The Venona Secrets by Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel Click here to return to book details Preface Eric Breindel and I had been friends for about fifteen years at the time the National Security Agency (NSA) began releasing the Venona documents in 1995. Venona was the U.S. code word given secret Soviet spy communications, equivalent to the word Ultra used for the Nazi secret messages. Eric and I had met when I was a professional staff member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and Eric was my counterpart on the Senate Intelligence Committee. We realized shortly after we met that we were kindred souls-we both had an interest in history, in particular the history of espionage and of Communism. Eric’s death in 1998 was a loss to me in many ways-as a coauthor, of course, but also as a valued friend with whom I would discuss these matters long into the night. When Venona appeared in 1995 our late-night telephone sessions increased both in frequency and in length. Each time one of us would discover something new, he would call the other, causing my wife to complain about being awakened in the middle of the night to hear about an exciting finding that Eric and I had made. Eric’s interest in these matters, as Norman Podhoretz explained at Eric’s memorial service, stemmed from the fact that, as the son of Holocaust survivors, he understood the nature of Nazi and Communist totalitarianism. My own interest stemmed from a teenage infatuation with Communist slogans, which I lost as soon as I learned more about that ideology. An earlier generation referred to the awakening of people to the Communist menace as their Kronstadt-taken from the 1921 Communist massacre of sailors who demanded democracy at the Kronstadt fortress. My Kronstadt was the North Korean invasion of South Korea in June 1950, when theory was transformed into practice. I served there with the U.S. Army in 1953, during which time I saw Korean civilians risk their lives crossing the enemy lines in the midst of fighting to escape from a Communist regime. That was an important lesson to me. After returning from Korea, I worked for the state of New York investigating Communist summer camps for children and charity rackets in which innocent people contributed money to supposedly good causes-money that went instead to pay for Communist propaganda. In 1965 I became an investigator for the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and from 1971 to 1975 I was the minority chief investigator for its successor, the House Committee on Internal Security. In 1978 I became a professional staff member for the House Intelligence Committee, where I assisted Congressman John Ashbrook (R-Ohio) and C. W. “Bill” Young (R-Florida) to oversee the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and worked on the committee’s study of KGB activities, including the extensive Soviet disinformation campaign. I left the committee in 1983 to become head of the Office to Counter Soviet Disinformation at the United States Information Agency. I retired in 1989 but continued to study, lecture, and write on the subject. In 1992 and 1993 my wife and I had the opportunity to work in the archives of the former Soviet Union and later in Czechoslovakia and Germany. While we were working in Russia, we learned that unreconstructed Communists were unhappy that we and other American researchers were given access to Soviet archives. An article in a hard-line Russian newspaper in April 1993 said: “What right do the Americans have to conduct research into secret materials in our archives? Which traitor to Russia’s interests opened the door to them?”1 But before the hard-liners succeeded in convincing Boris Yeltsin to restrict some of the more interesting sections, we had obtained thousands of pages of documents from the archives of the Communist International. Other researchers shared thousands more with us, and we in turn shared the material with Eric Breindel. Eric was only forty-two when he died in March 1998. A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard in 1977, where he was editorial chairman of the Harvard Crimson, Eric confronted leftist mythology while he was still in college. In 1982 he received his law degree from Harvard Law School and joined the staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee, where he worked for Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-New York). There he learned details of Soviet intelligence operations against the United States as well as what our government was doing about it. Eric then served as editorial page editor of the New York Post from 1986 to January 1997, when he became senior vice president of the Post’s parent company, News Corporation. An outstanding spokesman for conservative views, he was moderator of a weekly news show on public affairs on the Fox News channel. But despite his busy schedule, Eric continued to study Soviet intelligence operations. The release of Venona gave him the chance to put his knowledge to work. When Eric and I compared the Venona material with the documents we had obtained from the Soviet archives and with material the FBI had released about its investigations, we realized that the whole story had not yet been told. Working together, we drew a number of important conclusions. It was obvious that the earlier view of the United States government-that American Communists, because of their loyalty to the Soviet Union, might spy on their own government-was true, but it did not go far enough. Venona, together with our other sources, made it clear that American Communists with access to sensitive information were expected by the Party to turn it over to the Soviets. More importantly, the American Com-munist Party leadership sought out such members and turned them over to work for the Soviets. To guarantee their ideological loyalty, the Party checked them through its own secret files, and Soviet intelligence double-checked them through the files of the Communist International. Earl Browder, head of the American Communist Party, was deeply involved in recruiting Party members and vetting them for espionage. Of particular interest to both Eric