Rating: 
Summary: Plod through the Sink of Iniquity
Review: This book is a minor contribution to the history of the Cold War. I found herein a multitude of questions answered that had been nagging me for years. Such as the Duncan Lee story. That said, this is not a definitive history. We will wait a long time for that maybe twenty years after all the Soviet Archives have been mined. The authors have taken all the names that were revealed in the Venona materials by the US government. They took advanage of a brief window of opportunity to get in the Soviet Archives before access was again restricted. Then they collated all of this, sorted out the names into topical chapters, researched as much as could be done to briefly discuss each person, and then put it all together. Because this is based only on individuals mentioned in the Venona intercepts, the story is spotty, incomplete, and sketchy in places. This is more a volume to consult for names seen elsewhere than to read straight through. It is far from a bedside thriller or a "good read." Workmanlike but not all inclusive. Did what they intended.
Rating:
Summary: Requires us to rethink much of the 20th century
Review: This book, jammed with information that's only come to light in recent years, tells a number of fascinating stories.For starters, there's the story of an intellectual adventure. Venona was a small group of government employees who, with fearsome gobs of skull-sweat and toil, decrypted thousands of secret communications sent between Soviet embassies and Moscow during and immediately after World War II. The messages used an encryption scheme so complex that it would be a challenge to crack even with today's technologies. But teams of Americans and Brits--mostly female, as it happens, although there were plenty of brilliant men--were able to decode them with little more than pencil, paper, and brainpower. Venona is also a story of terrible treachery. Independently corroborated by data from the Soviet and Comintern archives, the Venona decryptions confirm things that were once controversial. For example: the American Communist Party was a puppet of Moscow that eagerly engaged in criminal activities. Julius Rosenberg and Algier Hiss were guilty. Literally hundreds of Communist agents deeply infiltrated American government at the highest levels. And the Soviets also had a substantial subversive presence within the American labor movement and in many elite segments of American society. Venona is also a story of Western bumbling. For years, naive American officials ignored or dismissed suggestions that there was any Communist threat. Several times this resulted in tragic losses now painfully visible in retrospect. Perhaps most damning of all, Venona is a story of how obsession with secrecy can be costly. The Soviets became aware of Venona shortly after the war ended. They completely overhauled their systems, and the Venona project decrypted no valuable communications after the mid-to-late 1940s. This more than anything is what makes Venona fodder for discussion and debate. From a conservative perspective we can understand why Venona was kept secret: Even after Venona's cover was blown, the Soviets could not know everything the US had managed to decrypt. For years after the Soviets found out about Venona, US counterintelligence was still able to make valuable use of Venona information. But even when we knew the Soviets had discovered Venona, we refused to reveal so much as a single scrap of their decryptions to the public--even when such revelations would have helped convict traitors or eased public fears. Throughout several Democratic and Republican administrations, everything about Venona and what it had uncovered remained surrounded by a dense cloud of secrecy. While the Venona secrets would seem to corroborate the worst and most paranoid fears of 1950s McCarthyism, the truth is arguably the reverse: because of information Venona uncovered, the US and most other Western governments did a thorough housecleaning in the years immediately after World War II. During those same years most of the leaders of the American labor movement also performed some housecleaning, and Communism lost its chic appeal in much of elite society. This was all BEFORE Joe McCarthy went off the deep end. Had at least some of the Venona messages been revealed to the public after we knew the Soviets had caught on, congressional anti-Communist investigations, had they happened at all, might well have been conducted in a more honest and responsible manner. In any case, years of pointless debate between conservative and left-wing intellectuals would have been avoided. And countless stereotypical Hollywood portrayals of anti-communists as paranoid and irrational probably wouldn't have happened. Because ultimately, Venona confirms that people were right to suspect and fear the Communists. But it also demonstrates that by the 1950s, Soviet infiltration had become a manageable problem rather than a screaming crisis. That excessive care with secrets can be just as destructive as carelessness with secrets has been argued rather passionately by former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was in large part responsible for the release of the Venona information, and who wrote this book's introduction. After reading it, it's hard not to see his point. Harvey Klehr (Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Politics and History at Emory University) and John Earl Haynes (20th Century Historian for the Library of Congress) do a fine job of not only relaying the Venona information, but of showing how it is independently corroborated by information now available in the archives of the former Soviet Union and the Comintern. But if their workmanlike prose is easy enough to read, the sheer number of players, events, and their interactions that are covered are sufficiently dizzying that a "Dramatis Personae" section at the start of every chapter might have been helpful! It's not light reading. On the whole, however, this book is a must-have reference to anyone interested in the history of the 20th Century.
Rating: 
Summary: professional, scholarly history
Review: This is a scholarly history without the flash, trash, hype, and jive of journalism. The authors had access to the decrypt of Soviet messages from the 1941-1945 period as well as the Soviet espionage archives and the FBI archives. They explain in detail how they obtained their information and then described the activities of Soviet agents. At the end is a list of about 450 people who were Soviet agents. For those of you who are not interested in the historic details, the bottom line is that everyone who was publicly accused of being a Soviet agent was one. Senator McCarthy was right and the professors and journalists were wrong.
