“The Venona Project began because Carter Clarke did not trust Joseph Stalin (Haynes and Klehr 2000, 8).”
Introduction
The Venona Project is a fascinating and frightening segment of U.S. history. The now-declassified and decrypted Venona messages offer much to learn from, notably in the context of how Soviet espionage was so prolific. The discussion surrounding the Venona Project will focus on what the U.S. gained from deciphering the Soviet messages, who was susceptible to Soviet recruitment, how these spies maintained highly sensitive positions and the impact Soviet spying had on the development of a Soviet atomic weapons program.
Sympathy for Communism
While officially starting in the 1940s, the Venona Project has its roots in the ideological and political landscape of the 1930s. The Great Depression, triggered by the 1929 stock market collapse, created widespread economic hardship and disillusionment with capitalism. As millions of Americans faced unemployment, poverty, and uncertainty, the appeal of alternative economic and political systems grew. During this period of economic despair, communist and socialist ideologies gained traction in the United States. However, joint Soviet-US operations against Nazi Germany throughout WWII also bolstered sentiment for communism, as the Soviet Union was seen as a crucial ally in the fight against fascism. The Communist Party USA (CPUSA) saw increased membership and influence as it presented itself as a champion of workers' rights and a viable alternative to capitalism's perceived failures. This ideological shift is crucial to understanding the context in which the Venona Project later operated.
The Origin Story
As a result of Colonel Carter Clarke's intense distrust of Joseph Stalin, Clarke ordered the Signals Intelligence Service (SIS), which Clarke supervised, to establish a program dedicated to deciphering Soviet diplomatic cables. At the heart of this project was Clarke’s desire to know whether the rumors regarding a Nazi-Soviet Peace Pact were accurate. Clarke assumed the Soviet diplomatic cables would have the answers if the SIS could decipher the messages.
In February 1943, the SIS, the precursor to the National Security Agency, began a secret program later codenamed VENONA. Initially, the mission was to examine and exploit Soviet diplomatic communications, but the scope expanded to include Soviet espionage efforts.
Deciphering Soviet Messages
The first discovery concerning Soviet espionage techniques was “...a complex two-part ciphering system involving a "one-time pad" code that in theory was unbreakable (Haynes and Klehr 2000, 9).” The code was deciphered by SIS in 1946 after spotting a Soviet procedural error, yet there was no evidence of a Nazi-Soviet Peace Pact. Instead, evidence supported the notion that messages between Soviet diplomats at the Soviet consulate in New York were between intelligence field officers, and “Espionage, not diplomacy, was the subject of these cables (Haynes and Klehr 2000, 9).”
The Extent of Soviet Espionage
The Venona deciphering also highlighted a frightening discovery, which was a very active Soviet spy ring that had penetrated the U.S., and 349 Americans were involved with the Soviets. However, due to the Soviets' use of codenames, it would take the U.S. decades to identify who the individuals were in conjunction with their codenames referenced in the deciphered messages. As a result, the Soviets obtained critical information about the Manhattan Project, American jet engines and aircraft, American diplomatic strategy, and more.
More disturbing was the many compromised high-ranking U.S. government positions, including Harry White, the second most powerful official in the U.S. Treasury Department, and Lauchlin Currie, a personal assistant to President Franklin Roosevelt. White advised the KGB on frustrating American diplomatic strategy, while Currie warned the KGB about an FBI investigation, allowing a key Soviet agent to evade detection.
The key Soviet agent in question was Gregory Silvermaster, the leader of a critical espionage ring.
William Perl was an additional individual connected to the U.S. government as an aeronautical scientist. Perl’s position allowed him to provide the Soviets with highly sensitive tests and design experiments for American jet engines and aircraft. Perl’s espionage had profound consequences, as it expedited Soviet aerospace technologies and gave the Soviets an even playing field in the sky, which came to fruition during the Korean War.
The Korean War
“In the Korean War, U.S. military leaders expected the Air Force to dominate the skies, on the assumption that the Soviet aircraft used by North Korea and Communist China would be no match for American aircraft (Haynes and Klehr 2000, 10).”
William Perl’s actions contributed extensively to the shock factor for U.S. military leaders. The Soviet-made MiG-15 was superior to the F-80 Shooting Star and led to the rapid development of the F-86 Saber, which would balance the technological capabilities between the U.S. and Soviet aircraft. As a result, the U.S. Air Force prevailed against the Soviet-made jets, but the success was primarily due to “the skill of American pilots than to the design of American aircraft (Haynes and Klehr 2000, 10).”
