VENONA project

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The VENONA project was a joint project of the US secret services and the British international secret service MI6 to decipher secret messages from official Soviet agencies in the USA, which were recorded between 1938 and 1945. Within this long-term project, the findings from other secret service projects such as the Shamrock Project were processed in a centralized manner.

background

In the period from 1939 to 1945, various US intelligence services and the FBI heard and stored thousands of diplomatic telegrams, most of which came from radio communications between the Soviet consulates and the embassy in Washington with Moscow . Other sources also cite an FBI break-in as the source of news. These messages were using a code book and an additional one-time pad - encryption (English "one-time pad" or here "session key.") Encoded and encrypted. Until 1945, however, the western secret services were not in a position to evaluate them, as the corresponding codes and encryption keys remained unknown. This changed with the success of the FBI in connection with the evaluation of the Venona papers . The United States Army Security Agency (ASA), founded in 1945, took over these documents and, together with the FBI, formed the secret VENONA project from them, in which cryptologists , linguists and analysts jointly evaluated the information available and still flowing in.

Development from 1942 to 1946

As early as February 1, 1942, the employee of the Signals Intelligence Service (SIS) Gene Grabeel at the headquarters of SIS Arlington Hall , a former girls' school in Arlington County , began a secret project with the aim of analyzing and deciphering Soviet messages. In the first few months, the data were initially sorted according to the diplomatic missions, the encryption system and the recipient. It was found that five different encryption methods were used. As it turned out later, one of the methods was used primarily for commercial information, the other four were used by Soviet Foreign Ministry agencies. Further analyzes made it possible to assign the codes to the trade representatives, the Soviet diplomats, the KGB and its predecessor organizations, the army and naval departments of the GRU .

In October 1943 the archaeologist and lieutenant of the SIS, Richard Hallock , discovered weaknesses in the cryptographic system of the messages of the trade representatives. These weaknesses provided valuable information for analyzing the other four encryptions. In the course of 1944, the cryptanalyst Cecil Phillips made a discovery that would subsequently significantly advance the decryption of KGB data. However, since the messages were double-encrypted and of great difficulty, it was still about two years before the first KGB messages could be decrypted.

Three important results of the American counterintelligence led to important information that could be used for comparison with the radio messages. First, the FBI carried out another careful questioning of Whittaker Chambers , whose earlier information about Soviet espionage in the United States had largely gone unnoticed in the 1930s. Then the Soviet coder Igor Gouzenko defected in Ottawa . Finally, in late 1945, Elizabeth Bentley defected and in 1945 provided the FBI with an extensive list of people who had worked for the Soviets. Although Gouzenko's information had brought some successes to counter espionage, which ten other Soviet spies in Canada and the USA were able to expose, he had little influence on the decryption efforts of the VENONA project due to the complex encryption procedures. The information provided by Chambers and Bentley should enable a good comparison of the data found in the decryption.

In the summer of 1946, Meredith Gardner first succeeded in reading messages from the KGB. On July 31, 1946, he extracted part of a KGB message from New York dated August 10, 1944, which contained a discussion of secret KGB actions in Latin America . On December 13, 1946, he was able to decipher a message about the American presidential election campaigns. A week later, he managed to decipher a message that had been sent to Moscow two years earlier and contained a list of the leading scientists of the Manhattan Project .

Over the next 40 years or so, around 2200 messages were decrypted and translated.

In those early years, the Arlington Hall cryptanalysts had no Soviet code book available to assist them. It was only later, after further breakthroughs in the decryption of the data had been achieved by 1953/54, that some previously found code books could be associated with these encryption methods. The first of these code books came from the KGB, had been found in 1945 and partly burned. Another code book was found at the end of the Second World War in a German radio station in a castle in Saxony. The Germans captured this code book on June 22, 1941 at the Soviet consulate in Petsamo in Finland. Lieutenant Oliver Kirby found other similar material on a mission in Schleswig.

From around 1946 the radio messages collected were referred to as the Venona papers and the project as the VENONA project.

