Venona: Soviet Espionage and the American Response 1939-1957 by Robert Louis Benson and Michael Warner, Eds. National Security Agency, Central Intelligence Agency, Washington, D.C. 1996 This amazing book is the first revelation by the U.S. government of the details of the silent and deadly struggle to discover, analyze, and neutralize Soviet espionage during and after World War II. The book is divided into three parts: a very informative Introduction; a second section containing 35 U.S. documents which give a good picture of official Washington's activities and policies; and a third section of 99 deciphered Soviet messages. Some of its revelations are shocking, and much that has passed as common knowledge of that period is now shown to be entirely wrong. No one can claim to understand American policy during the Cold War without having read this book. VENONA was the code word for a project which engaged U.S. security, intelligence, and counterintelligence agencies for nearly 40 years, attempting to break the Soviet diplomatic code used in espionage and subversion by the KGB (the Soviet secret police, and the GRU (Red Army intelligence). Cryptography has played an enormous part in the fate of nations, including the U.S., in this century. The decipherment of the Zimmermann telegram by the British in early 1917 was a major factor in provoking the United States to enter World War I. In the 20's Herbert Yardley cracked the Japanese diplomatic code. This achievement determined the outcome of the Washington Naval Conference and influenced the balance of power in the Pacific for a decade. In World War II cryptography was even more important. When U.S. Navy cryptographers broke the Japanese naval cipher in the late 1930s, the resulting MAGIC made possible the decisive victory at Midway — the turning point of the Pacific war. The U.S. also broke the Japanese diplomatic cipher: it is still hard to understand why Washington was so completely surprised by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. When the news of that stunning blow arrived, witnesses have described how cryptographer William Friedman paced his office in agony, exclaiming "But they knew! They knew!" In Europe, the Germans used a cipher machine, ENIGMA, which provided such a complex system that it was believed to be unbreakable. The British and French made no progress on it, but in 1938 a Polish group led by the gifted mathematician Maryan Rejewski succeeded in building a machine, the BOMBA, which essentially reversed the Enigma encipherment process. When the Nazis attacked Poland the Poles gave the plans for the BOMBA to French Intelligence, who relayed them to the British. The British later took all the credit for themselves, but. they quickly adapted and improved the Polish machines and set up a code breaking service under the name ULTRA which read a high proportion of German secret communications throughout the war. The Soviets also got the benefit of ULTRA because their network of spies and traitors had so thoroughly penetrated the entire British diplomatic establishment that almost everything of importance reached Moscow within days of its decipherment. The Soviets themselves used a different system: messages were encoded using a codebook in which words and phrases were represented by four digit numbers. Such a system, used properly, can only be read if the cryptographer has a copy of the codebook. However, spies can steal codebooks, and in war codebooks can be captured. The Soviets therefore, superenciphered the coded message using a "one-time pad" of pages with a series of random numbers on them which were sequentially added to the code numbers of 'the message. To read the message, the recipient, who would have the only other copy of the "one-time pad", would simply reverse the process and then use the codebook to read the message. The pages of the "one-time pad" were destroyed after use. To break such a system requires the cryptographer to have both the codebook and exactly the same sheet from the same "one-time pad", a situation so improbable that this method is considered unbreakable. During the short and bitter Russo-Finnish War the Finns captured a partly burned copy of the Soviet codebook and gave the book to the Germans. The Nazi cryptographic service was highly competent, but — the codebook was of no use to them without the "one-time pads". This codebook is almost certainly the one recovered by the U.S. Army in Germany in April, 1945. Major General William Donovan of OSS (the predecessor of CIA) had obtained Soviet code and cipher material from Finnish officers in 1944, but William Weisband, a Communist mole in the Armed Forces Security Agency, evidently got one of the numerous Communist moles in the State Department to prod Acting Secretary of State Edmund R. Stettinius (who believed, like Henry Stimson before him, that "gentlemen don't read other gentlemen's mail.") to ask FDR to order the return of the material to the Soviets. Roosevelt who had earlier stated to Ambassador William Bullitt that "some of my best friends are Communists!", was willing, and on December 27, 1944 the White House ordered Donovan -to turn over the materials to our military attaché in Moscow, who was to give them to General Fitin of the NFVD with assurances that "we are fully disposed to cooperate with them and not retain any material which they themselves might desire to have." (Document 12) Alas, history does not disclose General Fitin's reaction, but he must have struggled not to laugh in the attaché's face. Fitin (code name VIKTOR), chief of the KGB's First Directorate, was at the time receiving a stream of coded messages every day from Soviet spies in the White House, the State Department, the Treasury Department, the Atomic Energy Authority, and, in fact, almost every part of the U.S. government. Of the 99 deciphered messages in this book, nearly half are addressed to Fitin. The introduction to the published VENONA papers puts it plainly: "U.S. government agencies ran a security system that was porous for Soviet agents and yet opaque for American counterintelligence agencies charged with protecting secrets. