Excerpts from The Venona Program
By the time Lamphere began using the translated messages, the public
controversy over “loyalty” and “red-baiting” had risen dramatically
amid growing concern over US-Soviet tensions. New allegations that prominent American citizens had spied for the Soviets
burst upon the public in July 1948, when Bentley spoke before the House
Committee on Un-American Activities. Her testimony recounted, among
other things, Lauchlin Currie’s alleged distress over US efforts to read wartime Soviet telegrams
(this seems to have been the first public clue to the existence of
ASA’s effort). A few days later Whittaker Chambers charged that
Roosevelt administration figures Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White were secret Communists.
Heated denials by the accused and their supporters added to the drama
and controversy as elections loomed that autumn. Republican Congressmen
and activists hailed the testimony as the long-suppressed proof of
Democratic inattention toward Communist subversion. Truman bitterly resented such charges and insisted that the Hiss affair in particular was a GOP “red herring.”
Truman’s repeated denunciations of the charges against Hiss,
White, and others–all of whom appear under covernames in decrypted
messages translated before he left office in January 1953–suggest that Truman either was never briefed on the Venona program or did not grasp its significance. Although it seems odd that Truman might not have been told, no definitive evidence has emerged to show he was. In any event, Truman always insisted that Republicans had trumped up the loyalty issue and that wartime espionage had been insignificant and well contained by American authorities.
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In December 1948 the FBI identified a Soviet agent
covernamed SIMA as Judith Coplon, a young Justice Department analyst
recruited by the Soviets in 1944. Coplon would become the first person arrested on the basis of a Venona lead. FBI agents detained her in March 1949 along with a KGB official under UN cover;
her purse contained ostensibly sensitive documents (which the Bureau
had routed through her office as bait). Director Hoover or (less
likely) someone higher in the Truman administration forbade FBI
officials testifying at her trial from introducing the translated
messages as evidence. This protection of the cryptanalytic breakthrough
forced prosecutors and government witnesses into elaborate
cirumlocutions; Special Agent Lamphere, for example, testified that
suspicion had fallen on Coplon because of information from a reliable
“confidential informant” that was not a wiretap. Although both of
Coplon’s convictions would be overturned on appeal, subsequent
prosecutions developed in the same manner, with the too-sensitive
codebreaking secrets obscured behind mounds of corroborating evidence.
The Coplon case set the pattern for an intense series of investigations and prosecutions
that followed over the next two years. Meredith Gardner and his
colleagues (working from May 1949 under the auspices of AFSA, the new
Armed Forces Security Agency) supplied covernames and translations to
the FBI; Lamphere and other Special Agents tracked down the leads:
* February 1949. ASA observed that messages containing “Material G”
were quoting British Foreign Office telegrams sent to the British
Embassy in Washington during the war. Not until March 1951, however,
did American and British cryptanalysts conclude that “G,” “GOMMER,” and
“GOMER” (the Russian transliteration of HOMER) had to be the same agent who had provided the cables to the KGB. By the beginning of May 1951, the list of possible suspects had narrowed to one name: Donald Maclean of the Foreign Office. Maclean, with compatriot Guy Burgess, soon fled to the Soviet Union.
* September 1949. The FBI determined that covernames REST and CHARLES, both denoting a scientist in the wartime Manhattan Project, referred to physicist Klaus Fuchs, author of a paper quoted in one message. British authorities interrogated Fuchs in late 1949. His information in turn led the FBI to courier Harry Gold, arrested in Philadelphia on 22 May.(54)
* February 1950. Lamphere suspected that a Soviet agent covernamed CALIBRE had to be an enlisted man posted at the Manhattan Project facility at Los Alamos during the war. Subsequent AFSA analysis, and additional information from Harry Gold, led to David Greenglass, who confessed to the FBI on 15 June 1950 and also implicated his brother-in-law, Julius Rosenberg.
* Spring 1950. Covername NICK had emerged in 1949 as one Amadeo Sabatini, who had fought in Spain together with KGB asset Morris Cohen. Sabatini apparently kept quiet about Cohen but did point the FBI toward a Jones Orin York (almost simultaneously identified as Venona covername NEEDLE).
When questioned in April 1950, York alleged that a former case officer
of his was an AFSA employee named William Weisband. AFSA suspended
Weisband in May.
* Late June 1950. The FBI discovered that information in the messages about an agent who collected technological and scientific secrets, codenamed LIBERAL and ANTENNA, matched the known facts about New York engineer Julius Rosenberg. Two messages also implicated his wife, Ethel. Rosenberg
had been questioned on the basis of David Greenglass’ information on 16
June and tailed ever since, but he was not arrested until a month later.
