What was project venona

More than 60 years have passed since the end of World War II, and only now is some once-secret information from that conflict coming to light.

They were ordered declassified by the congressional Commission on Government Secrecy. The release of the Venona intercepts answered many questions regarding the immense Soviet penetration of the U. On February 1, , a top-secret group called the U. Army Signal Intelligence Service, the forerunner of the modern-day NSA, began a lengthy undercover project to intercept and analyze Soviet diplomatic traffic. In Clarke had picked up signals that a possible German-Soviet peace deal was in the works, and he wanted to find out if what he had heard had any merit.

Clarke ordered his small code-breaking unit to read all Soviet diplomatic messages being sent from the United States to Moscow. Operating in utmost secrecy from their headquarters in Arlington Hall, in what was then an out-of-the-way Virginia suburb of Washington, D. Through harrowing months of trial and error, the analysts were able to crack the Soviet code. What they found was not information leading to a separate peace treaty, but a large-scale, well-organized Soviet espionage penetration of the highest levels of the U.

The Soviet official entrusted with the overall handling of those messages from to was Lt. Fitin ran five different espionage branches in the United States. Behind its commercial facade, AMTORG was a covert means of obtaining intelligence on American industrial ventures and all information coming from the U.

LendLease Program to the Soviet Union. Fitin also oversaw the use of Soviet diplomats as intelligence agents, direct relations with KGB general intelligence headquarters in Moscow, the joint Soviet military intelligence GRU and Red Army general staff intelligence directorate and the GRU-Soviet naval intelligence staff.

By the time Venona analysts were able to make considerable headway into Soviet communications, the war had ended.

What they did learn in the early s, however, was that the Soviet Union had penetrated the top-secret Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, N.

The information culled via Venona regarding the Rosenbergs is noteworthy. These messages were encrypted of course, but in the United States, with the assistance of Great Britain, began to decrypt a good number of these messages.

This program led to the eventual capture of several Soviet spies within the Manhattan Project. The VENONA intercepts, as they were codenamed, remained a closely-guarded secret, known only to a handful of government officials, until the program was declassified in The cables should have been impossible to decrypt.

Collecting them was easy. The United States government simply acquired copies of all cables openly sent to and from various Soviet embassies and consulates. These messages were encrypted by a means known as a "one-time pad. The Army's Signal Intelligence Service began working on the problem in , and they gradually discovered a Soviet procedural error that allowed many of the messages to be painstakingly decrypted. The Venona messages clearly display Julius Rosenberg's role as the leader of a productive ring of Soviet spies.

Nor would there have been any basis for doubting his involvement in atomic espionage, because the deciphered messages document his recruitment of his brother-in-law, David Greenglass, as a spy.

It is also unlikely, had the messages been made public or even circulated more widely within the government than they did, that Ethel Rosenberg would have been executed. The Venona messages do not throw her guilt in doubt; indeed, they confirm that she was a participant in her husband's espionage and in the recruitment of her brother for atomic espionage. But they suggest that she was essentially an accessory to her husband's activity, having knowledge of it and assisting him but not acting as a principal.

Had they been introduced at the Rosenberg trial, the Venona messages would have confirmed Ethel's guilt but also reduced the importance of her role. Further, the Venona messages, if made public, would have made Julius Rosenberg's execution less likely.

When Julius Rosenberg faced trial, only two Soviet atomic spies were known: David Greenglass, whom Rosenberg had recruited and run as a source, and Klaus Fuchs. Fuchs, however, was in England, so Greenglass was the only Soviet atomic spy in the media spotlight in the United States. Greenglass's confession left Julius Rosenberg as the target of public outrage at atomic espionage.

That prosecutors would ask for and get the death penalty under those circumstances is not surprising. In addition to Fuchs and Greenglass, however, the Venona messages identify three other Soviet sources within the Manhattan Project. The messages show that Theodore Hall, a young physicist at Los Alamos, was a far more valuable source than Greenglass, a machinist.

Hall withstood FBI interrogation, and the government had no direct evidence of his crimes except the Venona messages, which because of their secrecy could not be used in court; he therefore escaped prosecution. The real identities of the sources Fogel and Quantum are not known, but the information they turned over to the Soviets suggests that Quantum was a scientist of some standing and that Fogel was either a scientist or an engineer.

Both were probably more valuable sources than David Greenglass. Had Venona been made public, Greenglass would have shared the stage with three other atomic spies and not just with Fuchs, and all three would have appeared to have done more damage to American security than he.

With Greenglass's role diminished, that of his recruiter, Julius Rosenberg, would have been reduced as well. Rosenberg would assuredly have been convicted, but his penalty might well have been life in prison rather than execution. There were broader consequences, as well, of the decision to keep Venona secret. The overlapping issues of Communists in government, Soviet espionage, and the loyalty of American Communists quickly became a partisan battleground. Led by Republican senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, some conservatives and partisan Republicans launched a comprehensive attack on the loyalties of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations.

Marshall, the Army chief of staff under Roosevelt and secretary of state and secretary of defense under Truman, as participants, in Senator McCarthy's words, in "a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.

A conspiracy of infamy so black that, when it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men. A number of liberals and radicals pointed to the excesses of McCarthy's charges as justification for rejecting the allegations altogether.

