The Defence of the Realm (70 page)

Despite this restriction, it was an extraordinary comment on the closeness of the transatlantic Special Relationship that ASA, the FBI and the
Armed Forces Security Agency (AFSA), which took over responsibility for VENONA production on its foundation in July 1949, should have been prepared to share with all three British intelligence agencies intelligence affecting US interests which they were not prepared to communicate to the CIA and most of the American intelligence community. After his meeting with Clarke, Travis telegraphed to Sillitoe and Menzies:

Only very few of American Military Intelligence [of which ASA was a part], A.S.A. and F.B.I. are in [the VENONA] picture, and nobody in any other Department. Imperative, therefore, no mention this line of information be made to any American even though he be indoctrinated, e.g., United States personnel at G.C.H.Q., members C.I.A., F.B.I. representative in U.K. etc.
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Thistlethwaite telegraphed a further warning that even Rear Admiral Inglis, head of USCIB and Director of US Naval Intelligence, then visiting Britain and the continent, knew nothing of the American VENONA decrypts: ‘We are therefore not at liberty to discuss it with him. Grateful if you would ensure “C” also appreciates this.'
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On becoming first head of AFSA in July 1949, Rear Admiral Earl F. Stone, also a member of USCIB, appears to have been seriously put out to discover that he had previously been kept in ignorance of VENONA. He was also – to quote a doubtless euphemistic FBI memorandum – ‘very much disturbed' to discover that, though ASA had called in the Bureau in an attempt to identify the codenames of the Soviet agents mentioned in the VENONA decrypts, it had failed to inform either the President or the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI). Stone insisted that ASA do so promptly. Carter Clarke ‘vehemently disagreed'. After what was probably a blazing row, Stone and Clarke took their dispute to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Omar Nelson Bradley.
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Truman was a strong supporter of Bradley, and had enthusiastically supported his appointment as army chief of staff in succession to Eisenhower a year earlier.
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In 1949, however, Bradley was guilty of an extraordinary act of insubordination to the Commander in Chief, siding with Clarke in his dispute with Stone over whether to reveal VENONA to Truman and the CIA. Bradley announced that if, in his opinion, the contents of the decrypts ever warranted it he ‘would personally assume the responsibility of advising the President or anyone else in authority'.
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Clarke assured Patterson that, even if Bradley did decide to pass on VENONA material to Truman or the National Security Council, he would do so in a ‘suitably dressed up form' which would conceal its SIGINT origin.
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Bradley was even more anxious to keep the VENONA secret from the CIA – and in particular
from its head, Rear Admiral Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, DCI from 1947 to 1950. Clarke doubtless reflected Bradley's views as well as his own when he told Patterson that he had ‘very good reason for suspecting that it is not safe to pass such secret material to C.I.A.'. That ‘very good reason' was, almost certainly, the evidence contained in the decrypts that OSS had been heavily penetrated during the war and the understandable (though mistaken) fear that its peacetime successor, the CIA, was also penetrated.
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The Director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, was equally suspicious of CIA security and viewed the Agency as an upstart rival.
