Venona project
The Venona project was a long-running and highly secret collaboration between United States intelligence agencies and the United Kingdom's MI5 and GCHQ that involved the cryptanalysis of messages sent by several Soviet intelligence agencies. There were known to be at least 13 code words for this effort used by the US and UK. Venona was the last code word for the project, and has no known meaning. (In the decrypted documents issued from the NSA, 'VENONA" is written in full capitals; authors writing on the subject generally capitalize only the first letter.)
In the early years of the Cold War, Venona would be an important source of information on Soviet intelligence activity for the Western powers. Although unknown to the public, and even presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman, it was a critical and guarded document behind many famous events of the early Cold War, such as the Rosenberg spying case.
Most of the messages which would later prove to be decipherable were intercepted between 1942 and 1945, and they were decrypted beginning in 1946 and continuing until 1980, when Venona was canceled.
Background
U.S. Army Signal Security Agency (commonly called Arlington Hall) code-breakers had intercepted large volumes of encrypted high-level Soviet diplomatic intelligence traffic during and immediately after World War II.
This traffic, some of which was encrypted with a one-time pad system, was stored and analyzed in relative secrecy by hundreds of cryptanalysts over a 40-year period starting in the early 1940s. Due to a serious blunder on the part of the Soviets—reusing pages of some of the one-time pads in other pads, which were then used for other messages—some of this traffic was vulnerable to cryptanalysis.
The Venona Project was initiated in 1943, under orders from the deputy Chief of Military Intelligence (G-2), Carter W. Clarke.[1] Clarke mistrusted Joseph Stalin and feared that the Soviet Union would sign a separate peace with Germany, allowing Germany to focus its military forces on Great Britain and the U.S.
The break-in
The Soviet systems in general used a code to convert words and letters into numbers, to which additive keys (from one-time pads) were added, encrypting the content. When used correctly, one-time pad encryption is theoretically unbreakable. Cryptanalysis by American and British code-breakers revealed that some of the one-time pad material had incorrectly been reused by the Soviets (specifically, entire pages, although not complete books), which allowed decryption (sometimes only partial) of a small part of the traffic.
It was Arlington Hall's Lt. Richard Hallock, working on Soviet "Trade" traffic (so called because these messages dealt with Soviet trade issues), who first discovered that the Soviets were reusing pages. Hallock and his colleagues (including Genevieve Feinstein, Cecil Phillips, Frank Lewis, Frank Wanat, and Lucille Campbell) went on to break into a significant amount of Trade traffic, recovering many one-time pad additive key tables in the process.
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0f/Meredith_Gardner%2C_at_far_left%2C_working_with_cryptanalysts.jpg/341px-Meredith_Gardner%2C_at_far_left%2C_working_with_cryptanalysts.jpg)
A young Meredith Gardner (of what would become the National Security Agency) then used this material to break in to what turned out to be NKVD (and later GRU) traffic, by reconstructing the code used to convert text to numbers. Samuel Chew and Cecil Phillips also made valuable contributions. On 20 December 1946, Gardner made the first break into the code, revealing the existence of Soviet espionage in the Manhattan Project.[2] Other alleged Soviet spies worked in Washington in the State Department, Treasury, Office of Strategic Services, and even the White House. Very slowly, using assorted techniques ranging from traffic analysis to defector information, more of the messages were decrypted.
Claims have been made that information from physical theft of code books (a partially burned one was recovered by the Finns) to bugging embassy rooms in which text was entered into encrypting devices (analyzing the keystrokes by listening to them being punched in), contributed to recovering much of the plaintext. These latter claims are less than fully supported in the open literature.
One significant aid (mentioned by the NSA) in the early stages may have been work done in cooperation between the Japanese and Finnish cryptanalysis organizations; when the Americans broke into Japanese codes during WWII, they gained access to this information. There are also reports that copies of signals purloined from Soviet offices by the FBI were helpful in the cryptanalysis.
Generating the one-time pads was a slow and labor-intensive process, and the outbreak of war with Germany in June 1941 caused a sudden increase in the need for coded messages. It's probable that the Soviet code generators started duplicating cipher pages in order to keep up with demand.
