Posted on 07/17/2005 5:58:36 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
Ten years ago, on July 11, 1995, the U.S. intelligence community held an extraordinary press conference at CIA headquarters to break the seal on one of the most closely held secrets of the Cold War. The world learned that starting in 1946 American cryptologists had cracked Soviet codes and read portions of thousands of messages Soviet intelligence operatives sent each other during World War II. Most of the cables decrypted in a program that came to be known as Venona, one of numerous codenames used to cloak its existence, were sent or received by the Soviet head of foreign intelligence.
Just as the ability to read Stalin’s spymaster’s correspondence dramatically altered the course of the Cold War, public release of the cables a half-century later altered our understanding of the dynamics of the conflict between the USSR and the West. Coupled with revelations from Soviet bloc archives, release of data gathered in the Venona program led to dramatic reassessments of decades of history. The revelations reverberated worldwide as members of the British, Australian and, above all, American communist parties who had protested their innocence were exposed as spies and liars. Two generations of Americans for whom the innocence of Julius Rosenberg and Alger Hiss was an article of faith were compelled to reconsider their mockery of those who had warned about widespread Communist espionage.
Venona not only produced lessons about the past -- it also illuminated issues that governments and the public are grappling with today, including the risks and benefits of the disclosure of intelligence, the dangers of bureaucratic tunnel vision, and the ease with which ordinary people will commit crimes to advance Utopian ideologies.
Venona was made possible because in 1942--during the darkest days of the war in Russia, when everything, including skilled manpower, was in short supply--Soviet code clerks produced and distributed to agents around the globe thousands of duplicate copies of “one-time” pads used to encrypt communications. As is clear from the name, the code tables were supposed to be used only once, and if this simple precaution had been heeded, the encryption system would have been impenetrable. But with Germans at the gates of Stalingrad, punctilious adherence to apparently arcane security rules must have seemed an unaffordable luxury. The chances of the shortcut being detected must have seemed vanishingly small.
The Venona secrets were disclosed at the July 1995 press conference largely as a result of prodding from the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who learned of the program when he headed the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy. The story of how a combination of extraordinary luck and tremendous talent led a small team working at a former girls’ boarding school outside Washington, D.C. to detect and exploit the opportunity presented by the replicated one-time pads has been described in several books, notably Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes’s Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (Yale University Press, 2000).
That first batch of Venona decrypts released a decade ago included cables between Pavel Fitin, the Soviet head of foreign intelligence, and his officers in New York describing the espionage activities of an American engineer codenamed “Liberal” who worked for the U.S. Army Signal Corps. These cables were among the first that the Army Security Agency (ASA), which was later folded into the National Security Agency, partially decrypted and shared with the FBI. It took the FBI a couple of years to discover that Rosenberg was Liberal, and another four decades for the National Security Agency to share with the American public the documents that removed all doubt that he was a spy.
A 1956 internal memo to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover revealed three major reasons why the Bureau didn’t reveal its smoking-gun evidence during the Rosenbergs’ 1951 trial. There was a fear that disclosing the existence of the Venona program could help the Russians minimize the damage to its U.S. spy networks. Although Hoover didn’t know it at the time, this concern was largely unwarranted because Fitin and his colleagues already knew a great deal about the Venona program. A Soviet spy was standing over the shoulder of an ASA code breaker when he decrypted the first cable suggesting that the Kremlin’s agents had targeted the Manhattan project, and Kim Philby, a Soviet agent who penetrated the top ranks of Britain’s foreign intelligence agency, had been briefed on Venona.
The second reason for withholding the decrypted messages from prosecutors resonates today. There is a world of difference between actionable intelligence and information that meets judicial standards of evidence. The FBI was certain Venona would, even if admissible, be useless in court. It was unlikely, the Bureau felt, that partially decrypted messages of unproved origin, peppered with codenames and euphemisms, would be considered dispositive. If the prosecution were permitted to show decrypted cables to a jury, the defense could reasonably argue that messages the government had failed to decipher could exonerate their clients.
There were also political reasons to keep Venona under wraps, especially in the 1950s. Republicans were attacking Democrats for coddling Communists and playing down the Red threat, while the Truman White House accused the GOP of red baiting. Publicizing documentation of widespread Communist espionage would have plunged the FBI into the middle of a superheated partisan debate.
While the intelligence value of keeping Venona secret is debatable – there was some value to keeping the USSR in the dark about precisely which cables had been decrypted -- the benefits that could have accrued from publicizing it are undeniable. Keeping the cables under lock and key prevented Americans from examining the evidence and forming their own opinions about the role domestic Communists played in bolstering Stalin’s power.
In a commentary published ten days after Venona was made public, Moynihan suggested that releasing the documents in 1950 would have convinced the Left of the reality of communist espionage, thereby heading off both the excesses of McCarthyism as well as the anti-anticommunism that distorted American politics for four decades.
