The Venona Secrets

Exposing Soviet Espionage and America's Traitors

Herbert Romerstein, Eric Breindel

• Editorial: Regnery History
• Año: 2001
• ISBN:
  9781596987326
• Categoría: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Categoría: Inteligencia y espionaje

The Venona Secrets presents one of the last great, untold stories of World War II and the Cold War.In 1995, secret Soviet cable traffic from the 1940s that the United States intercepted and eventually decrypted finally became available to American historians. Now, after spending more than five years researching all the available evidence, espionage experts Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel reveal the full, shocking story of the days when Soviet spies ran their fingers through America's atomic-age secrets. Included in The Venona Secrets are the details of the spying activities that reached from Harry Hopkins in Franklin Roosevelt s White House to Alger Hiss in the State Department to Harry Dexter White in the Treasury. More than that, The Venona Secrets exposes: • Information that links Albert Einstein to Soviet intelligence and conclusive evidence showing that J. Robert Oppenheimer gave Moscow our atomic secrets.• How Soviet espionage reached its height when the United States and the Soviet Union were supposedly allies in World War II.• The previously unsuspected vast network of Soviet spies in America.• How the Venona documents confirm the controversial revelations made in the 1940s by former Soviet agents Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley.• The role of the American Communist Party in supporting and directing Soviet agents.• How Stalin s paranoia had him target Jews (code-named Rats ) and Trotskyites even after Trotsky's death.• How the Soviets penetrated America's own intelligence services.The Venona Secrets is a masterful compendium of spy versus spy that puts the Venona transcripts in context with secret FBI reports, congressional investigations, and documents recently uncovered in the former Soviet archives.Romerstein and Breindel cast a spotlight on one of the most shadowy episodes in recent American history - a past when by our very own government officials, whether wittingly or unwittingly, shielded treason infected Washington and Soviet agents.

CHAPTER 1

What Was Venona?

VENONA WAS THE TOP SECRET NAME given by the United States government to an extensive program to break Soviet codes and read intercepted communications between Moscow and its intelligence stations in the West. The program was launched in February 1943 by the U.S. Army’s Signal Intelligence Service, the forerunner of the National Security Agency (NSA). The effort focused on piles of coded and enciphered messages that had been sent over commercial telegraph lines. The cables in question were dispatched between 1940 and 1948. While between 1947 and 1952 most of the intercepted messages susceptible to decoding were read, the effort to crack open as many cables as possible lasted until 1980.

The Soviet foreign intelligence service, known by the acronym OGPU, was renamed the NKVD before the war. Still later, it would be known as the KGB. During the time that concerns us, some spy operations also were carried out within America and elsewhere by the NKVD’s colleagues in Soviet military intelligence, later known as the GRU. The Red Army and Navy had separate agents targeting areas of special interest. But most of the espionage was conducted by the NKVD, which had replaced the GRU in the late 1930s in most intelligence collection.

Venona confirmed some of the conclusions of American counterintelligence and provided evidence for new conclusions about how Soviet espionage operated in the United States. The NKVD stations were called Rezidenturas. There were four of them in the United States. One was an “illegal Rezidentura,” which we will discuss below. Three were what the Soviets called “legal Rezidenturas.” These operated out of the Soviet embassy in Washington and the consulates in New York and San Francisco. During World War II, the Rezident, or chief, was Vassiliy Zarubin, who first in the New York consulate and later at the embassy in Washington used the name Vassiliy Zubilin.

Born in 1894, Zarubin joined the Cheka, Lenin’s secret police, in 1920 and had a varied career in both legal and “illegal” work. In 1925 he was assigned to the Cheka’s Foreign Intelligence Department and worked in China and, later, Western Europe. Subsequently, from 1934 to 1939, Zarubin worked as an “illegal” in the United States and Nazi Germany under the name Edward Herbert. He was recalled to the Soviet Union after the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact and assigned to the NKVD’s other activity—internal repression.

