Customer Reviews

The Venona Secrets: Exposing Soviet Espionage and America's Traitors

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

The VENONA Secrets offers further analysis of the worldwide WWII KGB/GRU espionage operations described in the encrypted telegrams (called VENONA) decoded after the war by US Army and British codebreakers and made public only in 1995 by NSA. These once top secret messages led to the arrest and conviction of the Rosenbergs and Klaus Fuchs, while providing the basis for shutting down many of the Soviet wartime espionage netowrks. They also documented the charges of Soviet espionage in America made by former Communist agents Whitticker Chambers, Elizabeth Bentley and a number of others.

This book, as opposed the the several others written on the topic, supplies new material in at least three areas. First, author Roemrstein's long experience in the field has allowed him to add documented perspective on the US Communist Party relationship to the Soviet secret services. In at least one case, that of Ruth Olsen, mentioned but unidentified in the VENONA material released, he provides the missing links. He also adds new details obtained from the so-called MAST decrypts that discussed mainly administrative matters between Soviets overseas and Moscow. Second, the authors apply their experience to three cases about which other authors have been more cautious: Harry Dexter White, Robert Oppenheimer, and Harry Hopkins, while discussing new materail on Albert Einstein and his tryst with a Soviet agent.

Many liberal academics and others who continue to make the argument 'that the Rosenbergs and Hiss were innocent victims of lies told by Chambers, Bentley and the FBI', will scramble to find alternative explanations for the analysis that convinces Romerstein and Breindel that White was a cooperating communist agent before WWII started for America, and that Oppenheimer was the same during the war. It doesn't stop there. Perhaps most controversial of all conclusions is that Harry Hopkins (FDR's principal personal advisor) was a Communist before and VENONA's Agent 19 serving the Soviets during the war. Few will challenge the validity of evidence presented, though there is likely to be heartburn and skepticism with regard to the authors' analysis and conclusions. The judgment as to who is right is one for the reader.

Third, while the focus of the book is mainly on America, the anti-semetic policies of the Soviet Union generally get a chapter based on new material. There are also chapters on the KGB use of jouralists as agents, the extensive KGB penetration of the OSS (America's wartime national intellignece service), and an appendix with selected VENONA documents to give the reader an idea of the raw evidence.

For the scholar, intellignece historian, and the reader who has long sought to learn the truth and make some sense of the Communist activities in the USA during the period 1920 - 1950, The VENONA Secrets is a postive contribution that should be studied carefully.

Over the years there has been a vast array of books about Soviet espionage and its American helpers: Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs, Harry Dexter White, Nathan Gregory Silvermaster, and so many more.

No matter the evidence, some members of the US press and intelligentsia refused to come to grips with the truth and admit that some of their great liberal heroes were actually agents of Stalin.

Herbert Romerstein's book proves once and for all that they were all guilty as charged. During the Second World War the United States intercepted and decoded secret soviet radio transmissions from Moscow to their agents in America. Using these documents, and materials from Soviet archives, Romerstein narrates the incredible story of just how deeply KGB agents penetrated the American government to its highest levels.

Romerstein's encyclopedic knowledge of the subject, based on years of research and study, puts the entire tragic story into historical pespective and makes fascination reading. If you are going to buy just one book of history this year, this is it!

If you went to school before the Soviet archives & Venona papers were opened up/released (1991-1995), you must read this book. If you don't know what the Venona Project's papers say, then your knowledge on immediate pre and post WWII Soviet espionage is incomplete and, most importantly, probably not accurate. The truth is uncomfortable to some- Alger Hiss was definitely a spy, as were the Rosenbergs, and penetration into New Deal personnel was very deep. Plenty of material for the anti-FDR types, and the "McCarthy was right" folks. I personally feel very uncomfortable with the fact that about 2 our of every 3 names that pop up here as spies were Jewish. Most humiliating. The authors, no anti-semites they, make the irony of Jews spying for the virulent Jew-hater Uncle Joe very clear. Like many peoples, though perhaps more so, Jews have an unfortunate tendency towards self-delusion. The book is a bit of a bumpy read, sometimes flowing smoothly, sometimes reading like its out of Reader's Digest (a bit...lowbrow??), which accounts for the 4 stars, rather than 5. It has photos of many of the spies, but overall the photographs could be much stronger.

Herbert Rommerstein,Jr. is by far the leading expert on the American Communist Party and subversion in America.I once had the opportunity to meet Mr.Rommerstein through a mutual friend assigned to the Spanish delagation of the U.N. during the 1950's. He was quite knowledgeable then and quite didactic on subversive activities.His book the Venona Secrets will be an eye opener for liberals and Soviet apologists and I assure you they will not be able to refute his keen research. John Rowland

Traitors, of course, imply treason and that is exactly the charge Romerstein and Breindel substantiate in this book. Specifically, that the American Communist Party was a knowing tool for Soviet espionage; that the alleged anti-fascism of American Communists was a facade unsupported by their behavior during the German-Russian Non-Aggression Pact; that American Communists probably supplied Nazi Germany with military secrets during that period; that the U.S. government of the 1940s was riddled with Soviet agents including Alger Hiss and Harry Hopkins, personal friend and advisor to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and that J. Robert Oppenheimer was among the Soviet spies on the Manhatten Project.

