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Venona Intercepts: Still Scary After All These Years
Southwest News-Herald ^ | January 5, 2010 | SALLY WRIGHT

Posted on Tuesday, January 05, 2010 11:53:47 AM by Tailgunner Joe

The Bard tells us, rightly, that the past is prologue. But until America’s greatest military intelligence success — and failure — becomes common knowledge Americans will remain intellectual sitting ducks, herded hither and yon, hoping to build a sheltering future on shaky misinformation.

I’m talking about the Venona Code intercepts: The 3000 encrypted communications between Soviet spies operating in this country and their masters in Moscow, which American and British code breakers began deciphering in 1946.

These KGB messages revealed that the Soviets had agents at the highest levels of the executive and legislative branches of our government — and those of our allies — before, during, and shortly after, WWII.

In just the small fraction of intercepted cables we’re able to decrypt more than 300 American residents are identified as Soviet agents. The enormous damage they did us still affects lives today.

We’ve long known that scientists at Los Alamos handed the Soviet Union the secrets of nuclear fission, enabling Stalin to build his own A-bomb. The geo-political fall-out from that (pun intended) can hardly be overestimated.

Venona gives us extensive detail. And much more.

When the Allies met at Yalta and Potsdam at the close of WWII, Soviet agents were among America’s highest level representatives, helping to send millions of non-Soviet citizens into Stalin’s Gulag, and set up the Soviet take-over of Eastern Europe.

And why was the West blind-sided in 1950 when North Korea invaded the South, starting the Korean War?

Because Willam Weisband, a Soviet spy and language expert helping American code breakers working on Venona and other Soviet codes, told the Soviets in 1948 of our successes. All their military/intelligence codes consequently went black, almost overnight, keeping us from learning they were helping China and North Korea prepare to invade the South.

That intelligence failure kept us from preparing for, or preventing, the Korean War.

Venona decrypts also describe how Soviet spies in America gave them our jet fighter secrets, enabling their MiG-15s to slaughter thousands in Korea.

So why do Americans typically think that Soviet spies in the US were a figment of Joe McCarthy’s imagination; and that the Rosenbergs, Hiss and Oppenheimer were wrongfully accused?

Because the US government didn’t release our Venona evidence till 1995. And then largely because two American scholars, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, had written about the Russian side of the Venona encryptions they’d discovered in Russia’s KGB archives in 1992.

The US initially had good reasons for hiding what we knew from Venona; like not wanting the Soviets to know what we’d learned and what we hadn’t, so spies we were watching wouldn’t be pulled and replaced.

But not releasing the Venona decryptions allowed forty years of misinformation to mislead American minds; to whitewash Hiss and the Rosenbergs; to vilify Bentley and Chambers, Soviet spies who changed their ways and came clean in the forties.

Still today, when the truths revealed in our Venona decrypts have been out for fourteen years, the general news media, Hollywood in particular (which continues to release misinformation on American spy hunts annually), as well as many in academia, remain strangely silent.

It’s no less dangerous now. Islamic terrorists are a different enemy, but the same intelligence challenges remain. And we seem to be making s similar mistakes: Political correctness whitewashes our enemies; enemy agents distort the facts; enemy friends ignore the truth. So we don’t know what to believe.

These are the lessons of 9/11. Unlearned. Still coded. Ignored. If we don’t learn from Venona - from the handful left who know what happened - the future will be catastrophic.

Clearing the air vs. splitting hairs and distorting Cold War history (Part 1)

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2258058/posts

RenewAmerica.Us ^ | 5/25/09 | Wes Vernon

Posted on Monday, May 25, 2009 4:55:42 PM by ReformationFan

Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter whitewashed

Since the downfall of the Soviet Union, volumes have been written about that late superpower’s penetration of American Society and its institutions before and during the Cold War years. It can be said without credible contradiction that what we now know about Soviet spying and infiltration of the U.S. for seven decades vindicates the much-maligned anti-Communists (in and out of Congress) of that era. If anything, they didn’t know the half of it.

It was they who warned — often to be met with a ton of ridicule and scorn — that there was a systematic and well-funded web of Soviet-backed subversion whose ultimate aim was to take over America from within.

And the hits just keep on coming

Shortly after the Soviet demise, the successor Russian regime allowed researchers to view the archives of the KGB and other Soviet intelligence agencies dating back to the early days of the world’s former leading Communist power and the free world’s main enemy after the war.

When startling revelations of those archives achieved a high level of worldwide publicity, the Russians clamped down and narrowed the scope of what was allowed to be viewed.

However, Alexander Vassiliev — a journalist and former KGB officer — managed to gain access to previously closed archives. He made notes — volumes of them — before collaborating with Allen Weinstein in the brilliant expose The Haunted Wood, published several years ago.

Weinstein, by the way, authored the 1978 best-seller Perjury, which clearly showed — once and for all — that Alger Hiss was rightfully convicted of lying when he said he was not a Soviet agent (only the statute of limitations enabled him to escape the charge of outright treason; perjury was his more recent act). Richard Nixon — as a young congressman — played a part in nailing Hiss in the forties. Hiss in the seventies used the political fallout from the Watergate scandal in an attempt to rehabilitate his own reputation. As for Weinstein, he went on to become the ninth archivist for the National Archives. He originally investigated the case expecting to prove Hiss innocent. When Weinstein discovered otherwise, he reported his findings in Perjury. The result was that Hiss’s effort to revive his respectability on the back of Nixon’s Watergate crashed and burned.