Venona project

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Venona project was a secret American counterintelligence program that ran from the 1st of February 1943 until the 1st of October 1980, outlasting the war that spawned it by more than three decades. At its heart was a paradox: code-breakers trying to crack a cipher that was, in theory, mathematically unbreakable. Yet the Soviets made a blunder. Under wartime pressure, one manufacturing facility produced roughly 35,000 pages of duplicate one-time pad key numbers. That duplication handed American cryptanalysts a crack in an otherwise impenetrable wall. Over those 37 years, analysts decrypted and translated approximately 3,000 messages. Those messages would expose Soviet spy rings inside the Manhattan Project, inside the State Department and Treasury, and reach all the way into the White House. What emerges from the Venona files is a portrait of two wartime allies spying on each other with methodical intensity, and of the long, painstaking effort to bring those secrets to light.

• 2. Wartime Origins

  ›

  Gene Grabeel, an American mathematician and cryptanalyst, launched the Venona project on the 1st of February 1943 on orders from Colonel Carter W. Clarke, then Chief of Special Branch of the Military Intelligence Service. Clarke's concern was specific and urgent: he distrusted Joseph Stalin and feared the Soviet Union might sign a separate peace with Nazi Germany, freeing German forces to concentrate entirely against Britain and the United States. Listening posts run by American, British, and Australian personnel intercepted large volumes of encrypted Soviet diplomatic intelligence messages during and immediately after the war. The work was carried out at Arlington Hall, where hundreds of cryptanalysts labored over the traffic in relative secrecy. Frank Rowlett served as one of the project's leaders. Most of the messages that would prove decipherable had been transmitted and intercepted between 1942 and 1945, during the period when the Soviet Union was itself an ally of the United States. The gap between interception and decryption stretched for years; the slow process of breaking into the code did not begin in earnest until 1946.

• 3. Breaking the Unbreakable

  ›

  The one-time pad system had protected military and diplomatic communications since the 1930s. When applied correctly, it is genuinely unbreakable. The system works by converting words and letters into numbers, then adding key numbers drawn from a pad that is used only once. The Soviets' error was industrial: pressure from the German advance on Moscow in 1941 created a surge in demand for coded messages that the code-generating infrastructure could not meet. Entire pages of key numbers were duplicated and distributed to widely separated users in an attempt to disguise the reuse, but American cryptanalysts detected the pattern anyway. It was Arlington Hall's Lieutenant Richard Hallock who first noticed it while working through what analysts called Soviet "Trade" traffic. Hallock and colleagues including Genevieve Feinstein, Cecil Phillips, Frank Lewis, Frank Wanat, and Lucille Campbell broke into a significant volume of that traffic, recovering many one-time pad additive key tables. A young Meredith Gardner then used that recovered material to reconstruct the underlying code used to convert text to numbers. Gardner credited Marie Meyer, a Signal Intelligence Service linguist, with some of the initial recoveries from the Venona codebook. Samuel Chew and Cecil Phillips also made valuable contributions. On the 20th of December 1946, Gardner achieved the first break into the code, and what it revealed was startling: Soviet espionage running through the heart of the Manhattan Project.

• 4. Spies Inside the Bomb Program

  ›

  Klaus Fuchs appeared in the early Venona decrypts under the code names CHARLES and REST. Fuchs had joined the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos in 1944, where he contributed to the development of a plutonium implosion design. He provided the Soviets with the blueprint for the Trinity device that was detonated at Los Alamos in July 1945. A Moscow-to-New-York message dated the 10th of April 1945 described information provided by CHARLES as "of great value," noting that it included data on the atomic mass of the nuclear explosive and details on the explosive method of actuating the bomb. Venona investigations eventually identified CHARLES and REST as Fuchs in 1949. He was arrested and tried on the 1st of March 1950, confessed to four counts of espionage, and received a maximum sentence of fourteen years. The trail from Fuchs ran further. Once caught, Fuchs identified Harry Gold. Gold in turn gave up David Greenglass, who worked at Los Alamos under the code name KALIBER and was Ethel Rosenberg's brother. Greenglass had lied on his security clearance to gain access to the project and changed his story several times during trial, eventually testifying against his sister and her husband in exchange for a reduced sentence for himself and no prosecution for his wife. He was sentenced to fifteen years but was released in 1960 after serving nine and a half. Meanwhile, Venona also identified unresolved code names: "Quantum" was identified in Alexander Vassiliev's notes from KGB archives as Boris Podolsky, and "Pers" as Russell W. McNutt, an engineer from the uranium processing plant at Oak Ridge.

