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| 349 U.S. citizens, noncitizen immigrants, and permanent residents of the United States |
349 U.S. citizens, noncitizen immigrants, and permanent residents of the United States are identified by Haynes & Klehr as having had a covert relationships with Soviet intelligence. Of these 171 are identified by true names and 178 are known only by a cover name.<sup id="fn_3_back">]</sup> The persons identified represent only a partial list and most are available in the main article. Twenty-four other persons were targeted for recruitment by the KGB, but evidence remains uncorroborated as to it having taken place. These persons are marked in the main article with an asterisk (*).<sup id="fn_4_back">]</sup> Some skeptical historians and analysist dispute some of these identifications. | ||
| ==Document Release Issues== | ==Document Release Issues== | ||
Revision as of 17:10, 22 August 2005
The VENONA project was a long-running and highly secret collaboration between United States intelligence agencies and the United Kingdom's MI5 that involved the cryptanalysis of messages sent by several Soviet intelligence agencies. The British codename for VENONA was Bride. In the early years of the Cold War, it was one of the West's most important sources on Soviet intelligence activity.
Background
U.S. Army Signal Security Agency (commonly called Arlington Hall) codebreakers had intercepted large volumes of encrypted high-level Soviet diplomatic and intelligence traffic during and immediately after World War II. The British had stopped intercepting Soviet traffic, at Winston Churchill's orders, shortly after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, and had no traffic to contribute to the project after that time.
This traffic, some of which was thought to be encrypted with a one-time pad system, was stored and analyzed in relative secrecy by hundreds of cryptanalysts over a 40-year period starting in the early 1940s. Due to what turned out to be a serious blunder on the part of the Soviets - re-using pages of some of the one-time pads in other pads, which were then used for other messages - this traffic was vulnerable to crypanalysis.
The Venona Project was initiated under orders from the Chief of Military Intelligence, Carter Clarke, who mistrusted Joseph Stalin. He feared that Stalin and Hitler would sign a peace treaty in order to focus Germany's military forces on the destruction of Great Britain and the U.S.
The breakin
The Soviet systems in general used a code to convert words and letters into numbers, to which an additive key (from one-time pads) were added, further disguising the content. Some brilliant cryptanalysis by American and British codebreakers revealed that some of the one-time pad material had incorrectly been reused by the Soviets (specifically, entire pages, although not complete books), which allowed decryption (sometimes only partial) of a small part of the traffic.
It was Arlington Hall's Lt. Richard Hallock, working on Soviet "Trade" traffic, who first discovered that the Soviets were re-using pages. Hallock and his colleagues (including Genevieve Feinstein, Cecil Phillips, Frank Lewis, Frank Wanat, and Lucille Campbell) went on to break into a significant amount of "Trade" traffic, recovering many one-time pad additive key tables in the process.
A very young Meredith Gardner (of what would become the National Security Agency) then used this material to break in to what turned out to be NKVD (and later GRU) traffic, by reconstructing the code used to convert text to numbers. Samuel Chew and Cecil Phillips also made valuable contributions. Very slowly, using assorted techniques ranging from traffic analysis to defector information, more of the messages were decrypted.
Claims have been made that information from physical theft of code books (a partially burned one was recovered by the Finns) to bugging embassy rooms in which text was entered into encrypting devices (analyzing the keystrokes by listening to them being punched in), contributed to achieving as much plaintext as was recovered. These latter claims are less than fully supported in the open literature.
One significant aid (mentioned by the NSA) in the early stages may have been work done in co-operation between the Japanese and Finnish cryptanalytic organizations; when the Americans broke into Japanese codes during WWII, they gained access to this information.
There has been speculation that the reason for the key material duplication was the increase in work (including key pad generation) in the period after the German attack in June of 1941. Other suggestions have it that it was Guderian's tanks just outside Moscow in early December that year which forced Moscow Centre to make such a fundamental error.
Results
The NSA reported that, according to the serial numbers of the Venona cables, thousands were sent, but only a fraction were available to the cryptanalysts. Approximately 2,200 of the messages were decrypted and translated; some 50 percent of the 1943 GRU-Naval Washington to Moscow messages were broken, but none for any other year, although several thousand were sent between 1941 and 1945. The decryption rate of the NKVD cables was:
- 1942 1.8%
- 1943 15.0%
- 1944 49.0%
- 1945 1.5%
Out of some hundreds of thousands of intercepted cyphertexts, it is claimed that under 3000 have been partially or wholly decrypted.
