Venona

Beginnings at Arlington Hall

On 1 February 1943 Gene Grabeel, a young employee of the US Army's Signal Intelligence Service, began work on Soviet encrypted communications at Arlington Hall. In November 1943 Lieutenant Richard Hallock made the first break into the Soviet diplomatic cipher, and in November 1944 Cecil Phillips, Genevieve Feinstein and Lucille Campbell broke into the KGB cipher.^1,3

The intercepted messages came from five Soviet cipher users, including the KGB, military intelligence (GRU) and naval intelligence.¹

The name means nothing: according to NSA, such codewords were picked at random by the United States and the United Kingdom and are not acronyms or abbreviations.¹

A cipher that should not have cracked

The Soviet system combined a codebook in which words and phrases were represented by numbers (see code) with additives taken from a one-time pad. Used correctly, a one-time pad makes a message unreadable, but the Soviet centre that produced the key material apparently reused some of the pages.^1,2

This procedural error allowed some of the messages to be painstakingly decrypted, but not all of them. Very few of the 1942 KGB messages could be broken; of the KGB New York station's messages to Moscow, 49% of those from 1944 and 15% of those from 1943 were read, and of the Washington messages from 1945, 1.5%.^1,2

Meredith Gardner and the FBI

Meredith Gardner, formerly a language instructor at the University of Akron, spent 27 years on the programme. On 20 December 1946 he broke into a KGB message sent two years earlier that contained a list of the leading scientists on the Manhattan Project.¹

On 19–20 October 1948 Robert J. Lamphere of FBI headquarters began regular liaison with Gardner; he received translations as soon as they were made until he left the FBI in 1955. By 1948 the British had joined the effort and assigned their own analysts to Arlington Hall. The CIA was officially briefed in 1953.^1,3

Who was unmasked

According to NSA, exploiting Venona between 1948 and 1951 exposed, among others, Klaus Fuchs, Harry Gold, David and Ruth Greenglass and Theodore Hall (codename MLAD). Fuchs was identified under the codenames CHARLES and REST in the summer of 1949, and the FBI made its final identification of the Rosenbergs in 1950; Julius Rosenberg appeared as ANTENNA, later LIBERAL (see atomic espionage).^1,2

Venona also led to the neutralisation of the senior British diplomat Donald Maclean, a long-time KGB agent codenamed HOMER (see the Cambridge Five).¹

Many people in the messages were never identified. And those who were could not always be charged: Hall was not brought to trial because there was no evidence apart from Venona, which was too sensitive to present in court.^1,2

The leak and the end of the programme

The KGB learned early on that the United States was studying Soviet communications. Bill Weisband (codename ZVENO) worked in the Russian section at Arlington Hall from 1945 until his arrest in 1950; Kim Philby occasionally visited Arlington Hall while stationed in Washington in 1949–1951.¹

In 1978 NSA decided to end the programme by 1 October 1980.^1,3

Declassification in 1995

Venona remained a closely guarded secret until it was declassified in 1995. The first release, in July 1995, comprised 49 translations on atomic espionage. After six releases, researchers now have all of the approximately 3,000 translations.^1,2