Book Reviews | The VENONA Progeny

The VENONA Progeny

Reviewed by Hayden B. Peake, curator of the CIA's Historical Intelligence Collection

This first appeared in the Summer 2000 issue of the Naval War College Review

Books about VENONA that are reviewed:

BENSON, Robert Louis and Michael WARNER, [Eds.], VENONA: Soviet Espionage And The American Response (Washington, DC: National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency, 1996), 450 pp., 33 page introduction followed by various VENONA decrypts and related documents including a chronology; softbound, lettersize. No index.

BALL, Desmond and David HORNER. Breaking The Codes: Australia's KGB Network 1944-1950 (St. Leonards, NSW, Australia: Allen & Unwin; 1998), 468pp, endnotes, appendices, bibliography, photos, index.

WEST, Nigel. Venona: The Greatest Secret Of The Cold War (London: HarperCollins, 1999), 384 pp., endnotes, bibliography, appendices, glossary, photos, index.

HAYNES, John Earl and Harvey KLEHR. Venona : Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 487 pp., endnotes, appendices, photos, index.

WEINSTEIN, Allen and Alexander VASSILIEV. The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America—The Stalin Era (New York: Random House; 1999), 402pp; footnotes, endnotes, photos, index. $30.00. ISBN 0-679-45724-0

ALBRIGHT, Joseph and Marcia KUNSTEL. BOMBSHELL: The Secret Story of America’s Unknown Atomic Spy Conspiracy (New York: Time Books, 1997), 399 pages, endnotes, bibliography, photos, index.

ROMERSTEIN, Herbert and Eric BREINDEL. and. The Venona Secrets: Exposing Soviet Espionage and America’s Traitors (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, Inc.), 400 pp., endnotes, appendices, bibliography, photos, index.

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 and trade missions in the United States. No significant effort was made to decrypt the cables, thought to be diplomatic in nature, until 1943 when reports were received that Stalin, by then our ally, was negotiating a separate peace treaty with Germany.

On 1 February 1943, the Army Signals Security Agency [SSA], an early predecessor of the National Security Agency, was ordered to establish a program—eventually called VENONA—to decipher the cables. The Soviet codes did not yield readily to cryptanalysis because, it was soon discovered, a two-part ciphering system had been employed and the second step used a one-time-pad—theoretically unbreakable. As it happened, none of the messages were broken before the end of the war, but by then the SSA cryptanalysts had made a startling discovery. Only slightly more than half of the thousands of intercepted cables concerned foreign ministry and trade matters; the balance involved Soviet intelligence organizations. By 1946 when the first message was decrypted, KGB, GRU and Naval GRU user systems had been identified.

When the VENONA program ended in October 1980, portions of nearly 3000 of the cables intercepted between 1939 and 1948, had been decrypted. The results revealed Soviet agents in every important organization in the American government, including the Manhattan Project. And our allies were not immune; VENONA exposed Soviet penetrations in Britain, Canada, and Australia. In 1995, the VENONA decrypts were declassified. Hard copies were made available to scholars and digital versions were posted on the NSA web site together with several monographs written by NSA historian, Lou Benson, providing historical details.

The public reaction to the VENONA decrypts was mixed. Walter and Miriam Schneir, long time advocates of the Rosenbergs are innocent thesis, wrote in The Nation (July 5, 1999) 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 accusation that Communist Party members had engaged in espionage for the Soviet Union. Amid a variety of counter-charges some claimed that the United States 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 McCarthy.

The books discussed below 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 informed by the FBI in 1952], and why —to protect VENONA—most of the spies identified were never prosecuted. While there is some overlap among them, each contributes details and analysis not found in the others.