In accordance with the Nazi-Soviet agreement, after the Nazi attack on Poland, the Red Army attacked the Poles from the east. The agreement with the Nazis provided the Soviet Union with almost half of Poland. By October 1939 thousands of Polish officers and enlisted men were in the hands of the Red Army. The officers were put in special camps and interrogated by the NKVD.

Zarubin arrived at one of the camps, called Kozelsk, on October 31, 1939. Although not officially the camp commander, Zarubin gave orders as if he had total control. On Zarubin’s orders, some prisoners were transferred to the Lubyanka, the NKVD headquarters in Moscow, for further interrogation. His responsibility was to determine which Polish officers should be severely punished for previous anti-Soviet activity and which could be recruited for Soviet intelligence operations. He spent much of his time speaking with staff officers, former college professors, and others who might be useful.

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Professor Stanislaw Swianiewicz was one of only a few who survived because he was removed from Kozelsk shortly before most of the others were sent to Katyn Forest to be shot. He remembered Zarubin, whom he referred to as Kombrig (Brigade Commander) Zarubin:

[Zarubin] directed the NKVD team which investigated and recorded the history and background of prisoners…. Kombrig Zarubin was the highest Soviet authority with whom the Polish officers who were detained in Soviet POW camps could enter into direct contact, and the picture of that suave, educated, and well-mannered general is still vivid among the few survivors from those camps. There is a mystery about Kombrig Zarubin, and it is hard to tell whether he should be regarded by Poles as an enemy or as a friend.

While others did most of the interrogating, Zarubin would single out specific prisoners for discussions:

The Kombrig was a very agreeable man to talk to. He was an educated man, he knew not only Russia, but the West as well. He spoke fluent French and German and had also some knowledge of English…. [U]sually he would offer his victim cigarettes of good quality. Sometimes also tea, cakes, and even oranges were served.

Zarubin would even lend the selected prisoners books from his library, which contained volumes in Russian, French, English, and German.¹

The work of the NKVD interrogators in Kozelsk was over by early February 1940. Zarubin returned to Moscow in January. Later, in April and May 1940, fifteen thousand Polish prisoners of war were transferred from Kozelsk and two other camps to Katyn Forest, where they were murdered by the NKVD on orders from Stalin and Lavrenti Beria, head of the secret police.²

After work at headquarters in Moscow, Zarubin spent a short time in China, where he reactivated an old Soviet agent, the ex-Nazi captain Walter Stennes, who was then a military advisor to the Chinese government. ³ Accompanied by his wife, Zarubin then returned to the United States on December 25, 1941 carrying diplomatic passports. They would remain in America until August 27, 1944.⁴

Zarubin discovered he was under FBI surveillance in July 1943 and concluded incorrectly that the FBI knew of his role in the murder of the Polish officers at Katyn. In a Venona message to Moscow, he said, “The real reasons for surveillance of me, I think, have been accurately ascertained—the ‘competitors’ [the FBI] have found out about my having been at Kozelsk.…” Elsewhere in the message, which was only partially broken, Zarubin referred to the Polish officers.⁵

In fact, the FBI knew nothing about his role in the murder of the Polish officers, but it suspected he was an NKVD officer from observing his activities and contacts. A month later the FBI received an anonymous letter, in Russian, identifying a number of the NKVD officers in the United States, including Zarubin. But the letter also contained some bizarre statements, such as that Zarubin was a secret agent of Japan and that his wife, also an NKVD officer, was a secret agent of Germany. Although the letter was hard to take seriously—in fact, it was eventually ascertained that the author was Mironov, an NKVD officer who, according to recent information from former KGB officers, was emotionally disturbed⁶—it did say that Zarubin and another officer “interrogated and shot Poles in Kozelsk…. All the Poles who were saved know these butchers by sight. 10,000 Poles shot near Smolensk was the work of both of them.”⁷ The killing of the Polish officers was well known, for the Nazis had already found the bodies at Katyn, near Smolensk, and had announced this in April 1943,⁸ but the FBI was not sure that Zarubin was involved—until, that is, the recent release of Soviet documents.

