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Subject: [Clips] Venona Ten Years Later: Lessons for Today
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http://www.hnn.us/articles/12812.html
History News Network
July 17, 2005
7-18-05: News at Home
Venona Ten Years Later: Lessons for Today
By Steven T. Usdin
Mr. Usdin, senior editor, BioCentury Publications, is the author of
forthcoming book Engineering Communism: How Two Americans Spied For Stalin
and Founded The Soviet Silicon Valley, Yale University Press).
Ten years ago, on July 11, 1995, the U.S. intelligence community held an
extraordinary press conference at CIA headquarters to break the seal on one
of the most closely held secrets of the Cold War. The world learned that
starting in 1946 American cryptologists had cracked Soviet codes and read
portions of thousands of messages Soviet intelligence operatives sent each
other during World War II. Most of the cables decrypted in a program that
came to be known as Venona, one of numerous codenames used to cloak its
existence, were sent or received by the Soviet head of foreign intelligence.
Just as the ability to read Stalin's spymaster's correspondence
dramatically altered the course of the Cold War, public release of the
cables a half-century later altered our understanding of the dynamics of
the conflict between the USSR and the West. Coupled with revelations from
Soviet bloc archives, release of data gathered in the Venona program led to
dramatic reassessments of decades of history. The revelations reverberated
worldwide as members of the British, Australian and, above all, American
communist parties who had protested their innocence were exposed as spies
and liars. Two generations of Americans for whom the innocence of Julius
Rosenberg and Alger Hiss was an article of faith were compelled to
reconsider their mockery of those who had warned about widespread Communist
espionage.
Venona not only produced lessons about the past -- it also illuminated
issues that governments and the public are grappling with today, including
the risks and benefits of the disclosure of intelligence, the dangers of
bureaucratic tunnel vision, and the ease with which ordinary people will
commit crimes to advance Utopian ideologies.
Venona was made possible because in 1942--during the darkest days of the
war in Russia, when everything, including skilled manpower, was in short
supply--Soviet code clerks produced and distributed to agents around the
globe thousands of duplicate copies of one-time pads used to encrypt
communications. As is clear from the name, the code tables were supposed to
be used only once, and if this simple precaution had been heeded, the
encryption system would have been impenetrable. But with Germans at the
gates of Stalingrad, punctilious adherence to apparently arcane security
rules must have seemed an unaffordable luxury. The chances of the shortcut
being detected must have seemed vanishingly small.
The Venona secrets were disclosed at the July 1995 press conference largely
as a result of prodding from the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who
learned of the program when he headed the Commission on Protecting and
Reducing Government Secrecy. The story of how a combination of
extraordinary luck and tremendous talent led a small team working at a
former girls' boarding school outside Washington, D.C. to detect and
exploit the opportunity presented by the replicated one-time pads has been
described in several books, notably Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes's
Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (Yale University Press, 2000).
That first batch of Venona decrypts released a decade ago included cables
between Pavel Fitin, the Soviet head of foreign intelligence, and his
officers in New York describing the espionage activities of an American
engineer codenamed Liberal who worked for the U.S. Army Signal Corps.
These cables were among the first that the Army Security Agency (ASA),
which was later folded into the National Security Agency, partially
decrypted and shared with the FBI. It took the FBI a couple of years to
discover that Rosenberg was Liberal, and another four decades for the
National Security Agency to share with the American public the documents
that removed all doubt that he was a spy.
A 1956 internal memo to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover revealed three major
reasons why the Bureau didn't reveal its smoking-gun evidence during the
Rosenbergs' 1951 trial. There was a fear that disclosing the existence of
the Venona program could help the Russians minimize the damage to its U.S.
spy networks. Although Hoover didn't know it at the time, this concern was
largely unwarranted because Fitin and his colleagues already knew a great
deal about the Venona program