Robert Louis Benson is the NSA point-man and institutional memory for the VENONA program. Michael Warner is a gifted young historian in the CIA’s Center for the Study of Intelligence. Together they contributed to and edited VENONA: Soviet Espionage And The American Response, the first major unclassified report on the program. This book provides a chronology of major events, a concise summary [33 pages] of the VENONA program—why it began, why it ended, and what happened in between. They support their analysis with documentary material–some reproduced in the book for the first time–that is presented in two parts. The first part presents 35 documents that reveal the government’s attempts to deal with foreign espionage between 1939 and 1960—including a copy of the infamous anonymous letter to J. Edgar Hoover damning the Washington NKVD resident. The emphasis is on Soviet intelligence and the consequences of the VENONA revelations. The second part contains copies of 99 VENONA decrypts selected to show just what they looked like when distributed and to indicate the extent to which complete decryption was possible. This traffic originated for the most part in the U.S. and Moscow—though one cable from Mexico City to Moscow is included—and deals with Communist Party, KGB, and GRU-Naval matters. While this book is an excellent introduction to the program, it does not deal in depth with the details of how the decrypted cables were analyzed or the impact of VENONA on the resulting espionage cases. These fine points are left to others and are addressed in the six books discussed below.

The approach taken by British intelligence historian, Nigel West, in VENONA: The Greatest Secret of the Cold War, differs in several respects from the other books. Whereas each has chapters on how VENONA originated and functioned in America, West presents the broadest geographic scope. Keeping Britain as his primary focus, he includes an extensive chapter on the impact of VENONA on Australian security agencies and he is the only one to describe the cryptographic links to France, Finland, and Sweden. Another difference is his use of the decrypts themselves. Instead of just summarizing content, West quotes many of the actual messages in the narrative with gaps indicating the unencrypted portions. This accounts, in part, for the skimpy endnotes. Seeing the structure of the actual decrypts gives the reader a good feel for the uncertainties involved and helps explain why agent identification by the FBI analysts was so difficult and sometimes impossible.

After the British joined the VENONA operation in the late 1940s, they began to decrypt and analyze cables sent over the London-Moscow and Moscow-Canberra circuits. Their results, released by NSA in 1996, contained a mix of clear text and gaps, the latter deliberately obscuring, in many cases, the true names of Soviet agents. It should be understood that the British government knew the true identities of these agents and declined for reasons not given, to make them public. The task for the historian then, is to use the clues that are provided by the clear text to determine the true name associated with the agent cryptonyms in the decrypts. While this was not always possible, after analyzing the GRU traffic from London to Moscow, West, for the first time, puts true names to Soviet agents identified previously only by their VENONA cryptonyms. For example, Ivor Montagu [cryptonym NOBILITY], brother of Ewen Montagu [author of The Man Who Never Was] was a life long communist and spied for the GRU though his family never suspected either. In another instance, WEST identified INTELLIGENSIA, an active GRU agent, as the well known British scientist J.B.S. Haldane who was helped by his wife Charlotte.

West is the only VENONA author to mention STELLA POLARIS, an operation involving the Finnish acquisition of “100 boxes of Soviet cryptographic material” stored for awhile in Sweden, that eventually played a role in VENONA. Similarly, he provides new information on Soviet agent and British musician Ernest D. Weiss, while devoting a chapter to the more familiar but still interesting Cambridge network. And on the basis of an interview with the wife and son of the Soviet agent who first alerted the NKVD to VENONA, William Weisband, he reveals that Weisband was born in Odessa, not Egypt, as reported by the other authors. Weisband himself had maintained the fiction to deflect attention during the war.

In the Postscript chapter, West comments on the impact of VENONA on lives of those who did the cryptographic work in Britain and America. The appendices include a list of cryptonyms in the London GRU traffic and a glossary of Soviet covernames used in VENONA, arranged alphabetically by cryptonym or covername. Haynes and Klehr [see below] have similar lists arranged alphabetically by true name. Access to both eases identification problems. The paperback edition of this book is the one to buy or consult because it corrects a number of errors and replaces several paragraphs inadvertently omitted by the publisher in the hardback edition. In short, West gives the most comprehensive coverage of the VENONA program and is a good place to become familiar with its scope and depth.

