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In the early years of the Cold War , Venona would be an important source of information on Soviet intelligence activity for the Western powers. Although unknown to the public, and even to Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman , it was a critical and guarded program behind many famous events of the early Cold War , such as the Rosenberg Spying Case and the defections of Donald MacLean and Guy Burgess . Most of the messages which would later prove to be decipherable were intercepted between 1942 and 1945, and they were decrypted beginning in 1946 and continuing until 1980, when Venona was cancelled. BACKGROUND The Venona Project was initiated in 1943, under orders from the deputy Chief of Military Intelligence (G-2), Carter W. Clarke. Clarke distrusted Joseph Stalin , and feared that the Soviet Union would sign a separate peace with the Third Reich , allowing Germany to focus its military forces against Great Britain and the United States. Code-breakers of the U.S. Army 's Signal Intelligence Service (commonly called Arlington Hall ) analyzed Encrypted high-level Soviet diplomatic intelligence message intercepted in large volumes during and immediately after World War II by American, British and Australian listening posts. Yri Modin , ''My Five Cambridge Friends'', 1994, Ballantine, p. 194 This traffic, some of which was encrypted with a One-time Pad system, was stored and analyzed in relative secrecy by hundreds of cryptanalysts over a 40-year period starting in the early 1940s. Due to a serious blunder on the part of the Soviets—reusing pages of some of the one-time pads in other pads, which were then used for other messages, some of this traffic was vulnerable to cryptanalysis. BREAKTHROUGH The Soviet systems in general used a Code to convert words and letters into numbers, to which additive Keys (from one-time pads) were added, encrypting the content. When used correctly, one-time pad encryption is theoretically unbreakable. Cryptanalysis by American and British code-breakers revealed that some of the one-time pad material had incorrectly been reused by the Soviets (specifically, entire pages, although not complete books), which allowed decryption (sometimes only partial) of a small part of the traffic. Generating the one-time pads was a slow and labor-intensive process, and the outbreak of war with Germany in June 1941 caused a sudden increase in the need for coded messages. It is probable that the Soviet code generators started duplicating cipher pages in order to keep up with demand. It was Arlington Hall's Lt. Richard Hallock , working on Soviet "Trade" traffic (so called because these messages dealt with Soviet trade issues), who first discovered that the Soviets were reusing pages. Hallock and his colleagues (including Genevieve Feinstein, Cecil Phillips , Frank Lewis, Frank Wanat, and Lucille Campbell) went on to break into a significant amount of Trade traffic, recovering many one-time pad additive key tables in the process. A young Meredith Gardner (of what would become the National Security Agency) then used this material to break in to what turned out to be NKVD (and later GRU ) traffic, by reconstructing the code used to convert text to numbers. Samuel Chew and Cecil Phillips also made valuable contributions. On 20 December 1946 , Gardner made the first break into the code, revealing the existence of Soviet espionage in the Manhattan Project . Other alleged Soviet spies worked in Washington in the State Department , Treasury , Office Of Strategic Services , and even the White House . Very slowly, using assorted techniques ranging from traffic analysis to Defector information, more of the messages were decrypted. Claims have been made that information from physical theft of code books (a partially burned one was recovered by the Finns) to bugging embassy rooms in which text was entered into encrypting devices (analyzing the keystrokes by listening to them being punched in), contributed to recovering much of the plaintext. These latter claims are less than fully supported in the open literature. One significant aid (mentioned by the NSA) in the early stages may have been work done in cooperation between the Japan ese and Finnish cryptanalysis organizations; when the Americans broke into Japanese codes during World War II, they gained access to this information. There are also reports that copies of signals purloined from Soviet offices by the Federal Bureau Of Investigation (FBI) were helpful in the cryptanalysis. RESULTS The NSA reported that, according to the serial numbers of the Venona cables, thousands were sent, but only a fraction were available to the cryptanalysts. Approximately 2,200 of the messages were decrypted and translated; some 50 percent of the 1943 GRU-Naval Washington to Moscow messages were broken, but none for any other year, although several thousand were sent between 1941 and 1945. The decryption rate of the NKVD cables was:
