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Venona- Russian spy network and USA

Discussion in 'WWII General' started by Kai-Petri, Apr 8, 2003.

  1. Kai-Petri

    Kai-Petri Kenraali

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    http://www.nsa.gov/docs/venona/monographs/monograph-2.html

    The U.S. Army's Signal Intelligence Service, usually called "Arlington Hall" after the location of its headquarters, began a program to examine what it believed to be Soviet diplomatic and trade communications on February 1, 1943. Arlington Hall had on hand an unsorted collection of encrypted Soviet telegrams that had been collected intermittently since 1939. Starting with this corpus, while continuing to collect additional message traffic, Arlington Hall commenced its attacks against the Soviet diplomatic cryptographic systems used in the traffic. The project to analyze and translate these messages, which turned out to include Soviet KGB and GRU spy messages in addition to diplomatic and trade messages, eventually was named VENONA.

    The first public release of translated VENONA materials, signals intelligence which had provided an insight into the alarming and hitherto unappreciated breadth and depth of Soviet espionage activities within the U.S., was in July, 1995. That release was a compilation of 49 VENONA translations which related to Soviet espionage efforts against U.S. atomic bomb research, including messages about the Rosenbergs and the MANHATTAN Project.

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    The COMINTERN (Communist International) was a Soviet-controlled organization that conducted liaison with the national Communist parties of various countries, including the United States, in order to further the cause of revolution. Moscow issued guidance, support, and orders to the parties through the apparatus of the COMINTERN. Nevertheless, Stalin publicly disbanded the COMINTERN in 1943. A Moscow KGB message to all stations on September 12, 1943, message number 142, relating to this event and included in this release, is one of the most interesting and historically important messages in the entire corpus of VENONA translations. This message clearly discloses the KGB's connection to the COMINTERN and to the national Communist parties. The message details instructions for handling intelligence sources within the Communist Party after the disestablishment of the COMINTERN.

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    The KGB messages from 1942 and 1943 employed the earlier and more difficult codebook. These 1942-1943 messages, some of which are the subject of this current release, were not attacked successfully until 1953-1954, when a second major cryptanalytic breakthrough was made through pure analysis by Dr. Samuel P. Chew at NSA, the successor of Arlington Hall. Only after this second major breakthrough was made was a partially burned KGB codebook, which had been found in 1945, able to be identified as the codebook employed in this system and to be put to use in attacking these messages.

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    ELIZABETH BENTLEY
    In 1945, Elizabeth Bentley, a KGB agent who also ran a network of spies and served as a sometime courier, went to the FBI to describe Soviet espionage in the United States and her part in it as courier and agent handler. She gave a 90 page statement, in which she named many names--persons in positions of trust who, she told the FBI, were secretly supplying information to the KGB. However, she brought no documentary proof. No prosecutions resulted directly from her accusations. Over the years she testified before Congress and in court and also published a book about her espionage career. Elizabeth Bentley was a controversial figure and there were many who discounted her confession. Miss Bentley appears in these VENONA translations (as covernames UMNITsA [GOOD GIRL] and MYRNA) as do dozens of KGB agents and officers whom she named to the FBI. VENONA confirms much of the information Miss Bentley provided the FBI.

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    The Rosenberg/Atomic Bomb Espionage Messages
    VENONA translations that have been identified as associated with atomic bomb espionage messages are being released first. All but two of this group of forty-nine messages were KGB traffic; one s a GRU and one a Soviet diplomatic message.

    These messages disclose some of the clandestine activities of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Harry Gold, Klaus Fuchs, David and Ruth Greenglass, and others susch as the spy known by the covername MLAD or the equally important, but still unidentified PERS. The role played by the person covernamed VEKSEL remains uncertain but troubling. A number of other covernames of persons associated with atomic bomb espionage remain unidentified to this day.

    VENONA messages show that KGB officer Leonid Kvasnikov, covername ANTON, headed atomic bomb espionage in the U.S., but that he, like the Rosenbergs, who came under his control, had many other high-tech espionage targets such as the U.S. jet aircrat program, developments in radar and rockets, etc. As with most VENONA messages, the Rosenberg messages contain much information relating to KGB net control and tradecraft matters.


    :eek:
     
  2. Kai-Petri

    Kai-Petri Kenraali

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    http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/venona/dyk.html

    The U.S. National Security Agency waited almost 50 years before releasing the first batch of Soviet cables decrypted by the Venona project, most of which were broken between 1947 and 1952.