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Hillenkoetter was frequently Truman's first caller of the day, bringing with him the intelligence briefing which later became known as the President's Daily Brief. If Truman were informed of VENONA, he would be likely to raise the subject with his DCI. Only by keeping the secret from the President, therefore, could Bradley and Hoover be sure that it was kept from the DCI.
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VENONA revealed much less about NKVD/NKGB intelligence operations in the United Kingdom than in the United States, chiefly because far fewer wartime messages were intercepted between Moscow and London than between Moscow and the US. Even before the Soviet entry into the war, the Foreign Office had agreed that the Soviet embassy in London could communicate with Moscow by radio on set frequencies. These radio messages were initially intercepted and recorded in the hope that they could eventually be decrypted, but interception (save for that of GRU traffic, which continued until April 1942) ceased in August 1941
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because of the need to concentrate resources on the production of ULTRA intelligence based on the decryption of Enigma and other high-grade enemy ciphers. Interception of Soviet traffic did not resume until June 1945. In the United States, by contrast, there was no agreement allowing the Soviet embassy and consulates to communicate with Moscow by radio. Instead, Soviet messages were written out for transmission by cable companies, which, in accordance with wartime censorship laws, supplied copies to the US authorities.
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The most important British VENONA breakthrough was the decryption in whole or in part of all but one of the radio messages sent by the Centre to London from 15 to 21 September 1945.
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The intercepts revealed the existence of an inner ring of British agents referred to by the Centre as ‘the valuable agent network', which had access to British intelligence. Some years later, following lengthy analysis of collateral evidence, the codenames for three members of the network were identified as those of Philby, Burgess and Blunt. At the time, however, clues to the identities of the agents were sparse. By the mid-1950s Burgess was the only one of the three whose codename had been correctly identified in the decrypts.
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Even in the
mid-1970s, twelve of the twenty-four codenames in the September 1945 decrypts had still not been identified.
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The unidentified included JACK and ROSA, an apparently important agent couple of whom no significant identifying details were given but who were, at various times, wrongly suspected of being Herbert and Jenifer Hart or Victor and Tessa Rothschild; and a high-level atom spy, KVANT (‘QUANTUM'), who it was later thought might be Bruno Pontecorvo, who defected to Russia in 1950.
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The importance of the intercepts during this single week in September 1945 provided graphic evidence of the serious intelligence loss sustained as a result of the non-interception of Soviet traffic for most of the previous four years. With the exception of that week, only five other telegrams exchanged between the Centre and the London residency were (partially) decrypted. The lack of British VENONA covering the most successful period of Soviet intelligence collection in Britain in the history of the Soviet Union was to prove an enormous handicap to post-war British counter-espionage. Had British VENONA been on the scale of its US counterpart, a number of the Security Service's most important counter-espionage investigations – chief among them the Cambridge Five – would undoubtedly have been both more successful and more rapidly concluded. The first two important British Soviet agents discovered as a result of VENONA, Klaus Fuchs and Donald Maclean, were both identified not from messages intercepted in Britain but from decrypts of traffic between the Centre and its residencies in Washington and New York relating to their time in the United States.