1946 to 1951

From 1946 to 1948 it was possible to decipher numerous messages and names from the various records and to translate them into English. However, the judiciary was unable to use these records to bring the identified individuals to justice, as both the FBI and the government found the information too important to be used in a public trial. In the period from 1948 to 1951, several messages were deciphered that contained clues to the activities of Klaus Fuchs , Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and David Greenglass as agents in the context of espionage against the Manhattan Project . However, it was very difficult to prove that the aliases could only be assigned to the corresponding real names with great effort, also because these changed within messages. For example, the alias for Julius Rosenberg was first verified as "Antenna", which later had to be changed to "Liberal". Even then, some information spoke in favor of Theodore Alvin Hall's work as an agent , but this was only proven beyond doubt in 1995. Problems of this kind made it possible for Fuchs to be considered the most important nuclear spy in the Soviet Union for a long time, although the latest findings show that Hall is much more important. Hall's code name was "MLAD", which means something like "Youngster" in Russian. This alias indicated that he was 19 years old when he started working as an agent.

Alger Hiss , too , was finally exposed in 1995 on the basis of the Venona papers as an agent of the Soviet Union who worked under the code name "Advokat" in the 1930s.

1952 to graduation in 1980

As early as the first years of the Cold War , the results of the VENONA project became one of the most important sources for counter-espionage in the USA. Numerous moles were discovered in the USA and, ultimately, many Soviet spies of the 1950s. The VENONA project was treated as an absolute secret for a long time, so that in many cases it was difficult to collect enough incriminating material for a judicial conviction of the convicted spies. Nevertheless, numerous Soviet agents could be convicted and further activities in the USA made impossible.

From 1953 the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), founded in 1947, also worked on the processing.

Nevertheless, it was not until 1964 that Meredith Gardner was able to read coherent messages from the radio traffic that gave further insight into the extent of the information to the Soviet Union about the Manhattan Project.

The Venona project was carried on for almost 40 years until 1980, as there was still the hope of being able to uncover more unidentified aliases. In 1977, William P. Crowell of the NSA decided to complete the project within about two years. In 1978 the completion of the project was set for October 1, 1980. Even then, the project remained a secret, and its existence was publicly denied until the early 1990s.

publication

It was not until 1995 that the results of the Venona project were made public by the National Security Agency , the successor organization to the US Army Signals Security Agency. Between July 1995 and September 1997, extensive project documents with over 3000 documents in a total of six releases were released and made accessible to the public. It became known that the project also summarized and processed all intelligence activities against the USA in the period from 1939 to 1945, i.e. including the activities of the German defense of Wilhelm Canaris as well as the Soviet NKVD and GRU .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f Introductory History of VENONA and Guide to the Translations
  2. ↑ a b c d The Venona Story ( Memento from April 30, 2004 in the Internet Archive )
  3. ^ Helmut Roewer, Stefan Schäfer, Matthias Uhl: Lexicon of secret services in the 20th century. Herbig, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-7766-2317-9 , p. 476 ff.
  4. ↑ from the memories of VENONA ( memento of October 27, 2004 in the Internet Archive ) by William P. Crowell
  5. ↑ a b The Lives of the Cambridge Five and the well-known VENONA Project (Original: The Lives of the Cambridge Spies and the Project Known as Venona)
  6. ↑ Chronology of espionage in the Cold War in 3sat.online
  7. ↑ Spies. P. 21 , archived from the original on August 29, 2008 ; accessed on August 26, 2014 (English).
  8. ↑ Robert Louis Benson: VENONA Historical Monograph # 5. The KGB and GRU in Europe, South America and Australia. Archived from the original on November 20, 2008 ; accessed on August 26, 2014 (English).
  9. ↑ THE VENONA INTERCEPTS. In: The Manhattan Project - An Interactive History. US Department of Energy - Office of History and Heritage Resources, archived from the original on February 27, 2010 ; accessed on August 26, 2014 (English).
  10. ^ The VENONA documents and the Alger Hiss case ( Memento from June 19, 2006 in the Internet Archive )
  11. ↑ http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/venona/intercepts.html
  12. ^ Released documents of the Venona project ( Memento from June 28, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
  13. ↑ VENONA Chronology: 1939–1996 after Denis Naranjo