Venona papers

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Venona Papers (also Venona documents ) is the code name of the US military intelligence services Signals Intelligence Service (SIS), National Security Agency (NSA) and Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) as well as the Federal Police FBI for documents about the recorded radio traffic of the Soviet Consulate in New York from 1940 to 1945, as well as the documents stolen there at the end of 1945 to encrypt and encode these messages. In 1946 the name Venona was determined by the SIS director William Friedman as the project name, known since 1995 as the VENONA project , in which this and other encrypted information from the previous years was decoded, deciphered, read and processed for about 34 years.

backgrounds

The FBI came into possession of these documents through a break-in at the Soviet consulate in New York after statements by the defector and former agent Elizabeth Bentley brought them on their tracks. Furthermore, there were recordings of wiretapping measures that had already been carried out and photocopies of courier shipments from the consulate that were made during this break-in. Due to the mistake of a Soviet cipher in Moscow in 1944 and the discovery of a code book in Finland , it was finally possible to break part of the Soviet encryption process . This provided information about moles in the United States. This also enabled the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) to decipher Soviet radio messages from the years 1934 to 1938. This also included information about the American Communist Party (CPUSA) and the Communist International , which was also recorded within Operation ISCOT from 1943 to 1945. There were also other decryption codes that the Soviet defector Igor Gusenko brought with him on his escape on September 5, 1945. Gusenko was the head of an encryption department at the MWD . On the basis of these files, ten spies in Canada and the USA were exposed and convicted. Including u. a. Allen Nunn May , Klaus Fuchs , Harry Gold and David Greenglass .

Furthermore, with the help of these documents and the codes, it was possible for the first time to recognize that there were serious security gaps within American atomic research and that detailed research results were reaching the Soviet Union. The US Manhattan Project , for example, was code-named "enormoz".

Processing of the documents

To work up these controversial documents that founded signal Security Agency (SSA) of the US Army as a predecessor of the NSA on 1 February 1943, the VENONA project , in which it from 1948, the British intelligence services MI5 and MI6 omnibus. From 1947 onwards, General Carter W. Clarke of the NSA (later deputy to CIA chief Allen Welsh Dulles ) headed and coordinated the cooperative community and also included open and so far unsolved espionage cases from previous years in the investigation. His successors were later Frank B. Rowlett and Oliver Kirby Hall . From the end of 1952, the CIA also participated in the Venona project.

consequences

The complete processing of these papers took about 10 years and became the basis for almost all unmasking of Soviet agents in the 1950s.

In the course of the processing, which including the evaluations lasted until around 1980, a. the following people exposed as Soviet agents:

Despite the detailed information in these papers, however , J. Edgar Hoover was unwilling to provide the documents as evidence to the court. He also arranged for both the interrogation protocols and the hearings to be kept under lock and key at the FBI. Its contents were only published in parts by the National Archive around 40 years later .

Forerunner actions

Venona was also the last code name used within the operations of the National Security Agency for the secret operations aimed at exposing radio communications by Soviet agents during the Second World War. Other names for actions of the NSA in this regard and with the same goal were “Jade” (1941), “Bride” (1941 to 1942) and “Drug” (1942 to 1945). Key contributors to these operations were senior NSA cryptologists at Arlington Hall (then the headquarters of the US Army Signal Security Agency in Virginia ), and others. a. Richard Hallock and Cecil Phillips . From 1946, the cryptanalyst Meredith Gardner also analyzed and translated the documents.

Release of files

The first part of the documents for the Venona Papers was released in July 1995 and contained information on the efforts of the Soviet Union to obtain information on the development of atomic bombs in the USA and in particular on the Manhattan Project . There are also five other parts (release), which have now been made accessible to the public with around 3000 documents.

  • Release 1 - contains material from the first release of documents (released July 11, 1995)
  • Release 2 - contains material from messages sent between the GRU residences (offices) in New York or Washington and the Moscow Center (GRU headquarters) between 1942 and 1945 (released October 26, 1995)
  • Release 3 - contains material like Release 2 (released March 1996)
  • Release 4 - contains material about 850 translations on news of the KGB in San Francisco and Mexico City as well as the GRU in New York and Washington in the period 1943-46 (released July 17, 1996)
  • Release 5 - contains material from the fifth release of documents (October 1996)
  • Release 6 - contains material from the final release of documents (September 1997)

One of the long-standing employees of the VENONA project, the American secret service expert John Earle Haynes , presented the latest results of the puzzle work and evaluations of these documents at the International Spy Conference 2005 in Raleigh (USA), and described that even the known information about the so-called Cambridge Five allow a completely new interpretation.

Soviet aliases

When the dispatches were deciphered, it became known which code names the NKVD used for countries, institutions and people. Those responsible had a "sense of humor", as the evaluators found.

