Venona Officially Released to the Public (11 JUL 1995)
As early as 1939, the Army had begun collecting encrypted Soviet diplomatic telegrams sent between Moscow and its KGB and GRU offices in New York, Washington, D.C. and other American cities. As they came in, they were put in storage at Arlington Hall, Virginia, until Feb. 1, 1943, when the chief of the Military Intelligence Division’s Special Branch, Col. Carter Clarke, ordered SSA to examine them. Clarke feared they would reveal the Soviet Union and Germany were secretly negotiating a separate peace to the war in Europe.
The daunting task of trying to crack the Soviet code system was first given to Gene Grabeel, a 23-year-old schoolteacher who had been hired just six weeks earlier. She was joined by additional personnel, including Mr. Meredith Gardner, a talented linguist and code breaker, and although progress was slow, a few successes were recorded. In late 1946, the group made a significant breakthrough when it uncovered evidence of Soviet espionage within the Manhattan Project, the American atomic bomb program (https://www.dvidshub.net/news/487461/sis-uncovers-soviet-infiltration-manhattan-project-20-dec-1946). Meanwhile, the Army Security Agency (ASA, successor to the SSA) continued to collect Soviet messages until 1948, when a traitorous ASA clerk named William Weisband revealed to the Soviets the American efforts to decipher their messages.
Although no new messages were collected after 1948, the project continued because of its potential to reveal ongoing Soviet espionage activities. The project moved to the Armed Forces Security Agency in 1949 and then to the National Security Agency (NSA) in 1952. By then, it had been codenamed VENONA, and the NSA was sharing investigatory leads about Soviet spies with both the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the CIA. The project continued until 1980, when the NSA deemed the analytical value of the messages to be exhausted.
While not all the messages could be fully translated, they revealed the success of Soviet espionage within the United States. In addition to infiltration of the Manhattan Project, the VENONA translations exposed nearly 350 American members of the Communist Party who spied for the Soviet Union and Soviet agents in many federal agencies, Congress, the media, and defense industries. VENONA also illuminated the activities of Soviet trade representatives, foreign ministry leaders, and attachés in the U.S. and espionage activities in Great Britain, Australia, and other countries.
Even after the project closed in 1980, it remained cloaked in secrecy. Robert Lamphere, an FBI agent who liaised with the NSA on the project, made the first public mention of the VENONA name in his 1986 book "The FBI-KGB War." The message translations, however, stayed in classified storage. Then, in May 1995, President Bill Clinton appointed New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan to chair the Commission on the Protection and Reduction of Government Secrecy. The commission used VENONA as its first target, advocating for the release of its translations. Coincidentally, at the urging of some of VENONA’s former cryptologists, NSA had already been considering such action.
On July 11, NSA, FBI, and CIA leadership, along with Senator Moynihan, held a public ceremony to commend the long-secret efforts of the VENONA cryptologists. They then formally released the first batch of forty-nine VENONA transcripts. During the next two years, NSA released five more batches of translations, about 2,900 messages in all. Hard copies were placed in the National Archives, the Library of Congress, and the National Cryptologic Museum at NSA, and digital versions were made available on the Internet.
The VENONA translations can still be found at: https://www.nsa.gov/Helpful-Links/NSA-FOIA/Declassification-Transparency-Initiatives/Historical-Releases/Venona/
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Article by Lori S. Stewart, USAICoE Command Historian. New issues of This Week in MI History are published each week. To report story errors, ask questions, request previous articles, or be added to our distribution list, please contact: TR-ICoE-Command-Historian@army.mil.
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