Gentlemen of Venona
HOTTELET, RICHARD C.
Gentlemen of Venona Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America By John Earl Haynes and Harwy Klehr Yale. 499 pp. $30.00. Reviewed by Richard C. Hottelet Former CBS News...
...Venona continued until 1980...
...Hundreds of thousands went to and from the Soviet Union, coded so deeply that it took three years and a masterpiece of cryptanalysis to begin laboriously reading them...
...The contents were stunning...
...They would have helped to prosecute many who remained only suspects, and they would have spared the American public much painful controversy...
...Thus began the Cold War...
...The ramifications of Soviet spying were enormous...
...He thus sought to transform it into the left wing of the Democratic Party and to enter the mainstream of American politics...
...Duncan Lee, a high OSS official, betrayed agency sources in foreign countries to the Soviets...
...In one 1944 cable whose code was cracked two years later, the KGB's office in New York notified headquarters that it had infiltrated America's most secret undertaking, the Manhattan Project, developer of the atom bomb...
...McCarthy, who had no knowledge of Venona, was simply lying when he claimed to have a list of 205...
...He always denied what he did, and the FBI decided not to use the Venona traffic to prove the opposite...
...The documents could have resolved questions about J. Robert Oppenheimer, too...
...By then some 2,900 cables between Moscow and its embassies and consulates around the world had been wholly or partially decoded...
...Clarke's cryptographic efforts aside, the U.S...
...He was an intellectual prodigy, a Harvard graduate at 18, and a fervent young Communist whose college roommate set him up with the KGB...
...Not all the party's 50,000 U.S...
...The cast of characters is bizarre, the motives that drove them combine the banal and the unfathomable...
...The product was devastating...
...She invented a warm relationship with the Roosevelts that enchanted Browder...
...authorities, Hall was never prosecuted...
...This conspiratorial mode, flourishing especially in Washington, soon served Moscow's spymasters...
...The State Department had at least six, including Alger Hiss and another senior official, Laurence Duggan...
...Stalin had concluded that the U.S...
...Venona" was the code name of a project begun in 1943 by Colonel Carter Clarke, whose Army Signal Intelligence Service codebreakers grew into the National Security Agency...
...The establishment of diplomatic relations with the United States in 1933 facilitated Soviet activities here...
...Something very similar had happened in 1918, with the Treaty of Brest Litovsk...
...Although a large part of the tale has been reported, the authors fill in blank spaces, confirm suspicions and puncture pretensions of innocence...
...The Great Depression was a propaganda bonanza and the Spanish Civil War afforded the opportunity to rally recruits against fascism...
...Best known for atomic espionage, Julius Rosenberg was more important to the KGB as a source of nonatomic information and recruiter of bright colleagues, engineering students at City College of New York who operated as his ring...
...Moscow also had obtained information from a brilliant young aeronautical engineer, William Perl, that helped it develop a superior jet aircraft...
...underscores the point...
...In one burlesque episode, a woman with Communist loyalties, Josephine Truslow Adams, followed up a casual meeting with Eleanor Roosevelt by deluging her with long letters...
...The role of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, for instance, would have been quite clear...
...Berle, strongly anti-Communist, did not follow up...
...He named a dozen middle-level officials who, as members of covert CPUSA caucuses, were operating inside the government...
...When the MiG-15 made its debut in Korea, it flew rings around propeller-driven U.S...
...Soviet military intelligence, for instance, hooked up with Whittaker Chambers' group, of which Alger Hiss was a member...
...The former Soviet spy wanted to alert the Administration to the infiltration...
...The story of Soviet spying in the United States, much of it done by Americans, forms a hair-raising, even mind-boggling chapter of our incredible century's history...
...But the fact that the Soviet code had been broken was so sensitive a secret that the papers could not be used as evidence, despite Moscow's having gotten wind of the possibility early on from a traitor in Venona itself and from Britain's Kim Philby...
...Sometimes, in the course of juggling its commitments to the KGB and the Comintern and trying, with them, to ride herd on its small army of interlocking and overlapping spy networks, the party fell on its face...
...government collected copies of all international cables entering and leaving the United States...
...Others traded more than information...
...From 1942to 1945, the USSRlaunched what the authors call an unrestrained espionage offensive against the United States...
...Of these, 178 were never identified...
...Indeed, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr uncover a richer source of drama than the most vivid imagination could conjure up...
...In the years immediately following, nothing changed...
...Although long known to U.S...
