Venona

...For the Venona evidence shows beyond any shadow of doubt that the period of maximum intensity of the Soviet spying effort inside America was 1942-45, years before America was supposed to have started the Cold War...

...Many hundreds of Americans had formal ties to the Soviet intelligence agencies in the 1930's and 1940's...

...The book should therefore be read by anyone, and especially historians and commentators in the media, who hold views about the nature of the Cold War and its origins, and particularly by those inclined to blame America...

...This genuine conspiracy operated at levels rather less eminent than McCarthy supposed, but nevertheless with PAUL JOHNSON'S most recent book is A History of the American People (Harper-Collins...

...spies saved the Soviets vast expense and industrial resources and shortened the development timetable by many years...

...The evidence of the scale of Soviet spying in America, and the role of the CPUSA, was overwhelming...

...This documentation of course provided evidence of the way Soviet agents set about recruiting and vetting Americans who spied for them, but it also put the authors on the track of a top secret American code-breaking process which had been used to identify some of the spies, such as the Rosenbergs, and bring them to justice...

...worked, and the persistent and callous manner in which American citizens, occupying positions of trust, worked with it...

...They were particularly numerous in wartime agencies whose emergency recruiting procedures bypassed normal civil service hiring rules...

...We should bear this lesson in mind when viewing Chinese-American friendship today, "most favored 68 September 199 9 • The American Spectator nation" agreements, and other practical demonstrations of Washington's anxiety to be on close terms with Peking...

...These and other sources, who actually provided the secrets, or, like Gregory Silvermaster and Maurice Halperin, stole and passed on documents, were backed up by a large number of talent spotters, vetters, couriers, suppliers of safe houses and mail drops, of forged identifications and cover businesses, or who liaised with Soviet officials...

...Attended by Moynihan, heads of the FBI, CIA, and the National Security Agency (NSA) — a body so secretive that it was sometimes known as No Such Agency—the meeting declared the Venona files now open to inspection, congratulated the staff of the project (all by then retired or dead) on the success of their mission, and produced 49 specimen decrypts unmistakably showing that Julius Rosenberg had been a Soviet agent— a charge hotly denied up till then by many liberal U.S...

...Over the next two years, the NSA released over 5,000 pages of decrypted text contained in 2,900 messages...

...Much of the evidence to justify such a damning judgment is printed in this book, which provides fascinating insights into the way in which the Soviet espionage operation in the U.S...

...More came out when the Soviet Union collapsed and its Communist Party archives, under the name of the Russian Center for the Preservation and Study of Documents of Recent History, were opened to Western scholars...

...They subsequently read through 4,300 files in thick folders bound in ribbon and covered in dust...

...interests thus inflicted is difficult to quantify in most areas, but in the field of nuclear weapons we know that U.S...

...A CPUSA member who went into government services at a sufficiently sensitive level was sure to be approached by a KGB talent spotter sooner or later...

...scholars, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, were astonished to be told that the records of the American Communist Party had been shipped secretly to Moscow and housed in a remote warehouse...

...For there was indeed a conspiracy, on a large scale, and for many years, organized by the Soviet government and its KGB, and actively assisted by the American Communist Party, to recruit spies in the government services of the United States and to transmit valuable information of all kinds to Moscow...

...The State Department had six spies, including two high-ranking ones, Laurence Duggan and Alger Hiss, both of whom worked for the Soviets for a decade...

...Some CPUSA members, asked to serve Stalin, declined from fear, but not one ever reported the approach to the U.S...

...ow do we know all this...

...They did so, pointing out that it was anomalous that scholars could now find, in open Russian archives, documentation on the Moscow end of Soviet cable traffic concerning their American spies, when the messages themselves were still locked up in closed United States archives...

...historians...

...This argument had its effect, and two months after the hearings, on July 11, 1995, the two authors were invited to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, for the official disclosure of what was now identified as the Venona Project...