Professor Desmond Ball and senior fellow David Horner are both with the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, of the Australian National University. Each has written extensively in the national security field and their Breaking The Codes was the first book on the subject to be published after the release of the decrypts in 1995. It is concerned primarily with ten Australians that spied for Soviet intelligence from 1943-1949. In that period they delivered to their Communist masters classified documents from the Australian military, domestic security and External Affairs departments, as well as British and American strategic plans. By 1945 Australian security officials knew there were leaks in the system, but it was not until the Americans and British informed them of the VENONA decrypts from the Canberra-Moscow KGB link, that the sources became known.

Several of the ten agents were first named publicly in 1954 by KGB Colonel Vladimir Petrov and his code clerk wife, when they defected to Australia. In reality, as Ball and Horner reveal, some of these identifications, although attributed to the Petrovs, actually came from VENONA. At the time, many Australian historians and political scientists dismissed the accusations as a conspiracy designed to win an election. More generally, it was denied that the Soviets had conducted espionage in Australia in the 1940s. So intense and persistent was this belief that after rumors of the decrypts surfaced in the 1980s, Australian historian Frank Cain wrote in 1991 that “There were no such decrypts.” When the authors learned of the VENONA program, some years before its declassification, they were, of course, obligated to remain silent never expecting the decrypts would be declassified.

Breaking The Codes includes a summary of the basic VENONA program and much more detail on Australian portion. Though there were only a relatively few Australian decrypts—about 200 out of 5000—they had a major impact on the country’s intelligence and security policy. Moreover, they were the only decrypts accomplished in ‘near-real-time or soon after the date of transmission’ by the American cryptanalysts, and the authors tell how this effected the Australian counterespionage operations. There is also a short history of Australian intelligence, its W.W.II role—including Naval intelligence and Naval ULTRA—and its close links to Britain’s Security Service [MI5].

The U.S. decision to deny Australia classified intelligence to Australia in 1947 and the circumstances of its restoration, in 1950, are also discussed. The chapter on the formation of the Australian Security Intelligence Organization [ASIO] makes the point that it was created to demonstrate to the British and Americans that Australia was taking its security obligations seriously. In this regard, the case studies of the agents identified by VENONA are of real interest. The evidence in some cases was enough to justify withdrawing access to classified information, but, amazingly, not specific enough for the Australians to dismiss the agents from their External Affairs positions. Some remained in non-sensitive positions for over 30 years. Others, as for example Ian Milner [cryptonyms BUR/DVORAK], the so-called Rhodes Scholar Spy, took a different path. When security began closing in Milner defected to Czechoslovakia and worked for their intelligence service.

One revelation, now of historical interest only, was that during W.W.II the Australian agents gave Allied war plans in the Pacific to their Soviet masters who then allowed the Japanese to acquire them. Whether the agents knew about this is unclear, but the authors quote the Australian Communist Party leaders as saying “we want a Russian victory, not necessarily an Allied victory” [page 350].

The book is well written and impressively documented with primary sources. Although most of the VENONA decrypts are quoted in part, several are reproduced in facsimile. Breaking The Codes should put a full stop to the efforts of the professional historian-doubters from down under to vindicate their Communists colleagues on charges of espionage. It can no longer be denied, the VENONA decrypts exist and are hard evidence.

In their 1992 book, The American Communist Movement: Storming Heaven Itself, written before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Library of Congress historian John Haynes and Emory University history professor Harvey Klehr wrote that although “American Communists owed their first loyalty to the motherland of communism rather than the United States…in practice few American Communists were spies.” They went on to conclude that viewing “the American Communist Party chiefly as an instrument of espionage or a sort of fifth column misjudges its main purpose.”

