Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (Annals of communism) (Hardcover)

~ (Author), Mr. Harvey Klehr (Author) "For more than forty years, nearly three thousand telegraphic cables between Soviet spies in the United States and their superiors in Moscow remained one of..." (more)
Key Phrases: unidentified asset, unidentified cover names, unrecovered code groups, New York, United States, Soviet Union (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

With this new volume, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr build upon their groundbreaking work in The Secret World of American Communism and solidify their reputations as the foremost historians of Soviet espionage in America. In Venona, they provide a detailed study of how the United States decrypted top-secret Communist cables moving between Washington and Moscow. This account, based on information unavailable to researchers for decades, reveals the full extent of the Communist spy network in the 1940s. At least 349 citizens, immigrants, and permanent residents of the United States had a covert relationship with Soviet intelligence agencies, among them Harry White (assistant secretary of the treasury in FDR's administration and the Communists' highest-ranking asset) and State Department official Alger Hiss, whose association with the Soviets had been hotly debated since the moment he was first publicly accused in 1948.

"The Soviet assault was of the type a nation directs at an enemy state," write Haynes and Klehr. They go on to suggest that Venona's code-breaking "indicated that the Cold War was not a state of affairs that had begun after World War II but a guerilla action that Stalin had secretly started years earlier." Moreover, "espionage saved the USSR great expense and industrial investment and thereby enabled the Soviets to build a successful atomic bomb years before they otherwise would have." Haynes and Klehr deliver what is at once a real-life spy thriller and a vital piece of scholarship. A grand achievement. --John J. Miller

From Library Journal

Those who were convinced that the Soviets were spying on us during the 1930s and 1940s were right. Haynes and Klehr have provided the most extensive evidence to date that the KGB had operatives at all levels of American society and government. Where Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassilievs The Haunted Wood (LJ 11/15/98) provided a peek at Soviet spying, Haynes and Klehr throw open the door, revealing a level of espionage in this country that only the most paranoid had dreamed of. Building on the research for their earlier books, The Secret World of American Communism (LJ 6/1/95) and The Soviet World of American Communism (Yale Univ., 1998), Haynes and Klehr describe the astonishing dimensions of spying reflected in the cable traffic between the United States and Moscow. Venona is the name of the sophisticated National Security Agency project that in 1946 finally broke the Soviet code. This is better than anything John le Carr could produce, because in this case, truth is really stranger than fiction. Highly recommended.Edward Goedeken, Iowa State Univ. Lib., Ames
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 512 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press (April 10, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300077718
• ISBN-13: 978-0300077711
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.5 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #867,783 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

99 of 112 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Requires us to rethink much of the 20th century, May 3, 2001

By	Dean Esmay (Westland, MI United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (Yale Nota Bene) (Paperback)

This book, jammed with information that's only come to light in recent years, tells a number of fascinating stories.

For starters, there's the story of an intellectual adventure. Venona was a small group of government employees who, with fearsome gobs of skull-sweat and toil, decrypted thousands of secret communications sent between Soviet embassies and Moscow during and immediately after World War II. The messages used an encryption scheme so complex that it would be a challenge to crack even with today's technologies. But teams of Americans and Brits--mostly female, as it happens, although there were plenty of brilliant men--were able to decode them with little more than pencil, paper, and brainpower.

Venona is also a story of terrible treachery. Independently corroborated by data from the Soviet and Comintern archives, the Venona decryptions confirm things that were once controversial. For example: the American Communist Party was a puppet of Moscow that eagerly engaged in criminal activities. Julius Rosenberg and Algier Hiss were guilty. Literally hundreds of Communist agents deeply infiltrated American government at the highest levels. And the Soviets also had a substantial subversive presence within the American labor movement and in many elite segments of American society.

Venona is also a story of Western bumbling. For years, naive American officials ignored or dismissed suggestions that there was any Communist threat. Several times this resulted in tragic losses now painfully visible in retrospect.

Perhaps most damning of all, Venona is a story of how obsession with secrecy can be costly. The Soviets became aware of Venona shortly after the war ended. They completely overhauled their systems, and the Venona project decrypted no valuable communications after the mid-to-late 1940s. This more than anything is what makes Venona fodder for discussion and debate.

From a conservative perspective we can understand why Venona was kept secret: Even after Venona's cover was blown, the Soviets could not know everything the US had managed to decrypt. For years after the Soviets found out about Venona, US counterintelligence was still able to make valuable use of Venona information.

But even when we knew the Soviets had discovered Venona, we refused to reveal so much as a single scrap of their decryptions to the public--even when such revelations would have helped convict traitors or eased public fears. Throughout several Democratic and Republican administrations, everything about Venona and what it had uncovered remained surrounded by a dense cloud of secrecy.