Results
The NSA reported that, according to the serial numbers of the Venona cables, thousands were sent, but only a fraction were available to the cryptanalysts. Approximately 2,200 of the messages were decrypted and translated; some 50 percent of the 1943 GRU-Naval Washington to Moscow messages were broken, but none for any other year, although several thousand were sent between 1941 and 1945. The decryption rate of the NKVD cables was:
- 1942 1.8%
- 1943 15.0%
- 1944 49.0%
- 1945 1.5%
Out of some hundreds of thousands of intercepted encrypted texts, it is claimed that under 3000 have been partially or wholly decrypted.
The existence of Venona decryptions became known to the Soviets not long after the first breaks. It is not clear whether the Soviets knew how much of the message traffic, or which messages, had been successfully decrypted. At least one Soviet penetration agent, British SIS Representative to the US, Kim Philby, was told about the project in 1949, as part of his job as liaison between British and US intelligence. The Soviets stopped reusing key pad material around 1946, possibly after learning of the US/British work from their agents, after which their secure traffic reverted to completely unreadable.
Significance
The decrypted messages gave important insights into Soviet behavior in the period during which duplicate one-time pads were used. With the first break into the code, Venona revealed the existence of Soviet espionage[3] at Los Alamos National Laboratories.[4] Identities soon emerged of American, Canadian, Australian, and British spies in service to the Soviet government, including Klaus Fuchs, Alan Nunn May and another member of the Cambridge Five spy ring, Donald Maclean. Others worked in Washington in the State Department, Treasury, Office of Strategic Services,[5] and even the White House.
The decrypts show that the US and others were targeted in major espionage campaigns by the Soviet Union as early as 1942. Some 349 code names are mentioned in the messages,[6] each signifying a person with some type of "covert relationship" with Soviet intelligence. It is likely that there were more than 349 participants in Soviet espionage, as that number is from a small sample of the total intercepted message traffic. Among those identified are Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Alger Hiss;[7] Harry Dexter White,[8] the second-highest official in the Treasury Department; Lauchlin Currie,[9] a personal aide to Franklin Roosevelt; and Maurice Halperin,[10] a section head in the Office of Strategic Services.
The Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor to the CIA, housed at one point or another between fifteen and twenty Soviet spies.[11] Duncan Lee, Donald Wheeler, Jane Foster Zlatowski, and Maurice Halperin, passed information to Moscow. The War Production Board, the Board of Economic Warfare, the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs and the Office of War Information, included at least half a dozen Soviet sources each among their employees. In the opinion of some, almost every American military and diplomatic agency of any importance was compromised to some extent by Soviet espionage.[12]
Prosecution
On February 1, 1956, Alan H. Belmont prepared an FBI memorandum on the significance of the Venona project and the prospects of using decryptions in prosecution.[13] It considered that, although decryptions may corroborate Elizabeth Bentley and enable successful prosecution of subjects such as Judith Coplon and the Perlo and Silvermaster groups, a careful study of all factors compelled the conclusion it would not be in the best interests of the United States to use Venona project information for prosecution.
The Memo gives a number of reasons why it was uncertain whether or not the Venona project information should be revealed and admitted into evidence.
A major hurdle was that a question of law was involved. A defense attorney probably would immediately move to dismiss the evidence as hearsay, being that neither the Soviet official who sent the message, nor the Soviet official who received it was available to testify. The FBI reasoned that decrypts probably could have been introduced, on an exception to the hearsay rule, based on the expert testimony of cryptographers.
In addition, according to Boarman, "the fragmentary nature of the messages and the extensive use of cover names therein make positive identification of the subjects difficult." Once an individual had been considered for recruitment as an agent by the Soviets, sufficient background data on him was sent to Moscow. Cover names were used not only for Soviet agents but other people as well. President Roosevelt, for example, was called "Kapitan" (Captain), and Los Alamos the "Reservation". Cover names also were frequently changed, and a cover name might actually apply to two different people, depending on the date it was used. Several subjects, notably Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, Maurice Halperin, and Lauchlin Currie, denied the accusations in open Congressional Hearings based on information from sources other than Venona. Assumptions made by cryptographers, questionable interpretations and translations placed reliance upon the expert testimony of cryptographers, and the entire case would be circumstantial.
