Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America - Yale Nota Bene Book | Cold War History, Spy Thriller, Political Nonfiction | Perfect for History Buffs & Political Science Students

Project Venona, the name of the project to attempt to decode the enormous number of daily messages between the Soviet Union and its three missions in the US (San Francisco, New York and Washington), was finally revealed in 1995.The book slowly and methodically lays out how a project begun in desperation by an obscure US Army Signal Corps officer who had a hunch finally achieved some success because of a "small" mistake by overworked and afraid-for-their-lives group of Soviet mathematicians on one side and the efforts of a "kid" puzzle and math whiz from Alabama on the other.Fortunately, their success was kept from all high-level members of the government, including the president. Otherwise, the Soviets would have known about the success with a day or two. How? Because Soviet spies had managed to infiltrate all important agencies of the government, even to the level of the #2 man in the Treasury Department and very high officials in State. Incredibly, even FDR's personal assistant, Lauchlin Currie, son of New England Blue Bloods, was one of the spies.The result? Of the many stunning results of the relatively small number of successful decriptions of the Venona traffic, there are two general findings that stick in the mind and beg to be understood still, if not justified.First: Beginning at once after the Soviet Revolution in October 1917, the Soviets began a massive, wide-ranging espionage war against the United States.No area of society or government was exempt. So successful were they that at the end of WWII, it can be accurately said that the US did not have ONE secret, one technical design, one industry, one department of government, that had not been fully penetrated. Not one!From the atomic bomb, to the design of all our ships and aircraft, to the first working model of the proximity fuse, to blueprints for all our key industrial plants, the KGB had the information, often before senior members of the government had it. In addition, our entire policy and planning process, both during and after WWII was totally transparent to the Soviets. The US press carefully crafted a caricature of "Uncle Joe" Stalin as a sort of distant, slightly out-of-touch, even dumb, peasant whose technical sophistication was non-existent. When Truman decided to inform Stalin about a "terrible new weapon" that had just been successfully tested in July, 1945, Truman's advisers were concerned to find a simple explanation that "Uncle Joe" could comprehend. He listened to Truman's round-about explanation and affected an air of blinking disbelief and general incomprehension. But in fact, Stalin had and understood the news -- and the details -- of the successful Trinity test even BEFORE Truman did.The second point, connected to the first, is that none of the foregoing would have been possible without the active, voluntary, cooperation of tens of thousands of American CITIZENS, who willingly and constantly betrayed their country -- often their adopted country.The history, and most important, the underlying motivation of how key members of the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA) with names like Steve Nelson and Elizabeth Bentley from places like a farming community in Iowa, and from wealthy New England families who pedigree dated to the American Revolution, made it all possible. You'll learn, for instance, how the most prolific source of Los Alamos atomic secrets was a young Physics prodigy, Harvard graduate, recommended to the government program by Harvard's president himself, walked into the Soviet mission in New York while on his Christmas vacation from Los Alamos and volunteered to provide all the atomic bomb secrets he could.His spying alone gave the Soviets the direct route to their own bomb development, without the bother of having to chase down all the expensive, time-consuming engineering alternatives that the Manhattan project had to deal with. Soviet physicists were certainly capable and knowledgeable enough to develop an atomic bomb -- eventually. But the fruits of espionage made their project one of engineering the manufacturing facilities needed to do so. The Americans paid for all the science and all the false leads.In coordination with points of contact in Moscow, they organized and managed critically important spy networks that they established in all the Communist-theory-defined industries: Entertainment and Mass Media (Hollywood, newspapers and magazines, etc.), Organized Labor, Education, (particularly science, engineering and education),Finance, and not least, Government.The portrait that emerges is one of active, creative cooperation with overall Soviet goals, goals that ultimately included the non-violent overthrow of our constitutional democracy! With what? First, a socialist system that retained recognizable (but harmless) elements of our traditional democracy's forms, transitioning to the necessary dictatorship of an enlightened leader such as Lenin or Stalin, which was a necessary precursor to the "heaven on earth" Utopian state that would naturally and inevitably follow.They believed this. And no amount of countervailing evidence, no facts, however harsh and inexplicable, could change that core ideologically-driven belief. The phases of denial of Soviet atrocities were predictable: 1. Deny the facts as being inventions by political opponents. 2. If pushed, minimize and mitigate the significance and extent of the facts; 3. If enable to deny or minimize, then acknowledge, reluctantly, minimally, that certain "excesses" were inevitably necessary to achieve the desired ultimate condition.The real problem, they truly believed, was that if only ordinary people were smart and sophisticated enough to appreciate Communism's true nature, why they would VOTE them into office! But, sadly, because the common man was simply to stupid to appreciate the modern, scientific basis of this new order, they would have to be tricked -- for their own ultimate good -- into subjugation. This notion of being part of an advanced guard of new thinking and new social structures was a prominent feature of the CPUSA recruiting efforts at every level.Leading up to the eve of WWII, the principal objective of the CPUSA was to maintain America's isolationist attitudes. The history of the propaganda developed to this end makes a book all to itself. And it was sucessful. Since the mid-1930's, after close-up investigations of developments in Hitler's Germany, the War Department had been pleading with Congress to re-instate the draft and allow the US to begin the serious work to move our army from 17th in size in the world to something that might plausible deter aggression by Germany and Japan. These efforts were continually rebuffed, but proponents were finally able to get such a bill up for a vote in June, 1940 (well after the invasion of Poland and the almost total decimation of the British) It passed by ONE VOTE.It wasn't until Hitler renounced his non-aggression pact with Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union that the CPUSA began a full-scale campaign to rally support for opposing Hitler. It's impossible to know what would have been the effect on US policy had Hitler maintained the non-aggression pact. In terms of military and industrial preparedness, The almost-two years between 1940 and Dec 7, 1941 would likely have been quite different.For me, the most perplexing question still hangs over our recent history, one whose aftermath remain with us today.Why? Why did so many Americans so enthusiastically embrace the Communist ideology and then work tirelessly to replace our form of government with it? Moreover, they continued to embrace it despite available evidence that the Soviet Union was anything but the social paradise it was portrayed as being.Most of these conspirators were considered "ordinary Americans", patriotic and civic-minded; indeed, many had fought in WWI (and later, in WWII).But the blunt truth was that they were NOT patriotic Americans, at least in the sense in which that term is normally understood. For them, American democracy and its forms no longer desirable, important or worthy of protection. In fact, just the opposite. To many, especially those in leadership positions, it was the Soviet Union that was deserving of political support and eventual ascendancy.The CPUSA came to being out of the movement of Progressivism that was a dominant political philosophy that was borne in late 19th century Europe and exported to the US by prominent intellectuals of the day. The story of how that ideology managed to so penetrate so deeply into the social and political fabric of the country is a great untold and unappreciated story that is part of the Venona legacy.How did this happen?