National Observer Home > No. 42 - Spring 1999 > Book Review

Venona: the Greatest Secret of the Cold War

 

by Nigel West

London, HarperCollins, 1999, pp. 384

Venona was a word chosen at random in 1961 to denote an operation that possibly constituted the greatest secret of the entire period of the Cold War, the subject of this new and extremely interesting book by Nigel West. The U.S. National Security Agency and its counterpart in Cheltenham, England, (G.C.H.Q.), spent 37 years analysing encrypted messages sent between Moscow, London, New York and a number of other Western capitals; the most illuminating "traffic" comes from the U.S.A., Canada, Britain and Australia. 

Western counter-intelligence agencies had to work very hard to achieve that amazing victory. They were helped by various circumstances, the account of which reads like an unputdownable novel. In June 1941 Finnish troops seized the Soviet consulate in the far northern town of Petsamo and discovered some codebooks that the N.K.V.D. had not had time to destroy. At the end of the second world war, the Finns managed to "crack" the technology of the Soviet communications system and set up a station to intercept and monitor Soviet diplomatic traffic. After the war ended, the authorities feared that Soviet troops might occupy Finland and moved the abundant material they had monitored to Sweden, an operation codenamed Stella Polaris. Before long and by a variety of means some of this material was accessed by American intelligence.

After the war there were two sensational defections by Soviet cipher clerks, Igor Guzenko (G.R.U., military intelligence) in Canada and Vladimir Petrov (N.K.V.D.) in Australia. Their assistance was important, but not decisive. The real turning point was when American analysts realised that Soviet cryptographers had made one fatal blunder during the war. The secret of the reliability of Soviet codes was the use of "one-time pads", which made every single message unique and "uncrackable". The one-time pads were produced in Moscow in conditions of total secrecy and then distributed to designated cipher clerks in special pouches which were kept under continual armed guard. In the winter of 1941-42, when the Germans were just outside Moscow, 70,000 pages of material to be used for making up the codes were duplicated and then inserted into one-time pads for distribution to the cipher clerks. This "astonishing act of negligence," writes West, "ultimately allowed British and American cryptographers to achieve what theoretically should have been impossible".

Work on Venona continued until 1980. During this period — 37 years — Western cryptographers analysed two million code keys and 750,000 messages and translated into English several hundred secret reports from Soviet agents (N.K.V.D. and G.R.U.) dating from 1940 to 1948. These intercepts remained absolutely secret throughout the Cold War decades, gave the American and British security organisations a "glimpse of the unvarnished truth", as West puts it, and provided them with incontrovertible evidence of the links between many important people in the U.S.A., Britain, Australia and other countries and the Soviet espionage network. Obviously, nothing of this could be revealed until the collapse of the communist system in Europe, after which strong pressure was put on the U.S. and U.K. authorities to reveal at least something about Venona. 

In 1994 the National Security Agency co-operated with the C.I.A. and published a selection of the Venona documents. West has carefully analysed them and spotted a number of gaps (fortunately, not very many), which he attributes to the desire of the Americans to protect some people who are (or were) still alive and had not been identified with absolute certainty as Soviet agents, and to the desire of the British to avoid the political embarrassment which the revelation of some "sensitive" names would cause. "The only other deliberate excision . . . is the consistent removal throughout of all references to the first date of circulation", caused, presumably, by the need to protect some remaining secrets of the technology used by British cryptographers. 

Several books about Venona have already appeared in the United States, and so West concentrates on the activities of Soviet intelligence in Britain. Because of Stalin's purges in the 1930s the presence of the N.K.V.D. in London was reduced to a minimum. In the 1940s most espionage activities here were carried out by Soviet military intelligence (the G.R.U.), which ran a multitude of agents and "useful contacts", about some of whom the author reveals fascinating details. One of the key agents was Oliver C. Green, a veteran C.P.G.B. member who had been wounded in the Spanish civil war and who collected and passed on intelligence from a wide variety of sources.