In their newest book, VENONA: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, the same authors revise their previous assessment for reasons they could not have foreseen. Between 1992 and 1998, they had been granted unexpected access to the records of the American Communist Party, until then secretly resident in the Soviet archives. The initial result was another book, The Secret World of American Communism (1995), based in part on cable traffic, found in the Soviet archives, between the KGB residence in New York and Moscow Center. This traffic demonstrated conclusively that the CPUSA had “an underground arm,” something long denied by the American Party members and some historians. This book was read by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then heading a commission on secrecy, who contacted both the authors and DCI John Deutch in May 1995. The issue was simple: if the Russians allowed Americans access to their cables, why shouldn’t the United States do the same? A few months later, the VENONA decrypts were declassified and in many cases analysts were able to compare the NSA decrypts with the Soviet full text originals. The inevitable charges of fabrication quickly emerged but were just as soon put to rest. The VENONA documents, never intended to be released by either country, were damning. History and all the previous cautious assessments had to be revised and author’s new book demolishes what had become CPUSA dogma: not a few, “but hundreds of American Communists…abetted Soviet espionage in the United States” in the 1930s and 1940s. Some have never been identified beyond the cryptonyms used in the VENONA cables. But the evidence identifying many others, some long suspected, is irrefutable. Haynes and Klehr have done a masterful job of analysis and presented it in a very readable fashion.

In the current work, which concentrates on the American side of VENONA, there are interesting chapters that review the origins of the project and how the Soviet code was broken. They name the American spies, tell how they operated, and how Army and FBI intelligence analysts, working with the partial decrypts, gradually linked cryptonyms to true names. Some were well known and highly placed in the government. For example, VENONA cables confirmed—at least for most analysts—that that Alger HISS [ALES] of the State Department was a GRU agent and that Harry Dexter White, assistant secretary of the Treasury Department, served the NKGB. They also provide more on the ring run by Julius ROSENBERG and his wife; he was an active NKGB agent and she knew it and helped him. The VENONA decrypts also showed that the American networks violated nearly every principle of clandestine operations–most of the American agents had received little or no training. The GOLOS-BENTLEY network that functioned in Washington is a good example. The decrypts confirm that this careless tradecraft was one of the reasons the NKGB eventually took over the agents from the American communists that initially ran them. The latter, VENONA makes clear, is the principal reason Elizabeth Bentley defected to the FBI. Her testimony, criticized in the media as “the bizarre rantings of a neurotic old maid,” was later confirmed by VENONA and contributed greatly to the disintegration of the Soviet espionage networks in America.

Despite the operational sloppiness, it cannot be denied that the Soviets were amazingly successful. VENONA makes absolutely clear that they had active agents in the State Department, the Treasury Department, the Justice Department, Senate committee staffs, the military services, the OSS, the Manhattan Project, the White House, and other wartime agencies. No modern government was more thoroughly penetrated. The Soviets even had an agent—Russian born US Army linguist William Weisband—who told them about the VENONA project in 1944—years before Philby did so—but there was little they could do at that point since details were lacking. Another measure of the magnitude of Soviet penetration is provided in the four appendices. One lists the 349 Americans and U.S. residents identified by VENONA that spied for the Soviets. Another lists 139 Soviet spies known from sources other than VENONA.

The authors recognize that the VENONA decrypts are not infallible and their conclusions about Soviet espionage are supported by a variety of corroborating evidence. They also acknowledge that some messages contain errors and are careful to allow for them. For example, Morton Sobell (convicted with the Rosenbergs) was identified in one decrypt as having only one leg, a charge he has easily disproved.

Still not everyone is convinced with their treatment. Faced with the emerging power of truth, some adopt naive interpretations of the evidence. Scottish professor Roger Sandilands, biographer of White House assistant Laughlin Currie, is a case in point. In a series of postings on the internet[1] directed at Haynes & Klehr, Sandilands suggests that the VENONA cables that report Currie’s FBI monitored conversations and meetings with the NKGB resident in Washington, can plausibly be interpreted as reports of “innocent conversations.” He neglects, inter alia, to point out that Currie didn’t report his contacts with known Soviet intelligence officers, was not representing the government in those contacts, and that others present were suspected Soviet agents. But these desperate efforts at self-justification are now in the minority. For most, VENONA: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, is the final word.

