The Venona Project

[SuperScout]

[The following was excerpted from the archives of the National Security Agency's report on the Venona Project. Kindly read the message, but don't shoot the messenger!]

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.


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The VENONA Project
On 1 February 1943, the U.S. Army's Signal Intelligence Service, a forerunner of the National Security Agency, began a small, very secret program, later codenamed VENONA. The object of the VENONA program was to examine and possibly exploit, encrypted Soviet diplomatic communications. These messages had been accumulated by the Signal Intelligence Service (later renamed the U.S. Army Signal Security Agency and commonly called "Arlington Hall" after the Virginia location of its headquarters) since 1939 but had not been studied previously. Miss Gene Grabeel, a young Signal Intelligence Service employee, who had been a school teacher only weeks earlier, started the project.

The VENONA Breakthroughs
From the very beginning in February 1943, the analysis of the traffic proved slow and difficult. Then in October 1943, Lieutenant Richard. Hallock, a Signal Corps reserve officer who had been a peacetime archaeologist at the University of Chicago, discovered weaknesses in the cryptographic system of the Soviet trade traffic. This discovery provided a tool for further analytic progress on the other four cryptographic systems.

Three closely spaced counterintelligence events occurred in 1945 that VENONA decrypts were able to amplify. First, the FBI carefully questioned Whittaker Chambers, whose earlier efforts to disclose details about Soviet espionage in the U.S. in the 1930s had gone unheeded. Second, Igor Gouzenko, a GRU code clerk, defected in Ottawa. Third, in late 1945 Elizabeth Bentley, a veteran KGB courier and auxiliary agent handler, went to the FBI and named names. While Gouzenko's revelations were important to Allied counterintelligence efforts, they had no bearing on the VENONA breakthroughs. Strong cryptographic systems like those in the VENONA family of systems do not fall easily. The VENONA decrypts were, however, to show the accuracy of Chambers' and Bentley's disclosures.

In the summer of 1946, Meredith Gardner, an Arlington Hall analyst, began to read portions of KGB messages that had been sent between the KGB Residency in New York and Moscow Center. On 31 July 1946, he extracted a phrase from a KGB New York message that had been sent to Moscow on 10 August 1944. This message, on later analysis, proved to be a discussion of clandestine KGB activity in Latin America. On 13 December Gardner was able to read a KGB message that discussed the U.S. presidential election campaign of 1944. A week later, on 20 December 1946, he broke into another KGB message that had been sent to Moscow Center two years earlier which contained a list of names of the leading scientists working on the Manhattan Project -the atomic bomb!

In late April or early May 1947, Gardner was able to read two KGB messages sent in December 1944 that showed that someone inside the War Department General Staff was providing highly classified information to the Soviets. These two messages are currently undergoing declassification review.

U.S. Army intelligence, G-2, became alarmed at the information that was coming out of Arlington Hall. An Arlington Hall report on 22 July 1947 showed that the Soviet message traffic contained dozens, probably hundreds, of covernames, many of KGB agents, including ANTENNA and LIBERAL (later identified as Julius Rosenberg). One message mentioned that LIBERAL's wife was named "Ethel."

[HARDCORE]

"WOW!" Informative & historically significant piece Scout!!

THANKS & VERITAS