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Venona Intercepts: Still Scary After All These Years
Southwest News-Herald ^ | January 5, 2010 | SALLY WRIGHT

Posted on Tuesday, January 05, 2010 11:53:47 AM by Tailgunner Joe

The Bard tells us, rightly, that the past is prologue. But until America’s greatest military intelligence success — and failure — becomes common knowledge Americans will remain intellectual sitting ducks, herded hither and yon, hoping to build a sheltering future on shaky misinformation.

I’m talking about the Venona Code intercepts: The 3000 encrypted communications between Soviet spies operating in this country and their masters in Moscow, which American and British code breakers began deciphering in 1946.

These KGB messages revealed that the Soviets had agents at the highest levels of the executive and legislative branches of our government — and those of our allies — before, during, and shortly after, WWII.

In just the small fraction of intercepted cables we’re able to decrypt more than 300 American residents are identified as Soviet agents. The enormous damage they did us still affects lives today.

We’ve long known that scientists at Los Alamos handed the Soviet Union the secrets of nuclear fission, enabling Stalin to build his own A-bomb. The geo-political fall-out from that (pun intended) can hardly be overestimated.

Venona gives us extensive detail. And much more.

When the Allies met at Yalta and Potsdam at the close of WWII, Soviet agents were among America’s highest level representatives, helping to send millions of non-Soviet citizens into Stalin’s Gulag, and set up the Soviet take-over of Eastern Europe.

And why was the West blind-sided in 1950 when North Korea invaded the South, starting the Korean War?

Because Willam Weisband, a Soviet spy and language expert helping American code breakers working on Venona and other Soviet codes, told the Soviets in 1948 of our successes. All their military/intelligence codes consequently went black, almost overnight, keeping us from learning they were helping China and North Korea prepare to invade the South.

That intelligence failure kept us from preparing for, or preventing, the Korean War.

Venona decrypts also describe how Soviet spies in America gave them our jet fighter secrets, enabling their MiG-15s to slaughter thousands in Korea.

So why do Americans typically think that Soviet spies in the US were a figment of Joe McCarthy’s imagination; and that the Rosenbergs, Hiss and Oppenheimer were wrongfully accused?

Because the US government didn’t release our Venona evidence till 1995. And then largely because two American scholars, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, had written about the Russian side of the Venona encryptions they’d discovered in Russia’s KGB archives in 1992.

The US initially had good reasons for hiding what we knew from Venona; like not wanting the Soviets to know what we’d learned and what we hadn’t, so spies we were watching wouldn’t be pulled and replaced.

But not releasing the Venona decryptions allowed forty years of misinformation to mislead American minds; to whitewash Hiss and the Rosenbergs; to vilify Bentley and Chambers, Soviet spies who changed their ways and came clean in the forties.

Still today, when the truths revealed in our Venona decrypts have been out for fourteen years, the general news media, Hollywood in particular (which continues to release misinformation on American spy hunts annually), as well as many in academia, remain strangely silent.

It’s no less dangerous now. Islamic terrorists are a different enemy, but the same intelligence challenges remain. And we seem to be making s similar mistakes: Political correctness whitewashes our enemies; enemy agents distort the facts; enemy friends ignore the truth. So we don’t know what to believe.

These are the lessons of 9/11. Unlearned. Still coded. Ignored. If we don’t learn from Venona - from the handful left who know what happened - the future will be catastrophic.

Alger Hiss - Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alger_Hiss
Alger Hiss and his younger brother, Donald Hiss, began working in the ... Hiss served as the secretary-general of the United Nations Conference on ...

[Here is the best that google is willing to offer regarding key words: “algar hiss” woodstock typewriter. Our forum’s research has been purged Nazi style. Interestingly, this thread is already available on google, but I doubt they want anyone to read this thread when I’m finished with it.]

The Pumpkin Papers and Their Role in the Alger Hiss Case
http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/hiss/pumpkinp.html

The Typewriter - The Alger Hiss Story
http://homepages.nyu.edu/~th15/typewr.html

On the barricades, and off - Google Books ResultMelvin J.
http://books.google.com/books?id=73lGvk6EGWgC&pg=PA124&lpg=PA124&dq=woodstock+typewriter+%22algar+hiss%22&source=bl&ots=RkkOzXy7qd&sig=TLhBESrBcZwrxyrTj3M6ZATKphM&hl=en&ei=pyG7S6X6IIWdlge-guS-Bw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CBYQ6AEwAw
Lasky - 1989 - Political Science - 479 pages
... insight of a New York publisher and historian to whom Algar Hiss had applied for a ... about the Woodstock typewriter on which his wife typed the secret ...