Jessica Smith was an American editor and activist and was the wife of Harold Ware and subsequently John Abt, both members of the Ware Group run by Whittaker Chambers and whose members also included Alger Hiss.

Harold or "Hal" Ware was an American Marxist, regarded as one of the Communist Party's top experts on agriculture. He was employed by a federal New Deal agency in the 1930s. He is alleged to have been a Soviet spy and is understood to have founded the "Ware Group," a covert group of operatives within the United States government aiding Soviet intelligence agents.