The Significance of Venona discusses the results and implications of the VENONA project, a long-running and highly secret collaboration between the United States intelligence agencies and the United Kingdom's MI5 and GCHQ that involved the cryptanalysis of Soviet messages.

Background

This decryption and cryptanalysis project became known to the Soviets not long after the first breaks. It is not clear whether the Soviets knew how much of the message traffic, or which messages, had been successfully decrypted. At least one Soviet penetration agent, British SIS Representative to the US, Kim Philby, was told about the project in 1949, as part of his job as liaison between British and US intelligence. The project continued for decades, long after Philby left British intelligence.

The decrypted messages from Soviet aid missions, GRU spies, KGB spies, and some diplomatic traffic, known collectively as the VENONA papers, gave important insights into Soviet behavior in the period during which duplicate one-time pads were used. On 20 December 1946, Meredith Gardner made the first break into the code, revealing the existence of Soviet espionage^[1] at Los Alamos National Laboratories.^[2] Others worked in Washington in the State Department, Treasury, Office of Strategic Services (OSS)^[3], and even the White House. Identities soon emerged of American, Canadian, Australian, and British spies in service to the Soviet government, including Klaus Fuchs, Alan Nunn May and another member of the Cambridge Five spy ring, Donald Maclean.

The decrypts include 349 code names^[4] for persons known to have had a covert relationship with Soviet intelligence. It is likely that there were more than 349 participants in Soviet espionage, as that number is from a small sample of the total intercepted message traffic. Among those identified are Alger Hiss^[5]; Harry Dexter White^[6], the second-highest official in the Treasury Department; Lauchlin Currie^[7], a personal aide to Franklin Delano Roosevelt; and Maurice Halperin^[8], a section head in the Office of Strategic Services. Almost every military and diplomatic agency of any importance was compromised to some extent^[9], including the Manhattan Project^[10].

Declassification

The 1995 Moynihan Commission on Government Secrecy declared that the "secrecy system has systematically denied American historians access to the records of American history. Of late we find ourselves relying on archives of the former Soviet Union in Moscow to resolve questions of what was going on in Washington at mid-century."

Some known spies, including Theodore Hall, were neither prosecuted nor publicly implicated, because the VENONA evidence against them was not made public. VENONA evidence has also clarified the case of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, making it clear that Julius was guilty of espionage and Ethel was an accessory, although their contributions to Soviet nuclear espionage were, arguably, not as vital as was alleged at the time. The information Julius passed to the Soviets related to the proximity fuze, or detonation device, not the actual process of nuclear fission. The Venona evidence determines sources within the Manhattan Project itself, as "Quantum" and "Pers," both still unidentified, facilitated transfer of nuclear weapons technology knowhow to the Soviet Union. Researchers are still seeking to identify some unidentified agents.

Significance

The VENONA documents, and the extent of their significance, were not made public until 1995. They show that the US and others were targeted in major espionage campaigns by the Soviet Union as early as 1942. The Office of Strategic Services^[11], the predecessor to the CIA, housed at one point or another between fifteen and twenty Soviet spies. Duncan Lee, Donald Wheeler, Jane Foster Zlatowski, and Maurice Halperin, passed information to Moscow. The War Production Board, the Board of Economic Warfare, the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs and the Office of War Information, included at least half a dozen Soviet sources each among their employees.

The decision to keep VENONA secret and restrict knowledge of it within the government was made by senior Army officers in consultation with the FBI and CIA. The CIA was not made an active partner until 1952. Army Chief of Staff Omar Bradley, concerned about the White House's history of leaking sensitive information, decided to deny President Truman direct knowledge of the project. The president received the substance of the material only through FBI, Justice Department and CIA reports on counterintelligence and intelligence matters. He was not told the material came from decoded Soviet ciphers. Truman had been distrustful of J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, and suspected the reports were exaggerated for political purposes.

The decision to not inform the President about the Project was made by unelected bureaucrats and military personnel, not by elected office holders or political appointees, and will be debated for years. This decision had domestic political consequences which reverberate to this day.

Debates over the extent of Soviet espionage in the U.S. were polarized partly because of the dearth of reliable information then in the public domain. Anti-Communists suspected that some spies—perhaps including a few who were known to the U.S. Government—remained at large. Those who criticized the government's loyalty campaign as an overreaction, on the other hand, wondered if some defendants were being scapegoated.

The Moynihan Commission on Government Secrecy, the first Commission to be authorized by statutory law in forty years, and only the second ever to do so, which won the release of the Venona transcripts, says in its Final Report:

"A balanced history of this period is now beginning to appear; the VENONA messages will surely supply a great cache of facts to bring the matter to some closure. But at the time, the American Government, much less the American public, was confronted with possibilities and charges, at once baffling and terrifying."

