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The Venona project was a United States counterintelligence program initiated during World War II by the United States Army's Signal Intelligence Service and later absorbed by the National Security Agency (NSA), that ran from February 1, 1943, until October 1, 1980. It was intended to decrypt messages transmitted by the intelligence agencies of the Soviet Union (e.g. the NKVD, the KGB, and the GRU). Initiated when the Soviet Union was an ally of the US, the program continued during the Cold War, when the Soviet Union was considered an enemy.
During the 37-year duration of the Venona project, the Signal Intelligence Service decrypted and translated approximately 3,000 messages. The signals intelligence yield included discovery of the Cambridge Five espionage ring in the United Kingdom, and also of Soviet espionage of the Manhattan Project in the US, known as Project Enormous. Some of the espionage was undertaken to support the Soviet atomic bomb project. The Venona project remained secret for more than 15 years after it concluded.
Most decipherable messages were transmitted and intercepted between 1942 and 1945, during World War II, when the Soviet Union was an ally of the US. Sometime in 1945, the existence of the Venona program was revealed to the Soviet Union by cryptology-analyst Bill Weisband, an NKVD agent in the US Army's SIGINT. These messages were slowly and gradually encryption beginning in 1946. This effort continued (many times at a low level of effort in the latter years) through 1980, when the Venona program was terminated. The analyst effort assigned to it was moved to more important projects.
To what extent the various individuals referred to in the messages were involved with Soviet intelligence is a topic of minor historical dispute. Most academics and historians have established that most of the individuals mentioned in the Venona decrypts were probably either clandestine assets and/or contacts of Soviet intelligence agents, How VENONA was Declassified, Robert Louis Benson, Symposium of Cryptologic History; October 27, 2005."Tangled Treason", Sam Tanenhaus, The New Republic, 1999. and very few argue that many of those people probably had no malicious intentions and committed no crimes."Tales from decrypts," The Nation, 28 October 1996, pp. 5–6.
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. It is probable that the Soviet code generators started duplicating cipher pages in order to keep up with demand.
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. Hallock and his colleagues, amongst whom were Genevieve Feinstein, Cecil Phillips, Frank Lewis, Frank Wanat, and Lucille Campbell, went on to break into a significant amount of Trade traffic, recovering many one-time pad additive key tables in the process. A young Meredith Gardner then used this material to break into what turned out to be NKVD (and later GRU) traffic by reconstructing the code used to convert text to numbers. Gardner credits Marie Meyer, a linguist with the Signal Intelligence Service with making some of the initial recoveries of the Venona codebook. Samuel Chew and Cecil Phillips also made valuable contributions. On December 20, 1946, Gardner made the first break into the code, revealing the existence of Soviet espionage in the Manhattan Project. Venona messages also indicated that Soviet spies worked in Washington in the State Department, Treasury, Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and even the White House. Very slowly, using assorted techniques ranging from traffic analysis to defector information, more of the messages were decrypted.
Claims have been made that information from the physical recovery of code books (a partially burned one was obtained by the Finns) to bugging embassy rooms in which text was entered into encrypting devices (analyzing the keystrokes by listening to them being punched in) contributed to recovering much of the plaintext. These latter claims are less than fully supported in the open literature.
One significant aid (mentioned by the NSA) in the early stages may have been work done in cooperation between the and Finland cryptanalysis organizations;when the Americans broke into Japanese codes during World War II, they gained access to this information. There are also reports that copies of signals purloined from Soviet offices by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) were helpful in the cryptanalysis. The Finnish radio intelligence sold much of its material concerning Soviet codes to the OSS in 1944 during Operation Stella Polaris, including the partially burned code book.
Out of some hundreds of thousands of intercepted encrypted texts, it is claimed under 3,000 have been partially or wholly decrypted. All the duplicate one-time pad pages were produced in 1942, and almost all of them had been used by the end of 1945, with a few being used as late as 1948. After this, Soviet message traffic reverted to being completely unreadable.