However, William Perl’s treason is nothing compared to that of the atomic spies, who single-handedly put atomic weapons into the hands of the Soviets.
The Manhattan Project
Klaus Fuchs, Theodore Hall, and David Greenglass “transmitted the complex formula for extracting bomb-grade uranium from ordinary uranium, the technical plans for production facilities, and the engineering principles for the "implosion" technique (Haynes and Klehr 2000, 10).”
“The latter process (the “implosion” technique) made possible an atomic bomb using plutonium, a substance much easier to manufacture than bomb-grade uranium (Haynes and Klehr 2000, 10).”
The betrayal of the aforementioned atomic scientists had devastating consequences, as it not only expedited the Soviet’s atomic weapons program by several years, significantly reduced the cost of the program, but also removed the U.S.’s status as an atomic monopoly (Haynes and Klehr 2000, 10-11). A fascinating aspect of this espionage operation is that without its success, the Soviets likely wouldn’t have developed an atomic bomb until after Stalin's death, which could have altered the climate surrounding the Cold War (Haynes and Klehr 2000, 11).
One example of how the tides shifted in the Soviets' favor due to this successful Soviet espionage operation relates to the Korean War. The Soviets managed to detonate their first atomic weapon in 1949, just one year before the start of the Korean War in 1950.
The Soviet’s first detonation of an atomic weapon would mark what is now known as the Arms Race, fundamentally altering the Cold War's geopolitical landscape and still affecting today’s landscape.
According to consensus among scholars, Stalin was “rarely a risk-taker,” and it is unlikely that Stalin would have authorized and assisted North Korea in invading South Korea without the success of the Soviet atomic weapons program. Stalin was aware of Truman’s willingness to use atomic weapons, notably Truman’s use of two atomic bombs in Japan in August 1945, and it was likely Truman would threaten the use of atomic weapons in response to an invasion on behalf of North Korea.
Due to Stalin now also possessing the means of unfathomable destruction, Truman could no longer use the threat of atomic weapons to gain compliance, as the other side (the Soviet Union) could now reciprocate the consequences of such an action.
The American Communist Party (CPUSA)
The CPUSA gained sympathizers and actively recruited disillusioned individuals with the current system. Many of these recruits were intellectuals, students, and professionals who believed in communist ideals and saw the Soviet Union as a model of a prosperous socialist state. This ideological foundation made it easier for Soviet intelligence to recruit spies within the United States.
The decrypted Venona messages exposed how the Soviets leveraged the ideological climate. Soviet intelligence agencies, such as the KGB, utilized American sympathizers to penetrate key sectors of the U.S. government, including the Manhattan Project and various administrative departments.
Case Studies of Recruited Spies
The Boy Who Cried Wolf: McCarthyism & Public Perception
The “anti-communist” actions and rhetoric of Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy during the 1950s led to the term “McCarthyism,” and his actions had profoundly adverse effects on America. McCarthy was highly vocal about the rise of communism in America. While McCarthy was partially correct in this assertion, his claims were far from accurate and had devasting consequences for those falsely painted as communists. An additional result of McCarthyism was a warped view of U.S. history spanning from the 1930s to the 1950s, which provided a false narrative concerning the early history of the Cold War. The lack of concrete evidence from the Venona Project during the height of the Red Scare and McCarthyism in the 1950s led to a more controversial and divisive interpretation of these events. Without the Venona evidence, accusations of espionage often appeared to be based more on suspicion and paranoia than on documented fact.
Two notable examples of McCarthy’s accusations involve Dean Acheson, Truman's secretary of state, and George C. Marshall, the Army chief of staff under Roosevelt and secretary of state and secretary of defense under Truman. In McCarthy’s words, there were:
"a conspiracy 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."
In reality, these claims were no more than a conspiracy. Yet, due to the classified nature of the Venona documents to both McCarthy and the general public, there was no way to provide evidence of McCarthy’s claims being inaccurate. As a result, McCarthy deteriorated the credibility of a real threat of communism penetrating the high echelons of the U.S. government. By the 1980s, many academic historians asserted that “Soviet espionage had been minor, that few American Communists had assisted the Soviets, and that no high officials had betrayed the United States (Haynes and Klehr 2000, 17).” Every aspect of this claim was false, and a far more devastating impact persisted throughout textbooks and influential books following McCarthy’s ignorance.