Nigel West wrote: "VENONA remain[s] an irrefutable resouce, far more reliable than the mercurial recollections of KGB defectors and the dubious conclusions drawn by paranoid analysts mesmerized by Machiavellian plots." ^[12]

Prosecution

On 1 February 1956, Alan H. Belmont prepared an FBI memorandum^[13] on the significance of the Venona project and the prospects of using decryptions in prosecution. It considered that, although decryptions may corroborate Elizabeth Bentley and enable successful prosecution of subjects such as Judith Coplon and the Perlo and Silvermaster groups, a careful study of all factors compelled the conclusion it would not be in the best interests of the United States to use Venona project information for prosecution.

The Memo states that it was uncertain whether or not the Venona project information would be admitted into evidence. A defense attorney probably would immediately move to dismiss the evidence as hearsay, being that neither the Soviet official who sent the message, nor the Soviet official who received it was available to testify. A question of law was involved. The FBI reasoned that decrypts probably could have been introduced, on an exception to the hearsay rule, based on the expert testimony of cryptrographers.

The extensive use of cover names also made prosecution difficult. Once an individual had been considered for recruitment as an agent by the Soviets, sufficient background data on him was sent to Moscow. Cover names were used not only for Soviet agents but other people as well. President Roosevelt, for example, was called "Kapitan" (Captain), and Los Alamos the "Reservation". Cover names also were frequently changed, and a cover name might actually apply to two different people, depending on the date it was used. Several subjects, notably Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, Maurice Halperin, and Lauchlin Currie, denied the accusations in open Congressional Hearings based on information from sources other than Venona. Assumptions made by cryptographers, questionable interpretations and translations placed reliance upon the expert testimony of cryptographers, and the entire case would be circumstantial.

Defense attorneys also would probably request to examine messages which cryptographers were unsuccessful in breaking and not in evidence, on the belief that such messages, if decoded, could exonerate their clients. The FBI determined that that would lead to the exposure of Government techniques and practices in the cryptography field to unauthorized persons, compromise the Government's efforts in communications intelligence, and impact other pending investigations.

Before any messages could be used in court they would have to be declassified. Approval would have to come from several layers of bureaucracy, and probably the President, as well as notification to British counterparts working on the same problem. In an election year, the Bureau felt exposed to a violent political war with the FBI right in the middle.

International implications were considered as well. While no written record has been located, it was stated by NSA officials that during the World War II, Soviet diplomats were granted permission to use Army radio facilities at the Pentagon to send messages to Moscow. It has been stated President Roosevelt granted this permission and accompanied it with the promise to the Soviets that their messages would not be intercepted or interfered with by United States. The FBI feared the Soviet international propaganda machine would work overtime to prove that the U.S. never acted in good faith during the war, and vilify the U.S. as an unfaithful ally and false friend.

Australia

The founding of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation by Labor Prime Minister Ben Chifley was considered highly controversial within Chifley's own party. Until then, the left-leaning Australian Labor Party had been hostile to domestic intelligence agencies on civil liberties grounds, and a Labor government actually founding one was a surprising about face. VENONA material has now made it clear that Chifley was motivated by evidence that Soviet agents were operating in Australia. Investigation had revealed that Wally Clayton (codenamed KLOD), a Soviet agent within the Communist Party of Australia, was forming an underground network within the CPA so that the party could continue to operate if it was banned.

Alger Hiss

According to the 1997 Moynihan Commission on Government Secrecy, the first bipartisan commission in forty years authorized by statute to make investigations into government secrecy and report back findings of fact, the complicity of Alger Hiss [1] is settled, as is that of Harry Dexter White. The Commission was instrumental in winning from both the National Security Agency and the FBI the release of Venona project documents. Senator Daniel Partick Moynihan, who chaired the Commission, said after release of the Commisssions findings, that government officials knew Hiss was guilty but did not speak up for fear of compromising the Venona project.

Critical Views

Although widely accepted and praised by historians and academics, the relevance accuracy and even the authenticity have been questioned by a small minority. Many of critics of the released VENONA papers claim the material to be unverifiable with some, such as Brian Villa of the University of Ottawa and Rutger’s Norman Markowitz, going so far as to claim that the NSA had doctored or fabricated VENONA material in its entirety. Nonetheless, research in Soviet Archives has added to the corroboration of many identities of cryptonyms in Venona materials.

Some remain skeptical of both the substance and the prevailing interpretations made since the release of the VENONA material. Victor Navasky, editor and publisher of The Nation, has written an editorial highly critical of John Earl Haynes’ and Harvey Klehr’s interpretation of recent work on the subject of Soviet espionage:

In Appendix A to their book on Venona, Haynes and Klehr list 349 names (and code names) of people who they say "had a covert relationship with Soviet intelligence that is confirmed in the Venona traffic." They do not qualify the list, which includes everyone from Alger Hiss to Harry Magdoff, the former New Deal economist and Marxist editor of Monthly Review, and Walter Bernstein, the lefty screenwriter who reported on Tito for Yank magazine. It occurs to Haynes and Klehr to reprint ambiguous Venona material related to Magdoff and Bernstein but not to call up either of them (or any other living person on their list) to get their version of what did or didn't happen.