and me was the Soviet attitude toward Jews as revealed in Venona. We were not surprised that the NKVD, the Soviet foreign intelligence service, showed disdain for and made cynical use of those Jews willing to work for them. What surprised us was the Venona code name for Jews-“Rats.” An NKVD program was set up to spy on and disrupt Jewish organizations that were helping Jewish victims in Europe, people who would have significant contacts in the postwar period. Why? Because the Soviets saw European Jews who supported democracy as an impediment to Soviet control in Eastern and Central Europe. Both as Americans and as Jews, we concluded that the Soviet Union and its intelligence operations were the enemies of our freedom. Study of the documents raised a number of questions. Do intelligence and espionage operations matter? Was Soviet espionage a significant factor in the projection of Soviet power? Was the demise of the Soviet Empire hastened, delayed, or, perhaps, unaffected by America’s response? The answers: Espionage by American Communists provided the Soviet Union with an atom bomb years before its scientists could have produced one, and subsequently the threat of atomic warfare enabled the Soviet Union to project its power and to influence Western thinking. Soviet-controlled agents of influence in the U.S. government during World War II helped the USSR achieve its goals in Central Europe and Asia. The existence of Soviet-controlled governments in Eastern Europe and the Far East provided a valuable asset to the Soviet side in the Cold War. These successes would not have been possible without the active participation of American Communists. After the 1950s the Soviets no longer had as large a cadre of “Soviet patriots”-Western Communists-on hand for espionage. Western counterintelligence operations, the discrediting of the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and Khrushchev’s “secret speech” denouncing Stalin combined to dry up the pool of espionage talent that had proliferated during the 1930s and 1940s. In the Cold War period (1946 to 1991) the Soviets were forced to rely on less trustworthy and less dedicated mercenary agents. The loss of most of their ideological agents-one of their most valuable assets-was a blow to the Soviets. We should also consider the true nature of the Soviet state. That Moscow was long Washington’s primary global adversary, as well as a formidable military threat, isn’t in dispute. But was it correct to view the Soviet Union as the “focus of evil” in the postwar world? (This concept, first advanced in the early 1950s by Time magazine editor and Alger Hiss accuser Whittaker Chambers, resurfaced in the speeches of President Ronald Reagan some three decades later.) Was it valid to see Soviet Communism as an ideology no less pernicious than Nazism? Or is it now merely convenient to do so in the sense that studying triumphant moments in the half-century-long Cold War is far more compelling if America’s chief foe represented genuine evil, not just impressive military might? President Reagan was right: The Soviet Union was indeed the “focus of evil” in the postwar world. It replaced Nazi Germany as the most dangerous adversary of the free nations; its important characteristics were identical to Nazi Germany’s, including mass murders, slave labor camps, and an insatiable desire for new territorial conquests. Finally, as the taboo on honest discussion of American Communism continues to lift, it is possible to examine the extent to which domestic Communists penetrated the U.S. government and engaged in espionage. This, of course, requires reassessing the essential nature of the American Communist movement. And the 1995 declassification of the Venona files facilitates analysis of this issue. The Venona papers, this book’s subject as well as one of its main sources, render certain key facts indisputable. It is now plain, for example, that the conventional wisdom regarding two questions-“Who in America spied for the USSR?” and “What were the overriding principles that animated domestic Communists?”-has long been grounded in falsehood. Notwithstanding claims pervasive in the academy and, by extension, in standard history texts, the Communist Party USA was never a legitimate, indigenous political movement; never, in short, was the Communist Party merely a left-of-center political faction consisting of “liberals in a hurry” (to borrow a widely used, Popular Front-era concept). The Communist Party USA leadership and its rank and file were composed of Americans who willfully gave their primary allegiance to a foreign power, the USSR. As a consequence, the Party served as a natural recruiting ground-and the leadership, a vetting agency-for prospective U.S.-based Soviet spies. Before and during World War II, most of the Americans who served as Soviet spies were members of the Communist Party and were recruited with the assistance of the Party leadership. A central goal of this book is to correct the conventional wisdom regarding American Communism-to challenge the falsehood inherent in the claim that Party members were left-wing heretics rather than disloyal conspirators. For Communists, true patriotism meant helping to make the world a better place by advancing the interests of the Soviet Union in any way possible. From the study of Venona, one inescapably concludes that while this bizarre view of loyalty informed the thinking of every member, only a chosen few had the ability or opportunity to serve as spies for the Soviet Union. Though the Communists made little secret of their unwillingness to subscribe to “traditional forms of patriotism,” Communist Party members managed to secure footholds in highly sensitive areas of American life. This was especially true during the New Deal years and the subsequent wartime U.S.