Germany was “ Kolbasnaya ” (sausage country), Great Britain was either “ Ostrov ” (island) or “ Kolonia ” (colony), Mexico was known as “ Derevnya ” (village). For the FBI the term “ Chata ” (hut) was used, for the US secret service OSS “ Izba ” (wooden house); the MGB , the Soviet foreign espionage, was seen by the NKVD as “ Sosedi ” (neighbors), the GRU as “ Dalniye sosedi ” (distant neighbors).

The capital Washington DC was hidden behind the name " Karfagen " (Carthage), San Francisco was " Vavilon " (Babylon). The US president Franklin D. Roosevelt was the " captain ", his deputy and successor, Harry S. Truman , however, only a " Matros " (sailor). For the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill , the Lubyanka in Moscow came up with the name “ Kaban ” (boar). Zionists were described as " Krysy " (rats) in the NKVD papers .

See also

Web links

literature

  • Richard J. Aldrich: The Hidden Hand: Britain, America, and Cold War Secret Intelligence , Overlook Press New York 2002, ISBN 1-58567-274-2 .
  • James Bamford: Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency , Anchor Books, ISBN 0-385-49908-6 .
  • Daniel Patrick Moynihan: Secrecy: The American Experience , Yale University Press New Haven 1998, ISBN 0-300-08079-4 .
  • Robert Louis Benson: The VENONA Story . Center for Cryptologic History, NSA , Fort Meade , USA. PDF; 0.8 MB ( memento from July 19, 2004 in the Internet Archive )
  • John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, A Tale of Two Venonas
  • Marcia Kunstel, Joseph Albright: Bombshell, The Secret Story of America's Unknown Atomic Spy Conspiracy , New York Times Books 1997, ISBN 978-0-8129-2861-7 .
  • John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr: Venona. Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (Annals of communism) , Yale University Press 1999, ISBN 978-0-300-07771-1 .
  • Robert Louis Benson, Michael Warner: Venona. Soviet espionage and the American response 1939-1957 , Laguna Hills CA Aegean Park Press, 1996, ISBN 0-89412-265-7 .
  • Herbert Romerstein, Eric Breindel: The Venona Secrets. Exposing Soviet Espionage and America's Traitors , Regnery Publishing Inc .; 1st edition 2000, ISBN 978-0-89526-275-2 .
  • Anja Nikles: The Venona documents and the espionage activities of Klaus Fuchs ; Books on Demand: Norderstedt 2010; ISBN 978-3839164822
  • Helmut Roewer , Stefan Schäfer, Matthias Uhl : Lexicon of the secret services in the 20th century . Herbig, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-7766-2317-9 , p. 476 ff.
  • Phillip Knightley: The history of espionage in the 20th century , Verlag Scherz (1989), ISBN 3-502-16384-7 , pp. 165 ff.
  • Wolfgang Krieger : Secret Services in World History. Espionage and covert actions from antiquity to the present , Munich: CHBeck 2003, 379 pp., ISBN 3-406-50248-2 .
  • Daniel Patrick Moynihan : Secrecy. The American Experience , Yale University Press 1999, ISBN 978-0-300-08079-7 . (content of the list of persons)
  • James Bamford: NSA. The anatomy of the most powerful secret service in the world , Verlag Goldmann 2002, ISBN 3-442-15151-1 , p. 35 ff.
  • Eric Breindel, Herbert Romerstein: The Venona Secrets. The Soviet Union's World War II Espionage Campaign Against the United States and How America Fought back , Basic Books 2000, ISBN 978-0-465-09842-2 .

Single receipts

  1. ↑ a b 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.
  2. ↑ Chronology of espionage in the Cold War in 3sat.online
  3. ↑ http://www.nsa.gov/publications/publi00039.cfm ( Memento from April 30, 2004 in the Internet Archive )
  4. ^ Robert Louis Benson, Michael Warner: Venona. Soviet espionage and the American response 1939-1957 , Laguna Hills CA Aegean Park Press, 1996, ISBN 978-0-89412-265-1 .
  5. ↑ [1]
  6. ^ Haynes, John Earl & Klehr, Harvey: Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America . Yale University Press 2000, ISBN 0-300-08462-5 , ff. Pp. 117, 118, 119, 121, 128, 163.
  7. ↑ Release of the Venona documents ( Memento of March 11, 2004 in the Internet Archive )
  8. ↑ Approval of the parts ( Memento of October 27, 2004 in the Internet Archive )
  9. ^ The KGB in San Francisco and Mexico City and the GRU in New York and Washington. Archived from the original on October 6, 2008 ; accessed on August 24, 2020 . [Scope of release of the Venona papers]
  10. ^ "Venona" secret documents in SpiegelOnline
  11. ^ Donal O'Sullivan, The American Venona Project. The unmasking of Soviet foreign espionage in the 1940s, in: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte , 4.2000, p. 609.
  12. ^ Donal O'Sullivan, The American Venona Project. The exposure of Soviet foreign espionage in the 1940s, in: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte , 4.2000, pp. 609–612.