Defense attorneys also would probably request to examine messages which cryptographers were unsuccessful in breaking and not in evidence, on the belief that such messages, if decoded, could exonerate their clients. The FBI determined that this would lead to the exposure of Government techniques and practices in the cryptography field to unauthorized persons, compromise the Government's efforts in communications intelligence, and impact other pending investigations.
Before any messages could be used in court they would have to be declassified. Approval would have to come from several layers of bureaucracy, and probably the President, as well as notification to British counterparts working on the same problem. In an election year, the Bureau feared it would be caught between the two sides of a venomous political dispute.
Public disclosure
For much of its history, knowledge of Venona was restricted, even from the highest levels of government. Senior Army officers, in consultation with the FBI and CIA made the decision to restrict knowledge of Venona within the government (even the CIA was not made an active partner until 1952). Army Chief of Staff Omar Bradley, concerned about the White House's history of leaking sensitive information, decided to deny President Truman direct knowledge of the project. The president received the substance of the material only through FBI, Justice Department and CIA reports on counterintelligence and intelligence matters. He was not told the material came from decoded Soviet ciphers. To some degree this secrecy was counter-productive; Truman was distrustful of FBI head J. Edgar Hoover, and suspected the reports were exaggerated for political purposes.
Some of the earliest detailed public knowledge that Soviet code messages from WWII period had been broken came with the release of Robert Lamphere's book, The FBI-KGB War, in 1986. Lamphere had been the FBI liaison to the code-breaking activity, had considerable knowledge of Venona and the counter-intelligence work that resulted from it.
Many inside the NSA had argued internally that the time had come to publicly release the details of the Venona project, but it was not until 1995 that a bipartisan Commission on Government Secrecy, with Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan as chairman, released the Venona project materials. Moynihan wrote:
- "[The] secrecy system has systematically denied American historians access to the records of American history. Of late we find ourselves relying on archives of the former Soviet Union in Moscow to resolve questions of what was going on in Washington at mid-century. [...] the Venona intercepts contained overwhelming proof of the activities of Soviet spy networks in America, complete with names, dates, places, and deeds."[14]
One of the considerations in releasing Venona translations was the privacy interests of the individuals mentioned, referenced, or identified in the translations. Some names were not released because to do so would constitute an invasion of privacy.[15] However, in at least one case, independent researchers identified one of the subjects whose name had been obscured by the NSA.
The dearth of reliable information available to the public—or even to the President and Congress—may have helped to polarize debates of the 1950s over the extent and danger of Soviet espionage in the United States. Anti-Communists suspected that many spies remained at large, perhaps including some that were known to the government. Those who criticized the governmental and non-governmental efforts to root out and expose communists felt that these efforts were an overreaction (in addition to other reservations about McCarthyism). Public access—or broader governmental access—to the Venona evidence would certainly have affected this debate, as it is affecting the retrospective debate among historians and others now. As the Moynihan Commission wrote in its final report:
- "A balanced history of this period is now beginning to appear; the Venona messages will surely supply a great cache of facts to bring the matter to some closure. But at the time, the American Government, much less the American public, was confronted with possibilities and charges, at once baffling and terrifying."
Bearing of Venona on particular cases
Venona has added information—some of it unequivocal, some of it ambiguous—to several espionage cases. Some known spies, including Theodore Hall, were neither prosecuted nor publicly implicated, because the Venona evidence against them was not made public.
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg
Venona has added significant information to the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, making it clear that Julius was guilty of espionage, but also showing that Ethel was probably no more than an accomplice, if that. Additionally, Venona and other recent information has shown that the content of Julius' espionage was not as vital as was alleged at the time. The information Julius passed to the Soviets related to the proximity fuze, or detonation device, not the actual process of nuclear fission. The Venona evidence determines that sources within the Manhattan Project itself, codenamed "Quantum" and "Pers," and both still unidentified, facilitated transfer of nuclear weapons technology to the Soviet Union. Researchers are still seeking to identify some unidentified agents.