-Soviet alliance. In this context, it is well to remember that, while the virtual taboo in intellectual circles on calling Communist Party members “Communists” was a reaction to the government’s emphasis on domestic security that marked the early days of the Cold War, secrecy and concealment had long been features of the American Communist movement. The taboo on discussing who was a Communist placed violators at risk of being denounced as “Red-baiters”-an unpleasant but ­­­less-than-chilling prospect. Indeed, its effectiveness in inhibiting debate had already begun to dissipate prior to the Soviet Empire’s demise. Still, even though open discourse about the moral legitimacy of the USSR and its American apologists managed finally to fight its way into the public square, a bodyguard of lies continued to protect the Communist Party USA from most academic inquiries into its espionage role. Today, most Americans are inclined to accept the notion that monstrous crimes are intrinsic to Communism in power, and are not a mere aberration. In short, the inarguable fact that crimes against humanity have been a feature of national life wherever Communists have seized power has implications that fewer and fewer Americans can ignore. The image of Lenin as a benevolent “tsar” whose disciples failed to grasp his political and moral instructions has lost most of its currency among serious intellectuals. In fact, American scholars were the first to note that even before Hitler, Lenin and Stalin made terror an instrument of state policy by using concentration camps, slave labor, man-made famines, and mass murder to realize political and economic goals. Efforts to distinguish Communism from Nazism (and other manifestations of political evil) often turn on ostensible intentions. The Communists, the argument says, have good intentions; the Nazis, bad ones. Actually, the real intention-totalitarian rule-was the same. Even some of the slogans were the same. The Nazis, like the Communists, used “peace” as a slogan to disarm their enemies. The Nazi pseudo-charity “winter help work” emulated Communist “concern” for the hungry and homeless and was equally duplicitous. And both movements relied on state terror. Slogans, marketed as intentions, are less important than actions and real goals. As for America’s commitment to intelligence gathering, various factors-Communism’s intrinsic evil, Moscow’s ill-concealed hostility to Washington, and the USSR’s military might-made it necessary both to collect information and to combat Soviet espionage efforts. The fear created by “not knowing” (from lack of timely information) has haunted ruling elites since the fifth century BC. At that time, the Chinese sage Sun Tzu argued in “The Art of War”-the first widely distributed handbook on the subject-that “knowledge is the reason… the wise general conquer[s] the enemy.…” The United States before the Second World War, however, seemed to regard itself-in this sphere as in many others-as a nation apart, and long failed to take Sun Tzu’s counsel to heart. Indeed, since the beginning of the century, the British and the Russians set the standard for intelligence gathering. Washington came late to the Great Game. Still, the key question remains: Have American efforts in this realm made a difference in the course of history? A negative response is difficult to justify. Allied intelligence superiority played an essential role in hastening Hitler’s defeat, in keeping the Cold War from escalating into a nuclear conflict-a hot war-and in preventing the global arms race from spinning out of control. In other words, despite the tendency to view intelligence as an effective weapon of war, states determined to keep the peace have long used intelligence to deter aggression. As for the Soviet espionage efforts chronicled in these pages, it is clear that Moscow’s agents in the United States helped prevent an earlier Nazi surrender to the Anglo-Americans-the prospect of which haunted the USSR throughout the war. As will be discussed, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Harry Dexter White played a key role in this Soviet endeavor. White died in 1948, shortly after questioning by the House Committee on Un-American Activities and after Whittaker Chambers publicly named him as a Soviet agent. President Harry Truman had appointed the Treasury official as executive director of the International Monetary Fund two years earlier, shortly after Elizabeth Bentley had also identified him as a spy to the FBI. Meanwhile, it has become clear that spies in the United States speeded Moscow’s quest to develop and test an atom bomb-perhaps by three to five years. Documents recently released in the former USSR, moreover, demonstrate that, absent an atomic bomb, Stalin would not have unleashed Pyongyang’s army to conquer the entire Korean peninsula. All in all, it’s hard not to acknowledge the importance intelligence and espionage had in the half-century twilight struggle between the Soviet Union and the United States. The Venona files are a window through which to view Soviet activity in this realm at a time-the war years-when Moscow and Washington were military allies. It is well to recall that before the war America’s “official” attitude toward covert intelligence gathering was reflected in Secretary of War Henry Stimson’s suggestion that “gentlemen don’t read each other’s mail.” Happily, the Stimson view didn’t enjoy unanimous support. And, as the Second World War ended and the Cold War began to heat up, the United States wasn’t entirely unprepared. In fact, at Arlington Hall in suburban Washington, home to the Army Security Agency (ASA), the Venona project was already under way breaking Soviet codes. The Soviet Union’s espionage advantage turned on a unique historical circumstance: Never before had a hostile foreign power enjoyed the unadulterated loyalty of tens of thousands of Americans, many of them intellectuals, some holding senior government posts. The Venona files demonstrate the Communist Party USA’s central role in achieving this loyalty. But the code breakers working on Venona helped impede the Party’s achievement. Eric and I have put together the story of Soviet espionage against the United States-espionage that took place at a time when we were “allies” in a war against Nazi Germany. For the Soviets there were no allies, only temporary cobelligerents that they spied against as they would on an enemy. -Herbert Romerstein August 2000 Price: $23.95 - Click here to order: Click here to return to book details