VENONA In February of 1943, the United States Army’s Signal Intelligence Service (SIS) launched a secret program with efforts to gather and decrypt, and later exploit, Soviet diplomatic communications. It took nearly two years before American cryptologists were able to break the KGB encryption. The information that was gained – in more than 2,000 messages – provided “insight into Soviet intentions and treasonous activities of government employees” (“VENONA”).
The Venona files are most famous for exposing Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, giving indisputable evidence of their association with the American Communist Party and involvement with the Soviet spy ring (“VENONA”). But what exactly made Venona possible? Who was involved? What did the program find? Arlington Hall’s Venona breakthrough in 1943-1946 was purely an analytic accomplishment, which was achieved without the benefit of either Soviet codebooks or plain-text copies of the original messages (Phillips).
The messages were recovered over a period of years and were decoded from a “codebook” that crypto-linguist Meredith Gardner, reconstructed by the use of classic code breaking techniques. It should be known that the security of the encoding and decoding system used by the Soviet’s heavily depended on the randomness/unpredictability of the “key” and how unique the one-time pad sets held by the sender and the receiver were. Different Soviet organizations used their own codes, changing them once every few years (Phillips).
Benson writes, “The successful decryption of the Venona messages was a triumph of analysis by a small group of intelligent and dedicated women and men working long hours in their cramped offices at Arlington Hall. ” Cryptologists had discovered that certain ciphers were being used for certain missions. Over a span of three years, Arlington Hall made substantial progress on breaking various Soviet codes by hand. Meredith Gardner, Cecil Phillips, and Richard Hallock were just a few of the many that labored to break the complex code system.
Meredith Gardner, a cryptologist, contributed greatly in breaking the underlying Soviet code and led the efforts to reconstruct the codebooks. He was able to recover the portions of the codebook that were used for spelling English names and phrases in a message by identifying the “spell” and “end spell” indicators. The first message broken was in February, 1946. The value of his work showed in July 1946 when he was able to decode a message that contained encryption procedures for Soviet spies occupying Mexico (“Meredith Gardner 2004 Inductee”).
In late April or early May of 1947, Benson writes, “Gardner was able to read two KGB messages that were sent in December 1944 that showed that someone inside the War Department General Staff was providing highly classified information to the Soviets. ” Pearson’s article in the Washington Post acknowledges Cecil Phillips and how he was an unsung hero of the Cold War conflicts, however, credited him with discovering a numerical quirk in the Soviet’s code. His work eventually led to the exposure and exploitation of a seemingly vast army of Soviet spies in the United States as well as espionage against the United States atomic bomb program.
A breakthrough came in the autumn of 1943 when Lt. Richard Hallock, one of the cryptologists that contributed to the successes of Venona. He analyzed Trade messages and demonstrated that the Soviets were making extensive use of duplicate key pages that were assembled in the separate onetime pad pages. The works of Hallock and the rest of the team had opened the first ‘crack in the walls of the Soviet code’ (Haynes and Klehr).
“The flaw in the Soviet messages resulted from the manufacturers’ duplication of one-time pad pages… F]or a few months in early 1942, a time of great strain on the Soviet regime, the KGB’s cryptographic center in the Soviet Union for some unknown reason printed duplicate copies of the “key” on more than 35,000 pages of additive and then assembled and bound these in one-time pads” (Phillips). By the time the Soviets discovered and saw the consequences of the flaw, most of the duplicate one-time pad pages had already been used. The set of potentially exploitable messages were thus, consequently, bound by the production of the duplicate pages and the ability to spot such uses.
However, finding those duplicates only made the messages “potentially readable: indeed, some messages and passages remained unexploitable even after 37 years of effort,” Phillips writes. The Venona files are the most famous for exposing Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in their involvement with the American Communist Party and the Soviet spy ring (“VENONA”). In the summer of 1949, the Federal Bureau of Investigation gained knowledge that the secret of the construction of the atom bomb had been stolen and had been turned over to the Soviet Union.
Further investigation revealed that Julius Rosenberg had begun associating with Ethel Greenglass (later Ethel Rosenberg) around 1932. Both became devoted communists between 1932 and 1935, after which they strongly believed that “nothing was more important than the communist cause. ” (“The Atom Spy Case”). David Greenglass, Ethel’s brother, first opposed his sister’s efforts to convert him to communism, but ended up joining the Young Communist League at the age of 14. Although he continued his belief in communism, he never ended joined the Communist Party.
He claimed to have been ‘disillusioned with communism’. He realized that communism was being used more as a tool by the Soviets for the purpose of world conquest rather than a means of reaching a panacea. (“The Atom Spy Case”). In the summer of 1946, linguists started to read portions of the messages that had been decrypted. Over the course of a few months, analysts had uncovered references to the Manhattan Project amongst other espionage activities in the decrypted messages. The United States Army’s SIS contacted the
Federal Bureau of Investigation after the decrypted messages showed alarming content. Eventually, over 2,000 messages had been decrypted, at least in part, and exposed details of KGB tradecraft, espionage against the United States Atomic Program, the mass number of people claimed to be intelligence assets, and activities of the American Communist Party (“Cold War: VENONA Exhibit”). Venona, the secret program launched with hopes of gathering and decrypting Soviet communications, was highly successful.
With the help of a small group of dedicated men and women, the United States government gained insight into Soviet intentions and treasonous activities of some government employees, as well as espionage, in over 2,000 messages. Meredith Gardner, Cecil Phillips, and Richard Hollack were just a few of those who labored – and made significant contributions – to break the Soviet code system. The Venona files led to the conviction of many identified intelligence assets working for the Soviet Union under the American Communist Party (such as the Rosenbergs) against the United States.
