Difference between revisions of "Venona files"

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The Venona project intercepted codes passed among agents of the communist Soviet Union, and attempted to decrypt them. This was a project by the United States and United Kingdom during the Cold War. It helped identify people who were spying for the Soviet Union, and passing military secrets (such as information about the atomic bomb to it). Historians John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr have stated,

Unfortunately, the success of government secrecy in this case has seriously distorted our understanding of post-World War II history. Hundreds of books and thousands of essays on McCarthyism, the federal loyalty security program, Soviet espionage, American communism, and the early Cold War have perpetuated many myths that have given Americans a warped view of the nation's history in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. ^[1]

Background

The Moynihan Commissions of Government Secrecy wrote in its final report, "The first fact is that a significant Communist conspiracy was in place in Washington, New York, and Hollywood" ^[2] The Commission's final report also included, "the United States Government possessed information which the American public desperately needed to know: proof that there had been a serious attack on American security by the Soviet Union, with considerable assistance from what was, indeed, an “enemy within.” ... Only the American public was denied this information." ^[3]

During World War II, the Soviet Union ran espionage operations against the War Department and the State Department, the War Production Board, the Office of Economic Warfare, and even the Office of the President of the United States. It successfully penetrated each institution, and stole the secrets of many other organizations concerned with national security. No modern government was more thoroughly penetrated. ^[4]

Between 1942 and 1945 thousands of encrypted cables were sent between KGB stations in the U.S. and Moscow but only a fraction were ever decrypted. The decryption rate was as follows:

• 1942 1.8%
• 1943 15.0%
• 1944 49.0%
• 1945 1.5%

Approximately 2,200 of the messages were decrypted and hundreds of cover names were found to be involved in clandestine activity with the KGB. Many have been identified.

With the first break into the code, Venona revealed the existence of Soviet espionage^[5] at Los Alamos National Laboratories.^[6] Identities soon emerged of American, Canadian, Australian, and British spies in service to the Soviet government, including Klaus Fuchs, Alan Nunn May and Donald Maclean, a member of the Cambridge Five spy ring. Others worked in Washington in the State Department, Treasury, Office of Strategic Services,^[7] and even the White House. The decrypts show that the U.S. and other nations were targeted in major espionage campaigns by the Soviet Union as early as 1942. Among those identified are Ethel and Julius Rosenberg; Alger Hiss; Harry Dexter White,^[8] the second-highest official in the Treasury Department; Lauchlin Currie,^[9] a personal aide to Franklin Roosevelt; and Maurice Halperin,^[10] a section head in the Office of Strategic Services. By comparing the known movements of the agents with the corresponding activities described in the intercepts, the FBI and the code-breakers were able to match the aliases with the actual spies.^[11] Nearly every American military and diplomatic agency of any importance was compromised to some extent^[12]

"Mr. Hoover"

One of the more bizarre incidents in the Venona investigation occurred a few years before work was ever begun on deciphering encryptions. A Soviet assistant to the KGB Washington station chief became displeased with his superior and other case officers he was working with. Lt. Col. Vassili Mironov, who's cover name was Markov, wrote an anonymous letter to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover in August 1943 in Russian on a Cyrilic typewritter. There is no "H" in the Cyrilic alphabet, so in Russian the letter is addressed to "Mr. Guver."

In the letter, Mironov names several high level KGB operatives,^[13] many involved in the ongoing atomic espionage, and suggest surveilling them would lead to incrimination. Cited in the letter is Mironov's boss, Vasili Zarubin, the North American KGB Rezident; Zarubin's wife Elizabeth Zarubina who was accreditted in 1992 as playing a significant role in recruiting J. Robert Oppenheimer and infiltrating Klaus Fuchs into the Manhattan Project; Semyon Semenov said to be "robbing the whole of the war industry in America;" Grigory Kheifets, KGB San Fransisco Rezident who first contacted Oppenheimer at Berkley and managed other contacts; and Leon Tarasov, KGB Mexico City Rezident to whom the targeting of the Los Alamos, New Mexico facility and operations connected with it were transfered in order to gain better operational security.

