attorney general to prosecute the leaders of the CPUSA under the sedition sections of the Smith Act. to be translated into Russian, shipments to the Soviet Union had to be inspected to ensure that what was ordered had been delivered, properly loaded, and dispatched on the right ships. This omission is important because Truman was mistrustful of J. Edgar Hoover, The opening in the 1990s of the archives of the former Soviet Union showed that the penetration of American institutions was, indeed, significant, and was being directed locally by the Communist Party of the United States. every Soviet cargo ship that arrived at an American port to pick up Lend-Lease supplies had in its crew at least one, often two, and sometimes three informants who reported either to the KGB or to the Naval GRU. Policy on International Control, 1945. the message where the individual is first given a codename happens to be Their task Only the hurried deployment of America's newest jet fighter, the F-86 Saber, allowed the United States to match the technological To learn more about the use of cookies, please read our, A Note about Transcription of the Documents, 3: The American Communist Party Underground, 9: Hunting Stalin's Enemies on American Soil, 11: Soviet Espionage and American History, APPENDIX A: Source Venona: Americans and u.S. Was Donald, the unidentified Navy captain who was a GRU (Soviet military intelligence) source, still in uniform, perhaps by this time holding the rank of admiral? William Perl, a brilliant young government aeronautical scientist, provided the Soviets with the results of the highly secret tests and design experiments for American jet The hunt for Communists in the United States clearly reached the point of hysteria by the early 1950s, but what is often overlooked is that it had its origins in a very real phenomenon. Yet Venona showed that the KGB had Mole, the appropriate cover name of a Soviet source inside the Washington establishment who had passed on to Moscow high-level Why, according to the author of the memo, might it be unwise politically to try to use Venona information as trial evidence? Whittaker Chambers, it is unlikely that his aides would have considered undertaking a campaign to discredit Bentley and indict Chambers for perjury, or would have allowed themselves to be taken in by the disinformation Alternatively, students could be asked to write an answer in response to the following more general question. in danger of being pushed into the sea, and then again in the winter when Communist Chinese forces entered the war in massive numbers. As part of the aid arrangements, the United States invited the Soviets to greatly expand their diplomatic staffs and The VENONA files are most famous for exposing Julius (code named LIBERAL) and Ethel Rosenberg and help give indisputable evidence of their involvement with the Soviet spy ring. vehicles (nearly 400,000 American trucks went to the Soviet Union), aircraft, and other materiel would most assist the Soviet war effort. The Army's 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. actual texts and the enormous import of the messages remained secret until 1995. intelligence agencies had cooperated with other Soviet institutions, whose newly opened archives therefore hold some intelligence-related material and provide a back door into the still-closed intelligence archives. Forums | The Soviet Union, Great Britain, and the United States formed a military alliance in early 1942 to defeat Nazi Germany and its allies. procedural error that opened the cipher to attack. messages to be painstakingly decrypted. Automobiles | And what of the two unidentified With Greenglass's role diminished, that of his recruiter, Julius Rosenberg, would have been reduced as well. The deciphered Venona cables do But by the time they had rendered the first messages into readable text in 1946, the war was over and Clarke's initial goal was moot. The Soviet Union's unrestrained espionage against the United States from 1942 to 1945 was of the type that a nation directs at an enemy state. The enormous backlog of FOIA requests has led to lengthy delays in releasing documents; it is not uncommon to wait more than five years to It concentrates on operations during World War II, the most aggressive and effective phase of Soviet activity. not just with Fuchs, and all three would have appeared to have done more damage to American security than he. aircraft but were conspicuously superior to the first generation of American jets as well. This was a project by the United States and United Kingdom during the Cold War.It helped identify people who were spying for the Soviet Union, and passing military secrets (such as information about the atomic bomb). Perhaps most ominously, confessions by several spies made it clear that Soviet espionage had, during the Second World War, infiltrated the top-secret Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb. Sports | of Foreign Affairs in Moscow turned out to be cables between professional intelligence field officers and Gen. Pavel Fitin, head of the foreign intelligence directorate of the KGB in Moscow. Stalin's intelligence agencies shifted their focus toward America. With less successful espionage, the Soviet Union might not have developed the bomb until after Stalin's The deciphered cables of the Venona Project identify 349 citizens, immigrants, and permanent residents of the United States who had had a covert relationship with Soviet intelligence Anticommunism further lost credibility in the late 1960s when The cables should have been impossible to decrypt. officials even whitewashed evidence pointing to the theft of American classified documents in the 1945 Amerasia case (see chapter 6) because they did not wish to put at risk the continuation of the wartime Soviet-American The president was informed about the substance of the Venona messages as it came to him through FBI and Justice Department memorandums on espionage Even given these hindrances, however, each year more files are opened, went to senior executive-branch political appointees and members of Congress. Locate and bookmark suggested materials and links from EDSITEment-reviewed websites used in this lesson. a Soviet spy's identity investigations and CIA reports on intelligence matters. This provides an overview of the program, including the methods used to identify the real names of individuals referred to only by code names in the decrypted messages. The Venona Project began because Carter Clarke did not trust Joseph Stalin.