Free Republic

Remembrances of VENONA -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- National Cryptologic Museum NSA Home Page Note: The following are the remarks made by Mr. William P. Crowell, Deputy Director of NSA when the declassification of the VENONA project was announced at CIA Headquarters on 11 July 1995. Mr. Crowell retired from NSA on 12 September 1997. In the early 1960's, shortly after joining NSA, I was one of a small but fortunate group of agency employees invited to a meeting with Frank Rowlett, one of the eminent NSA cryptologists who had been so successful during World War II. For over an hour Frank told us...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Fifty years after Sen. Joe McCarthy conducted some of the most infamous hearings in Senate history, thousands of pages of his secret probes into alleged Communist subversion will finally be made public. Some 5,000 pages of 1953-1954 closed-door hearings from McCarthy's Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations will be released Monday by Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat, and Susan Collins, a Maine Republican. Levin and Collins have both chaired McCarthy's former committee during the past two years as the documents were prepared for release. They plan to issue them in the same Senate hearing room where McCarthy himself...

Vladimir Putin's attendance at a reunion of KGB veterans at the notorious Lubyanka prison, and his embrace of Vladimir Kryuchkov ? the former KGB chief who led the August 1991 coup against Mikhail Gorbachev ? has coincided with yet more disclosures about the successes achieved by Soviet spies during the Cold War. Undoubtedly the Moscow spymasters had much to celebrate, even if some embarrassing defections in recent years have caused them discomfort. It was an as yet unidentified Russian intelligence officer who tipped off the FBI to the duplicity of bureau counterintelligence turncoat Robert Hanssen in return for resettlement in...

Meredith Gardner, who has died aged 89, was the American codebreaker responsible for breaking the ciphers that led to the arrests of the atom spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and the break-up of the Cambridge spy ring.During the late 1940s, Gardner was the main cryptanalyst working on the Venona material, messages sent between the KGB’s Moscow Centre and its agent handlers abroad using the theoretically unbreakable one-time pad system.Fluent in French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Lithuanian, Russian and Spanish, Gardner joined the United States Army’s codebreaking organisation, the Signals Security Agency, early in the Second World War.He worked initially...

<!-- div#globalnavdiv td img { display: block } --> People & Events J. Robert Oppenheimer, (1904 - 1967) Robert Oppenheimer was born on April 22, 1904, into a wealthy, New York, Jewish family. They lived in an apartment overlooking the Hudson River and vacationed in a summer home on Long Island. As a 17-year-old, Oppenheimer went to Harvard where a classmate says he "intellectually looted the place." But it was after Harvard that Oppenheimer found his intellectual passion. First at Cambridge University in England and then at Göttigen University in Germany, the young American scholar began making his mark...