A paper which was not presented at the VENONA Conference: Oct. 3,4 1996
An Examination of the Authenticity of the Venona "Intercepts"
The announcement for this VENONA conference speaks of a “scholarly conference on Soviet intelligence efforts to penetrate the United States Government during the 1940s and 1950s [sic] and US counterespionage against such efforts.”(1)
        I have extreme difficulty understanding the announcement--probably because I have no intelligence background. The CIA is sponsoring a “scholarly” conference? This appears to me very alice-in-wonderlandish. If it is to be a genuine scholarly conference then one would expect the sponsors to honor the customary academic traditions. All the relevant material would have to be thoroughly documented. Private sources or private truths would be unacceptable. Everything would be out in the open. That’s the only way the participant can critique the presented material. This is the essence of a scholarly conference. Since the CIA is by nature a secretive organization, how can it possibly--through the persona of its creation, CENTER for the STUDY of INTELLIGENCE--sponsor such a conference?  Using the government’s own pronouncements and documentation, it is not difficult to show that this conference is an attempt on the part of the CIA to acquire a veneer of legitimacy;  to offset its reputation as the author of such egregious activities as the Viet Nam Phoenix program, attempted assassinations of heads of state, and the overthrow of legitimately elected governments. Why now? What secrets were there that could not have been aired 10--20--30--40 years ago--without any harm to the security of the USA?
        Before I go further I have to make clear that I am not a disinterested party. I was convicted in 1951, together with Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, on the charge of conspiracy to commit espionage--a conviction achieved  through the use of government-sponsored perjury--and served more than 18 years in prison. Strangely enough my supposed cover names “RELE/SERB” appear in only four of the 2200 documents comprising Venona,(2) with the final reference concluding that the code name that the decrypters tentatively assigned to me was in error (message no. 943). Could it be that I, a convicted spy, (J. Edgar Hoover thought I should be given the death penalty) somehow eluded the best efforts of the Venona decryption team to include me in? Or is it that perhaps I am innocent--even though convicted? And  strangely, even with every resource at their command the “decrypters” could not somehow find any messages to incriminate me.
        The opening ceremony that launched the Venona show last July 11,  made a mockery of the whole enterprise as a serious attempt at informing the public about this project. To the media the CIA projected it as an unveiling of Cold War decrypted  Soviet cables, an opening up of the CIA’s files with all of its secrets. Actually the ceremony developed as a propaganda exercise which sought to justify the Cold War, coupled with a sumptuous display of self-congratulatory hyperbole: “It was a brilliantly successful cryptoanalytic effort;” (3) or,  “Today we release information which reveals another tremendous intelligence success for the United States;”(4)  or, “The official revelations about Venona are amongst the most important ever made about codebreaking since the end of WW II.” (5) Let us examine some of these “revelations.”
        Contrary to NSA director Admiral Crowell’s assertion that “the FBI used the information unlocked by these codebreakers...to successfully arrest and prosecute the atom spies,” (3) it is a matter of record, that with the possible exception of Klaus Fuchs, Venona did not result in the apprehension and conviction of a single individual. Nonetheless, the day after the initial  ceremony all of the major newspapers, with a single exception, attributed the arrest of Julius Rosenberg to Venona, and concluded that the case was now closed. This, despite the evidence in Julius’ FBI files that contain a clear admission that the CIA had no idea who “ANTENNA/ LIBERAL”  (the cover names that the CIA ultimately assigned to Julius) was until Greenglass fingered him.(6) Thus it was only with backward processing that they were able to assign these cover names to Julius. And this is the crux of the decryption process--which the CIA refuses to reveal--how did they correlate the cover names with the true names. In my own case they concluded that the cover names “RELE/SERB” were Morton Sobell--until a message revealed that RELE had an artificial leg.(2) But upon what did they base their initial notion, that RELE was Morton Sobell? It would be both informative and interesting to learn how the decrypters made their “mistake”.
        This whole area--connecting cover names with real names--remains clouded and mysterious. It is difficult to understand how it came about that while almost everyone mentioned had a cover name, several central figures--Max Elitcher, Alfred Sarant, Ethel (whose first name only is given), Ruth Greenglass, among them--are identified by their real names, together with detailed characterizations so as to make their identity and that of others with whom they are associated, unmistakable. Then it became child’s play to connect certain cover names with clearly identified real names. But not all are identified that easily. 
        Let us look at the decryption process itself. This is not the first time these decrypts have been released. It is a matter of record that Venona has been leaked piecemeal to insiders over the past two decades.(7,8) It is amusing, that the pamphlet “Introductory History of Venona,” distributed by the NSA, goes to some lengths to deny that “battlefield-recovered Soviet codebooks” were of any assistance in the decryption effort.(9) Robert Lamphere, the FBI’s liaison man, and others have always pointed to these Soviet codebooks to explain the breakthrough in the decoding effort.(7) Nonetheless the whole decoding exercise, despite some attempts at generalized “explanations” remains a deep mystery, since single-use-pad encryption messages are theoretically impossible to break.(10)
        Another troublesome area revolves around the NSA’s admitted inability to decode messages received after some time in 1945. At the initial ceremony Vice Admiral McConnell acknowledged: “We don’t know when or who or exactly where our ability to exploit the communications was compromised, and early on our window of opportunity was compromised...and closed forever .”(11)
        In a similar vein Lamphere writes: “I was also chagrined...to learn that by May 1945 the KGB had changed its codes and Meridith Gardner could not break any of the messages dated after that time.”(7) And even the official publication of the NSA,  VENONA Historical Monograph #3, states that no KGB messages after 1945 were ever broken.(12) Thus to argue, as did Dr. David Kahn, the former official NSA historian in residence, that the reason the Venona messages were not introduced in the Rosenberg-Sobell trial in 1951 was in order not to compromise Venona, (13) when in fact it had been compromised six years earlier, demonstrates the mendacity which permeated the whole ceremony.
        One can only speculate about how Venona was compromised, since the NSA has sought to deliberately confuse the question. Lamphere writes that in 1948 he was fortunate to acquire “a mass of material (plain text)...that had been sent to the Soviet Union in ciphered form in 1944.” He explains: “This material had been photographed by New York FBI agents in the course of an investigation [sic] into Soviet operations in New York in 1944.”(7) But Richard Rhodes, in “Dark Sun,” is a little less coy about the “investigation.” He writes that “New York had pulled a bag job on the Soviets in 1944, burglarizing their offices; came back with a stack of documents.”(8)
        If we change the date of the bag job to late 1945, a more likely date for such an operation since the war was now ended and the cold war had begun in earnest, I think it would help to explain the sudden closing of the “window of opportunity.” What with the NSA  now in possession of the plain text of a quantity of coded messages, decoding the other Soviet messages became easier--which might help us to understand why Director McConnell and others were so unwilling to hazard any explanation for the closure of the window.
        The most troublesome area involves the exact times when the claimed decrypts were produced---the initial and the various reissues--in order to be able to judge how much the decrypts were influenced by outside information. Here the NSA seems to have introduced factors calculated to confuse the matter. The fourth and last Venona release has a considerable number of decrypts extending through 1946--which is well out of the range of the “window of opportunity.” What to make of this?
        The speakers at the ceremony and the distributed pamphlet repeatedly speak of the splendid cooperation between the FBI and the CIA (3,4,13), calling this project “a model of outstanding interagency cooperation,”  and “you have established for us not just a legacy but a model for cooperation.” But it is common knowledge that  J. Edgar Hoover looked on the CIA with a jaundiced eye and was completely uncooperative--and even worse.(14)
        The CIA has presented Venona in a typical Hollywood fashion. The messages that they call “intercepts” were handed over to them by the cable companies which the Soviets used to transmit their traffic. Almost 50 years later the CIA is still declassifying these “secret” documents, as if there can still be any secrets left. The whole operation appears to me to be an attempt to bolster the sagging image of the CIA, which has been taking a beating in the press, what with the Aldrich Ames affair as well as numerous bungled operations. And trying to lay to rest the question of the guilt of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg was no minor consideration.
        Having entered the fray under the aegis of an academic institution --center for the Study of Intelligence-- the CIA should recognize that it can no longer rely on its secretive methods. One might even go as far as to say that the CIA was brave in attempting this whole operation--to think that it could manage the outcome. Or was it simply chutzpah? 