Anticommunism further lost credibility in the late s when critics of U. By the s many commentators, and perhaps most academic historians, had concluded that Soviet espionage had been minor, that few American Communists had assisted the Soviets, and that no high officials had betrayed the United States. Many history texts depicted America in the late s and s as a "nightmare in red" during which Americans were "sweat-drenched in fear" of a figment of their own paranoid imaginations.

As for American Communists, they were widely portrayed as having no connection with espionage. One influential book asserted emphatically, "There is no documentation in the public record of a direct connection between the American Communist Party and espionage during the entire postwar period.

Consequently, Communists were depicted as innocent victims of an irrational and oppressive American government. In this sinister but widely accepted portrait of America in the s and s, an idealistic New Dealer Alger Hiss was thrown into prison on the perjured testimony of a mentally sick anti-Communist fanatic Whittaker Chambers , innocent progressives the Rosenbergs were sent to the electric chair on trumped-up charges of espionage laced with anti-Semitism, and dozens of blameless civil servants had their careers ruined by the smears of a professional anti-Communist Elizabeth Bentley.

According to this version of events, one government official Harry White was killed by a heart attack brought on by Bentley's lies, and another Laurence Duggan, a senior diplomat was driven to suicide by more of Chambers's malignant falsehoods.

Similarly, in many textbooks President Truman's executive order denying government employment to those who posed security risks, and other laws aimed at espionage and Communist subversion, were and still are described not as having been motivated by a real concern for American security since the existence of any serious espionage or subversion was denied but instead as consciously anti-democratic attacks on basic freedoms.

As one commentator wrote, "The statute books groaned under several seasons of legislation designed to outlaw dissent. Despite its central role in the history of American counterintelligence, the Venona Project remained among the most tightly held government secrets.

By the time the project shut down, it had decrypted nearly three thousand messages sent between the Soviet Union and its embassies and consulates around the world. Remarkably, although rumors and a few snippets of information about the project had become public in the s, the actual texts and the enormous import of the messages remained secret until The U.

It is all the more amazing, then, how little got out about the Venona Project in the fifty-three years before it was made public.

Unfortunately, the success of government secrecy in this case has seriously distorted our understanding of post-World War II history. Hundreds of books and thousands of essays on McCarthyism, the federal loyalty security program, Soviet espionage, American communism, and the early Cold War have perpetuated many myths that have given Americans a warped view of the nation's history in the s, s, and s.

The information that these messages reveal substantially revises the basis for understanding the early history of the Cold War and of America's concern with Soviet espionage and Communist subversion. Although this act opened some files to public scrutiny, it has not as yet provided access to the full range of FBI investigative records.

The enormous backlog of FOIA requests has led to lengthy delays in releasing documents; it is not uncommon to wait more than five years to receive material. Capricious and zealous enforcement of regulations exempting some material from release frequently has elicited useless documents consisting of occasional phrases interspersed with long sections of redacted blacked-out text. Even given these hindrances, however, each year more files are opened, and the growing body of FBI documentation has significantly enhanced the opportunity for a reconstruction of what actually happened.

The collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in led to the opening of Soviet archives that had never been examined by independent scholars. The historically rich documentation first made available in Moscow's archives in has resulted in an outpouring of new historical writing, as these records allow a far more complete and accurate understanding of central events of the twentieth century. But many archives in Russia are open only in part, and some are still closed.

In particular, the archives of the foreign intelligence operations of Soviet military intelligence and those of the foreign intelligence arm of the KGB are not open to researchers.

Given the institutional continuity between the former Soviet intelligence agencies and their current Russian successors, the opening of these archives is not anticipated anytime soon. However, Soviet intelligence agencies had cooperated with other Soviet institutions, whose newly opened archives therefore hold some intelligence-related material and provide a back door into the still-closed intelligence archives.

But the most significant source of fresh insight into Soviet espionage in the United States comes from the decoded messages produced by the Venona Project.

These documents, after all, constitute a portion of the materials that are still locked up in Russian intelligence archives. Not only do the Venona files supply information in their own right, but because of their inherent reliability they also provide a touchstone for judging the credibility of other sources, such as defectors' testimony and FBI investigative files.

Through most of the twentieth century, governments of powerful nations have conducted intelligence operations of some sort during both peace and war. None, however, used espionage as an instrument of state policy as extensively as did the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin.

In the late s and s, Stalin directed most of the resources of Soviet intelligence at nearby targets in Europe and Asia. America was still distant from Stalin's immediate concerns, the threat to Soviet goals posed by Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. This perception changed, however, after the United States entered the world war in December Stalin realized that once Germany and Japan were defeated, the world would be left with only three powers able to project their influence across the globe: the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and the United States.

And of these, the strongest would be the United States. With that in mind, Stalin's intelligence agencies shifted their focus toward America. The Soviet Union quickly became a major recipient of American military Lend-Lease aid, second only to Great Britain; it eventually received more than nine billion dollars. As part of the aid arrangements, the United States invited the Soviets to greatly expand their diplomatic staffs and to establish special offices to facilitate aid arrangements.

Thousands of Soviet military officers, engineers, and technicians entered the United States to review what aid was available and choose which machinery, weapons, vehicles nearly , American trucks went to the Soviet Union , aircraft, and other materiel would most assist the Soviet war effort. Soviet personnel had to be trained to maintain the American equipment, manuals had to be translated into Russian, shipments to the Soviet Union had to be inspected to ensure that what was ordered had been delivered, properly loaded, and dispatched on the right ships.

Entire Soviet naval crews arrived for training to take over American combat and cargo ships to be handed over to the Soviet Union.