The reader is left with the implication — unfair and unproven — that every name on the list was involved in espionage, and as a result, otherwise careful historians and mainstream journalists now routinely refer to Venona as proof that many hundreds of Americans were part of the red spy network.

My own view is that thus far Venona has been used as much to distort as to expand our understanding of the cold war — not just because some researchers have misinterpreted these files but also because, in the absence of hard supporting evidence, partially decrypted files in this world of espionage, where deception is the rule, are by definition potential time bombs of misinformation. [2]

Haynes and Klehr, the foremost scholars of the VENONA material dismiss their critics as being intentionally naïve about Soviet espionage and their willing collaborators in the West as well as ignorant of all evidence showing otherwise.

Instead, some historians who find the information revealed by Venona to be unpalatable have tried to suggest that, while the documents are genuine, they are not necessarily accurate. KGB agents, it is alleged, were busy telling their Moscow superiors what they wanted to hear and boasting about non-existent sources within the American government. Thus, Anna Kasten Nelson of American University is confident that “Agents tend to tell their superiors what they want to hear” and Scott Lucas of Birmingham University in England discerns “the tendency of any intelligence officer to exaggerate, for political superiors, the number and importance of agents they are controlling.” None offered any evidence.

Victor Navasky wanted to parse the concept of espionage. “There were a lot of exchanges of information among people of good, many of whom were Marxists, some of whom were Communists, some of whom were critical of US government policy and most of whom were patriots. Most of these exchanges were innocent and were within the law. Some were innocent but nevertheless were in technical violation of the law. And there were undoubtedly bona fide espionage agents- on both sides.” Not only can Navasky not point to any information flowing from Soviet scientists and government officials to Americans as part of this exchange- what secrets were the KGB agents passing on to Harry White and Ted Hall? - he does not provide any details about American spying on the Soviet Union during World War II.^[14]

Notes

• ^1 Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Secrecy: The American Experience, (New Haven: Yale University Press 1998), pg. 54; "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."
• ^2 Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy. Secrecy: Report of the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy. VI. Appendices: A. Secrecy: A Brief Account of the American Experience. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1997, pg. 29 (PDF 746K). "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."
• ^3 Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy. Secrecy: Report of the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy. VI. Appendices: A. Secrecy: A Brief Account of the American Experience. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1997, pg. 9 (PDF 746K). "KGB cables indicated that the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in World War II had been thoroughly infiltrated with Soviet agents."
• ^4 Moynihan, Secrecy, p.54; "In these coded messages the spies' identities were concealed beneath aliases, but 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."
• ^5 Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Secrecy: The American Experience, (New Haven: Yale University Press 1998, ISBN 0-300-07756-4, pg. 146-47; "Hiss was indeed a Soviet agent and appears to have been regarded by Moscow as its most important."
• ^6 Robert L. Benson, The Venona Story, National Security Agency Historical Publications. No date.
• ^7 Robert J. Hanyok, Eavesdropping on Hell: Historical Guide to Western Communications Intelligence and the Holocaust, 1939-1945. Ft. Meade, MD: National Security Agency, Center for Cryptologic History, 2005; "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."
• ^8 CIA Publications, The Office of Strategic Services: America's First Intelligence Agency, no date. [3]; "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."
• ^9 Hayden Peake, Naval War College Review The Venona Progeny, Volume LIII, No. 3, Sequence 371, Summer 2000; "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. No modern government was more thoroughly penetrated."
• ^10 U.S. Department of Energy, Office of History and Heritage, The VENONA Intercepts, 1946-1980, "This program led to the eventual capture of several Soviet spies within the Manhattan Project."
• ^11 The Office of Strategic Services: America's First Intelligence Agency, Michael Warner, CIA History Staff, Center for the Study of Intelligence, Published: United States Central Intelligence Agency, 2000.
• ^12 FBI File Belmont to Boardman, 1 February 1956, Washington D.C.
• ^13 Nigel West, Venona: The Greatest Secret of the Cold War (London: HarperCollins, 1999), pp. 330
  

See also

• History of Soviet espionage in the United States
• List of Americans in the Venona papers
• VENONA project

References

• NSA official VENONA site
• Moynihan Commssion Report on Government Secrecy (1997)

Further reading

• Robert Louis Benson, Michael Warner, Venona: Soviet Espionage and the American Response 1939-1957 (National Security Agency and Central Intelligence Agency, Washington D.C., 1996)
• Robert Louis Benson, The Venona Story (National Security Agency, Center for Cryptologic History, 2001)
• John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (Yale University, New Haven, 1999)
• Nigel West, Venona: The Greatest Secret of the Cold War (HarperCollins, London, 1999)
• Ellen Schrecker, Many are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Boston: Little Brown, 1998)