    In December 1946, in one of the earliest Venona breakthroughs, Meredith Gardner, an analyst with the Signal Intelligence Service (an NSA forerunner), broke into a 1944 KGB message that gave a list of the leading scientists working on the Manhattan Project, the effort to build an atomic bomb.

    Twenty-one deciphered KGB cables, all from 1944 and 1945, discuss Julius Rosenberg, who bore the covernames "Antenna" and, later, "Liberal."

    Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed at New York's Sing Sing Prison on June 19, 1953, were the only persons put to death for espionage in the U.S. during the Cold War.

    The Venona intercepts reveal that the Soviets never gave Ethel Rosenberg a cover name -- evidence, say her sons Robert and Michael Meeropol, that she was innocent of espionage.

    In a December 5th, 2001, Associated Press story, David Greenglass admitted he lied under oath about his sister Ethel's involvement in espionage to reduce his own sentence and keep his wife Ruth out of prison.

    Nearly a half century after the death of his sister, David Greenglass and his wife Ruth are alive and well, living under assumed names in the New York area.

    Ted Hall, another spy within the Manhattan Project, was a physics prodigy who attended Columbia University at age 14 and graduated from Harvard at age 18.

    The KGB gave Hall the cover name "Youngster," because when he first passed secrets to the Soviets about the atomic bomb, he was only 19 years old.

    Hall told his wife Joan that he gave the U.S.S.R. secrets of the atom bomb because he was afraid the U.S. might become a very reactionary power after World War II, and that the Soviet Union was the only country capable of standing up to it.

    After the war, Hall earned a doctorate at the University of Chicago and eventually moved to England. Neither he nor his principal courier Saville Sax was ever prosecuted.

    Till the day he died, on November 1, 1999 at the age of 74, Hall never fully admitted to undertaking espionage.

    Klaus Fuchs, perhaps the most damaging spy within the Manhattan Project, made a full confession in 1950, served nine years in prison, and then moved to Communist East Germany, where he died in 1988.

    Within months of Fuchs' confession, which led to several arrests, the spies Joel Barr and Alfred Sarant disappeared. Nothing more was heard from them until 1983, when a Harvard researcher identified them as the leading Soviet scientists Joseph Berg and Philip Georgievich Staros.

    In the end, Venona was seriously compromised by the American William Weisband and the Englishman H.R. "Kim" Philby, both of whom had access to Venona apparently told the Soviets about the program.

    Venona shows that the KGB's cover names for American concerns included "Enormoz" (the Manhattan Project), "Arsenal" (the U.S. War Department), and "The Bank" (the U.S. Department of State).

    In a KGB message, a member of the American Communist Party was known as a "Fellowcountryman," while a member of the Young Communist League was called a "Gymnast."

    To date, the NSA has declassified more than 3,000 messages related to Venona.

    Yet of the voluminous message traffic sent to Moscow from the KGB's New York office, Venona cryptanalysts were able to decrypt only 49 percent of the 1944 messages, 15 percent of the 1943 messages, and a mere 1.8 percent of the 1942 messages.

    Many persons known in the Venona traffic only by their cover names have never been identified, including "Quantum," a spy who gave valuable scientific information about the atom-bomb project to the Soviets at a meeting at the Soviet embassy on June 14, 1943.

    PS. Some of the results are quite stunning. For example, to my astonishment one finds evidence of KGB humor. Washington is referred to as CARTHAGE, San Francisco is referred to by the code name BABYLON, and for New York is referred to as TYRE -- all ancient cities that came to ruin.

    [ 08. April 2003, 07:20 AM: Message edited by: Kai-Petri ]
     
  3. De Vlaamse Leeuw

    De Vlaamse Leeuw Member

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    Very interesting Kai. We are getting used to the fact you always give us very good information.

    But do you also have information about American spies in Russia during the cold war?
     
  4. Kai-Petri

    Kai-Petri Kenraali

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    Erwin,

    nothing worth mentioning at the moment. The Russians seem to have been very active all the way, even with the lend-lease etc etc. Frankly I am surprised about this and what the Venona files have brought up and later on will...

    I just bought a book on KGB so we´ll get more names and facts soon.

    Actually I seem to get to the conclusion that the US were enough "naive" to think that the Russians would not spy on them or try to steal their secrets. As well no organized spying organization by the US before the cold war in Russia, and during the cold war making one would be quite a tough thing.