(2025). 9780300084627, Yale University Press. ISBN 9780300084627
The existence of Venona decryption became known to the Soviets within a few years of the first breaks. It is not clear whether the Soviets knew how much of the message traffic or which messages had been successfully decrypted. At least one Soviet penetration agent, British Secret Intelligence Service representative to the US Kim Philby, was told about the project in 1949, as part of his job as liaison between British and US intelligence. 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. However, this information allowed them to alert those of their agents who might be at risk of exposure due to the decryption.
"Thanks to successful espionage, the Russians tested their first atom bomb in August 1949, just four years after the first American test. As will be discussed, we had learned of the Los Alamos spies in December 1946—December 20, to be precise. The US Army Security Agency, in the person of Meredith Knox Gardner, a genius in his own right, had broken one of what it termed the Venona messages—the transmissions that Soviet agents in the United States sent to and received from Moscow."Identities soon emerged of American, Canadian, Australian, and British spies in service to the Soviet government, including [[Klaus Fuchs]], Alan Nunn May, and Donald Maclean. Others worked in Washington in the [[State Department]], the Treasury, OSS, "KGB cables indicated that the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in World War II had been thoroughly infiltrated with Soviet agents." and even the White House.
The messages show that the US and other nations were targeted in major espionage campaigns by the Soviet Union as early as 1942. Among those identified are Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White (the second-highest official in the Treasury Department), Lauchlin Currie "Currie, known as PAZh (Page) and White, whose cover names were YuRIST (Jurist) and changed later to LAJER (Lawyer), had been Soviet agents since the 1930s. They had been identified as Soviet agents in Venona translations and by other agents turned witnesses or informants for the FBI and Justice Department. From the Venona translations, both were known to pass intelligence to their handlers, notably the Silvermaster network." (a personal aide to Franklin Roosevelt), and Maurice Halperin (a section head in the Office of Strategic Services).
The identification of individuals mentioned in Venona transcripts is sometimes problematic, since people with a "covert relationship" with Soviet intelligence are referenced by . Further complicating matters is the fact the same person sometimes had different cryptonyms at different times, and the same cryptonym was sometimes reused for different individuals. In some cases, notably Hiss, the matching of a Venona cryptonym to an individual is disputed. In many other cases, a Venona cryptonym has not yet been linked to any person. According to authors John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, the Venona transcripts identify approximately 349 Americans who they claim had a covert relationship with Soviet intelligence, though fewer than half of these have been matched to real-name identities.
(2025). 9780300084627, Yale University Press. ISBN 9780300084627 However, not every agent may have been communicating directly with Soviet intelligence. Each of those 349 persons may have had many others working for, and reporting only to, them.
The OSS, the predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), housed at one time or another between fifteen and twenty Soviet spies. Duncan Lee, Donald Wheeler, Jane Foster Zlatowski, and Maurice Halperin passed information to Moscow. 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.
At this time some information was trickling in from US intercepts and rare overflights near the East-West border; but with a dearth in intelligence, not even a hint was received of the North Korean attack (approved by Stalin) on South Korea in June 1950. This led to the approval of Operation Gold in Berlin, a joint CIA/ SIS operation to tap into underground telephone cables a short distance across the border in East Berlin; the scheme was based on Operation Silver a British SIS operation in Vienna.
Operation Gold was betrayed to the NKVD/ KGB by British SIS member George Blake even before it started intercepting in May 1955. But to avoid compromising Blake, it was allowed to continue to April 1956, with knowledge of the project kept inside the NKVD/ KGB.
However, Vasili Mitrokhin was a KGB archivist who defected to the United Kingdom in 1992 with copies of large numbers of KGB files. He claimed Harry Hopkins was a secret Russian agent. The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB, by Vasily Mitrokhin and Christopher Andrew. Moreover, Oleg Gordievsky, a high-level KGB officer who also defected from the Soviet Union, reported that Iskhak Akhmerov, the KGB officer who controlled the clandestine Soviet agents in the US during the war, had said Hopkins was "the most important of all Soviet wartime agents in the United States". KGB: The Inside Story of Its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev, by Oleg Gordievsky and Christopher Andrew.