Mironov made an assertion that the information his boss, Zurabin, was obtaining from all these sources was being sent to Japan, and not the Soviet Union. Mironov and several others were all recalled to Moscow and an investigation found this to be untrue. Mironov was diagnosed schizophrenic, hospitalized, and later shot.

See also

• List of Americans in the Venona papers

Further redaing

• "Venona Source 19 and the Trident Conference of 1943" by Eduard Mark in IQ and National Security vol 13 (1998).

References

1. ↑ Haynes, John Earl & Klehr, Harvey Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, Yale University Press, (2000), p. 18. ISBN 0300084625.
2. ↑ Moynihan Commission on Government Secrecy, Appendix A 6. The Experience of The Bomb
3. ↑ Moynihan Commission on Government Secrecy, Appendix A 7. The Cold War
4. ↑ Peale, Hayden B., The Venona Progeny, Naval War College Review, Summer 2000, Vol. LIII, No. 3. "Venona makes absolutely clear that they had active agents in the U.S. State Department, Treasury Department, Justice Department, Senate committee staffs, the military services, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the Manhattan Project, and the White House, as well as wartime agencies."
5. ↑ Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, Secrecy : The American Experience, Yale University Press, (1998), pg. 54, ISBN 0-300-08079-4. "these intercepts provided...descriptions of the activities of precisely the same Soviet spies who were named by defecting Soviet agents Alexander Orlov, Walter Krivitsky, Whittaker Chambers, and Elizabeth Bentley."
6. ↑ A Brief Account of the American Experience. Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy. Report of the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy. VI; Appendix A. U.S. Government Printing Office. pg. A-27. "Thanks to successful espionage, the Russians tested their first atom bomb in August 1949, just four years after the first American test. As will be discussed, we had learned of the Los Alamos spies in December 1946—December 20, to be precise. The U.S. Army Security Agency, in the person of Meredith Knox Gardner, a genius in his own right, had broken one of what it termed the Venona messages—the transmissions that Soviet agents in the United States sent to and received from Moscow."
7. ↑ A Brief Account of the American Experience. Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy. Report of the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy. VI; Appendix A. U.S. Government Printing Office. pg. A-7. "KGB cables indicated that the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in World War II had been thoroughly infiltrated with Soviet agents."
8. ↑ Benson, Robert L. The Venona Story, National Security Agency
9. ↑ Eavesdropping on Hell, National Security Agency. "Currie, known as PAZh (Page) and White, whose cover names were YuRIST (Jurist) and changed later to LAJER (Lawyer), had been Soviet agents since the 1930s. They had been identified as Soviet agents in Venona translations and by other agents turned witnesses or informants for the FBI and Justice Department. From the Venona translations, both were known to pass intelligence to their handlers, notably the Silvermaster network."
10. ↑ Warner, Michael, 2000. The Office of Strategic Services: America's First Intelligence Agency; Chapter: X-2. Central Intelligence Agency Publications. "Duncan C. Lee, Research & Analysis labor economist Donald Wheeler, Morale Operations Indonesia expert Jane Foster Zlatowski, and Research & Analysis Latin America specialist Maurice Halperin, nevertheless passed information to Moscow." For title page to book, see here
11. ↑ Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 1998, Secrecy : The American Experience, Yale University Press, pg. 54, ISBN 0-300-08079-4.
12. ↑ Peale, The Venona Progeny.
13. ↑ Document No. 10 in Robert Louis Benson and Michael Warner, eds., Venona: Soviet Espionage and the American Response, 1939-1957 (Washington, DC: National Security Agency/Central Intelligence Agency, 1996).[1][2][3][4]

External links

• Explanation and History of Venona Project Informantion, FBI Memo Belmont to Boardman, Feb. 1, 1956.
• Benson, Robert Louis, and Warner, Michael, eds. VENONA: Soveit Espionage and the American Response 1939-1957 Laguna Hills, CA: Aegean Park Press, (1996). Part I: The American Response to Soviet Espionage, Archival Citations and a Note on the Documents.