In 1991, the KGB and Crown Publishers of New York conceived a precedent setting publishing agreement. The original idea was to write a series of cold war intelligence histories co-authored by a Soviet historian and his American counterpart, with each side providing appropriate primary source material. But before a contract could be signed, the Soviet Union disappeared. Nevertheless, the KGB’s foreign intelligence service successor, the SRV, decided to conclude the agreement only to have Crown Publishing withdraw. The co-authors already lined up were thus left to their own devices and each found their own publisher. For historian Allen Weinstein and his co-author, former KGB operative—now journalist—Alexander Vassiliev, it was Random House and The Haunted Wood is the result.

As with Haynes and Klehr, Weinstein and Vassiliev began their research in Russia and were given access in 1993 to portions of the KGB/SVR archives never before made available to historians. As their research progressed, they requested more documents to clarify details. By 1995 they had been so successful that the SVR stopped releasing documents—the authors were “learning too much” was the reason given. By then it was too late, there was enough material for a book and a manuscript was drafted. When the VENONA decrypts were released the authors found they corroborated many of the cases in their draft book. Moreover, forty of the partially decrypted VENONA cables matched the full text cables previously released for Haunted Wood—a historians dream come true. All of this material combined with defector testimony allowed the authors to clarify and add corroborating detail to previously known operations. An example of the former is their revelation that it was Cambridge spy Kim Philby who told the NKGB that Elizabeth Bentley had defected to the FBI. In the latter category, the new material confirms details concerning the atom spies, Harry Dexter White’s role, the Hiss case, and a number of others. The chapter on the OSS, long known as deeply penetrated, adds new names and corroborates agents identified in VENONA. No intelligence service had so many well placed moles.

In regards to non-executive branch agents, the book also exposes several previously unreported penetrations. The most spectacular if not disturbing example is the case of Congressman Samuel Dickstein, the man who introduced the legislation that eventually became the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Dickstein spied for the NKVD in the late 1930s, one of the few who served his Soviet masters strictly for money.

Haunted Wood also adds new detail in the case of Hollywood film producer Boris Morros, a Soviet spy for years before being discovered, thanks to VENONA. Questioned by the FBI, Morros quickly realized his predicament and volunteered to become a double agent to save his skin―he did a good job. In his 1959 book, My Ten Years As A Counterspy, Morros lets the reader believe he went to the FBI first. In the same category, in fact they were part of the same espionage ring for awhile, is the case of Martha Dodd. Daughter of the American ambassador to Germany in the 1930s, she started her spying in Berlin and continued well into the 1950s. The material from the Soviet files shows that she became the lover of her KGB recruiter and tried for years to marry him despite his wife and family in Russia. She eventually married an American, also a Soviet agent, and they escaped to Eastern Europe via Mexico one step ahead of the FBI. And although the indictment against them was quashed by the Carter administration, they remained in Czechoslovakia until their deaths.

The documentary evidence is cited in endnotes by KGB file number, volume number and page number. This has raised concerns among reviewers, scholars and those named as agents, because there is no way to check the sources. In the case of Michael Straight, recruited for the NKVD by Anthony Blunt while both were at Cambridge in the 1930s, Haunted Wood makes the statement that STRAIGHT met with and reported to Theodore Mally and Arnold Deutsch, two well known NKVD recruiters in England. Not so says Straight—who now has no reason to lie—he never met either one let alone reported to them.[2] At the time he was still in school and Blunt was his only contact. There is no way to determine the basis for the Haunted Wood judgment, all the others involved are dead. But it is true that the VENONA decrypts do not provide any corroboration. Perhaps the records were mistranslated, or misinterpreted, or Blunt made erroneous claims to enhance his own position. The alternative, that they were fabricated to perpetuate some Soviet myth or otherwise deceive the West, is less tenable. In the event, final judgment in cases like this, must be withheld.

