WITCH HUNTS ARE A FUNCTION OF WITCHES:

IN 1939, WHEN THE SOVIET UNION was an ally of  Nazi Germany, the U.S. Army began collecting copies of encrypted cables sent commercially to Moscow by the Soviet diplomatic missions in the United States. No effort to decrypt the cables, thought to be diplomatic in nature, was made until 1943, when reports were received that Stalin, by then an ally of the United States, was negotiating a separate peace treaty with Germany. At that time, the Army Signals Security Agency (SSA), an early predecessor of the National Security Agency (NSA), was ordered to establish a program--eventually called VENONA--to decipher the cables. The Soviet codes did not yield readily to cryptanalysis, because, as it was soon discovered, a two-part ciphering system had been employed; the second step used a one-time pad--theoretically unbreakable. As it happened, none of the messages was deciphered before the end of the war.

Once progress began to be made, however, the SSA cryptanalysts made a startling discovery. Only slightly more than half of the 750,000 intercepted cables concerned foreign ministry and trade matters; the balance involved Soviet intelligence organizations. By 1946, when the first message was decrypted, KGB, GRU (military intelligence), and naval GRU-user systems had been identified. When the VENONA program ended in October 1980, portions of nearly three thousand of the cables intercepted between 1939 and 1948 had been decrypted. The results revealed that Soviet agents had penetrated every important organization in the American government, including the Manhattan Project. The Allies were not immune; VENONA revealed Soviet penetrations in Britain, Canada, and Australia. In 1995 the VENONA decrypts were declassified. Hard copies were made available to scholars, while digital versions were posted on the NSA Website, together with several monographs providing historical details.

The public reaction to the VENONA decrypts was mixed. Walter and Miriam Schneir, longtime advocates of the "the Rosenbergs are innocent" theory, wrote in the 5 July 1999 issue of The Nation that "no reasonable person who examines all the relevant documents can doubt, for example, that in World War II Washington some employees of government agencies were passing information that went to the Russians, that the American Communist Party provided recruits for Soviet intelligence work or that VENONA yielded clues that put investigators on the trail of Klaus Fuchs[,] . . .  Julius Rosenberg and others." But many still could not accept the charges that Communist Party members had engaged in espionage for the Soviet Union. There were a variety of countercharges. Some claimed that the U.S. government had fabricated the cables. Others argued that the interpretation of the partially decrypted messages was faulty. Still others claimed "Red scare revisionism," coupled with "right-wing triumphalism," aimed at rehabilitating Senator Joseph McCarthy.

The books discussed here consider these issues to varying degrees. They reveal how the codes were broken, who did the work, the nature of the espionage, how the Soviets found out about VENONA  (long before the CIA was officially informed by the FBI in 1952), and why most of the spies identified were never prosecuted. While there is some overlap between them, each book contributes its own details and analysis.

Tweet   @brothersjudd