Zarubin’s “legal” officers were all openly part of what the Soviets called the “Soviet colony” in the United States. Most used the cover of diplomats, but some were journalists for Soviet publications or the Soviet press agency TASS, or trade representatives of such Soviet companies as Amtorg. The agents they ran were Americans who used their government positions to collect secret information or to influence policy, or both. Some of the agents were so dedicated to the USSR that they were self-starters and would sometimes steal information or influence policy even without specific instructions, to the delight of their Soviet handlers.

The fourth Rezidentura was the “illegal” one. The Rezident was Iskhak Akhmerov. He and the “illegal” officers under him had no open contact with the so-called Soviet colony, although the legal Rezidentura provided the “illegals” with communication facilities to Moscow. “Illegal” intelligence officers had false identities and false nationalities. They worked with only the most important and sensitive Soviet agents and concealed their Soviet responsibilities from any unwitting American who might know them in their cover capacities. The only Americans who were aware that the “illegal” officers were Soviet officials were those who were themselves Soviet agents.

Zarubin worked closely in the United States with his “illegal” colleague Akhmerov, who reported to Moscow through Zarubin. Shortly before Zarubin’s departure for Moscow in 1944, Stepan Apresyan, who became the New York NKVD Rezident in 1944, had to get Moscow’s permission to maintain contact with Akhmerov. He cabled the Centre (NKVD’s Moscow headquarters) with a Venona message: “In connection with ‘Maksim’s’ [Zarubin’s] departure how often may one meet ‘Mer’ [Akhmerov] and should I be the one to meet him?”⁹

Akhmerov subsequently held high ranks at KGB headquarters in Moscow and eventually received substantial honors: He was twice awarded the Order of the Red Banner, an important medal for heroism, as well as the Badge of Honor. He was also named an “Honored Chekist,” the highest award issued specifically to KGB officers.

Born in 1901, Akhmerov joined the OGPU (foreign intelligence service) when he was twenty-nine years old. In 1932 he was assigned to the Foreign Department (INO) of the Intelligence Service. After serving in China in 1934, he was assigned to the United States as an “illegal” officer.¹⁰ The assignment was not necessarily a desirable one: A year earlier, the “illegal” Rezident, Valentine Markin, had died under mysterious circumstances in New York, and Akhmerov served under his successor, Boris Bazarov.¹¹

When Bazarov left for Moscow in 1938 to be purged, Akhmerov became Rezident. According to his colleague at NKVD headquarters, Vitaliy Pavlov, Akhmerov directed ten American agents at this time, including people in the State Department, Treasury Department, and White House. We know from Venona that one of the most important agents was Harry Dexter White.

Akhmerov was at first joined in the United States by his wife, Elena, but he soon found a new love in the person of Helen Lowry, the niece of American Communist Party leader Earl Browder. Lowry, who came to New York from Kansas in 1935, was given a job in a Soviet commercial enterprise and became active in the Communist Party. The next year Soviet intelligence recruited her, and she was assigned as the assistant to Akhmerov to run a Washington “safe house”—a secure place for an intelligence officer to meet agents. When she and Akhmerov fell in love, Elena went back to Moscow. Akhmerov and Lowry married in 1939.

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The newly wed Akhmerovs were recalled to Moscow in mid-1939, and she was given Soviet citizenship. But the Akhmerovs were sent back to the United States in September 1941 to reestablish the “illegal” apparatus that had been temporarily deactivated almost two years earlier.¹² Akhmerov’s cover was a fur business; his grandfather had been in that business decades earlier. His former wife, Elena, back in Moscow, became secretary to secret police head Beria.¹³

Elizabeth Bentley, an American courier for a Soviet spy network, joined the Communist Party in New York in 1935 and became involved in Soviet intelligence activity in 1938. But, following the death of her lover and boss in the spy ring, Jacob Golos, Bentley fled the Party, confessed to the FBI in 1945, and became a highly valued source of information on Soviet espionage. She had worked with both Akhmerov, whom she knew as “Bill,” and his wife, Helen, whom she had known as “Catherine” during the war.¹⁴