While the Venona secrets would seem to corroborate the worst and most paranoid fears of 1950s McCarthyism, the truth is arguably the reverse: because of information Venona uncovered, the US and most other Western governments did a thorough housecleaning in the years immediately after World War II. During those same years most of the leaders of the American labor movement also performed some housecleaning, and Communism lost its chic appeal in much of elite society. This was all BEFORE Joe McCarthy went off the deep end. Had at least some of the Venona messages been revealed to the public after we knew the Soviets had caught on, congressional anti-Communist investigations, had they happened at all, might well have been conducted in a more honest and responsible manner. In any case, years of pointless debate between conservative and left-wing intellectuals would have been avoided. And countless stereotypical Hollywood portrayals of anti-communists as paranoid and irrational probably wouldn't have happened.

Because ultimately, Venona confirms that people were right to suspect and fear the Communists. But it also demonstrates that by the 1950s, Soviet infiltration had become a manageable problem rather than a screaming crisis.

That excessive care with secrets can be just as destructive as carelessness with secrets has been argued rather passionately by former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was in large part responsible for the release of the Venona information, and who wrote this book's introduction. After reading it, it's hard not to see his point.

Harvey Klehr (Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Politics and History at Emory University) and John Earl Haynes (20th Century Historian for the Library of Congress) do a fine job of not only relaying the Venona information, but of showing how it is independently corroborated by information now available in the archives of the former Soviet Union and the Comintern. But if their workmanlike prose is easy enough to read, the sheer number of players, events, and their interactions that are covered are sufficiently dizzying that a "Dramatis Personae" section at the start of every chapter might have been helpful!

It's not light reading. On the whole, however, this book is a must-have reference to anyone interested in the history of the 20th Century.

45 of 49 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars professional, scholarly history, September 2, 2004

By	it (Sunnyvale, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (Yale Nota Bene) (Paperback)

This is a scholarly history without the flash, trash, hype, and jive of journalism. The authors had access to the decrypt of Soviet messages from the 1941-1945 period as well as the Soviet espionage archives and the FBI archives. They explain in detail how they obtained their information and then described the activities of Soviet agents. At the end is a list of about 450 people who were Soviet agents. For those of you who are not interested in the historic details, the bottom line is that everyone who was publicly accused of being a Soviet agent was one. Senator McCarthy was right and the professors and journalists were wrong.

I also recommend The Venona Secrets : Exposing America's Cold War Traitors by Herb Romerstein if you want more detailed information from an experienced espionage agent of the time. This other book, available here on Amazon, will tell you many more interesting things.

36 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Facts on Soviet spying, September 5, 2000

By	Lars Lundeberg (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews

BACKGROUND

Venona was the cover name of a top secret US government project that from the 1940's to the 1980's intercepted and decoded Soviet government messages all over the world. Venona gave numerous facts about Soviet espionage from some 3000 messages. Venona was officially revealed in 1995 The Soviets got hints about Venona, but thought their codes were safe.

TIDBITS

Learning details about spies, the US government often did not prosecute, since it would alert the Soviets that their codes were being broken. Instead the FBI often maneuvered to keep spies away from sensitive positions by stopping promotions or having people fired. Often when a spy was brought to trial, the government still held back evidence. Therefore, many spies were never convicted, or got off easy. This gave ammunition to leftist public opinion who claimed "McCarthyism". The book details hundreds of spies/cases such as Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs, the Manhattan Project, ... just to name a few.

OUTLINING

The authors tells how the book came about. The basics of Venona. What the codes looked like. In detail how they were constituted and broken. Then its off to numerous "cases". Typically a person or "ring" is reported on a couple of pages. Some cases cover whole chapters.

FACTS / OPINIONS

Filled with facts of the Soviet operations. Such as birth names, KGB/GRU internal cover names and cover names used in the US. The book gives dates, cities, US Business', government offices and political organizations. We see the orders the KGB gave, who recommended who to sensitive posts, how much money changed hands... The authors stays with the facts and gives almost no opinions, but some background. The book is not about telling stories, so often we get facts without "punch-lines". Venona does not explain everything, and open ended cases are presented as well. Then the book sometimes speculates in a couple of possible scenarios referring to other facts. Fact and speculation are always easy to separate.

READ

The text is sober and easy to read. The authors always gives clear and open references. We learn only a little about the personal lives and feelings of the spies. Except for their basic motivation. Which are the usual black-mail, ideology, greed, personal vendetta,...

COMMENTS

The sheer number of spies is staggering. They were everywhere. Including the top of the US government. It makes you wonder how much of what the Western World did, actually was controlled from Moscow. The book makes it easy to understand how all the weapons of mass destruction we develop comes back to haunt us.