Project Venona

May meeting of the Association for Rational Thought

link:
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/88689259309?
pwd=VHegY8x0jCjtDPFP4bYfrBaAQgR2zB.1

Project Venona: a cryptographic insight into the origins of The Red Scare and the Dawn of the Cold War.
or: “The Soviets are our allies … naah.”

Speaker: Dave Siegel

In 1943, American codebreakers began secretly attacking the Soviet codes used by Soviet agents in the US (Project Venona). The codes were extremely difficult to break, and progress was very slow. What the decrypted messages revealed, over the next almost 40 years, was that, starting well before 1942, the USSR had launched “unrestrained espionage against the US … of the type which a nation directs at an enemy state [1].” This led some Americans to date the Cold War as
having started before 1942. The Soviet efforts, aided by The American
Communist Party (CPUSA), had been astonishingly successful in penetrating many departments of the US government, including senior officials in the State and Treasury Departments, the OSS (the forerunner to the CIA), sources within the Manhattan Project, and within the super-secret WWII code-breaking operations at Arlington Hall and Bletchley Park. Suspected agents included a personal aide and a close advisor to the President. The suspected agents were mostly American citizens who were members of the CPUSA. It was a counter-intelligence nightmare.

But Venona yielded only fragmentary information that was insufficient, on its own, to conclusively identify the sources. (In Venona messages, the Soviets obscured identities with cover names, and used sophisticated spycraft). Generally, spies could only be identified through conventional “gum-shoeing,” with corroboration deducible from Venona. Thus, the information yielded by Venona has been
extremely controversial: many have charged that Venona was the same as, and inspired, McCarthy-ism: the accusation of people as spies with little or incomplete evidence. Venona has also been used as indictment of prominent people, whose identities were inferred from the content, as Soviet agents. Subsequent investigation, and Russian archives [1,3], have invalidated many of those claims, while substantiating the validity of Venona in general. Venona corroborated accusations; but it did not, by itself, conclusively identify almost any spies.

Dave will show examples of decoded Venona messages, and focus on the impact of the information derived from Soviet sources in The Manhattan Project. Generally, Soviet sources identified by further investigation were either prosecuted, fired, or side-lined. Venona was never used to prosecute a very important spy that it did identify
unambiguously; and, oddly, it was only declassified in 1994, long after the fall of the USSR. A later generation of historians (e.g. [1-3]) has tried to achieve a more nuanced understanding of the motivations of the sources; of what being named in Venona messages really meant; of how it impacted the USA; and of the reasons why Venona was not declassified earlier, or used in prosecutions. The resulting, more complete, story has surprises for people on both sides of the old controversies.

A good source on this affair is reference #1; below.
1. John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, “Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America,” Yale Univ. Press, New Haven, c. 1999.
2. J.E. Haynes, “Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Lists and Venona,” April 2007,
https://www.johnearlhaynes.org/page62.html , (accessed 03/09/24).
3. Allen Weinstein and Aleaxander Vassiliev, “The Haunted Wood: Soviet
Espionage in America – the Stalin Era.” Random House, NY, c. 1999,.