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. His conviction was based on witnesses and documents, including the testimony of a Soviet spy named Elizabeth Bentley who defected and named Hiss and dozens of other U.S. government officials who spied for the Soviets. Also, 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 couldn't be charged with espionage because the statute of limitations had expired, but he served 44 months in prison for lying under oath about his spying. In 1996, the U.S. released an intercepted Soviet cable from 1945 showing that a person with a unique biography that only matches Hiss had been working for the Soviet military since 1935.