• 5. The Rosenberg Network

  ›

  Julius Rosenberg appeared in Venona under the code name LIBERAL, with Venona making clear that he was guilty of espionage. Ethel Rosenberg, though not acting as a principal, was shown to have served as an accessory and participated in the recruitment of her brother David Greenglass for atomic espionage. Julius passed information to the Soviets on the proximity fuze, design and production details on the Lockheed P-80 jet fighter, and thousands of classified reports from Emerson Radio. Harry Gold, operating under the code names GOOSE and ARNOLD, had been working as a KGB agent since 1935 after being recruited by Thomas Black on behalf of the Amtorg trading organization. That same year, Gold obtained employment at the Pennsylvania Sugar Company with Black's help, and during his time there worked under Semyon Semyonov and Klaus Fuchs. Gold's eventual confessions were a significant gain for the FBI: they led to the arrest of Abraham Brothman, David Greenglass, and Julius Rosenberg. Brothman was convicted of lying under oath to a grand jury and sentenced to fifteen years. The Venona decrypts also clarified that senior American officials were compromised: Alger Hiss of the State Department and Harry Dexter White, the second-highest official in the Treasury Department, were both identified. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, writing in 1998, stated that Hiss appeared to have been regarded by Moscow as its most important American agent.

• 6. The Cambridge Connection

  ›

  Kim Philby learned about the Venona project in 1949 through his role as the British Secret Intelligence Service's liaison to American intelligence. What he learned put his fellow Cambridge spy Donald Maclean in immediate danger. The FBI had told Philby about an agent cryptonymed "Homer," whose 1945 message to Moscow had been decoded and traced to a sender in New York with connections to the British Embassy in Washington. Philby did not know Maclean's code name, but he deduced the sender's identity from those details alone. By early 1951, Philby knew American intelligence would soon reach the same conclusion and advised Moscow to extract Maclean. The result was the flight of Maclean and Guy Burgess to Moscow in May 1951, where both lived out the rest of their lives. Burgess had begun passing information to Soviet intelligence while studying at the University of Cambridge, alongside Philby, Anthony Blunt, and Maclean. He continued the work as a BBC Radio correspondent, as an MI6 officer, and as a member of the British Foreign Office. Philby's code name was STANLEY. At the time of Maclean's flight, Burgess was stationed in Washington in the British Foreign Office but had been sent back to Britain in 1950 for what was described as bad behavior, which put him in position to warn Maclean directly. Burgess knew he himself was under suspicion by MI5 and Scotland Yard's Special Branch when the two men fled.

• 7. Secrecy and Its Costs

  ›

  Army Chief of Staff Omar Bradley made the decision to keep Venona from President Harry S. Truman, citing concerns about the White House's history of leaking sensitive information. Truman received counterintelligence material drawn from Venona's findings but was never told it came from decoded Soviet ciphers. The consequence was corrosive: Truman distrusted FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and suspected that intelligence reports were being exaggerated for political purposes. Even the CIA was not made an active partner in Venona until 1952. In late October 1948, the Soviets began systematically changing their ciphers in rapid succession, a sequence attributed to two sources: Bill Weisband, a linguist at Arlington Hall who was himself an NKVD agent, and Kim Philby. This episode became known as Black Friday. The cipher change effectively ended new productive decryption, and the dearth of signals intelligence that followed meant that no hint of the North Korean attack on South Korea in June 1950 reached American analysts in time. The first detailed public knowledge that Soviet wartime codes had been broken came with the 1984 publication of Chapman Pincher's book Too Secret Too Long. Peter Wright's 1987 memoir Spycatcher, written by an MI5 assistant director, provided the first account to identify the Venona project by name and lay out its long-term implications. It was not until 1995 that the bipartisan Commission on Government Secrecy, chaired by Senator Moynihan, formally released Venona project materials to the public.

• 8. Contested Evidence

  ›

  Intelligence historian Nigel West described Venona as "an irrefutable resource, far more reliable than the mercurial recollections of KGB defectors and the dubious conclusions drawn by paranoid analysts mesmerized by Machiavellian plots." But critics have raised persistent objections. A 1956 internal memorandum written by A. H. Belmont, then assistant to FBI director Hoover, argued strongly against using Venona translations in court. Belmont noted that cryptographers had themselves acknowledged that "almost anything included in a translation of one of these deciphered messages may in the future be radically revised." He also pointed to the complexity of matching cryptonyms to individuals: the personal details associated with the code name "Antenna" fit more than one person before investigators finally linked it to Julius Rosenberg. Rutgers University law professor John Lowenthal focused his critique on a single message, Venona 1822, in which the code name "Ales" was identified as "probably Alger Hiss." Lowenthal called that identification "a conclusion psychologically motivated and politically correct but factually wrong." The NSA subsequently declassified the original Russian text of that message; it remains the only Venona message for which the complete decrypted Russian text has been published. Victor Navasky, editor of The Nation, warned that the list of approximately 349 Americans identified in the Venona transcripts as having a covert relationship with Soviet intelligence could leave readers with the unfair implication that every name on the list was involved in espionage. According to authors John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, fewer than half of those 349 individuals have been matched to real-name identities, and each of those named agents may have had many others working for and reporting only to them.