In the opinion of some, almost every American military and diplomatic agency of any importance was compromised to some extent by Soviet espionage.[25]. Intelligence and National Security. [citation needed]. The Finnish radio intelligence sold much of its material concerning Soviet codes to OSS in 1944 during Operation Stella Polaris, including the partially burned code book. As it had been sent from New York and had its origins in the British Embassy in Washington, Philby deduced that the sender was Donald Maclean, now resident in London (Philby had not known Maclean's code name). "[4] Navasky goes further in his defense of the listed people and has claimed that a great deal of the so-called espionage that went on was nothing more than “exchanges of information among people of good will” and that “most of these exchanges were innocent and were within the law.”[5], According to Ellen Schrecker, "Because they offer insights into the world of the secret police on both sides of the Iron Curtain, it is tempting to treat the FBI and Venona materials less critically than documents from more accessible sources. [23], The Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor to the CIA, housed at one time or another between fifteen and twenty Soviet spies. [10] 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. Analysis supported some criminal spy cases, such as that against Julius Rosenberg for some of the charges but cast doubt on the case against his wife Ethel Rosenberg. 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. Romerstein , Herbert and Breindel, Eric (2000). 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Boardman", "A Brief Account of the American Experience", http://www.access.gpo.gov/congress/commissions/secrecy/pdf/12hist1.pdf, http://www.nsa.gov/about/_files/cryptologic_heritage/publications/wwii/eavesdropping.pdf, "The Office of Strategic Services: America's First Intelligence Agency; Chapter: X-2", https://www.cia.gov/csi/books/oss/art07.htm, http://web.archive.org/web/20000817012527/http://www.nwc.navy.mil/press/Review/2000/summer/re2-Su0.htm, http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=h-diplo&month=9907&week=b&msg=sObK4G6XORytI4LXBpW2xw&user=&pw=, "Appendix A; SECRECY; A Brief Account of the American Experience", "Report Of The Commission On Protecting And Reducing Government Secrecy", http://origin.www.gpo.gov/congress/commissions/secrecy/pdf/12hist1.pdf, "The Venona Files and the Alger Hiss Case", http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/hiss/hissVenona.html, http://homepages.nyu.edu/~th15/lowenthal.pdf, http://www.fas.org/irp/eprint/theoharis.htm, http://homepages.nyu.edu/~th15/venona.html, "Venona Historical Monograph #4: The KGB in San Francisco and Mexico City and the GRU in New York and Washington", http://homepages.nyu.edu/~th15/lowsoviet.html, http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/declass/venona/index.shtml, https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/venona-soviet-espionage-and-the-american-response-1939-1957/part2.htm, "The American Response to Soviet Espionage", https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/venona-soviet-espionage-and-the-american-response-1939-1957/part1.htm, "Report of the Commission On Protecting And Reducing Government Secrecy", http://www.fas.org/sgp/library/moynihan/index.html, http://www.mi5.gov.uk/output/Page242.html, http://www-personal.umich.edu/~sanders/214/other/handouts/VenonaChrono.html, "Red Files: Interview with Cecil Philips, US Signal Intelligence Service", http://216.239.37.104/translate_c?hl=en&u=http://www.pbs.org/redfiles/kgb/deep/interv/k_int_cecil_philips.htm&prev=/search%3Fq%3DHarold%2BGlasser%2Bvenona%26start%3D60%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26sa%3DN, "In the Enemy’s House: Venona and the Maturation of American Counterintelligence", http://web.archive.org/web/20061115021025/http://www.fbi.gov/libref/historic/history/foxpaper.htm, http://www.regnery.com/regnery/010309_venona_preface.html, https://covert-history.wikia.org/wiki/Venona_project?oldid=10315. In many other cases, a Venona code name has not yet been linked to any person. The president received the substance of the material only through the FBI, Justice Department and CIA reports on counterintelligence and intelligence matters. Haynes, John Earl and Klehr, Harvey (1999). After this, Soviet message traffic reverted to being completely unreadable.[15]. 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. [citation needed] Before any messages could be used in court they would have to be declassified. Some of the earliest detailed public knowledge that Soviet code messages from World War II had been broken came with the release of Robert Lamphere's book, The FBI-KGB War, in 1986. es:Proyecto Venona It was Arlington Hall's Lieutenant 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. Those who criticized the governmental and non-governmental efforts to root out and expose communists felt that these efforts were an overreaction (in addition to other reservations about McCarthyism). Duncan Lee, Donald Wheeler, Jane Foster Zlatowski, and Maurice Halperin passed information to Moscow. [4][5][6], The Venona Project was initiated in 1943, under orders from the deputy Chief of Military Intelligence (G-2), Carter W. at Los Alamos National Laboratories. Eduard Mark. There are also reports that copies of signals purloined from Soviet offices by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) were helpful in the cryptanalysis. A major hurdle was a question of law. The Venona project was a long-running secret collaboration of the United States and United Kingdom intelligence agencies involving cryptanalysis of messages sent by intelligence agencies of the Soviet Union, the majority during World War II. "[14] Cover names were used not only for Soviet agents but other people as well. Lamphere had been the FBI liaison to the code-breaking activity, had considerable knowledge of Venona and the counter-intelligence work that resulted from it. It decoded almost 3,000 Soviet messages. "[43], Schrecker agrees the documents have genuinely established the guilt of many prominent figures, but is still critical of the hardline interpretation by scholars such as Murno Gladst, arguing, "complexity, nuance, and a willingness to see the world in other than black and white seem alien to Haynes' view of history. According to British writer Nigel West it was president of Czechoslovak government-in-exile Edvard Beneš. [41] Research in Soviet Archives has added to the corroboration of some Venona material, including the identities of many codenamed individuals. sv:Venonaprojektet Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy. London, Summer 1998, pp.
This message traffic, 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. [26] Military historian Eduard Mark[27] and American authors Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel concluded that it was Roosevelt's aide Harry Hopkins. Belmont compared the Venona messages to teleprinters sent from FBI field offices to headquarters. [28] According to American authors John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, source codename "19" could be someone from the British delegation to the Washington Conference in May 1943. One significant aid (mentioned by the NSA) in the early stages may have been work done in cooperation between the Japanese and Finnish cryptanalysis organizations; when the Americans broke into Japanese codes during World War II, they gained access to this information. According to authors John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, the Venona transcripts identify approximately 349 Americans whom they claim had a covert relationship with Soviet intelligence, though fewer than half of these have been matched to real-name identities. That code word has no known meaning. It is probable that the Soviet code generators started duplicating cipher pages in order to keep up with demand. [citation needed]. 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.