Alexander Vassiliev's notes identified the source code-named "19" as Laurence Duggan.
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg also had another connection to a recruit for the Soviets named David Greenglass, who was Ethel's brother and Julius's brother-in-law.
Venona and other recent information has shown that, while the content of Julius' atomic espionage was not as vital to the Soviets as alleged at the time of his espionage activities, in other fields it was extensive. The information Rosenberg passed to the Soviets concerned the proximity fuze, design and production information on the Lockheed P-80 jet fighter, and thousands of classified reports from Emerson Radio.
The Venona evidence indicates unidentified sources code-named "Quantum" and "Pers" who facilitated transfer of nuclear weapons technology to the Soviet Union from positions within the Manhattan Project. According to Alexander Vassiliev's notes from KGB archive, "Quantum" was Boris Podolsky and "Pers" was Russell W. McNutt, an engineer from the uranium processing plant in Oak Ridge. Vassiliev-Notebooks-and-Venona-Index-Concordance.pdf, ed. 2013, pp: 325, 343
In 1935, Gold, with the assistance of Black, gained employment at the Pennsylvania Sugar Company, one of the largest producers of sugar in the world at the time. During his tenure, Gold worked under Semyon Semyonov and Klaus Fuchs. Over time, Gold began to work with Abraham Brothman, a fellow spy who was identified in Gold's confessions for stealing industrial processes on behalf of the Soviet Union and would later be convicted for lying under oath to a grand jury.
Gold's confessions turned out to be a major success for the FBI, as he would unveil a network of spies entrenched in the success of KGB espionage efforts. Along with Brothman, Alfred Slack (sentenced to 15 years), David Greenglass, and Julius Rosenberg were all arrested following the interrogations of Gold. With regard to Los Alamos, Fuchs, Greenglass, and Gold all played a role in aiding the Soviet atomic espionage campaign.
The founding of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) by Labor Prime Minister Ben Chifley in 1949 was considered highly controversial within Chifley's own party. Until then, the political left-leaning Australian Labor Party had been hostile to domestic intelligence agencies on civil liberties grounds and a Labor government founding one seemed a surprising about-face. But the presentation of Venona material to Chifley, revealing evidence of Soviet agents operating in Australia, brought this about. As well as Australian diplomat suspects abroad, Venona had revealed Walter Seddon Clayton (cryptonym "KLOD"), a leading official within the Communist Party of Australia (CPA), as the chief organizer of Soviet intelligence gathering in Australia.Andrew, Christopher. "The Defence of the Realm. The Authorized History of MI5", 2008. , p. 371 Investigation revealed that Clayton formed an underground network within the CPA so that the party could continue to operate if it were banned. In 1950, George Ronald Richards was appointed ASIO's deputy-director of operations for Venona, based in Sydney, charged with investigating intelligence that uncovered the eleven Australians identified in the cables that had been decoded. He continued Venona-related work in London with MI5 from November 1952 and went on to lead Operation Cabin 12, the high-profile Petrov Affair to Australia of Soviet spy Vladimir Petrov.
Some of the earliest detailed public knowledge that Soviet code messages from World War II had been broken came with the release of Chapman Pincher's book, Too Secret Too Long, in 1984. Robert Lamphere's book, The FBI-KGB War, was released in 1986. Lamphere had been the FBI liaison to the code-breaking activity and had considerable knowledge of Venona and the counter-intelligence work that resulted from it. However, the first detailed account of the Venona project, identifying it by name and making clear its long-term implications in post-war espionage, was contained in MI5 assistant director Peter Wright's 1987 memoir, Spycatcher.