For decades, academia failed to grasp the extent and details of Soviet infiltration into various sectors of the U.S. government and the role of American citizens in espionage. As a result, textbooks and other academic literature of that time reflected a twisted and largely false interpretation of Soviet espionage and the role of communism in America. One notable example of how these falsehoods bled into literature is from Ellen Schrecker's book "Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America", in which the author stated, "There is no documentation in the public record of a direct connection between the American Communist Party and espionage during the entire postwar period (Schrecker 1998)."
In this manipulated purview, what followed was the consensus that communists were innocent victims of an oppressive American government. President Truman’s executive order, denying potential security threats from government positions, was deemed “consciously anti-democratic attacks on basic freedoms (Haynes and Klehr 2000, 18).” Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted of espionage and sent to the electric chair due to being victims of false charges as a result of anti-Semitism. Every other convicted Soviet spy was, in some shape or form, a result of government overreach. While these accusations have now been officially disproven due to the release of the Venona Project, the accusations reigned supreme over reality for decades, diminishing the American public’s trust in the U.S. government.
The Hollywood Ten and the Blacklist
McCarthyism’s impact surpassed that of government and included the blacklisting of the Hollywood Ten, along with hundreds of others connected to the entertainment industry suspected of having communist ties.
The Hollywood Ten include: Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Adrian Scott, and Dalton Trumbo
Of these ten individuals, all were confirmed to have been members or participants in the CPUSA. However, not a single member of the Hollywood Ten was a Soviet spy, and yet almost all of them lost their careers and livelihoods regardless of that fact.
The driving force behind the Hollywood blacklisting was the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which subpoenaed all ten individuals mentioned above in 1947. The Hollywood Ten would go on to refuse to answer the committee’s questions regarding their involvement with the communist party, reiterating the importance of their First Amendment rights. HUAC responded by issuing the Hollywood Ten contempt of Congress charges, prison sentences, and the destruction of their careers as a result of the blacklist.
Dalton Trumbo, who at the time was the highest-paid screenwriter in the world, discovered a workaround: using fake names or giving credit to other writers on his screenplays. In the 1950s, Trumbo wrote “Roman Holiday” and “The Brave One”, both of which won an Academy Award. However, Ian McLellan Hunter was credited for “Roman Holiday,” and “The Brave One” was attributed to a pseudonym Trumbo devised, Robert Rich. It wouldn’t be until 1960 that Trumbo was once again credited when “Spartacus” and “Exodus” were released, bringing him an Academy Award for “Spartacus” and an Academy Award nomination for “Exodus”. The Academy Award nomination and Academy Award win was a symbolic victory for Trumbo and the hundreds of others that were blacklisted and brought a formal end to the hold the blacklist had on Hollywood.
While the story of Trumbo has a happy ending, the same is not true for hundreds of others. McCarthyism was fueling widespread paranoia and hysteria concerning the threat of communism, and in its wake was devastation.
Declassification
The 52 years the Venona Project remained unknown to U.S. officials, the general public, and other nations was a significant intelligence success despite all the evident failures illustrated in the deciphered messages. While snippets of the Venona Project became public in the 1980s due to increased Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests surrounding the Cold War, the Venona Project wouldn’t be fully declassified until 1995, marking approximately 52 years of a successful covert operation.
After the declassification, historians had to revisit and revise their understanding of Cold War espionage. New findings from the Venona documents provided concrete evidence of Soviet espionage, leading to more accurate and nuanced accounts in history books and scholarly works.
Many individuals who were accused of espionage or sympathizing with communist causes during the McCarthy era were either vindicated or confirmed as spies based on the Venona documents. This reevaluation profoundly impacted the reputations of these individuals and their families.
The revelations from Venona also led to a reevaluation of past U.S. policies and actions during the early Cold War period. The Venona Project would influence how future intelligence operations and counterespionage measures were perceived and implemented.
Conclusion
The Venona Project not only highlighted the vulnerabilities of some of the most sensitive positions in the U.S. government but also illustrated many aspects of the espionage tactics utilized by Soviet intelligence. More importantly, without Clarke’s skepticism and pushing the SIS to decipher diplomatic cables, the Soviets may have been far more ingrained in U.S. decision-making and other sensitive positions. These mistakes remain critical lessons to learn from and support the notion that effective counterespionage is paramount to maintaining national security.
Reference(s):
Haynes, John Earl, and Harvey Klehr. 2000. Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America. Yale Nota Bene. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/reader.action?docID=3420390&ppg=25.
Schrecker, Ellen. 1998. Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America. Little, Brown.