“Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America”, by John Earl and Harvey Klehr

 

504 pages, Yale University Press, ISBN-13: 978-0300084627

The “Venona” referred to in Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America by John Earl and Harvey Klehr refers to the Venona Project, the counterintelligence program initiated during World War II by the United States Army’s Signal Intelligence Service – later absorbed by the National Security Agency – and which was in service from February 1^st, 1943 all the way until October 1^st, 1980. From the start, Venona was meant to spy on our erstwhile ally, the Soviet Union, and decrypt messages transmitted by their ever evolving intelligence agencies – the NKVD, the KGB and the GRU, etc. – from and to the United States.

By all accounts, Venona was brilliantly successful, decrypting and translating upwards of over 3000 such messages over its 37-year lifespan and leading to many successes for the West, from Project Enormous (the Soviet infiltration of the Manhattan Project in the US) to the discovery of the Cambridge Five espionage ring in the UK. Perhaps the best indication of just how brilliant Venona was is the fact that it stayed secret, not only over the course of its operations, but for a full 15 years after it officially ended, with only about some 1% of the decoded Soviet messages not being declassified and published by the United States until 1995.

While fascinating, Venona is also depressing as all hell, as the treachery of supposed Americans in the pay of their Soviet Masters is something to behold, and not in a good way. So many Yanks were converted to the Red Cause, reaching all the way to the naïve Roosevelt White House where they even managed to direct American foreign policy during and immediately after World War II (for all you stubborn Alger Hiss defenders SHUT UP: the man was a traitor and deserved much more than the piddling three years and eight months he served of a pathetic five year sentence – like being fed to rabid dogs, for instance).

All of this leads to the most perplexing question that hangs still over our recent history, one whose aftermath remains with us today. Why? Why did so many Americans so enthusiastically embrace the Communist ideology and then work tirelessly to replace our free form of government with an enslaved one? Moreover, why did they continue to embrace Communism despite all of the available evidence that it was anything but a totalitarian oppressor intent on crushing all beneath its iron heel? Most of these conspirators were considered “Ordinary Americans”, patriotic and civic-minded; indeed, many had fought in WWI and, later, in WWII.

But the blunt truth was that they were NOT patriotic Americans, at least in the sense in which that term is normally understood; for they saw the American Experiment as a flawed and evil oppressor of…everything, while the Soviet Union was the true beacon of freedom in the world. A twisted and demented view of the world in which up is down, right is left, night is day and so on and so forth; in fact, to listen to all of those BLM and Antifa “activists” burning down American cities today, one would hear many of the same complaints and criticisms from the far left today as we did even during the height of the Cold War. The more things change…