    :confused:
     
  5. De Vlaamse Leeuw

    De Vlaamse Leeuw Member

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    That's true. But I think that Roosevelt - in contrast with Churchill - trusted Stalin very much.

    I even think that the Russians had spies at the Los Alamos project.
     
  6. Kai-Petri

    Kai-Petri Kenraali

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    According to the Venona decryptions, Stalin’s agents included:

    Lauchlin Currie, senior White House aide to FDR, who alerted the NKVD (Soviet intelligence) to FBI investigations of its top agents.

    Martha Dodd, licentious daughter of the American ambassador to Berlin, whose passionate affair with the first secretary of the Russian embassy included passing confidential diplomatic correspondence to Moscow.

    Alger Hiss, chief of the State Department’s Office of Special Political Affairs, who accompanied Roosevelt to Yalta in 1945 and chaired the founding conference of the UN. This senior assistant to the secretary of state gave Soviet military intelligence diplomatic cables concerning Axis threats to Soviet security.

    Laurence Duggan, head of the State Department’s Division of American Republics and the secretary of state’s personal adviser for Latin America, who gave the NKVD Anglo-American plans for the invasion of Italy.

    Michael Straight, a family friend and protege of President and Mrs. Roosevelt who was recruited into the NKVD by Soviet spy Anthony Blunt while attending Cambridge University.

    Harry Dexter White, assistant secretary of the Treasury, U.S. director of the IMF, senior adviser to the American delegation at the founding conference of the UN, who facilitated employment for Soviet sources in his department.

    Harold Glasser, vice-chairman of the War Production Board and assistant director of the Treasury’s Office of International Finance, who gave the NKVD a State Department analysis of Soviet war losses.

    Gregory Silvermaster, a Treasury economist whose spy network provided Moscow with prodigious amounts of War Production Board data on arms, aircraft, and shipping production.

    Victor Perlo, chief of the Aviation Section of the War Production Board whose spy ring supplied the Soviets with aircraft production figures and included a Senate staff director.

    Judith Coplon, Justice Department analyst who alerted Moscow to FBI counterintelligence operations.

    Duncan Lee, descendant of Robert E. Lee and senior aide to OSS chief William J. Donovan, who became the NKVD’s senior source in American intelligence; he divulged secret OSS operations in Europe and China.

    William Weisband, NSA linguist who informed Moscow that the Venona Project had deciphered its messages.

    http://www.unc.edu/depts/diplomat/AD_Issues/amdipl_15/platt_15.html
     
  7. T. A. Gardner

    T. A. Gardner Genuine Chief

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    What is interesting in all of this, and in the massive amount of other Soviet post-war spying efforts, is that the Soviet Union was unable to surge ahead on technology, failed outside of the immediate post-war period to make any significant political or economic gains in nations outside that bloc and, in the end collapsed as a political power itself.
    This says alot about the ineffectiveness and instability of totalitarian government.
     
  8. Kai-Petri

    Kai-Petri Kenraali

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    It was kinda intersting to read on the communistic view on the A-bomb research. If I remember correct the communistic principle could not accept the atom theory ( a jewish one ?!) and thus could not publicly go on with the research. However the scientists were given the order to continue on the work even if it was not seen as suitable for communistic countries to work on it as publicly the Atom theory did not exist for them...
     
  9. nc_martialartist

    nc_martialartist Member

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    Heh, that's awesome.

    You know, those cables prove the guilt of much of the "innocents" that were victimized by liberal opponents of so-called McCarthyism. Perhaps ol' Joe was right after all, eh?
     
  10. Kai-Petri

    Kai-Petri Kenraali

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    There definitely is more than just suspicions to the "Communist spy" thing in the late 1940´s but I guess the realization of the problem led to huge overexaggeration though and many innocent people were put to court.
     
  11. Gen.Patton

    Gen.Patton Member

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    Very good info.
     
  12. Kai-Petri

    Kai-Petri Kenraali

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  13. Kai-Petri

    Kai-Petri Kenraali

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    Noticed this person there as well:

    William Perl - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

    "John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr have suggested that data provided by him aided the Soviets in the unique tail-fin design of the MiG-15 fighter used in the Korean War."

    Wonder if any new info has on this has surfaced? Just for curiosity.
     
  14. Kai-Petri

    Kai-Petri Kenraali

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    Venona and Rosenbergs. They were Guilty.
     

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