Alger Hiss
According to the Moynihan Commission on Government Secrecy, the complicity of Alger Hiss is settled by Venona,[16] as is that of Harry Dexter White. Senator Moynihan said after release of the Commission's findings that government officials knew Hiss was guilty but did not speak up for fear of compromising the Venona project. However, a number of current authors consider the Venona evidence on Hiss to be inconclusive.[17]
Soviet espionage in Australia
The founding of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation by Labor Prime Minister Ben Chifley was considered highly controversial within Chifley's own party. Until then, the left-leaning Australian Labor Party had been hostile to domestic intelligence agencies on civil liberties grounds, and a Labor government actually founding one was a surprising about face. Venona material has now made it clear that Chifley was motivated by evidence that Soviet agents were operating in Australia. Investigation had revealed that Wally Clayton (codenamed KLOD), a Soviet agent within the Communist Party of Australia, was forming an underground network within the CPA so that the party could continue to operate if it was banned.
Critical Views
Although widely accepted by many historians and academics, the relevance, accuracy, and even the authenticity of Venona decrypts have been questioned by some. Many of critics of the released Venona papers claim the material to be unverifiable with some, such as Brian Villa of the University of Ottawa and Rutgers University’s Norman Markowitz, going so far as to claim that the NSA had doctored or fabricated Venona material in its entirety in order to discredit the reputation of the CPUSA and its members.[18] Research in Soviet Archives has added to the corroboration of some Venona material, including the identities of many codenamed individuals.[19]
Some remain skeptical of both the substance and the prevailing interpretations made since the release of the Venona material. Victor Navasky, editor and publisher of The Nation, has written an editorial highly critical of John Earl Haynes' and Harvey Klehr's interpretation of recent work on the subject of Soviet espionage:
- In Appendix A to their book on Venona, Haynes and Klehr list 349 names (and code names) of people who they say "had a covert relationship with Soviet intelligence that is confirmed in the Venona traffic." They do not qualify the list, which includes everyone from Alger Hiss to Harry Magdoff, the former New Deal economist and Marxist editor of Monthly Review, and Walter Bernstein, the lefty screenwriter who reported on Tito for Yank magazine. It occurs to Haynes and Klehr to reprint ambiguous Venona material related to Magdoff and Bernstein but not to call up either of them (or any other living person on their list) to get their version of what did or didn't happen.
- The reader is left with the implication—unfair and unproven—that every name on the list was involved in espionage, and as a result, otherwise careful historians and mainstream journalists now routinely refer to Venona as proof that many hundreds of Americans were part of the red spy network.
- My own view is that thus far Venona has been used as much to distort as to expand our understanding of the cold war—not just because some researchers have misinterpreted these files but also because, in the absence of hard supporting evidence, partially decrypted files in this world of espionage, where deception is the rule, are by definition potential time bombs of misinformation.[20]
Navasky endeavors to deconstruct the concept of espionage itself. "There were a lot of exchanges of information among people of good will, many of whom were Marxists, some of whom were Communists, some of whom were critical of US government policy and most of whom were patriots. Most of these exchanges were innocent and were within the law. Some were innocent but nevertheless were in technical violation of the law. And there were undoubtedly bona fide espionage agents—on both sides." [21]
Nigel West on the other hand, expressed confidence in the decrypts: "Venona remain[s] an irrefutable resource, far more reliable than the mercurial recollections of KGB defectors and the dubious conclusions drawn by paranoid analysts mesmerized by Machiavellian plots."[22]
Haynes and Klehr dismiss critics of the importance and truthfulness of Venona material as being naïve about Soviet espionage as well as ignorant of evidence that supports it.[23]
Ellen Schrecker has rebutted this interpretation. "Because they offer insights into the world of the secret police on both sides of the Iron Curtain, it is tempting to treat the FBI and Venona materials less critically than documents from more accessible sources. But there are too many gaps in the record to use these materials with complete confidence."[24] Schrecker has come to the determination that the documents have genuinely established the guilt of many prominent figures. However, Schrecker is still critical of the hardline interpretation of the materials by scholars such as Haynes, arguing that "...complexity, nuance, and a willingness to see the world in other than black and white seem alien to Haynes' view of history."[25]
See also
- Elizabeth Bentley
- Michael Burd
- Whittaker Chambers
- Judith Coplon
- Lauchlin Currie
- Klaus Fuchs
- Harry Gold
- David Greenglass
- Ruth Greenglass
- History of Soviet espionage in the United States
- Donald Duart Maclean
- Joseph McCarthy
- David Niles
- Kim Philby
- Victor Perlo
- List of Americans in the Venona papers
- Franklin Delano Roosevelt
- Julius and Ethel Rosenberg
- Nathan Silvermaster
- Joseph Stalin
- Bill Weisband
- Harry Dexter White
Notes
- ^
Benson, Robert L. "The Venona Story". National Security Agency. Retrieved 2006-06-18.
