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http://www-hoover.stanford.edu/pubaffairs/newsletter/99summer/venona.html

Several books have been published recently about the penetration of the U.S. government by Soviet intelligence operations during the 1930s and the 1940s. The coauthors of one of those books, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, visited the Hoover Institution on June 14 to discuss their book and its revelations.

The Venona project was a U.S. government operation to intercept and decrypt coded messages sent during World War II between the Soviet embassies in America and Moscow. John Earl Haynes, a twentieth-century political historian at the Library of Congress, and Harvey Klehr, a professor at Emory University in Atlanta, examined Venona documents as well as recently opened Soviet archives in Russia. They concluded that Soviet espionage during World War II was thorough and hostile.

“The Venona documents provide a guide to an extraordinarily pervasive campaign by the Soviet Union to obtain secrets from the United States,” Klehr said, adding that the effort and money devoted to the spying was “remarkable.”

Only recently declassified, the Venona files reveal not only the extent of Soviet spying but also the close ties between Soviet intelligence and the American Communist Party, despite the surveil-lance of the Communists by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other security agencies.

“Enthused with idealism and a com-mitment to a better world, Communists often approached espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union as a calling,” Klehr said. “Unlike spies largely motivated by a desire for personal monetary gain and or coerced by fear of exposure, Communists were reliable and dependable.”

The decrypted Venona cables confirm the guilt of Julius Rosenberg, whose code name was “Liberal” and who gave atomic secrets from the Manhattan Project to the Soviet Union.

Haynes credited Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) with getting the Venona files declassified.

Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America is published by Yale University Press. Haynes and Klehr are also coauthors of The Soviet World of American Communism (with Kyrill M. Anderson) and The Secret World of American Communism (with Fridrikh I. Firsov).

The VENONA project http://www.cvni.net/radio/nsnl/nsnl6venona.html

On 1 February 1943, the U.S. Army's Signal Intelligence Service, a forerunner of the National Security Agency, began a small, very secret program, later codenamed VENONA. The object of the VENONA program was to examine and possibly exploit, encrypted Soviet diplomatic communications. These messages had been accumulated by the Signal Intelligence Service (later renamed the U.S. Army Signal Security Agency and commonly called "Arlington Hall" after the Virginia location of its headquarters) since 1939 but had not been studied previously. Miss Gene Grabeel, a young Signal Intelligence Service employee, who had been a school teacher only weeks earlier, started the project.

The accumulated message traffic comprised an unsorted collection of thousands of Soviet diplomatic telegrams that had been sent from Moscow to certain of its diplomatic missions and from those missions to Moscow. During the first months of the project, Arlington Hall analysts sorted the traffic by diplomatic mission and by cryptographic system or subscriber.

Initial analysis indicated that five cryptographic systems, later determined to be employed by different subscribers, were in use between Moscow and a number of Soviet overseas missions. It also became apparent that one system involved trade matters, especially Lend-Lease. The other four systems appeared to involve the Soviet Foreign Ministry in Moscow in communication with its missions abroad.

The complete information, including hundreds of real messages, can be found on the site of the National Security Agency. Interesting stuff! Check URL.

“Enthused with idealism and a com-mitment to a better world, Communists often approached espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union as a calling,” Klehr said. “Unlike spies largely motivated by a desire for personal monetary gain and or coerced by fear of exposure, Communists were reliable and dependable.”

No nation in the history of espionage had better human assets than the Soviet Union between 1933 and 1956. Thousands of highly educated, highly placed people all over the world who served the Soviet Union out of pure idealism. The Red Orchestra, Richard Sorge, the Cambridge Group, an as yet undiscovered Oxford Group, etc.

A downside of espionage is that the people you are dealing with are generally traitors and resentful failures and degenerates or are using you to serve their own agenda (like Chalabi) so what they say must be viewed with extreme caution. Idealists, on the other hand, will do their best to give you anything they can.