Venona project

The project Venona is the fruit of a long extremely secret collaboration between the American information agencies, British MI5 and the British general headquarters (GCHQ), which had as an aim the Cryptanalyse of messages sent by several Soviet information agencies. More than thirteen code names were used by the the United States and the Great Britain. Venona was the latest to date, and does not carry particular significance. (In the deciphered documents published by NSA, “VENONA” is written in capital letters; the majority of the authors who wrote on the subject always capitalized only the first letter.)
Durant the first years of the Cold war, Venona appeared, for the western powers, an important source of information on the activities of the Soviet intelligence services. Although that was hidden with the general public, and even with the presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, the project played a significant part in a good number of events of the beginning of the Cold war, such as for example, the business of espionage putting in scene the husbands Rosenberg. The majority of the messages which proved decipherable thereafter were intercepted between 1942 and 1945, and were deciphered towards the beginning of the year 1946 and that until 1980, date on which the Venona project was stopped.

Context

The `breakers of code' of the American military agency of safety of signals (U.S. Army Signal Security Agency) (commonly called) had intercepted great quantities of strongly encrypté traffic coming from the Soviet intelligence services during and right after the Second world war.

This traffic, partly encrypted according to a system with disposable Mask (system), was kept and analyzed in secrecy by a hundred cryptanalystes over one period of approximately 40 years, as of the beginning of the year 1940. Because of a serious boob on behalf of Soviet - the re-use for various messages of pages of keys supposed not to be useful that once - part of the traffic was particularly exposed and vulnerable to the cryptanalyse.

The Venona project was born in 1943, under the order of the deputy chief of the military informations Carter W. Clarke. Clarke did not trust Stalin and feared only the Soviet Union does not sign a peace treaty separated with the Germany, thus making it possible Germany to concentrate its military force on the Great Britain and the the United States.

The opening

In a general way, Soviet used a code to convert the words and the letters of numbers, to which keys of single use were added, which cryptait the contents of the message. If it is used correctly, the system with single key is theoretically unbreakable. The cryptanalyse by breakers of code American and British revealed that part of the keys had been re-used by Soviet (more specifically of the pieces of keys, not the key whole), which allowed the decoding (sometimes partial) of a small portion of the traffic.

It was, working in Arlington Hall on the traffic `Commercial' Soviet (this traffic treated mainly Soviet trade, of or its name…), which discovered the first that Soviet made of the recycling of keys. Hallock and its colleagues (of which Genevieve Feinstein, Cecil Philips, Frank Lewis, Frank Wanat, and Lucille Campbell) were able at `to break' most of the traffic `Commercial', and consequently recovered occasion of the whole tables of additive keys used in these messages.

The young person (employed what will become later NSA) used all these data to decipher what proved to be traffic of the ministry for the Soviet interior (NKVD, and later of the directory of the Soviet information, GRU), by rebuilding the code used to convert the texts of numbers. Samuel Chew and Cecil Philips took an active part in this decoding. December 20th 1946, Gardner put at the day the first pieces of deciphered data, which revealed the existence of Soviet spies within the Manhattan Project. Other supposed Soviet spies occupied a station in Washington, the Treasury, the strategic office (Office off Strategic Services), and even with the White House. Slowly but surely, using varied techniques energy of the analysis of traffic to the use of indics, more and more of messages were deciphered.

Certain information was obtained thanks to wires tapping of rooms of embassy: the noise of the keys at the time of the text input in the machines of encryption could be analyzed and retranscribed. Claims were raised as what information drawn from these books of retranscribed codes contributed in much greater part to decoding of the messages than the analysis of the traffic. These claims find much support in the literature.