{{cite web}}
: Cite has empty unknown parameters:|coauthors=
and|month=
(help) - ^
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Chairman (1997). "Report of the Commission On Protecting And Reducing Government Secrecy; Appendix A: The Experience of The Bomb". United States Government Printing Office. Retrieved 2006-06-18.
{{cite web}}
: Cite has empty unknown parameters:|coauthors=
and|month=
(help) - ^
Moynihan, Daniel Patrick (1998). Secrecy : The American Experience. Yale University Press. pp. pg. 54. ISBN 0-300-08079-4.
{{cite book}}
:|pages=
has extra text (help); Cite has empty unknown parameter:|coauthors=
(help) "these intercepts provided...descriptions of the activities of precisely the same Soviet spies who were named by defecting Soviet agents Alexander Orlov, Walter Krivitsky, Whittaker Chambers, and Elizabeth Bentley." - ^
Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy. "A Brief Account of the American Experience" (PDF). Report of the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy. VI; Appendix A. U.S. Government Printing Office. pp. pg. A-27. Retrieved 2006-06-26.
{{cite web}}
:|pages=
has extra text (help); Cite has empty unknown parameters:|month=
and|coauthors=
(help) "Thanks to successful espionage, the Russians tested their first atom bomb in August 1949, just four years after the first American test. As will be discussed, we had learned of the Los Alamos spies in December 1946—December 20, to be precise. The U.S. Army Security Agency, in the person of Meredith Knox Gardner, a genius in his own right, had broken one of what it termed the Venona messages—the transmissions that Soviet agents in the United States sent to and received from Moscow." - ^ ibid, pg. A-7; "KGB cables indicated that the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in World War II had been thoroughly infiltrated with Soviet agents."
- ^ ibid, pg. 54; "In these coded messages the spies' identities were concealed beneath aliases, but by comparing the known movements of the agents with the corresponding activities described in the intercepts, the FBI and the code-breakers were able to match the aliases with the actual spies."
- ^ ibid pg. 146-47; "Hiss was indeed a Soviet agent and appears to have been regarded by Moscow as its most important."
- ^
Benson, Robert L. "The Venona Story". National Security Agency. Retrieved 2006-06-26.
{{cite web}}
: Cite has empty unknown parameters:|coauthors=
and|month=
(help) - ^
"Eavesdropping on Hell". National Security Agency. Retrieved 2006-06-26.
{{cite web}}
: Cite has empty unknown parameters:|coauthors=
and|month=
(help) "Currie, known as PAZh (Page) and White, whose cover names were YuRIST (Jurist) and changed later to LAJER (Lawyer), had been Soviet agents since the 1930s. They had been identified as Soviet agents in Venona translations and by other agents turned witnesses or informants for the FBI and Justice Department. From the Venona translations, both were known to pass intelligence to their handlers, notably the Silvermaster network." - ^
Warner, Michael (2000). "The Office of Strategic Services: America's First Intelligence Agency; Chapter: X-2". Central Intelligence Agency Publications. Retrieved 2006-06-27.
