"Somehow, settling factual disputes about who was and wasn't a spy [for the Soviets, during the Second World War] has failed to create any new consensus. Instead, it has brought the fight about Communism in America back to life."

Jacob Weisberg

"Cold War Without End," The New York Times, November 28, 1999.

>> THE VENONA DOCUMENTS

Beginning in the late 1920s, the Soviet Union used a "virtually unbreakable cipher system," called a "one-time pad," for sensitive diplomatic and intelligence communications. Due to carelessness on the part of Soviet cryptographers during and immediately after the Second World War, some of the one-time pads were reissued. In 1946, an American cryptanalyst, by the name of Meredith Gardner, who worked for the U.S. Army Security Agency and was assigned to what was then called the Venona Project, succeeded in deciphering some of the messages. The FBI, under the direction of special agent Robert Lamphere, began a review of the Venona cables in 1948, with the goal of identifying Soviet agents and sources whose code names appeared in the documents.[1] The public was not aware of the decrypted cables at that time. Apparently, even the attorney general and President Truman were kept out of the loop and were not told of the cables' existence. [2] Information about the Venonas was released on July 12, 1995 and reached the attention of the general public in October, 1996, through the publicity surrounding the Venona conference, co-sponsored by the National Security Agency (NSA), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Center for Democracy. [3] [4] [5]

The release of the Venona documents represented a dramatic breakthrough for historians who had wrestled for years with questions about the nature and extent of Soviet espionage in the U.S. before and during World War II. The content of the decrypts corroborated much of the testimony of witnesses like Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley and lent credence to the contention that members of Soviet intelligence agencies had been engaged in spying on the American government and that the American Communist Party had provided a source of people willing to release privileged information to the state security branch of the Soviet government (then called the NKVD, later to be known as the KGB) and a smaller source of people ripe for recruitment as agents. [6] The cables provide a glimpse, if fragmented, of specific activities of the participants.

No less dramatic in the ongoing search for answers, was the release of files from selected Soviet (KGB) archives in the early 1990s after the fall of the Iron Curtain. When taken together, the Venona cables, the secret Soviet files and the testimony of cooperative witnesses provide convincing evidence that a spy network existed in the United States (though not by the time McCarthy came on the scene). The evidence also indicates that the efforts of these Soviet supporters caused no serious damage to the security of our country.

Based on what has been learned from these sources, Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, authors of The Haunted Wood, reach the following conclusions:

During the early years following formal U.S.-Soviet recognition, the USSR's underground operatives in the United States functioned under frequently repeated instructions from Moscow to concentrate on three crucial areas of information collection: scientific and economic secrets from U.S. industries with potential value to the industrialization process under way in the Soviet Union; policy documents related to Japanese and German military threats to the Soviet regime... and information on individuals and groups in the United States supporting either the exiled Soviet leader Leon Trotsky or the various small pro-monarchist organization of so-called Whites.... These 'anti-Soviet' activists preoccupied Joseph Stalin and the uneasy cabal that supported his leadership in the USSR. [7]

The most urgent of the demands during the early years after recognition, say Weinstein and Vassiliev, was the "the collection of information related to US foreign policy, especially in Europe and the Far East, and gathering American government intelligence data concerning German and Japanese actions that affected the USSR's security." [8]

The release of the Venonas and the report of incriminating KGB files did not put an end to the long-standing battle between mainstream historians and their critics on the Left. Victor Navasky, former editor/publisher of the Nation, attorney John Lowenthal and others disapprove of the willingness of some historians to accept, virtually without question, the authenticity of the Venona cables. These critics suggest that, because of the absence of undisputed facts to support them, the decrypts only serve to muddy the water. [9] [10] Navasky and Lowenthal challenge, also, the "Cold War" historians' acceptance of the reliability of the uncovered archives, pointing to the fact that there is no longer access to these files; thus their accuracy cannot be assured.

Nevertheless, the impact of the information gathered from the release of the Venona cables and the publication of the Soviet archives has been profound. By now, there remains little doubt on the part of anyone but the fiercest skeptic that a concerted Soviet espionage campaign did exist and that this effort involved cooperation from a large number of Americans willing to provide privileged information to the Soviets. [11]

FOOTNOTES

[1] Robert J. Lamphere, The FBI-KGB War: A Special Agent's Story (Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1995), 78-98.

[2] Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Secrecy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 70-71.

[3] Andrew Christopher and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB. (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 143. Ellen Schrecker, Many are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1998), xvii, 234.

[4] The CIA, which was established in 1947, was not informed about the Venonas until late 1951. Ibid., 205.

[5] Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, chairman of a joint congressional-executive branch commission studying concerns about government secrecy, was instrumental in getting CIA director John Deutsch to declassify the Venonas. John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, June 1999), 6.

[6]   See Venona #142(a) KGB Moscow to Camberra, 12 September, 1943; #1340, New York to Moscow, 21 September, 1944. Robert Louis Benson and Michael Warner, eds., Venona: Soviet Espionage and The American Response, 1939-1957 (National Security Agency and Central Intelligence Agency, 1996), 243, 341.

[7]   Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America -- The Soviet Era, (New York: Random House, 1999), 24.

[8]   Ibid., 32.

[9]   Victor Navasky, "Cold war Ghosts," The Nation, (July 16, 2001), 40.

[10] John Lowenthal agrees. He challenges, in particular, the acceptance of footnotes allegedly revealing the identity of the cover names exposed and specifies entries that are inaccurate or at least unclear. Ellen Schrecker also suggests caution regarding the use of the Venona documents as evidence, citing "...there are too many gaps in the record to use these materials with complete confidence... no indication as to when the documents were first deciphered nor how the identifications were made," and warning that since most of the names found in the Venona documents are aliases, we are relying on intelligence agencies' claims that a specific code name really does refer to a specific individual. Martin Duberman adds, "We still don't know what portion of the total number of Venona documents transmitted to the Soviets by US espionage agents has in fact been released. Nor do we know how or why particular code names in the documents have been linked to given people ...." Lecture by John Lowenthal at Symposium: "Venona and Alger Hiss," University of Michigan, November 5, 2000. John Lowenthal, "Venona and Alger Hiss," Intelligence and National Security 15, no. 3 (Autumn 2000): 98-130, 106. Navasky, "Cold War Ghosts," 38. Ellen Schrecker, Many are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1998), xvii, 166. Martin Duberman, "A Fellow Traveling," review of Commies: Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left, in The Nation, Vol. 273, No. 3, (July 16, 2001), 34.

[11] See John Earl Haynes Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev, Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009.