The story is full of misinformation and half-truths. Venona, for instance, revealed infiltration not only of the Manhattan Project, but the State Department and other government agencies.
Further, the reuse of codes was not necessarily caused by bungling, but by the stresses of war. The Russian one time pads were volumious, consisting of pages and pages organized into books. Under the stress of war time conditions, the Russians began to issue books which reused printed pages from other books, but in a different sequence. For instance, a code book might be produced by using pages from the previous ten code books selected, more or less, at random and shuffled. In the production of the cypher pads, the Russians took short cuts, it was not sloppy field work but high level shortcuts. They probably figured that the Americans would never bother to unravel them. Unfortunately for the Russians, when the same text is encoded in the same place using the same pad, perfect coincidence occurs. All the Americans had to look for was the same sequence of about 10 characters (something that would almost never happen by chance) to recognize two messages encyphered with the same book, and having phrases alike in brief passages. Once you have two messages encyphered with the same pad, decypherment is assured.
Lonesome, you should post this on Slate. Today. Please.
You are so right about Venona. The State Dept as well as the alphabet soup of agencies thrown together during & right after WWII were infested. Truman cooked up a truly bizarre “loyalty” scheme which was much like something BO would concoct—a bunch of convoluted rules & bureaucracies that served as a smoke screen.
The FBI had reams of info on these people but the White House was more concerned with finding & punishing McCarthy’s sources.
Blacklisted by History, by M. Stanton Evans is the most complete & accurate history of that era I’ve ever read.