Here are the books on Venona. I can only recommend the first personally. It busts the Rosenbergs, Hiss, Hopkins and most of the other "controversial" accused communists. The second one appears at a glance to be written a little more accessibly for people who aren't espionage freaks.
The links are to the books' pages at Amazon.com. There is a 44 page excerpt of
The Venona Secrets and a 24 page excerpt of
Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage there, including the entire index. There are also some used copies of the older
Secrets available there, if money's tight.
Incidentally, there is a tantalizing clue to the genesis of Venona in Leo Marks's Between Silk and Cyanide but that's all I'll say about it (cryptology is a hobby of mine).
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
the other freaky thing about the communist smear of McCarthy was that they assumed McCarthy senate hearings were a set up in the same way that the Russian show trials were a set up for mass murder.
This was not the case. Nor was it ever in the cards.
What was the case was that at the time Stalin was gearing up for a pogrom in what was later to be known as the "Doctor's Plot". The historical evidence suggests that this would have happened had not Stalin died.
As it is the number of Spies that McCarthy talked about fairly well matched the number of spies that the Venona cables outed and intimated. (I think the confirmed spies were something like 100 and the number of spies that the cables pointed to--but couldn't name--was something like 400.)
The national security agency told the FBI about the information contained on the Venonoa cables but insisted that the FBI had to develop their own information to make the cases against the spies. They couldn't use NSA info to convict them. In most of the cases the FBI was unable to do so. People like the Rosenburgs and the Hiss's were the exception.
Did the FBI tell McCarthy about the Venona intercepts? There is no evidence that this happened. But the coincidences seem strong enough to suggest that time may eventually tell a bit more about that angle.
The really grisly part of this story is that the Russian KGB had a spy in the NSA decoding department who told the Russians that their diplomatic code had been broken in 1948. So the Russians knew. And the Americans learned about the spy soon after. (he fled the country first.)
That means that both Russian and American intelligence knew about the facts behind Venona and McCarthy and they knew that each other knew.
It was the US public that was left in the dark. And this has been the cause of unbelievably bitter divisions in the country since.
I find the subject fascinating as well. I read a book by Martin Gardner that got me interested.