Word: venona
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...heartbreakingly sweet that one struggles (though unsuccessfully) to join in the son's self-deception. William F. Buckley Jr., who as a young conservative in the 1950s was a friend to both Chambers and McCarthy, gives his version of McCarthy in a documentary novel, The Redhunter. And in Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr analyze the deciphered '40s cable traffic, recently released, between Soviet agents working in America and their masters in Moscow--files that show there was far more spying, and far more complicity by American party members, than was previously thought...
Next March, moreover, Basic Books will bring out The Venona Secrets by Herbert Romerstein, former minority chief investigator of the House Internal Security Committee (which used to be HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee), and the late Eric Breindel. The book will make sensational charges, among them Romerstein's claim that the radical journalist I.F. Stone was a paid Soviet agent...
...Soviet enslavement of Eastern Europe, the Hiss conviction, the detonation of the first Soviet nuclear bomb, the communist takeover of China and the invasion of South Korea, something was wrong in the world. The opening of Soviet archives after the collapse of the U.S.S.R., together with the Venona decryptions, which the National Security Agency began releasing in 1995, has made it clear that the fear of Soviet espionage was neither neurotic nor hallucinatory...
...Venona traffic validates the "even paranoids have enemies" school. Although Venona might have saved America a lot of internal strife had it been released years ago, it demonstrates beyond argument that the Soviet penetration into American life, government, science and industry during the '30s and '40s was deep, thorough and hostile. Venona shows that the American Communist Party was elaborately involved in the spying (though of course only a small minority of party members were actual spies). To fake the Venona traffic would have required a conspiracy involving thousands, working together over many years. Furthermore, the decrypted messages are often...
Apart from that stroke of bad timing, this authoritative reference book rides the espionage headlines exceedingly well. The Soviets' CIA mole Aldrich Ames is here, as is hot-off-the-press documentation gleaned from the long-secret U.S. "Venona" decrypts of Russian intelligence, which pretty much confirm the guilt of the late Alger Hiss. More than 2,000 entries deal with the history of spying, the complexities of cryptography and trade jargon (dry clean: to determine whether one is under surveillance; pianist: a clandestine radio operator; swallow: Russian term for a female agent assigned to seduce a target; raven...