...Intrigued by rumors of Nazi-Soviet peace negotiations —actually attempted in Stockholm that year—he wondered about a separate peace that would allow Hitler to concentrate his forces against the United States and Britain...
...Reviewed by Richard C. Hottelet Former CBS News correspondent This book illuminates the back alleys of the U.S.-Soviet relationship...
...He was recently reported to be living in comfortable, respected retirement in England...
...There were also three sources referred to in the papers who have not been identified...
...In addition, the authors say the OSS, forerunner of the CIA, had between 15 and 20 Soviet spies...
...Believing he now had a private line to the White House and the President's approval, he renamed the CPUSA, calling it the "Communist Political Organization...
...was not really on the lookout for Soviet espionage until 1944...
...Haynes and Klehr speculate very plausibly that achieving nuclear parity with the United States emboldened Stalin, who rarely took risks, to authorize North Korea's invasion of the South in 1950...
...Throughout all this the CPUSA provided Soviet intelligence with false Americanpassports, passed counterfeit money, and recruited agents whose party records ensured reliability...
...Adams was a mainstay of the Committee to Free Earl Browder, head of the CPUSA, who was in prison for passport fraud...
...Had he been, much more information would have reached Moscow and it would have had the bomb even sooner...
...In a way, he typified some of the KGB's best recruits...
...In the 1920s and '30s the Kremlin had financed what became the CPUSA and set up small espionage units, even though its attention was directed mainly toward Europe and enemies like the Trotskyites and Zionists...
...The existence of the project, at least officially, was kept a secret until 1995...
...The past, though, did not augur well for U.S.-Soviet relations...
...wartime members were Soviet spies, but most spies were Communists...
...The Roosevelt policy of friendship and accommodation meant nothing...
...The 1939 meeting between Whittaker Chambers and Assistant Secretary of State Adolf A. Berle Jr...
...Currie told the Russians Roosevelt was willing to let Stalin keep the half of Poland he had seized under the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact, and would press the Polish government-in-exile to make concessions...
...Beginning with the outbreak of World War II in 1939, the U.S...
...Central to the action is the Communist Party of America, launched in 1919 and officially known since 1929 as the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA...
...The USSR became an ally, and counterintelligence focused on the main enemies, Germany and Japan...
...He also reported a Hungarian plan to surrender to the Allies in October 1944...
...The Venona papers contain some remarkable sketches of people implicated in the spying...
...Moscow soon demolished this fool's paradise and the restored CPUSA expelled Browder...
...Leaks from the Manhattan Project about the science and engineering of an atomic bomb enabled the Soviet Union to make one in 1949, years before it could have done so on its own...
...The decryptions, together with newly released FBI files, document the CPUSA's supplying agents, couriers and mail drops in the murder of Leon Trotsky in Mexico in 1940, and in the unsuccessful effort to free his assassin...
...Moscow leaked the information to the Germans, who occupied the country at once, ensuring that Hungary and the Balkans would come under Soviet domination...
...Senator JosephR...
...The historian Allen Weinstein writes that when Hall's Soviet contact, hardly believing his good luck, asked him why he thought it necessary to disclose such secrets, Hall replied, "There is no country except the Soviet Union which could be entrusted with such a terrible thing...
...Meanwhile the CPUSA, under Moscow's orders, created a "secret apparatus" with underground printing presses so that the party could continue to function in case of an emergency...
...would be his main rival in the postwar world...
...planes and the first generation of Americanjets...
...Among those best placed to gather information and influence policy were Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Harry Dexter White and Lauchlin Currie, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's senior administrative assistant...
...The scientific head of the Manhattan Project had a complex history of Communist contacts yet was, say the authors, not a KGB source...
...He might well have thought that he had deterred President Harry S. Truman from using the bomb against the onrush of Communist troops...
...It revealed that at least 349 American citizens, immigrants and permanent residents had a covert relationship with Soviet intelligence agencies in the 1930s and '40s...
...The greatest surprise in the cables was the identity of a major spy, Theodore Alvin Hall...
...Washington's burgeoning New Deal and wartime agencies were easily penetrated...
...White stacked Treasury's upper ranks with spies—and managed as well to plant a secret member of the Chinese Communist Party in Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist government...
...When FDR released him, on the occasion of a visit to Washington by Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav M. Molotov, Adams took credit...
...Los Alamos was glad to have this star physicist...
...From its inception it was Moscow's pawn, furnishing some spies, background-checking others, contributing its own and its front organizations' services not only to commit treason but also murder—all behind a smokescreen of smarmy idealism...
Vol. 82 • June 1999 • No. 7