Rating:
Summary: Spying on an Ally in Time of War
Review: This is really two books in one: The first is a slim, but absolutely fascinating, volume about "Venona," the code name for the program in which approximately 3,000 extremely-secret cable messages sent by KGB agents in the United States to the Soviet Union were deciphered and translated from Russian between 1946 and 1981 by American counterintelligence authorities. The other is a rather conventional survey of Soviet espionage in the United States in the 20th century and its purported connection to the American Communist Party. At the very end of the book, authors John Early Haynes and Harvey Klehr assert that, "from 1942 to 1945[,] the Soviet Union launched an unrestrained espionage offensive against the United States." The now-indisputable fact that a state at war spied aggressively on one of its own allies is at the heart of this book. According to Haynes and Klehr: "This book describes Soviet espionage in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s. It concentrates on operations during World War II, the most aggressive and effective phase of Soviet activity." The authors write: "Venona decryptions identified most of the Soviet spies uncovered by American counterintelligence between 1948 and the mid-1950s." Haynes and Klehr report that Klaus Fuchs, Julius Rosenberg, and Donald Maclean, among others, were Soviet spies identified through Venona documents. However, the authors make the controversial assertion that their book "shows how the success of the wartime espionage offensive rested on the extensive base prepared in the 1930s by the Communist International and the American Communist Party." In law school, students are taught to beware of this false maxim: "After, therefore, because." In other words, the fact that one event follows another in time does not necessarily mean that the first causes the second. I am skeptical of the implication that the activities of the American Communist Party in the 1930s caused, or even contributed to, the success of Soviet agents in the United States during World War II. The first chapter, entitled "Venona and the Cold War," which seeks to place the deciphered messages into historical context, is splendid. The most intriguing section of this chapter, in my opinion, revolves around a counterfactual: What would have happened if Soviet agents had not succeeded in penetrating the Manhattan Project, as a result of which the Soviet Union had not developed its atomic bomb until after Stalin's death in 1953. According to Haynes and Klehr: "It is doubtful that Stalin, rarely a risk-taker, would have supplied the military wherewithal and authorized North Korea to invade South Korea in 1950 had the Soviet Union not exploded an atomic bomb in 1949." That is not quite a revelation, but it is a very interesting idea. And Chapter 2, which describes how the Soviet code was broken, is a great detective story, as well as an excellent introduction to the world of counterintelligence. As Haynes and Klehr write, the United States' National Security Agency had the worldwide resources "to attack the Soviet cipher," and its efforts, although laborious, proved to be a brilliant success. According to the authors, in addition to many other benefits: "Venona provided the FBI and the CIA with crucial information about the professional practices and habits of Soviet intelligence. agencies....Young [Soviet] intelligence officers who show up often in Venona continued to serve with the KGB into the 1980s." Haynes and Klehr also write: "Soviet cryptographic officials had great confidence in the unbreakability of their one-time pad and appear to have done little about early reports of attacks upon it." According to the authors, Venona was eventually exposed by Soviet agents, including the notorious H.R. "Kim" Philby, a senior British intelligence officer stationed in Washington, D.C., who had access to Venona information until the summer of 1951 and later defected to the Soviet Union. The first 60 pages or so of this book are positively riveting. (So is the appendix in which Haynes and Klehr provide an annotated list of 349 "U.S. citizens, noncitizen immigrants, and permanent residents of the United States who had a covert relationship with Soviet intelligence that is confirmed in the Venona traffic." Alger Hiss's name appears on this list, and it is now virtually impossible for any reasonable person to deny Hiss's connection with the Soviet Union's intelligence apparatus.) I would enthusiastically recommend this book just for its presentation of the Venona material. It was as interesting as anything I have read about the Cold War in quite a long time. The text which follows the Venona chapters is less compelling. Haynes and Klehr's description of the "American Communist Party underground," various espionage networks, and the Soviet Union's "friends in high places" is interesting but only confirms what has previously been published. I suspect that the authors realized that this ground had been plowed before because, for instance, they only devote about five pages to Hiss, the accusations against whom have been the subject of several books, both pro and con. But the chapters entitled "Military Espionage" and "Industrial and Atomic Espionage" are well worth reading. In their final chapter, entitled "Soviet Espionage and American History," Haynes and Klehr candidly concede: "While the Venona cables document Soviet penetration of the American government, they are of less assistance in determining how much damage Soviet spies did to American security." My own conclusion is that, while Soviet espionage in the United States may not have been widespread in the middle decades of the century, when Soviet spies were successful, as in their penetration of the Manhattan Project, the damage was enormous. Haynes and Klehr appear to concur: "The major exception to the lack of specific knowledge bears on atomic espionage....Espionage saved the USSR great expense and industrial investment and thereby enabled the Soviets to build a successful atomic bomb years before they otherwise would have." Like most good history, this book is a cautionary tale: One lesson clearly is that the United States cannot be too careful about protecting the security of its nuclear weapons and related technology.