Looking at Venona another decade later, it is also clear that secrecy obscured some realities that could have led to a much-needed assessment of the FBI’s competence to detect threats to national security. Although Venona was one of America’s greatest counterintelligence triumphs, the project was important precisely because it illuminated an equally immense failure. It revealed that a handful of Russians developed hundreds of sources who spied on President Roosevelt; provided real-time reports on the Manhattan Project, probably shaving years from the USSR’s effort to eliminate America’s monopoly on nuclear weapons; and gave the Red Army blueprints for everything from America’s first jet fighter to its most sophisticated radar.
Virtually all of the spies had been members of or were closely associated with the Communist Party. Many, including Rosenberg, were able to continue spying for years after they first came to the FBI’s attention as security threats. Spies who were fired from government jobs as security threats easily found work in the private sector that afforded access to even more valuable information. No one connected the dots. Russia’s spies thrived in the U.S. during World War II largely because the FBI and Army failed to grasp the nature of the threat. Hoover and his subordinates thought of domestic communists primarily as sources of subversion, not as espionage agents.
Perhaps the longest-lasting impact of the release of the Venona documents has been to transform the debate over Communist espionage in the 1940s into one that is all too relevant today. The pertinent question is no longer whether Americans spied, but rather how highly educated, intelligent men and women failed to comprehend the true nature of Stalinist communism, and why they were willing to risk their lives and imperil the security of their families, neighbors and friends to commit crimes on behalf of a foreign power opposed to the basic tenets of modern society. Answers to similar questions, regarding educated Muslims with experience of life in Europe and the U.S. like those who led the 9-11 and Madrid attacks, are essential to constructing a defense against 21st century terrorism.
It appears that they have not become any smarter in the past 80 years.
We also see them in the UN, with their constant striving for "social justice" which is code for 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his need', aka communism.
one of the saddest cases to come out that period was the husband of the editor of the washington post: phil graham husband of martha graham.
It was her newspaper, or rather, her dad's newspaper. Graham married into the family. He was groomed to take over the newspaper.
However, during the McCarthy period he was one of the few people who were advised of the contents of the Venona cables.
Never the less, he was unable to stop the Washington Post's attack on everything to do with McCarthy-because by that time the communists had convinced the media that McCarthy was a set up for a pogrom. They took what stalin attempted to do with the doctor's plot and applied it to the republicans in general people like nixon in particular. anyone who sided with McCarthy was immediatly suspect and definitely out.
For someone like graham the difference between the image and the reality was too much. after embarrassing himself with some extra marital flings he committed suicide.
The sad and crazy thing is that martha graham died after the release of the venona cables...but she never understood.
I've added this to my reading list.
You do not have to convice your Komrades of anything.
Unfortunately, there are not a lot of good books about him. I read "Joseph McÇarthy and the Cold War", "The Politics of Fear", "Nightmare in Red" and "Joseph McCarthy : Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator". They all just pissed me off, except the last one, which was pretty good.
However, it was "Witness" that really turned the worm for me. After I read that, I read a couple of books on the Venona Project, and there are a few really good ones out there now.
You must read "Witness", then read up on Venona, and it really brings it all together.
I have to thank Ann Coulter's book for getting me on the path, though. If not for hers, I might never have gone that way.
THAT is a great question!
WHO is going to buy time for us this time, with respect to the socialists, communists and islamofacists?
Who is going to be slandered for telling the truth?
Great post! The penetration of our country by the USSR is just shocking when studied. In return we did basically nothing until the late 1940's. If the CIA had not been established and the FBI not stepped up its efforts, who knows where it might have ended?
Great post. Great comments.
Profound, indeed. It ranks in my top five as well.
I think the thing I found MOST disturbing is that the Left and the Media use the same tactics today that they did back then! Of course, they can no longer use certain insinuations and words with impunity as they did back then, calling Whittaker Chambers a "queer", etc.
But the tactics are the same.
It's not difficult to answer that at all, especially for one who has been through a modern liberal American university.
Communists idealogues descend on the American college campus and commence to exploit the naivete of the brand-new skulls full of mush. They do this by cajoling and belittling all thought that is not in mesh with the communist ideology. If the student doesn't believe it, he is branded as not very bright. All thoughts expousing socialistic utopianism is richly rewarded and all dissent is greeted with failing grades and humiliation.
Thus, by this diabolical excuse for education, the "liberal" mind set becomes the dominant one in academe, and the liberal arts graduate is more inclined to betray his country than to fight for it.
There are several I can think of, of the top of head, that have already been smeared, accused, slandered, defamed, prosecuted and sentenced in the LSM.
Perhaps one of them will rise to the occasion?
Good one Joe!
I wonder why, though, that Eisenhower spoke out against him toward the end.
To answer your question......most were a part of it.
When I was a little girl, my mother made me watch the Army - McCarthy hearings. I really was too little to understand all of it, but I understood enough and my mother filled in the blanks for me. She, like most Americans back then, was a fierce anti-Commie. Most Americans, no matter WHAT the MSM said then, hated Commies and were FOR McCarthy and what he was attempting to do.
I read this book. It also casts serious suspicion onto Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb.
I thought you might like it. I agree with your answer, of course. Wish I could hang out and play connect the dots, but tomorrow looms on the horizon.
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