by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr

Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan persuaded the American intelligence community to declassify the Venona Project in 1995, which was more than forty years after the Soviets learned that the project had uncovered their massive espionage penetration of every sensitive department of the United States government.    The project began because Colonel Carter Clark did not trust Joseph Stalin.  In February 1943 he ordered the Signal Intelligence Service, the Army’s elite code breakers, to attempt to decode cables between Soviet diplomats in the United States and Moscow.  The cables were virtually impossible to decode as long as they were sent using a complex two-part ciphering system.  However, about 1700 cables, or a bit over one percent of the total were sent in which the “one time pad” had been reused, and that allowed at least partial decoding.  “The deciphered cables of the Venona Project identify 349 citizens, immigrants, and permanent residents of the United States who had had a covert relationship with Soviet intelligence agencies.”  About 200 were never identified except by code name, which means that those people remained in their government and military positions unimpeded in their activities.

The Soviets learned about the Venona project from a high level official in the Roosevelt administration within a year and a half of its origin.  Ironically, the first cables weren’t successfully decoded until 1946, which was after the Soviets learned of Venona and had corrected the mistake of reusing the one time pads. Continue reading →