The secretary-general of the conference that created the charter of the United Nations was Alger Hiss. Hiss was a senior U.S. State Department official who was later convicted of perjury in connection with a Soviet spy ring. The conviction was partly based on the testimony of a Soviet spy named Elizabeth Bentley who defected and named dozens of U.S. government officials who spied for the Soviets. In conjunction with this, a Time magazine senior editor named Whittaker Chambers confessed to colluding with Hiss in spying for the Soviets and produced internal State Department documents with Hiss's handwriting on them. Hiss could not be charged with espionage because the statute of limitations had expired, but he served 44 months in prison for perjury. In 1996, the U.S. released an intercepted Soviet cable from 1945 showing that a person with a biographical detail that matches only Hiss had been working for the Soviet military since 1935 under the codename "ALES."