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).