* Sometime in 1949-50. Gardner translated a 1944 message that described the recruitment of Harvard physics student Theodore Alvin Hall. Soon afterward, the Bureau determined that the covername YOUNGSTER [MLAD], found in other messages, matched Hall.
Special Agents questioned Hall in 1951, but he was never prosecuted
(probably because a case could not have been made without revealing
AFSA’s program).
Translated messages also corroborated various charges made by Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers. By June 1950 the Bureau determined that the covername ALES, mentioned in one KGB message, referred to former State Department aide Alger Hiss, then serving a sentence for perjury. Around the same time, Lamphere told Gardner that the covername JURIST meant Harry Dexter White, a former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury,
who had died suddenly a few days after denying Whittaker Chambers’
August 1948 charge before the House Committee on Un-American
Activities. The translations also clarified another sensational spy case a few years later when the FBI identified the covername MARQUIS as Joseph Milton Bernstein, a GRU agent linked to the Institute of Pacific Relations and Amerasia magazine.
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Who Was William Weisband?
In 1950 one Jones Orin York (covername NEEDLE) told the FBI that he had passed secrets to the KGB since the mid-1930s. A worker in the aircraft industry on the west coast, York said that his KGB handler during 1941-42 had been one Bill Weisband, who had helped him buy a camera for photographing documents.(a)
York’s allegation was disturbing news, implying that the KGB had a mole in the sensitive Armed Forces Security Agency (AFSA).
Born in Egypt in 1908 of Russian parents, Weisband emigrated to America
in the 1920s and became a US citizen in 1938. He joined the US Army
Signals Security Agency in 1942 and performed signals intelligence and
communications security duties in North Africa and Italy, where he made
some important friends before returning to Arlington Hall and joining
its “Russian Section.” Although not a cryptanalyst, as a “linguist
adviser” (he spoke fluent Russian) the gregarious and popular Weisband
had access to all areas of Arlington Hall’s Soviet work. Meredith
Gardner recalled that Weisband had watched him extract the list of
Western atomic scientists from the December 1944 KGB message mentioned
earlier.
Weisband always denied involvement in espionage, and the US
Government never prosecuted him for it. While suspended from AFSA on
suspicion of disloyalty, he skipped a federal grand jury hearing on
Communist Party activity. As a result, in November 1950 Weisband was
convicted of contempt and sentenced to a year in prison. He died
suddenly of natural causes in 1967.
The Venona messages do not hold a definite reference to William Weisband. Nevertheless, three messages mention a “ZVENO” (the Russian word for “link”).
The earliest and clearest reference suggests procedures for the KGB’s
London residency to use in contacting ZVENO, who was awaiting a
transfer to England. ZVENO, according to one message, had spent the last four weeks in an Italian- language course in Virginia and would leave for Britain by mid-July.(b) NSA records show that Weisband spent that June honing his skills in a language (probably Italian) at Arlington Hall, shipped out on 17 July, and arrived in London by 29 July.
(a) Information that York provided in a later FBI interview can be
seen in the Washington Field Office’s memorandum “William Wolf
Weisband,” 27 November 1953, Document 34.
(b) New York 981 to Moscow, 26 June 1943; this was not fully translated until 1979.
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The extreme secrecy of the Venona information tended to ensure that any precautions would be viewed skeptically by some of the very intelligence personnel they were designed to protect. Only a handful of American intelligence officers had access to the Venona secret,
and those who did not have such access had no way, in many cases, to
judge the reliability of the evidence gathered against alleged Soviet
agents in the 1940s. As a result, even seasoned intelligence
professionals viewed the spy cases and internal security debates of the
1940s and early 1950s as McCarthyite hysteria. This attitude probably
influenced some in the Intelligence Community as a whole to
underestimate the Soviet espionage threat.
Elizabeth Bentley died in Connecticut in December 1963, long before the end of the Cold War she had helped to start. She never knew about the Venona secret, or about the way in which her testimony (among that of others) assisted the program. Before
she died, she had been denounced as a traitor, a liar, and a criminal
by everyone from her old comrades to a former President of the United
States. The controversy over her testimony was only a skirmish
in the national debate over the true extent of Soviet espionage, and
over the federal government’s attempts to balance competing
requirements of civil liberties and internal security. The declassification of Venona augments and clarifies the evidence in the public domain, and consequently should move the debate from the politics and personalities of those who testified in public to the
capabilities and actions of political leaders and intelligence
officers–both American and Soviet–who worked in many cases behind the
scenes.
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