The decoding of Soviet messages from 1940-1948, coupled with documents from the Communist governments of the former Warsaw Pact, provides the evidence for these charges.

Romerstein and Breindel write in a clear prose, and this book can be read fairly easily cover to cover in a few sittings. However, its organization seems more that of a reference book for scholars of Soviet espionage and U.S. political history rather than a straightforward narrative. The individual chapters cover the most famous spy rings operating in the U. S. during the years of the Venona message, espionage directed toward stealing nuclear secrets, anti-Trotskyite activities, and co-opting journalists for propaganda purposes. The index is comprehensive and includes listing for the many code names used by the NKVD and GRU.

There is some interesting material on the struggle to root Communists out of American unions. The question of Jewish involvement in Soviet espionage is briefly and unsatisfyingly touched on. The authors acknowledge that Jews had a heavy and disproportionate involvement in the early Soviet intelligence services. But it is also true that Jews later became a target of those same organizations and Jews were purged out of them. What was the initial attraction to begin with?

However, there is a repetition of details about individual agents from chapter to chapter and no attempt to give a chronology of their activities. I suspect the authors organized the book around the idea that their fellow scholars would simply pick individual chapters to read depending on their interests rather than completely read the book.

This is not a biographical look at spies. For instance, we get almost no idea why Elizabeth Bentley went from NKVD agent to double agent for the FBI. It was perhaps because her NKVD lover/controller Jacob Golos had died, and she was miffed at the NKVD's lack of confidence in her ability to continue to run agents. Likewise, we are presented with no explanation for Jack Childs remark "What took you so long?" to the FBI when they confronted him about decades of spying for the USSR.

While the book offers a brief explanation on the interception and decoding of the Venona messages, there are certainly better accounts of it elsewhere.

The book does have a nice appendix where we are presented with several photocopies of the decoded Venona messages so you get a feel of the raw data the authors worked with and what the NSA and its predecessor, the U.S. Army Signal Intelligence Service, produced in a job that lasted until 1980.

Romerstein and Breindel have given us what would be a first-rate spy thriller if it were fiction. It reads like a novel but it is well-documented fact. The role of the Communist Party in Soviet espionage is an important and fascinating aspect of cold war history which the authors have brought to life.

One of the issues that probably most people are not aware of is that the Venona decrypts only decoded about 1/3 of 1% of the Soviet cable traffic during the WW2 time period. From that tiny fraction of decoded or partially decoded messages, about 300 code-names for Soviet agents/spies/traitors of various types were figured out. But of the 300 only about half were eventually identified with actual names. There may have been some agents with duplicate names, but even so, the number is staggeringly large. Most people who are even aware of all this probably think the number was very small. One wonders how many more names of spies might have been unmasked if more than three out of each thousand messages had been decoded.

These spies not only stole/gave away the atomic bomb, but they also made or influenced key policy decisions that favored Soviet Communist expansion. Today, we are still living with the nightmares created by the decisions made by those spies.

I wish that, although the decryption, based on one-time pads, and itself betrayed, AND enormously expensive and difficult would have continued. There are more pressing priorities today; nevertheless newer super computers, parallel processors, and other techniques might be able to help us embarrass some of the people who betrayed the people of United States, Europe and Asia.

This book is an excellent, interesting, scary and well-research document - and I can say that because I actually read the book and I am now buying a second copy for a friend. M.S Butch is also wrong in saying McCarthy did not identitfy any communists in government. He also did not distroy any lives, including any Hollywood lives since he was not involved in the Hollywood Ten episode in any way, shape or form (everyone should know by now that you can't believe everything or anything you read in the New York Times). Here's a list of eight people Mc Carthy identified as communists - and guess what?! He was right!

T.A. Bisson
Mary Jane Keeney
Cedric Belfrage
Solomon Adler
Franz Neumann
Leonard Mins
Gustavo Duran
William Remington

This book, as with many others, does a very good job of exposing the soft underbelly that has put US security at risk for over 50 years. It's unfortunate that these disclosures rarely make it into the history books or Hollywood movies. But with attitudes such as those reflected by "Self-vindication" it shouldn't come as a surprise. These people still can't come to terms with the fact that the CPUSA was a Soviet-funded agency, with a specific goal to undermine the US government. As he writes: "This book uses evidence provided by US govenment intelligence agencies to prove that US government intelligence agencies were justified in investigating and prosecuting critics of policies made by US government intelligence agencies."First of all, there is much more proof than just the government's revelation of Venona to justify the criticism of Soviet espionage. Since the fall of the Wall and collapse of the Soviet Union, researchers and scholars have had access to Soviet archives that had never been seen before. These archives, alone, have provided proof of the damage done by those associated with the Soviet Union. And this damage goes well beyond the claim of "being a critic of US policy." There is a big difference between being a critic of US policy and actively working to undermine US policy...which is exactly what these spies did. It was treason, pure and simple. And those in the CPUSA and others working in Hollywood were more than just individuals seeking "social justice"...they were propagandist on the payroll of their Soviet masters.

This book is extremely informative and descriptive in detailing the Soviet's ability to influence our government from the 1920's through the 1950's in matters both political and military. It's amazing to discover how deeply the Soviets had penetrated our government. And the degree to which the Soviets were able to gain access to various levels within different government agencies. It is no wonder how the Soviets obtained secrets to the atom bomb and other highly sensitive military information.