Rating:
Summary: Spying on an Ally in Time of War
Review: This is really two books in one: The first is a slim, but absolutely fascinating, volume about "Venona," the code name for the program in which approximately 3,000 extremely-secret cable messages sent by KGB agents in the United States to the Soviet Union were deciphered and translated from Russian between 1946 and 1981 by American counterintelligence authorities. The other is a rather conventional survey of Soviet espionage in the United States in the 20th century and its purported connection to the American Communist Party. At the very end of the book, authors John Early Haynes and Harvey Klehr assert that, "from 1942 to 1945[,] the Soviet Union launched an unrestrained espionage offensive against the United States." The now-indisputable fact that a state at war spied aggressively on one of its own allies is at the heart of this book. According to Haynes and Klehr: "This book describes Soviet espionage in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s. It concentrates on operations during World War II, the most aggressive and effective phase of Soviet activity." The authors write: "Venona decryptions identified most of the Soviet spies uncovered by American counterintelligence between 1948 and the mid-1950s." Haynes and Klehr report that Klaus Fuchs, Julius Rosenberg, and Donald Maclean, among others, were Soviet spies identified through Venona documents. However, the authors make the controversial assertion that their book "shows how the success of the wartime espionage offensive rested on the extensive base prepared in the 1930s by the Communist International and the American Communist Party." In law school, students are taught to beware of this false maxim: "After, therefore, because." In other words, the fact that one event follows another in time does not necessarily mean that the first causes the second. I am skeptical of the implication that the activities of the American Communist Party in the 1930s caused, or even contributed to, the success of Soviet agents in the United States during World War II. The first chapter, entitled "Venona and the Cold War," which seeks to place the deciphered messages into historical context, is splendid. The most intriguing section of this chapter, in my opinion, revolves around a counterfactual: What would have happened if Soviet agents had not succeeded in penetrating the Manhattan Project, as a result of which the Soviet Union had not developed its atomic bomb until after Stalin's death in 1953. According to Haynes and Klehr: "It is doubtful that Stalin, rarely a risk-taker, would have supplied the military wherewithal and authorized North Korea to invade South Korea in 1950 had the Soviet Union not exploded an atomic bomb in 1949." That is not quite a revelation, but it is a very interesting idea. And Chapter 2, which describes how the Soviet code was broken, is a great detective story, as well as an excellent introduction to the world of counterintelligence. As Haynes and Klehr write, the United States' National Security Agency had the worldwide resources "to attack the Soviet cipher," and its efforts, although laborious, proved to be a brilliant success. According to the authors, in addition to many other benefits: "Venona provided the FBI and the CIA with crucial information about the professional practices and habits of Soviet intelligence. agencies....Young [Soviet] intelligence officers who show up often in Venona continued to serve with the KGB into the 1980s." Haynes and Klehr also write: "Soviet cryptographic officials had great confidence in the unbreakability of their one-time pad and appear to have done little about early reports of attacks upon it." According to the authors, Venona was eventually exposed by Soviet agents, including the notorious H.R. "Kim" Philby, a senior British intelligence officer stationed in Washington, D.C., who had access to Venona information until the summer of 1951 and later defected to the Soviet Union. The first 60 pages or so of this book are positively riveting. (So is the appendix in which Haynes and Klehr provide an annotated list of 349 "U.S. citizens, noncitizen immigrants, and permanent residents of the United States who had a covert relationship with Soviet intelligence that is confirmed in the Venona traffic." Alger Hiss's name appears on this list, and it is now virtually impossible for any reasonable person to deny Hiss's connection with the Soviet Union's intelligence apparatus.) I would enthusiastically recommend this book just for its presentation of the Venona material. It was as interesting as anything I have read about the Cold War in quite a long time. The text which follows the Venona chapters is less compelling. Haynes and Klehr's description of the "American Communist Party underground," various espionage networks, and the Soviet Union's "friends in high places" is interesting but only confirms what has previously been published. I suspect that the authors realized that this ground had been plowed before because, for instance, they only devote about five pages to Hiss, the accusations against whom have been the subject of several books, both pro and con. But the chapters entitled "Military Espionage" and "Industrial and Atomic Espionage" are well worth reading. In their final chapter, entitled "Soviet Espionage and American History," Haynes and Klehr candidly concede: "While the Venona cables document Soviet penetration of the American government, they are of less assistance in determining how much damage Soviet spies did to American security." My own conclusion is that, while Soviet espionage in the United States may not have been widespread in the middle decades of the century, when Soviet spies were successful, as in their penetration of the Manhattan Project, the damage was enormous. Haynes and Klehr appear to concur: "The major exception to the lack of specific knowledge bears on atomic espionage....Espionage saved the USSR great expense and industrial investment and thereby enabled the Soviets to build a successful atomic bomb years before they otherwise would have." Like most good history, this book is a cautionary tale: One lesson clearly is that the United States cannot be too careful about protecting the security of its nuclear weapons and related technology.
Rating:
Summary: Decoding Soviet Espionage
Review: Venona is an outstanding history lesson. It clearly illustrates the pervasiveness of Soviet Espionage in the United States during (and after) World War II. Unlike many such studies, this is well researched and utilizes not only US but also period Soviet sources. Highly recommended.
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