{{cite web}}
: Cite has empty unknown parameters:|coauthors=
and|month=
(help) "Duncan C. Lee, Research & Analysis labor economist Donald Wheeler, Morale Operations Indonesia expert Jane Foster Zlatowski, and Research & Analysis Latin America specialist Maurice Halperin, nevertheless passed information to Moscow." For title page to book, see here - ^
Warner, Michael (2000). "The Office of Strategic Services: America's First Intelligence Agency; Chapter: X-2". Central Intelligence Agency Publications. Retrieved 2006-06-26.
{{cite web}}
: Cite has empty unknown parameters:|coauthors=
and|month=
(help) - ^
Peake, Hayden B. "The Venona Progeny". Naval War College Review, Summer 2000, Vol. LIII, No. 3. Retrieved 2006-06-26.
{{cite web}}
: Cite has empty unknown parameters:|coauthors=
and|month=
(help) "Venona makes absolutely clear that they had active agents in the U.S. State Department, Treasury Department, Justice Department, Senate committee staffs, the military services, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the Manhattan Project, and the White House, as well as wartime agencies. No modern government was more thoroughly penetrated." - ^
"FBI Office Memorandum; A. H. Belmont to L. V. Boardman". 1956. Retrieved 2006-06-27.
{{cite web}}
: Cite has empty unknown parameters:|accessyear=
,|accessmonthday=
, and|coauthors=
(help); Unknown parameter|month=
ignored (help) - ^
Moynihan, Daniel Patrick (1998). Secrecy : The American Experience. Yale University Press. pp. pg. 15. ISBN 0-300-08079-4.
{{cite book}}
:|pages=
has extra text (help); Cite has empty unknown parameter:|coauthors=
(help) - ^
Benson, Robert Louis. "Venona Historical Monograph #4: The KGB in San Francisco and Mexico City and the GRU in New York and Washington". National Security Agency Archives, Cryptological Museum. Retrieved 2006-06-18.
{{cite web}}
: Cite has empty unknown parameters:|month=
and|coauthors=
(help) - ^
Linder, Douglas (2003). "The Venona Files and the Alger Hiss Case". Retrieved 2006-06-27.
{{cite web}}
: Cite has empty unknown parameters:|accessyear=
,|month=
,|accessmonthday=
, and|coauthors=
(help) - ^ Schindler, John R. (2005). "Hiss in VENONA: The Continuing Controversy". Retrieved 2006-09-17.
- ^ Klehr, Harvey (2005). "VENONA and Cold War Historiography in the Academic World". 2005 NSA Cryptologic History Symposium. Retrieved 2006-11-03.
- ^
Haynes, John Earl and Klehr, Harvey (2003). In Denial: Historians, Communism, and Espionage. Encounter Books. pp. pg. 101. ISBN 1-893554-72-4.
{{cite book}}
:|pages=
has extra text (help); Cite has empty unknown parameter:|coauthors=
(help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) - ^
Navasky, Victir (July 16, 2001). "Cold War Ghosts". The Nation. Retrieved 2006-06-27.
{{cite web}}
: Cite has empty unknown parameters:|accessyear=
,|month=
,|accessmonthday=
, and|coauthors=
(help); More than one of|author=
and|last=
specified (help) - ^ ibid.
- ^
West, Nigel (1999). Venona--The Greatest Secret of the Cold War. Harper Collins. pp. pg. 330. ISBN 0-00-653071-0.
{{cite book}}
:|pages=
has extra text (help); Cite has empty unknown parameter:|coauthors=
(help) - ^
Haynes, John Earl (2000). "The Cold War Debate Continues: A Traditionalist View of Historical Writing on Domestic Communism and Anti-Communism". Journal of Cold War Studies. Volume 2 (Number 1).
{{cite journal}}
:|issue=
has extra text (help);|volume=
has extra text (help); Unknown parameter|month=
ignored (help) - ^
Schrecker, Ellen (1998). Many are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America. Little, Brown. pp. pp. xvii-xviii. ISBN 0-316-77470-7.
{{cite book}}
:|pages=
has extra text (help); Cite has empty unknown parameter:|coauthors=
(help) - ^
Schrecker, Ellen. "Comments on John Earl Haynes', "The Cold War Debate Continues: A Traditionalist View of Historical Writing on Domestic Communism and Anti-Communism"". Retrieved 2006-06-27.
