know. Our national security requires that we get to the truth about Iranian infiltration of our government.