Many inside the NSA had argued internally that the time had come to publicly release the details of the Venona project, but it was not until 1995 that the bipartisan Commission on Government Secrecy, with Senator Moynihan as chairman, released Venona project materials. Moynihan wrote:
The secrecy system has systematically denied American historians access to the records of American history. Of late we find ourselves relying on archives of the former Soviet Union in Moscow to resolve questions of what was going on in Washington at mid-century. ... the Venona intercepts contained overwhelming proof of the activities of Soviet spy networks in America, complete with names, dates, places, and deeds.One of the considerations in releasing Venona translations was the privacy interests of the individuals mentioned, referenced, or identified in the translations. Some names were not released because to do so would constitute an invasion of privacy. However, in at least one case, independent researchers identified one of the subjects whose name had been obscured by the NSA.
The dearth of reliable information available to the public—or even to the President and Congress—may have helped to polarize debates of the 1950s over the extent and danger of Soviet espionage in the United States. Anti-communism suspected many spies remained at large, perhaps including some known to the government. Those who criticized the governmental and non-governmental efforts to root out and expose Communists in the United States felt these efforts were an overreaction (in addition to other reservations about McCarthyism). Public access—or broader governmental access—to the Venona evidence would certainly have affected this debate, as it is affecting the retrospective debate among historians and others now. As the Moynihan Commission wrote in its final report:
A balanced history of this period is now beginning to appear; the Venona messages will surely supply a great cache of facts to bring the matter to some closure. But at the time, the American Government, much less the American public, was confronted with possibilities and charges, at once baffling and terrifying.
The National Cryptologic Museum features an exhibit on the Venona project in its "Cold War/Information Age" gallery.
Many of the critiques of the Venona translations have been based on specific cases. The Schneirs' critique of the Venona documents was based on their decades of work on the case of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Another critique of the Venona translations came from the late Rutgers University law professor John Lowenthal, who as a law student worked as a volunteer for Alger Hiss's defense team, and later wrote extensively on the Hiss case.For Lowenthal's work on the Hiss case see the Alger Hiss Story website, hosted at NYU. Lowenthal's critique focused on one message (Venona 1822 KGB Washington-Moscow 30 March 1945),Available at the NSA's Venona website. in which the comments identified the cryptonym 'Ales' as "probably Alger Hiss." Lowenthal raised a number of objections to this identification, rejecting it as "a conclusion psychologically motivated and politically correct but factually wrong." Lowenthal's article led to an extended debate on the 'Ales' message,The first response to Lowenthal was
Following this there was an extended discussion on h-net diplo list and the h-net list for the history of American communism. For a summary of a draft response from Lowenthal (he died in 2003) see
Another response following this was This gave rise to a conference paper: (archived version)
and finally a response from Mark again (he died in 2009):
Victor Navasky, editor and publisher of The Nation, has also written several editorials highly critical of Haynes' and Klehr's interpretation of recent work on the subject of Soviet espionage. Navasky claims the Venona material is being used to "distort ... our understanding of the cold war" and that the files are potential "time bombs of misinformation." Commenting on the list of 349 Americans identified by Venona, published in an appendix to Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, Navasky wrote, "The reader is left with the implication—unfair and unproven—that every name on the list was involved in espionage, and as a result, otherwise careful historians and mainstream journalists now routinely refer to Venona as proof that many hundreds of Americans were part of the red spy network." Navasky goes further in his defense of the listed people and has claimed 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."
According to historian 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. But there are too many gaps in the record to use these materials with complete confidence." Schrecker believes the documents established the guilt of many prominent figures but is still critical of the views of scholars such as Haynes, arguing, "complexity, nuance, and a willingness to see the world in other than black and white seem alien to Haynes' view of history."
See also
Notes
References and further reading
Books
(2025). 9780300084627, Yale University Press. ISBN 9780300084627
(2025). 9781929631759, Enigma Books. ISBN 9781929631759
Online sources
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