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Re: VENONA Project; KGB files reveal clue that broke British spy
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From: Stefan Lemieszewski <[email protected]>
To: Multiple recipients of list <[email protected]>
Subject: VENONA Project; KGB files reveal clue that broke British spy
X-Listprocessor-Version: 6.0b -- ListProcessor by Anastasios Kotsikonas
X-Comment: BELARUS issues and communication
Fyi for any researchers in this field, accompanied by a related article in
The Daily Telegraph.
Stefan Lemieszewski
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The VENONA Project
"In July 1995 the Intelligence Community ended a 50-year silence regarding
one of cryptology's most splendid successes - the VENONA Project. VENONA was
the codename used for the U.S. Signals Intelligence effort to collect and
decrypt the text of Soviet KGB and GRU messages from the 1940's. These
messages provided extraordinary insight into Soviet attempts to infiltrate
the highest levels of the United States Goverment.=20
Today, we are proud to offer these exceptional documents on the NSA home
page and we invite you to study and interpret them in the context of
history. NSA will declassify over 2200 messages related to VENONA. We
believe they will not only provide a window into Soviet espionage during the
1940's, but will also give you a glimpse of the important contributions
signals intelligence and cryptographic expertise make to our nation's
security. "
The above quote is from from the introduction to the VENONA Project by Mr.
William P. Crowell, Deputy Director, National Security Agency
You can find Venona at:=20
http://www.nsa.gov:8080/docs/venona/ddir.html
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The article below is from The Daily Telegraph, October 2, 1996:
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KGB files reveal clue that broke British spy ring
By Michael Smith=20
The name's Bond, Vladimir Bond
THE intercepted KGB messages that detail Moscow's dealings
with the British spies Kim Philby, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess were
released by GCHQ yesterday.
The move was forced on the Cheltenham spy base by the
Americans, who released on to the Internet the results of Operation Venona,
the top-secret project to decipher Moscow Centre's communications with its
foreign stations.
The files placed in the Public Record Office at Kew
yesterday include the vital clue that led to the collapse of the Cambridge
spy ring. They also name another Cambridge-based spy, Dr Theodore Hall, an
American who worked inside the Manhattan Project, the secret programme to
develop the atom bomb. He was never prosecuted and still lives in England.
But it is Maclean, recruited by Philby while he was still
a Cambridge student, who emerges as the jewel in the KGB's crown. In April
1944, as a rising star in the Foreign Office, he was posted to the
Washington embassy.
The deciphered messages show he gave the Russians a wealth
of information on Anglo-American relations and their secret post-war
agreements, including the exchanges of atomic secrets.
Since his wife Melinda was pregnant and living with her
mother in New York, Maclean had the perfect excuse to go there every
weekend to pass the information on to his KGB control, away from the routine
surveillance of diplomats in Washington.
MI5 narrowed down those names to a handful of people
who would have had access to the top-secret exchanges
between London and Washington
It was not until 1949 that the Venona team managed to
break into the messages from New York to Moscow containing the information
provided by Maclean, who was identified by the cover name Homer. Philby, who
was posted to Washington as an intelligence liaison officer shortly after
the messages were deciphered, described how the FBI concluded that any one
of 6,000 people might have been Homer.
"It had so far occurred neither to them nor the British
that a diplomat was involved, let alone a fairly senior diplomat," he said.
"Instead, the investigation had concentrated on non-diplomatic employees of
the embassy."
But slowly, MI5 narrowed down those names to a handful of
people who would have had access to the top-secret exchanges between London
and Washington.
Then in April 1951, the Venona cryptanalysts found the
vital clue in one of the messages. For part of 1944, Homer had had regular
contacts with his Soviet control in New York - using his pregnant wife as an
excuse. The names had been narrowed down to just one - Donald Maclean.
Tipped off by Philby, who had access to the Venona material, he fled to
Moscow with Burgess.
Dr Hall is the Cambridge scientist named in the files as
the KGB's main spy in the Los Alamos complex in New Mexico, where the US
atomic bomb was developed. He refused to comment last night. He came to
Britain in the 1950s after US intelligence discovered that he was Mlad, the
man who along with his British colleague Klaus Fuchs gave the Russians the
technical details of the so-called Manhattan Project.
Fuchs, a German emigr=E9 who became a naturalised
British citizen, became a KGB spy in 1941
Because he never confessed, the authorities could not
prosecute him without giving away the extent to which the KGB messages were
being read. Dr Hall, who is now 70 and suffering from terminal cancer and
Parkinson's disease, still lives with his wife Joan in a semi-detached
house in Cambridge.
Within the university, where he worked until the
mid-1980s, he is renowned for his pioneering work on biological X-ray
microanalysis, which allows scientists to work out the presence of various
elements within living matter. Hall was a brilliant man who was already a
Harvard graduate when, at the age of 19, he was recruited first by the
Manhattan Project and then, almost immediately, by the KGB.
As well as providing technical explanations of the atomic
processes, Dr Hall gave Moscow a complete list of universities doing work
on the Manhattan Project so the KGB could seek out other agents within
them. The files show that he and Fuchs were far more important than the
more famous Julius Rosenberg, cover named Liberal, and his wife Ethel, who
were both sent to the electric chair. Fuchs, a German emigr=E9 who became a
naturalised British citizen, became a KGB spy in 1941. He confessed and in
1950 was sentenced at the Old Bailey to 14 years' jail.
In the mid-1950s he was allowed to go to East Germany, where he died in=
1988.