Out of some hundreds of thousands of intercepted encrypted texts, it is claimed that under 3,000 have been partially or wholly decrypted. All of the duplicate one-time pad pages were produced in 1942, and almost all of them had been used by the end of 1945, with a few being used as late as 1948. After this, Soviet message traffic reverted to completely unreadable. The existence of Venona decryptions became known to the Soviets within a few years of the first breaks. It is not clear whether the Soviets knew how much of the message traffic, or which messages, had been successfully decrypted. At least one Soviet penetration agent, British Secret Intelligence Service Representative to the U.S., Kim Philby , was told about the project in 1949, as part of his job as liaison between British and U.S. intelligence. Since all of the duplicate one-time pad pages had been used by this time, the Soviets apparently did not make any changes to their cryptographic procedures after they learned of Venona. However, this information did allow them to alert those of their agents who might be at risk of exposure due to the decryptions. SIGNIFICANCE The decrypted messages gave important insights into Soviet behavior in the period during which duplicate one-time pads were used. With the first break into the code, Venona revealed the existence of Soviet espionage at Los Alamos National Laboratories . Identities soon emerged of American, Canadian , Australia n, and British spies in service to the Soviet government, including Klaus Fuchs , Alan Nunn May and Donald Maclean , a member of the Cambridge Five spy ring. Others worked in Washington in the State Department, Treasury, Office of Strategic Services, and even the White House. The decrypts show that the U.S. and other nations were targeted in major espionage campaigns by the Soviet Union as early as 1942. Among those identified are Julius And Ethel Rosenberg ; Alger Hiss ; Harry Dexter White , the second-highest official in the Treasury Department; Lauchlin Currie , a personal aide to Franklin Roosevelt; and Maurice Halperin , a section head in the Office of Strategic Services. Further complicating matters is the fact that the same person sometimes had different code names at different times, and the same code name was sometimes reused for different individuals. In some cases, notably that of Alger Hiss, the matching of a Venona code name to an individual is disputed. In many other cases, a Venona code name has not yet been linked to any person. According to authors John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr , the Venona transcripts identify approximately 349 Americans who they claim had a covert relationship with Soviet intelligence, though less than half of these have been matched to real-name identities. The Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor to the CIA , housed at one time or another between fifteen and twenty Soviet spies. Duncan Lee , Donald Wheeler , Jane Foster Zlatowski , and Maurice Halperin passed information to Moscow. The War Production Board , the Board Of Economic Warfare , the Office of the Coordinator Of Inter-American Affairs and the Office Of War Information , included at least half a dozen Soviet sources each among their employees. In the opinion of some, almost every American military and diplomatic agency of any importance was compromised to some extent by Soviet espionage. Some scholars and journalists dispute the claims by Haynes, Klehr, and others concerning the precision of the matching of code names to actual persons. Also contested is the implication that all 349 persons identified had a witting covert relationship with Soviet intelligence; it is argued that in some cases the individual may have been an unwitting information source or a prospect for future recruitment by Soviet intelligence. See "Critical views" below. BEARING OF VENONA ON PARTICULAR CASES Venona has added information—some of it unequivocal, some of it ambiguous—to several espionage cases. Some known spies, including Theodore Hall , were neither prosecuted nor publicly implicated, because the Venona evidence against them was not made public. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg See Also: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg Venona has added significant information to the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, making it clear that Julius was guilty of espionage, but also showing that Ethel was probably no more than an accomplice, if that. Additionally, Venona and other recent information has shown that while the content of Julius' atomic espionage was not as vital as was alleged at the time of his espionage activities, in other fields it was extensive. The information Rosenberg passed to the Soviets concerned the Proximity Fuze , design and production information on the Lockheed P-80, and thousands of classified reports from Emerson Radio . The Venona evidence indicates that it was unidentified sources codenamed "Quantum" and "Pers" who facilitated transfer of nuclear weapons technology to the Soviet Union from positions within the Manhattan Project. Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White Main articles: According to the Moynihan Commission on Government Secrecy, the complicity of both Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White is settled by Venona. |
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