Access to VENONA was tightly restricted. A list dated 2 October 1952, five years after the Security Service's first involvement in it, records that only nine officers had unrestricted access to the decrypts; another nineteen had restricted access or were aware of their existence.
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Secretaries were not allowed to open envelopes containing VENONA material.
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As a result of Soviet penetrations of both AFSA and SIS, however, these security precautions were fatally undermined. In 1950 AFSA was shocked to discover that one of its employees, William Weisband, had been a Soviet agent ever since he joined the wartime army SIGINT agency in 1942.
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The son of Russian immigrants to the United States, Weisband was employed as a Russian linguist and roamed around first ASA, then AFSA, on the pretext of looking for projects where his linguistic skills could be of assistance. Cecil Phillips, one of the cryptanalysts who worked on VENONA, remembers Weisband as ‘very gregarious and very nosy':

He would come around and ask questions about what you were doing . . . He was never aggressive. If you said, as I often did, ‘Nothing important,' or ‘I'm doing
something as dull as hell,' he would wander off . . . I never heard him offer a political thought. He was around everywhere all the time. He cultivated the senior officers.

Meredith Gardner recalls Weisband looking over his shoulder at a critical moment in the project late in 1946, just as he was producing one of the first important decrypts – a telegram from the New York residency to Moscow of December 1944 listing some of the scientists who were developing the atomic bomb.
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It seems to have been over a year, however, before Weisband was able to pass on this dramatic news to Moscow. After the defection of the American KGB courier Elizabeth Bentley in 1945, the Centre ordered contact with Weisband to be broken as a security measure. Contact was not resumed until 1947.
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It was probably as a result of Weisband's warning that the Soviet reuse of one-time pads ceased in 1948.
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By the time Weisband was arrested in 1950, the Centre had an even better-informed source on the progress being made by Meredith and his colleagues. In September 1949, a month before he arrived in Washington as the SIS liaison officer, Kim Philby was indoctrinated into VENONA.
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Soon afterwards he reported to Moscow that the atom spy successively codenamed REST and CHARLES, referred to in a number of the decrypts, had been identified as Klaus Fuchs – thus enabling Moscow to warn those of its American agents who had dealt with Fuchs that they might have to flee through Mexico. Among those who made their escape were Morris and Lona Cohen, who later reappeared in Britain using the aliases Peter and Helen Kroger and were convicted of espionage in 1961.
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After his death in 1995, Morris Cohen was posthumously declared a Hero of the Russian Federation by President Boris Yeltsin.

Soon after his arrival in Washington, Philby was taken to AFSA by the departing SIS liaison officer, Peter Dwyer, and introduced to Gardner. On this, as on a number of previous visits, Dwyer provided information which helped Gardner fill in gaps in one of the decrypts. Almost half a century later, Gardner still vividly recalled the meeting:

. . . I was very much pleased [with progress on the decrypts] and so was Dwyer, of course. Philby was looking on with no doubt rapt attention but he never said a word, never a word. And that was the last I saw of him. Philby was supposed to continue these visits, but helping me was the last thing he wanted to do.
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Despite discontinuing meetings with Gardner, however, Philby contrived to increase his access to VENONA decrypts. His anxiety to do so grew in June 1950 after the first partial decryption of telegrams to the London residency from Moscow in September 1945 referred to the existence of a
‘valuable' British agent network, of which, as he was well aware, he had been a prominent member.
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The Security Service SLO, Geoffrey Patterson, wrote to the DG on 18 July 1950:

Philby has signalled ‘C' to suggest that an extra copy of any material which G.C.H.Q. send to [their Washington liaison] should be enclosed for Philby and myself. At the moment [their liaison] receives only one copy which he, of course, shows to us, but he has no time in which to sit down and copy it for us. If Philby and I can have our own copy it will give us more time for studying it before we approach the F.B.I. on the subject.
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Armed with his own copies of VENONA decrypts, Philby was able to pass them on to Moscow.
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At the time he was the only person in either London or Washington able to identify a particularly important Soviet spy in Britain, codenamed STANLEY in the September 1945 telegrams from Moscow to London,
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as himself.

Thanks to Weisband and Philby, the VENONA secret was communicated to Moscow well before it reached either the President of the United States or the CIA. From 1950 onwards, following Weisband's arrest,
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Clarke, Bradley and Hoover must have been aware that the secret they had kept from Truman and the Agency was known to Stalin and the Centre. Though American and British security procedures both failed miserably to prevent Moscow learning of the VENONA decrypts, however, they were remarkably successful in keeping the secret within the United States and Britain.

Despite the fact that VENONA probably identified more Soviet agents than any other Western intelligence operation of the Cold War, it was too secret to be mentioned in American or British courts, even in camera, and therefore led to very few convictions. It was possible to mount successful prosecutions against Soviet agents identified in the decrypts only if they could be persuaded to confess or if alternative evidence could be discovered from non-SIGINT sources. Among the few who admitted their guilt when confronted by the evidence against them (which they had no idea was based on SIGINT) were two of the atom spies at Los Alamos: the Germanborn British physicist Klaus Fuchs and the American Technical Sergeant David Greenglass. Greenglass also implicated his wife's brother-in-law, Julius Rosenberg, whom VENONA had identified as the organizer – with some assistance from his wife Ethel – of a highly successful Soviet spyring in New York producing a wide range of scientific and technological intelligence. When the Rosenbergs' trial opened in 1951, Greenglass was the chief witness for the prosecution. Unlike Fuchs, who was sentenced to fourteen years' imprisonment in 1950, the Rosenbergs were sentenced to
death, though the execution was not carried out until 1953.
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They were the only Soviet spies executed during the Cold War.