...It was not true, as he and others maintained, that the entire New Deal was a disguised Communist plot and that the loyalties of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations were suspect...

...In 1995, in their book on American Communism, the authors had asserted that "in practice few American Communists were spies" and that "to see the American Communist Party chiefly as an instrument of espionage or a sort of fifth column misjudges its main purpose...

...Damage to U.S...

...Not "few" but hundreds of Amer-jean Communists spied for Russia and "espionage was a regular activity of the American Communist Party...

...It] was indeed a fifth column working inside and against the United States in the Cold War...

...significant access to state secrets...

...That is just the kind of atmosphere the Chinese spymasters, like their Soviet predecessors, relish, and there is also growing evidence of their success in exploiting it to gain U.S...

...Other Soviet spies included Lauchlin Currie, a presidential administrative assistant, two senior atomic scientists, Theodore Hall and Klaus Fuchs, and Duncan Lee, a senior aide to the head of the OSS...

...But some of the most useful Soviet spies, such as Julius Rosenberg, Silver-master, Charles Kramer, Fuchs, Hall, and Victor Perlo, themselves sought out KGB agents and volunteered to serve Moscow...

...As a result they published two books: The Secret World ofAmerican Communism (1995) and The Soviet World ofAmerican Communism (1998...

...The War Production Board, the Office of the Co-ordinator of Inter-American Affairs, the Board of Economic Warfare, and the Office of War Information each had a minimum of six Soviet spies...

...The Communist Party of the USA, to give it its full title, had over 5o,000 members during the Second World War, and these provided the most eager recruits...

...Let us hope that a modern equivalent of Venona is monitoring their efforts...

...Much was H revealed by the testimony of defectors like Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers, by congressional testimony, and the evidence made public when spies were brought to trial...

...It was there that two U.S...

...Most of these spies worked not just for money but out of political sympathy...

...Such, for instance, were Elizabeth Bentley and Amadeo Sabatini...

...Choosing Uncle Joe Over Uncle Sam Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr Yale University Press /487 pages I $30 REVIEWED BY Paul Johnson T he damage that Senator McCarthy inflicted on his own country was not so much that he threatened civil liberties—thereby enabling subversives to claim that any attempt to expose their activities was "McCarthyism" — but that he tried to expose the wrong conspiracy...

...Hints about the code-breaking made in their 1995 book led to a call from Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, chairman of the new Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy, who asked The American Spectator • September 1999 67 them to give evidence when his commission met in May 1995...

...secrets...

...Nor were Dean Acheson, Truman's secretary of state, and George C. Marshall, Truman's secretary of defense, part of a conspiracy, to use McCarthy's words, "on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man, a conspiracy of infamy so black that, when it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men...

...Throughout this period, the party and its members were at the heart of the immense system whereby Moscow stole U.S...

...The book also indicates that America's friendly feelings toward the Soviet Union, its wartime ally, and the relaxed attitude American officialdom took in cooperating with the Soviets, provided precisely the climate in which the most determined and successful Soviet spying could flourish...

...The American Spectator • September 1999 69...

...The assistant secretary of the Treasury, Harry Dexter White, was a Soviet spy, and the Division of Monetary Research, which he headed and where he was succeeded by another Soviet spy, Frank Coe, had six more, plus two others elsewhere in the Treasury...

...They were forced to contradict both these verdicts...

...Those who gave atomic secrets to Moscow must likewise bear some responsibility for the acceleration in the spread of nuclear weapons and their transfer to rogue states...

...This ridiculous fantasy, for which there was no solid evidence at all, served not only to discredit the senator himself, and the investigative committee system, but to add to the difficulties of serious and professional attempts to identify real Soviet agents in government service...

...secrets...

...Thus, the hastily created wartime intelligence body, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), housed at least 15 and perhaps as many as zo Soviet spies...

...With the Cold War now over, and the messages over 40 years old, why the need for continuing secrecy...

...authorities...