Akhmerov once told Bentley how he had courted Helen in Washington, where they worked in 1938 or 1939. When Bentley met them, they were living in New York. In the summer of 1944 Mrs. Akhmerov gave birth to a daughter, Elena, who later served as an officer at KGB headquarters,¹⁵ and in September they moved to Baltimore.¹⁶ Akhmerov’s son with his previous wife was living with her in Moscow; in March 1945 Moscow cabled to the New York NKVD that the “son is alive and well.”¹⁷ (Young Akhmerov eventually followed in his father’s footsteps and became a senior KGB officer.¹⁸ After a KGB career in Africa, he died in the late 1980s.) Helen and Iskhak Akhmerov returned to Moscow on December 7, 1945.

Even though the Soviets had an elaborate spy mechanism functioning in America and were extremely careful to protect the identities of their agents, there were serious security problems. Early in the war the Soviets sent some messages via secret and illegal radios. But in 1943 the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), while searching the airwaves for clandestine Nazi radio transmitters, detected unauthorized radio signals coming from Soviet consulates in New York and San Francisco. The United States government confiscated the radios,¹⁹ thus forcing the NKVD to rely on commercial telegraph agencies such as RCA. These coded messages were routinely supplied to American wartime censors. And this, of course, made them available to the code breakers.

Still, the Soviets were confident that the Americans could not read their communications to and from their home base. The messages were not only replete with code phrases and names, but also encrypted—that is, the letters were translated into blocks of apparently random numbers. The security of this method depended on the use of what is called a one-time pad—an easily disposable booklet of thousands of groups of numbers which served to conceal the coded letter messages. The sender simply designated to the receiver which page out of hundreds in the booklet contained the right number sequences, and that page was never used again. Code breakers found “one-time pads” impenetrable because key words were not repeated by the same number groups.

But back in Moscow the exigencies of wartime led the Soviet code makers into a fatal error. The demand for one-time pads soon outstripped the production facilities, and reissuing duplicate pads became a simple necessity. Through painstaking testing of numbers and words, the Americans began to find patterns that enabled them to decrypt large portions of the dispatches.

In the end, about 2,900 Soviet messages were broken into and translated. Traffic from the New York NKVD office to Moscow during the critical war year of 1944 was the most readable; 49 percent of them were broken. By contrast, only 15 percent of the 1943 messages and less than 2 percent of the 1942 traffic were readable. By war’s end in 1945, the Soviets had regained their grip on security; only 1.5 percent of these cables could be decoded.²⁰

The Communist Party USA and Soviet Espionage

When the Venona solutions began to be available to the public (between 1995 and 1997), some intelligence scholars were surprised at the extent to which Soviet intelligence had been able to penetrate the United States government. The messages also demonstrated that the overwhelming majority of Americans who spied on behalf of the Soviets were members of the Communist Party USA. Although these facts we...

Índice

• Title Page
• Preface
• CHAPTER 1 - What Was Venona?
• CHAPTER 2 - An “Agent of Influence” Makes History
• CHAPTER 3 - The Making of an Apparat
• CHAPTER 4 - Whittaker Chambers’s Spy Ring
• CHAPTER 5 - The Elizabeth Bentley Spy Rings
• CHAPTER 6 - Atomic Espionage
• CHAPTER 7 - Atomic Espionage—The Rosenberg Case
• CHAPTER 8 - Atomic Espionage—California Phase
• CHAPTER 9 - Target: OSS
• CHAPTER 10 - Hunting Down “Polecats”
• CHAPTER 11 - The Jack Soble/Robert Soblen Ring
• CHAPTER 12 - “Polecats” and “Rats”: Spying on Dissidents and Jews
• CHAPTER 13 - Target: Journalists
• CHAPTER 14 - Conclusion
• APPENDIX A - The Documents
• APPENDIX B - The Spies
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• Acknowledgments
• Copyright Page