An important help (mentioned by the NSA) at the time of the first gropings was undoubtedly the work of co-operation between the Japanese and Finnish organizations of cryptanalyse. Reports/ratios also state that copies of recording of catch signals of Soviet offices by FBI were very useful for the work of cryptanalyse. The generation of keys of single use was at the time a slow process and requiring many efforts, and the bursting of the war in Germany in June 1941 created an increasingly large need for the coded messages. It is extremely probable that the operators in responsibility of generate the Soviet codes started to duplicate the keys of coding to be able to follow the request.

Results

The NSA defers (while basing itself on the serial numbers of the cables of the Venona project) that on the thousands of messages sent, only one fraction were accessible to the cryptanalystes. Approximately 2.200 messages were deciphered and translated; some 50% of the exchanges of 1943 between the GRU and Moscow were `broken', but it was the only year when there was as much of it, in spite of the great quantity of messages sent between 1941 and 1945. The rates of decoding of the messages of the NKVD were:

  • 1942 : 1.8%

  • 1943 : 15.0%
  • 1944 : 49.0%
  • 1945 : 1.5%

Among the few hundreds of thousands of intercepted encrypted texts, it arises that approximately 3.000 messages partially or were completely deciphered. Soviet learned the existence from decodings of the Venona project shortly after the first breakings. Did Soviet know which proportion of their traffic and their messages had been correctly deciphered? It is not obvious. At least an infiltrated Soviet agent, the British representative of LOCATED in the USA, was put at the current of the project in 1949 within the framework of its work of connection between the intelligence services British and American. Soviet stopped re-using the keys about 1946, probably after having learned work from analysis of the British and American by their agents. The following years, the traffic returned in a completely indecipherable state.

Stakes

The deciphered messages provided important information on the behavior of Soviet during the period during which the keys were re-used. During the first breaking of code, VENONA put at the day the presence of spies at the National laboratories of Los Alamos. Identity of many spies American, Canadian, Australian and British with the service of the Soviet government, whose Klaus Fuchs, Alan Nunn May and another member of the circle of spies, Donald Maclean, were discovered. Decodings show that the United States and other countries was targets of massive Soviet espionage campaigns, and this since 1942. Some 349 code names are mentioned in the messages, each one describing a particular person having a relationship to the intelligence services of the Soviet Union. It is reasonable to think that there was much more than 349 spies participating in these operations, because the intercepted messages remain a sample of the totality of the messages which forwarded for this period. Among the identified people appear Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Algiers Hiss, Harry Dexter White, number 2 of the department of the Treasury, Lauchlin Currie, an personal assistant of Franklin Roosevelt and Maurice Halperin, a section head to the Strategic Services. The Office of the Strategic Services precisely, the predecessor of the CIA, was the den for this period of more than 15 Soviet spies (simultaneously!). Duncan Lee, Donald Wheeler, Jane Foster Zlatowski, and Maurice Halperin, inter alia, were charged to make pass information to Moscow. To quote only they, War Board Production, Board off Economic Warfare, the Office of Coordination of the inter-American businesses and the office of information on the War, contained a half-dozen of infiltrated Soviet among their employees. Some even think that almost all the agencies military or diplomatic were compromised closely or by far by Soviet espionage.

Messages deciphered as evidence

The 1er February 1956, Alan H. Belmont prepared a memo for the FBI in connection with the real stakes of the Venona project and the prospects offered by the cryptanalyse for the legal proceedings. It considered there that in spite of the fact that the deciphered messages corroborated for example the remarks of Elizabeth Bentley at the time of its lawsuit and had allowed the legal proceeding of Judith Coplon and the groups Perlo and Silvermaster, a meticulous study of all the factors led to the conclusion according to which it was not in the interests of State-Plain to base itself on the furnished informations by Venona to engage of the continuations with legal content. The memo in question advanced a certain number of reasons for which it was debatable that information resulting from decodings of the Venona project can be used at ends of justice. One of the principal points of application was the law and its implication in the procedure. A defense counsel would treat in an unquestionable way these `evidence deciphered' like `hearsay' and not of the evidence with whole share, calling upon the fact that neither official Soviet transmitting message, nor official receiving Soviet can testify in the business. In answer, the FBI advanced that the deciphered messages could be used, as an exception of the rule of the `hearsay', while being based on the testimony of the experts cryptographes.