The authors acknowledge that doubts will remain concerning particular cases until complete access to the KGB files is possible. Still, from the evidence they present, it is fair to conclude that the Soviets treated the United States as an espionage enemy—not ally—during W.W.II. And, mainly because of VENONA, their postwar operations were closed down bringing to an end the era of the ideological Communist agent.

The scope of the books described above is too broad to look in great depth at any particular case. Journalists Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel (husband and wife) do just that in their book BOMBSHELL: The Secret Story of America’s Unknown Atomic Spy Conspiracy. They tell the story of one Soviet agent, teenage Harvard physicist Theodore Hall, known in VENONA as MLAD [YOUNG]. When the VENONA decrypts were first released, MLAD’s identity was blacked out. But the clues remaining in the text were sufficient for scholar Herbert Romerstein and Ralph Bennett of Readers Digest to identify him. Only then did NSA re-release the decrypt with the name in the clear. To confirm their deduction, Romerstein and Bennett interviewed Hall [the first to do so] in Cambridge, England, and he admitted he was MLAD. Albright and Kunstel, hearing about the story while working in Moscow, went further and produced this book. It is based on VENONA, 16 days of interviews with Hall, and interviews with some of his former KGB controllers and Western intelligence officers involved. Besides the VENONA role in the story, the reader gets a feel of the political times—1930s-1940s—when young teenage idealists made self-serving decisions in the name of world peace.

Like Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley before him, Ted Hall, was a committed Communist and he too volunteered to be a Soviet agent. Quickly accepted when the NKVD learned he worked in the Manhattan project, he soon began passing them atomic secrets using couriers. The story of how he beat the security at Los Alamos—a topic with a certain contemporary relevance—makes absorbing reading, especially in view of his youth. After the war Hall joined the open Communist Party for awhile and was investigated by the FBI but could not be prosecuted without revealing VENONA. Nevertheless, he wasn’t taking any chances and moved, with his wife, to Cambridge in the early 1950s where they remained until his death in 2000. Hall admitted his Communism and, indirectly in the book, his espionage, adding that he was not sorry for what he did, adding “it was for the good of mankind.”

BOMBSHELL also reveals the role of three of Hall’s courier-colleagues, Americans Saville Sax, and Morris and Lona Cohen. The former escaped prosecution when the FBI decided to protect VENONA. The latter, also linked to the Rosenberg ring, were warned by the NKGB, and avoided capture in America by fleeing to Europe. They were later to serve the KGB in England as Peter and Helen Kroger—selling antiquarian books. Working with KGB illegal, Gordon Lonsdale, they were caught, tried and imprisoned in Britain before being traded to the Soviet Union where they spent the rest of their lives. The authors end their tale by quoting a statement obtained from Hall. In it he is careful to avoid outright admissions, but he does say that he is “by no means ashamed” of what he did. Later in an interview shown as part of episode 21 of CNN’s Cold War series, he finally admits, explicitly, his treachery. Here too he makes no apology.

After the sudden death of co-author Eric Breindel, Herbert Romerstein finished The Venona Secrets: Exposing Soviet Espionage and America’s Traitors, the last of the VENONA books published to date. With its focus on America, it adds corroboration to the work of Haynes and Klehr with additional new documentation—using the MAST decrypts from England—and analysis that places particular emphasis on the role of the Communist Party in Soviet espionage in America from the 1920s to the mid 50s. An appendix reproduces selected VENONA decrypts that support key arguments.

The unique perspective applied to the examination of these issues comes from Romerstein’s long involvement in matters Communist. His early brief experience as a teenage Communist was followed, inter alia, by service on the staff of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (later Internal Security), the House Intelligence Committee and finally the U.S. Information Agency. While some of the chapters deal with topics familiar to readers of the other VENONA books, Romerstein’s forceful arguments and simple declarative style make for good reading.