Another leader of a group of informants was Ursula Kuczynsky, of whom, admittedly, something was known earlier. In 1943 she played a key role in helping Klaus Fuchs to re-establish contact with the Soviets. She supplied political tittle-tattle from her father, who was acquainted with several Labour politicians, and was on good terms with the British ambassador to Moscow, Sir Stafford Cripps. She also acquired military documents and recruited two Britons, an R.A.F. officer and a radio operator. Fuchs was arrested in 1950; on the day before his trial began, she left for East Berlin. 

A third group of agents was headed by a pianist called Ernest D. Weiss, who supervised two C.P.G.B. members, an Air Ministry official, Major Wilfred Vernon, and an Irishman, Frederick Meredith, among others. One of these others was Andre Labarthe, who makes frequent appearances in the Venona "traffic" under the codename Jerome, and who held the post of director-general of French Armament and Scientific Research at de Gaulle's H.Q. 

In some cases it was easy to identify the people behind the codenames. "Writer", for instance, was mentioned on 15 August 1940, as having been serving aboard the Malines when it steamed "into Rotterdam with the task of preparing for the evacuation of the consulate". "Theraputist" had access to "documentary materials on the training of fighter pilots". Other revelations are even more surprising. One important agent of the G.R.U. was the Honourable Ivor Montagu (codenamed "Nobility"), also a C.P.G.B. member. In 1940, during the Hitler-Stalin Pact period, he was able to supply a great deal of military data as his access to army camps was facilitated by his status as a newspaper correspondent. West stresses that this information was "of value to the Soviets, and presumably their German allies". Yet another G.R.U. contact in London, "Baron", turns out to be a high ranking officer in Czechoslovak intelligence, Karel Sedlacek. The mystery of who went under the codename "Intelligensia" has now been solved, thanks to West's research. This was Professor J. B. S. Haldane, a supporter and, from 1942, member of the C.P.G.B. However, the British authorities have deleted from the declassified Venona materials the texts identifying him as a supplier of a great deal of scientific intelligence to the G.R.U. 

The author deliberately writes little about the Venona material on N.K.V.D. — as distinct from G.R.U. — contacts because this has been covered in other books, but he reminds the reader that the treachery of Donald Maclean and Kim Philby is clearly documented in the Venona transcripts. Not everyone mentioned there has yet been identified. For example, some mysterious agents were operating in London under the codenames "Dan", "Leaf", "Jack" and "Rosa". Peter Wright hazarded a guess that the last two were really Victor and Tess Rothschild, but it has not been possible to prove this. M.I.5 and G.C.H.Q. feared that these four people continued to work for Moscow long after 1948. 

West could not find enough material about Britain to fill his book and so he writes also about the U.S.A., where the scale of Soviet espionage was breathtaking and, as in the U.K., relied heavily on members and sympathisers of the local communist party. Venona confirms beyond all doubt that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White were secret agents of the Soviet special services. In addition to them, West names dozens of others, including little known ones, linking them with their codenames. We read in detail about the personnel who served in the N.K.V.D. and G.R.U. "residences" in Washington and New York, as well as about their network of agents who penetrated the entourage of President Roosevelt and his wife Eleanor, the Congress, the State Department and the laboratories working on nuclear weapons. Perhaps only one proviso needs to be made here. The author states that, according to Venona, in May 1943 "Agent 19" took part in a meeting between Roosevelt and Churchill, and he identifies this mystery man as Eduard Benes, the President of Czechoslovakia. Several American experts believe that "Agent 19" was in fact the U.S. President's aide, Harry Hopkins. 

Summing up the results of Operation Venona, West expresses his delight that so many members of the American intelligence community kept such super secrets to themselves for such a long time:

"Those privy to Venona's secrets maintained their oaths of loyalty and discretion, even though the material they handled included items with potentially profound political implications. If Richard Nixon had known that his early postwar allegations of widespread Communist penetration could be confirmed by just a handful of Venona texts, his electoral chances and career would have been greatly improved before he became President."

Two linked logical questions for political scientists, historians and psychologists continually bother one while reading this useful book. Why were totalitarian inclinations so very characteristic of the Old Left, and why did so many of its members participate so enthusiastically in the operations of the Soviet espionage machine?

Oleg Gordievsky

---

National Observer No. 42 - Spring 1999