{{cite web}}
: Cite has empty unknown parameters:|month=
and|coauthors=
(help)
References & further reading
Books
- Aldrich, Richard J. (2001). The Hidden Hand : Britain, America and Cold War Secret Intelligence. John Murray Pubs Ltd. ISBN 0-7195-5426-8.
{{cite book}}
: Cite has empty unknown parameter:|coauthors=
(help) - Bamford, James (2002). Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency. Anchor Books. ISBN 0-385-49908-6.
{{cite book}}
: Cite has empty unknown parameter:|coauthors=
(help) - Benson, Robert Louis (1996). Venona: Soviet Espionage and the American Response 1939-1957. Aegean Park Press. ISBN 0-89412-265-7.
{{cite book}}
: Cite has empty unknown parameter:|coauthors=
(help) - Budiansky, Stephen (2002). Battle of Wits: The Complete Story of Codebreaking in World War II. Free Press. ISBN 0-7432-1734-9.
{{cite book}}
: Cite has empty unknown parameter:|coauthors=
(help) - Haynes, John Earl (2000). Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America. Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-08462-5.
{{cite book}}
: Unknown parameter|coauthors=
ignored (|author=
suggested) (help) - Lamphere, Robert J. (1995). The FBI-KGB War: A Special Agent's Story. Mercer University Press. ISBN 0-86554-477-8.
{{cite book}}
: Unknown parameter|coauthors=
ignored (|author=
suggested) (help) - Schrecker, Ellen (1998). Many Are the Crimes : McCarthyism in America. Little, Brown. ISBN 0-316-77470-7.
{{cite book}}
: Cite has empty unknown parameter:|coauthors=
(help) - Schrecker, Ellen (2006). Cold War Triumphalism: The Misuse of History After the Fall of Communism. New Press. ISBN 1-59558-083-2.
{{cite book}}
: Cite has empty unknown parameter:|coauthors=
(help) - Romerstein, Herbert and Breindel, Eric (2000). Venona Secrets: Exposing Soviet Espionage and America's Traitors. Regnery Publishing. ISBN 0895262754.
{{cite book}}
: Cite has empty unknown parameter:|coauthors=
(help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) - Warner, Michael (1996). Venona - Soviet Espionage & American Response. Aegean Park Press. ISBN 0894122657.
- West, Nigel (1999). Venona--The Greatest Secret of the Cold War. Harper Collins. ISBN 0-00-653071-0.
{{cite book}}
: Cite has empty unknown parameter:|coauthors=
(help)
Online
- "NSA official Venona site". National Security Agency. Retrieved 2006-07-09.
{{cite web}}
: Cite has empty unknown parameters:|accessyear=
and|accessmonthday=
(help) - Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Chairman (1997). "Report of the Commission On Protecting And Reducing Government Secrecy". United States Government Printing Office. Retrieved 2006-06-18.
{{cite web}}
: Cite has empty unknown parameters:|coauthors=
and|month=
(help) - "Selected Venona Messages". Central Intelligence Agency. Retrieved 2006-07-09.
{{cite web}}
: Cite has empty unknown parameters:|accessyear=
and|accessmonthday=
(help) - "MI5 Releases to the National Archives". MI5. Retrieved 2006-07-09.
{{cite web}}
: Cite has empty unknown parameters:|accessyear=
and|accessmonthday=
(help) - Naranjo, Denis. "Venona Chronology 1939-1996". Retrieved 2006-07-09.
{{cite web}}
: Cite has empty unknown parameters:|accessyear=
and|accessmonthday=
(help) - "Red Files: Interview with Cecil Philips, US Signal Intelligence Service". PBS. Retrieved 2006-07-09.
{{cite web}}
: Cite has empty unknown parameters:|accessyear=
,|month=
,|accessmonthday=
, and|coauthors=
(help) - Benson, Robert L. "The Venona Story". National Security Agency. Retrieved 2006-06-18.
{{cite web}}
: Cite has empty unknown parameters:|coauthors=
and|month=
(help)