Disclosure with the general public

Throughout the course of the project, few people knew for Venona, even in the higher realms of the government. The top graded of the army, in agreement with FBI and the CIA, made the decision to restrict the knowledge of the Venona project to the only government (even the CIA did not make integral part of the project before 1952). The general-in-chief of the armies, Omar Bradley, anxious of the possible escapes of sensitive informations which could take place at the White House (taking into account the antecedents of the latter on the matter…), decided to hold a little president Truman apart from the secrecy. The president accepted only bits of information through reports/ratios of the FBI and the CIA on the activities of intelligence of the enemy, without direct mention of the project. This culture of the secrecy around Venona had anti-productive effects; Truman came from there to think that the reports/ratios of the FBI, too élusifs on the information sources, were voluntarily exaggerated for political reasons and less and less made confidence with the director of the FBI of the time, J. Edgar Hoover.

In 1986, the exit of the book of Robert Lamphere, " The FBI-KGB War" , public the fact made that Soviet coded messages had been deciphered during the second world war.

In the Venona project, Lamphere established the link for the FBI on the activities of decoding, and had an unequalled knowledge of the project, and work of against-espionage which had milked there.

Many people at the NSA pled in-house to make public the details of the project, but it had to be waited until 1995 so that the bipartite commission on the secrecies of the government, chaired by the senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan allows information circulation sensitive. Written Moynihan:

" American policy of the secrecy forever allowed to the American historians to have access to the files of the history of the country. Now, one finds oneself to make confidence with the files of the Soviet secret services in Moscow more on what occurred to Washington in the Fifties. The interceptions of the Venona project contained evidence of the activities of the Soviet spy networks in the United States, with the names, the places, the dates of all the acts of espionnage."
One of the problems subjacent with the fact of making public this information resided in the private character of the relative data at the people mentioned or identified in decodings. Certain names were not made public because that would have constituted an invasion of privacy. However, in at least one of the cases, of the independent investigators identified one of the subjects whose name had been hidden by the NSA.

The lack of reliable sources of information largely fed the debate on the danger of Soviet espionage in the United States. The anticommunists were afraid that good number of spies are still within the government institutions, some even being able to be known authorities. Those which criticized the official and semi-official efforts to track the Communists felt that these efforts were in fact only one on-reaction (who more is, in the context of MacCarthisme). The free access with the evidence of Venona would have surely affected the debate, in same measurement that it affects today the debate between the historians working on the subject. Just like the Moynihan commission wrote in his final report:

" A reasonable version of the history of this period starts to be born today. The deciphered messages of Venona certainly will bring a great quantity of useful informations for finally bringing a true explanation on this history. But at the time, the US government, and to a lesser extent the American people, were confronted with embarrassing assumptions and evidence and terrifiantes."

The Venona project on particular cases

Venona had its word to say - sometimes in a non-equivocal way, sometimes in an ambiguous way - in some lawsuits of espionage. Certain known spies, like Theodore Hall, neither were continued nor publicly blamed, because the evidence of Venona against them was never made public.

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg

Principal Article: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg

Venona brought a great quantity of information to the lawsuit of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, highlighting the fact that Julius was engaged in operations of espionage, but also that Ethel was nothing more than one accomplice. Moreover, Venona showed that the information recovered by Julius was not so critical that one had been able to think at the time (mainly of information on ballistic missiles, but not on the process of Nuclear fission).

Algiers Hiss

Principal Article: Algiers Hiss

According to the Moynihan commission, the complicity of Algiers Hiss is clearly established, just like that of Harry Dexter White. The senator Moynihan declared after the verdict of the commission that the official ones of the government knew that Hiss was implied but did not speak about it about fear of compromising the secrecy around the Venona project. However, certain authors consider that the evidence of the culpability of Hiss remains too weak to lead to a clear conclusion on its implication.