Undoubtedly the most controversial aspect of the book will be the portions dealing with three Americans the authors declare were Soviet agents. The first and most controversial—because so many have long espoused a strong opposing view—is Harry Hopkins [FRD’s closest personal advisor] who is linked to the unidentified Agent 19 in a VENONA decrypt. The circumstantial evidence presented is certainly strong and well reasoned, but no alternatives are considered. The second case is that of Harry Dexter White [Assistant Treasury Secretary during the latter part of WWII] and the evidence here is strong, though the reader must accept, to a degree, the memoirs of one of White’s Soviet contacts. In the third case the authors state they “have conclusive evidence showing that J. Robert Oppenheimer gave Moscow our atomic secrets.” Facilitated their transmission might have been a better choice of words, though there is no direct corroboration of this either. Nevertheless, the evidence of Oppenheimer’s Communist Party links and his behavior during the war are hard to explain in any other way. Taken singly or together, these views are likely to elicit expressions of outrage from academics and journalists similar to the whiny scorn heaped on the authors of Special Tasks, the memoirs of Pavel Sudoplatov [Gerald Schecter et al., Little Brown, updated edition,1995] which made some of the same charges.

Of no less significance, though perhaps less controversial, is the section on the Soviet manipulation of Albert Einstein and the chapter on NKVD operations against dissidents and Jews; the latter not addressed in the other books. In the chapter entitled ‘Target Journalists,’ the authors argue that the late journalist I. F. Stone “promoted Soviet disinformation themes.” And they quote from his pro-Stalinist columns and give other examples to support their conclusion that Stone too was a Soviet agent.

In the chapter on Atomic Espionage, Romerstein’s expertise on the CPUSA lead him to the possible true name of a person called OLSON in one of the VENONA decrypts. While NSA had decrypted the name accurately, the analysts at the FBI were unable to identify ‘Rose Olson.’ Through the other clues given in the decrypted text, Romerstein concludes the name was a pseudonym for Roz Childs, the wife of Jack Childs, a CPUSA party functionary, who joined by his brother Morris, later became an FBI informant. Haynes and Klehr discuss the same point but are not as sure about the identity. The trail of clues and the reasoning involved will hold the reader’s attention while arguing implicitly that CI analysts should know their case genealogy.

The final chapter of The Venona Secrets—Conclusions—summarizes the authors’ fundamental arguments based on the VENONA decrypts. They will not be welcome news to those that continue to hold out hope that American Communists were nothing more than liberals-in-a-hurry. But for many, if not most, any doubt has already been erased by the evidence in the chapters on The Making of the Apparat, the activities of Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers, and the penetration of the OSS. Taken together with the other six books, it is hard to see how even the most frequently made counterargument—that there was no Communist involvement in espionage—can be sustained. Nor is there any room left for the position that even if there was some espionage by Communists, it was justified because the Soviet Union was our ally. The same is true when it comes to specific cases, but supporters of Alger Hiss, Lauchlin Currie, Duncan Lee, to name a few, will no doubt persist.

Two nagging questions—with perhaps unknowable answers—remain. The first— why did so many Americans and citizens of her wartime allies, spy for Stalin?—is dealt with in each of the books. The collective and no doubt at least partially accurate answer is that the agents’ devotion to a foreign country came from a deep belief in the Communist ideology. But that doesn’t explain how such intelligent people—and they were that if nothing else—could have believed so blindly in a cause for which there was so much evidence contradicting its utopian claims—especially after the Hitler-Stalin Pact. The second question, possibly the more important of the two from an intelligence point of view, is what difference did all the espionage make in the end? This topic the authors leave to future historians. Thus one might reasonably conclude that there is at least one more book about VENONA and its consequences to be written.

1] http://www.h-net.msu.edu/logs/mlogs.cgi

2] Letter from Michael STRAIGHT to the author, dated 26 January 1999.