Okay. I am confused. I saw a NOVA report *this week* on Venona, then I saw the link, even replied ... then noticed it link was posted in Feb 2002 ... A Rerun NOVA?
Here's a list of Venona-related Soviet spies:
http://www.unc.edu/depts/diplomat/AD_Issues/amdipl_15/platt_15.html The authors claim that Americans identified by the Venona transcripts to be Soviet agents were members of the Moscow-controlled CPUSA, an “auxiliary” of Soviet intelligence, whose active collaboration facilitated Stalin’s espionage offensive against the U.S. Fueled with an “ideological affinity for the Soviets,” these idealistic Marxist-Leninists betrayed what they considered a “morally illegitimate” American capitalist system. Few defected or renounced Communism, even after Stalin’s purges and 1939 pact with Hitler.
According to the Venona decryptions, Stalin’s agents included:
* Lauchlin Currie, senior White House aide to FDR, who alerted the NKVD (Soviet intelligence) to FBI investigations of its top agents.
* Martha Dodd, licentious daughter of the American ambassador to Berlin, whose passionate affair with the first secretary of the Russian embassy included passing confidential diplomatic correspondence to Moscow.
* Alger Hiss, chief of the State Department’s Office of Special Political Affairs, who accompanied Roosevelt to Yalta in 1945 and chaired the founding conference of the UN. This senior assistant to the secretary of state gave Soviet military intelligence diplomatic cables concerning Axis threats to Soviet security.
* Laurence Duggan, head of the State Department’s Division of American Republics and the secretary of state’s personal adviser for Latin America, who gave the NKVD Anglo-American plans for the invasion of Italy.
* Michael Straight, a family friend and protege of President and Mrs. Roosevelt who was recruited into the NKVD by Soviet spy Anthony Blunt while attending Cambridge University.
* Harry Dexter White, assistant secretary of the Treasury, U.S. director of the IMF, senior adviser to the American delegation at the founding conference of the UN, who facilitated employment for Soviet sources in his department.
* Harold Glasser, vice-chairman of the War Production Board and assistant director of the Treasury’s Office of International Finance, who gave the NKVD a State Department analysis of Soviet war losses.
* Gregory Silvermaster, a Treasury economist whose spy network provided Moscow with prodigious amounts of War Production Board data on arms, aircraft, and shipping production.
* Victor Perlo, chief of the Aviation Section of the War Production Board whose spy ring supplied the Soviets with aircraft production figures and included a Senate staff director.
* Judith Coplon, Justice Department analyst who alerted Moscow to FBI counterintelligence operations.
* Duncan Lee, descendant of Robert E. Lee and senior aide to OSS chief William J. Donovan, who became the NKVD’s senior source in American intelligence; he divulged secret OSS operations in Europe and China.
* William Weisband, NSA linguist who informed Moscow that the Venona Project had deciphered its messages.
While Haynes and Klehr acknowledge that there were “sensible [security] reasons” for keeping Venona secret (so secret that even President Truman lacked direct knowledge of it), they argue that “This decision denied the public the incontestable evidence afforded by the messages of the Soviet Union’s own spies.” Proof of Soviet espionage and “American Communist participation” based on the testimony of defectors was “inherently more ambiguous than the hard evidence of the Venona messages.” If Venona had been made public, they maintain, government investigations and prosecutions of Communist party members would have been more defensible. The guilt of the Rosenbergs would have been indisputable and the innocence of secretaries of state Dean Acheson and George C. Marshall would have been clearly established. Manhattan Project director J. Robert Oppenheimer’s Communist background and indifference to possible Soviet infiltration of Los Alamos (until 1943) would have been verified, but so would Moscow’s failure to recruit him as an agent.
Paradoxically, the success of the Venona secret has skewed our understanding of the Cold War. Haynes and Klehr are correct to note that those histories of the Stalinist era that belittle the Soviet threat have indeed “perpetuated many myths that have given Americans a warped view of the nation’s history.” Hopefully, these invaluable Venona files will help us see more clearly just how much of a threat Soviet espionage and Communist subversion posed to American security. The much-desired opening of all Russian intelligence archives dealing with this period would go far in doing just that.