1.  Center for Study of Intelligence Newsletter, no. 4, p. 4.
2.  Venona messages nos. 943 (4 July 1944), 976 (11 July 1944), 1251 (2 Sept. 1944).
3.  Admiral William P. Crowell,  Deputy Director NSA, remarks at NSA Venona Ceremony, July 11, 1995.
4.  Dr. John Deutch, CIA director, at the Ceremony.
5.  Dr. David Kahn, NSA historian-in-residence, at the Ceremony.  
6.  FBI Files: 1) letter to Director from Scheidt in re call between Inspector A. Belmont and ASAC W. Whelan of June 16, 1950 (date of letter not clear, p. 1-4);  2) letter to Director, FBI (Sept. 27, 1950) Bureau File 65-58236;  3) Joseph Weichbrod memo from D M Ladd (Sept. 13, 1948).
7.  Robert J. Lamphere and Tom Schachtman, The FBI-KGB War (Random House, 1986), chapter 10.
8.  Richard Rhodes, Dark Sun: the Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (Simon & Schuster,1995), p. 336. 
9. Introductory History of Venona and a Guide to the Translations, prepared by Robert Louis Benson (National Security Agency, 1995), p. 8.
10. Article by George Johnson, New York Times (July 16, 1995). 
11. Vice Admiral John M. McConnell, Director NSA, at the Ceremony,
12. VENONA Historical Monograph, #3, p.10: “No other Washington-Moscow KGB messages from any other year [other than 1944 and 1945] were ever successfully deciphered.” 
13. Louis J. Freeh, Director FBI, at the Ceremony.
14. David Martin, Wilderness of Mirrors, ( Harper & Row, 1980) p.36-37. Tells how J. Edgar Hoover went so far as to sabotage the CIA’s South American operation.

10/29/96

NCRRC Note: An exchange about Venona between Mort Sobell and others interested in these issues can be found at:

http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/~diplo/Sobell.htm

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