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover allegedly knew nothing of the Manhattan Project before [U.S. Communist Party official] Steve Nelson inadvertently informed him in the Spring of 1943. Hoover and the FBI come out of these documents looking good, but the apathy of the Administration during and just after the war made it impossible for them to achieve much. Even an anonymous letter to Hoover in August 1943 from a disaffected Soviet KGB official spelling out details of the top-level Soviet intelligence operations in the U.S. (Document 10) made little or no impact. In fact, the desperate concern of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations to be friendly to the Soviets, augmented by highly placed moles like Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White and influential sympathizers like Harry Hopkins, guaranteed that the only American intelligence successes would come from Communist defectors like Walter Krivitsky, Elizabeth Bentley, and Whittaker Chambers. Even then, as the VENONA documents show, the instinct of the politicians was to minimize, or even attack, these defectors. Document 21 of the VENONA volume is a memo (August 16, 1948) of a meeting of Truman's Attorney General with advisors who made 6 recommendations including: (3) "Justice should make every effort to ascertain if Whittaker Chambers is guilty of perjury."; (3a) "Investigation of Chambers' confinement in mental institution."; (4) "The Attorney General will furnish [Elizabeth Bentley's data] ... to determine how much ... was freely available to the Soviet Government ... The purpose of this would be to make it clear that Miss Bentley was not successful in transmitting secret material to the Russians that they did not already have." Truman's response (Document 22) to the Attorney General was: "I wonder if we could not get a statement of facts from the FBI about the meddling of the House Un-American Activities Committee and how they dried up sources of information that would have been accessible in the prosecution of spies and communists. Their meddling efforts were in fact a 'red herring' to detract attention from the shortcomings of the 80th Congress..." Nothing in either the memo or Truman's reaction to it contemplates the possibility that Bentley or Chambers might have been telling the truth. Instead, as the Introduction concludes: "Elizabeth Bentley died in Connecticut: in December 1963 ... Before she died she had been denounced as a traitor, a liar, and a criminal by everyone from her old [Communist] comrades to a former President of the United States." It has been said with bitter truth that God takes care of drunks, children, and the United States of America. Certainly the story of the VENONA project is a good example. In 1943 the Army Signals Security Agency (SSA), headquartered at Arlington Hall, had begun studying encrypted Soviet telegrams. Gene Grabeel, a Virginia school teacher began this work, which she would continue for 36 years. Decrypted Japanese Army messages showed that the Japanese had also received Finnish data on Russian ciphers which the Americans could put to good use. Some progress was made, but In early 1944 Lauchlin Currie, one of FDR's aides who was a Communist mole, informed his Soviet contacts that the Americans were close to breaking a Soviet code. Fortunately the KGB, relying on the supposed unbreakability of the "one-time pad" system, made only minor modifications (message 26 in the VENONA series) which caused no more than a brief delay in the SSA's work. The decipherment., led by Meredith Gardner and Lt. Richard Hallock, was greatly helped by a fortunate accident. For a few months in 1942, the KGB cryptographic center had mistakenly printed 35,000 duplicate random number sets and bound them into "one-time pads". Most of these duplicate pages were used between 1942 and 1944. It was only a tiny crack in the cipher system, but the cryptanalysts at Arlington Hall found the weakness and brilliantly capitalized on it. Even so, not all messages were decipherable, and some only partially. Nevertheless, the harvest was magnificent. Some 2900 Soviet messages were at least partially read, of which 99 VENONA transcripts are in the present volume. The insight they afford into the breadth and scope of Soviet penetration of our most secret and important government projects is breathtaking. Soviet spies are usually identified by cover names: Alger Hiss was ALES; Julius Rosenberg was ANTENNA, later changed to LIBERAL.(!), etc. There are dozens of these, but there are also quite a few cover names whose owners have never been identified. The messages relate to every aspect of espionage: recruitment of agents; selection of 5 young Communists with good American passports for radio school; dispatch and legal cover for couriers; how to slip agents past U.S. port security; false identity papers; and numerous other details of spycraft. There are also policy discussions: HELMSMAN (Earl Browder, head of the U.S. Communist Party) provides an interesting assessment of Roosevelt's chances of election to a fourth term (message 28), and other messages make it clear that the U.S. Communist Party was a rich source of agents for Soviet intelligence. Message 22 (from Mexico City to Moscow) reads: "...The SURGICAL OPERATION is planned by the DOCTORS to take place in four days' time ... Without delay transfer 20,000 in KAPITAN's money for urgent requirements... " The explanatory notes make clear that cover word HOSPITAL means prison, and that this message relates to an attempted jailbreak for Trotsky's assassin, a project that evidently did not come off. However, KAPITAN is the cover name for President Roosevelt, so the Soviets seem to have used American funds, given to support their war effort, for clandestine purposes. Some of the messages have grim implications. on February 10, 1944 the Soviet Vice Consul wired Moscow " ... in Portland second mate Elizaveta Kuznetsova ... deserted from S.S. Pskov (and] went into hiding. on this matter we are sending MAZHOR to Portland." (Message 25). Evidently P4AZHOR did his job: on November 7, 1945 message 98 reads "On 4 November the traitor to the fatherland Kuznetsova was shipped to Vladivostok on the tanker Belgorod. Details in a supplement." One shudders to think of what happened to poor Elizaveta. Of course, the Comrades were not always so unfeeling. Message 75 includes the touching remark: "LIBERAL has on hand eight people plus the filming of materials. The state of LIBERAL's health is nothing splendid..." Poor Julius Rosenberg was working his little Communist heart out to get every last bit. of secret information to his Kremlin bosses, and they were very concerned about his health. Message 89 is the famous one which identified Alger Hiss beyond doubt. Paragraph 6 says "After the Yalta conference, when he had gone to Moscow, a Soviet personage in a very responsible position (ALES gave to understand that it was Comrade Vyshinsky) allegedly got in touch with ALES..." Only one member of the U.S. delegation at Yalta — Hiss — went home by way of Moscow. In this review I have just skimmed the surface of these fascinating messages. For anyone who wants to understand the roots of the Cold War and the scope and nature of the clandestine struggle that followed World War II this volume is essential. The achievement of U.S. cryptographers was awesome, and it is important to remember that after the war this work was carried on by volunteers. They all deserve the everlasting gratitude of their country. Back to Cry Havoc #20 Table of Contents Back to Cry Havoc List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1999 by David W. Tschanz. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com