Soviet espionage in Australia

The creation of the Australian Secret services of information (Australian Security Intelligence Organization) by Labor the Prime Minister Ben Chifley was very discussed inside even of its party. Information drawn from decodings of the Venona project established clearly that Chifley was justified by obtaining evidence that Soviet agents acted on the Australian ground. The investigations revealed that Wally Clayton (code name KLOD), a Soviet agent infiltrated with the Australian Communist party, was setting up a clandestine network within the party to enable him to continue to exist in spite of prohibitions.

Criticisms

Although they is largely approved by many historians and academicians, the relevance, the precision, and even the authenticity of decodings of the Venona project were called in question. The majority of criticisms on the reports/ratios of the Venona project call into question the impossible checking of the sources, some pushing their charges up to the point to argue that the NSA really manufactured decodings with an aim of discrediting the reputation of the CPUSA and its members. Research in the Soviet files corroborated part of information of Venona, in particular code names of several individuals.

Many remains skeptics in substance on the interpretations made since the disclosure of the relative informations to the Venona project. Victor Navasky, writer and editor of the newspaper The Nation, wrote a very critical édito on interpretations of John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr relative to recent work on Soviet espionage:

" In the appendix has of their book concerning the Venona project, Haynes and Klehr make to the list of 349 names (and code names) people of which they affirm that they have " have a secret relationship to the Soviet intelligence services which is confirmed by the traffic intercepted by Venona." This list includes all the names from Algiers Hiss until Harry Magdoff, the former economist of New Deal and the Marxist editor association of Monthly Review, like Walter Bernstein, the writer gauchist of the Yank magazine. Haynes and Klehr reprinted decodings of Venona dealing with Magdoff and Bernstein, but did not take the trouble to ask them their version of the facts (nor that of any other alive person of their list). The reader thus arises with the impression - unfounded - which all the listed people were implied in businesses of espionage, and consequently, differently meticulous historians and known journalists advance now without Venona complex as the proof that several hundreds of Americans belonged to the network of red spies. My personal vision is rather than Venona was used as much to deepen that to deform our knowledge of the cold war - not only because several researchers badly interpreted decodings, but also by the fact that in the absence of irrefutable evidence, the partially deciphered files, in this world of espionage, are as many bombs of misinformation to retardement."

Navasky tries to peel the concept of espionage in itself. " There were many exchanges of information between benevolent, Marxist people for the majority, Communists partly, some of them criticizing the US government, others glorifiant it. Most of these exchanges were innocent and did not transgress aucunes laws. Others, certainly always innocent, violated the law. And undoubtedly there were also agents of conscientious espionages - of both cotés."

Nigel West, on the other hand, expressed its confidence in decodings: " Venona remains a resource of information irrefutable, much more reliable than the glorious memories of the ex-defectors of the KGB or than the doubtful conclusions made by analysts paranos lobotomized by their fear of plots machiavéliques."

Haynes and Klehr refute those which criticize the importance and the cogency of the furnished informations by VENONA by advancing their naivety about Soviet espionage and their ignorance of the evidence which goes with. Ellen Schrecker refuted this interpretation later. " Thanks to the fact that they offer information on the secret polices of the two with dimensions ones of the Iron curtain, it is trying to treat decodings of Venona of manner less critical than the documents coming from easier sources of access. But there are however too missing data in these decodings to grant a confidence totale." to them;

Schrecker had the certainty which these documents had been able to establish the culpability of many key personalities Soviet espionage. However, Schrecker remains moderate on brutal interpretations of information by researchers like Haynes, advancing the fact that " … complexity, nuancement, and a certain will to exceed a vision manichéenne things are qualities which seem foreign with Haynes and its vision of Histoire."

See too

Random links:Canton of Yssingeaux | Mode of breeze | The Rebel (televised series) | Haldarsvík