The Soviets eventually stopped reusing key pad material, possibly after learning of the US / British work from several of their agents, after which their one-time pad traffic reverted to completely unreadable.
Significance
Main articles: Significance of Venona
The NSA followed Soviet intelligence traffic for only a few years in World War II, and decrypted only a small portion of that traffic. The Venona project was a thirty-eight year investigation conducted by the NSA and FBI counterintelligence, and held classified for an additional fifteen years after the program ended. Researchers, historians, and the public continue to debate its significance and meaning.
List of Americans in the Venona papers
- Main article: List of Americans in the Venona papers
349 U.S. citizens, noncitizen immigrants, and permanent residents of the United States are identified by Haynes & Klehr as having had a covert relationships with Soviet intelligence. Of these 171 are identified by true names and 178 are known only by a cover name. The persons identified represent only a partial list and most are available in the main article. Twenty-four other persons were targeted for recruitment by the KGB, but evidence remains uncorroborated as to it having taken place. These persons are marked in the main article with an asterisk (*). Some skeptical historians and analysist dispute some of these identifications.
Document Release Issues
The release of VENONA translations involved careful consideration of the privacy interests of individuals mentioned, referenced, or identified in the translations. Some names have not been released when to do so would constitute an invasion of privacy.
The NSA has failed to release all the VENONA documents as machine-readable text files. (Text processing technology could be used to extract information from the decrypts for historical research if the VENONA documents were released in this form.)
The NSA website states: "These historical documents are GIF images of formerly classified carbon paper and reports that have been declassified. Due to the age and poor quality of some of the GIF images, a screen reader may not be able to process the images into word documents."
"individuals may request that the government provide auxiliary aids or services to ensure effective communication of the substance of the documents. For such requests, please contact the Public Affairs Office at 301-688-6524."
See also
Notes
- Note (1): Moynihan Commssion on Government Secrecy, Appendix A, The Experience of The Bomb (1997)
- Note (2): Secrecy: The American Experience; by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, New Haven: Yale University Press 1998, pg. 15.
- Note (3): John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, Appendix A, Source Venona: Americans and U.S. Residents Who Had Covert Relationships with Soviet Intelligence Agencies, pgs. 339-370. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999)
- Note (4): Haynes and Klehr, Appendix D, Americans and U.S. Residents Targeted as Potential Sources by Soviet Intelligence Agencies, pgs. 387-389.
- Note (5): VENONA Historical Monograph #4 National Security Agency Archives, Cryptological Museum
References
- NSA official VENONA site
- Moynihan Commssion Report on Government Secrecy (1997)
- Selected Venona Messages
- MI5 Releases to the National Archives
Ellen Schrecker, 1998. Many are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Boston: Little Brown)
Further reading
- Robert Louis Benson, Michael Warner, Venona: Soviet Espionage and the American Response 1939-1957 (National Security Agency and Central Intelligence Agency, Washington D.C., 1996)
- Robert Louis Benson, The Venona Story (National Security Agency, Center for Cryptologic History, 2001)
- John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (Yale University, New Haven, 1999)
- Nigel West, Venona: The Greatest Secret of the Cold War (HarperCollins, London, 1999)
Additional background material
- Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Secrecy: The American Experience (New Haven: Yale University Press 1998) ISBN 0300080794
- Richard J. Aldrich, The Hidden Hand: Britain, America, and Cold War Secret Intelligence (New York: Overlook Press, 2002) ISBN 1585672742.
- James Bamford, Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (Anchor Books) ISBN 0385499086. (See also the same author's earlier, The Puzzle Palace, also about the NSA.)
- Albright and Kunstel, Bombshell - About Soviet WWII espionage in the US, including Venona.
- Steven Budiansky, Battle of Wits - An overview in one volume of cryptography in WWII.
External links
- YUP VENONA; Decoding Soviet Espionage in America Yale University Press Web site (Despite the title, this is less about VENONA itself than about Communist Party USA espionage and support of espionage.)
- Venona Chronology 1939-1996 per Denis Naranjo