Significance of Venona

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 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 at Los Alamos National Laboratories.^[1] Others worked in Washington in the State Department, Treasury, Office of Strategic Services, 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 at least one of the Cambridge Five spy ring (Donald Maclean).

The decrypts include 349 code names 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; Harry Dexter White, the second-highest official in the Treasury Department; Lauchlin Currie, a personal aide to Franklin Roosevelt; and Maurice Halperin, a section head in the Office of Strategic Services. Almost every military and diplomatic agency of any importance was compromised to some extent, including the Manhattan Project.

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 not as vital as was alleged at the time. Ethel had been an accomplice, and Julius' information related to the proximity fuse, or detonation device, not the actual process of controlled fusion. 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.

This is an extremely different picture from the one which had developed over most of 50 years. While researchers seek to identify some still unidentified agents, the overall picture of infiltration is difficult to refute.

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^[2], 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 is an astounding question which shall be debated for years, being that it was made by unelected bureaucrats and military personel, and not elected office holders or political appointees. This decision had domestic political consequences which reverberate to this day. And the debate over whether this decision was the right decision, or the wrong decision, is only beginning.

Debates over the extent of Soviet espionage in the United States were polarized in 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 US 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. Given the tensions of the times, and what was known by the government at that time, however, continued secrecy was not illogical. With the Korean war raging and the prospect of war with the Soviet Union considered a real possibility, military and intelligence leaders almost certainly believed that any cryptologic edge that America gained over the Soviets was too valuable to concede—even if it was already known to Moscow.

Australia

In 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 not only were there a large number of very damaging Soviet agents operating in Australia, but that these probably included members of his party. Chifley was succeeded by the conservative, anti-communist Sir Robert Menzies. Menzies began what was long considered an over-zealous anti-communist "witch hunt", but it is now known that VENONA decrypts and associated surveillance had identified one of the Soviet agents as being either the popular "Doc" Evatt (one of Chifley's Cabinet Ministers, instrumental in the early organisation of the United Nations, and former President of the UN General Assembly), or Evatt's secretary Alan Dalziel. As well, other middle ranking government officials were either identified or implicated. Further, investigation had revealed that Wally Clayton (codenamed KLOD), a Soviet agent within the Communist Party of Australia, was forming an illegal "underground network" within the CPA, presumably as a prelude to political violence. When Menzies announced a Royal Commission into Soviet espionage in Australia, it was supported by the anti-communist Roman Catholic factions of the ALP but strongly opposed by "Doc" Evatt and allies. The ALP eventually split over this issue.

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

Victor Navasky, editor and publisher of The Nation, has written an editorial highly critical of the 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]

Ellen Schrecker agrees. "Because they offer insights into the world of the secret police on both sides of the Iron Curtain, it is tempting to treat the FBI and Venona materials less critically than documents from more accessible sources. But there are too many gaps in the record to use these materials with complete confidence" (1998, pp. xvii-xviii). Other skeptics include Walter and Miriam Schneir.

Notes

^1 Moynihan Commssion on Government Secrecy, Appendix A, The Experience of The Bomb (1997)
^2 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

Significance of Venona

Background

Declassification

Significance

Australia

Alger Hiss

Critical Views

Notes

See also

References

Further reading

Skeptical