30 October 2007

Venona

Interior of Building "A," Arington Hall

The Army's Signal Intelligence Service recruited thousands of people to work at Arlington Station, the heart of the attack on the Japanese codes. They hired linguists and mathematicians and people who could do cross-word puzzles.

The Army hired earnest young women fresh out of school, and boys with flat-feet who could not carry a rifle. They hired bankers and lawyers and professors from all across the country. All of them would have roles in the victory over Japan, and the subsequent attack on the Soviet diplomatic codes. They were of such significance that their exploitation lasted over a quarter century.

The exploitation had a series of code-words associated with it over the years. They were all sensitive, some so sensitive that the Army would not disclose them to the President of the United States. The last of them was “VENONA,” a nonsense word that will stand as the cover term for the biggest secret that Arlington Hall ever held.

The implication of the decrypted Venona messages was vast, since the tantalizing bits seemed to indicate that the US Government had been thoroughly penetrated by Soviet intelligence, both civil and military. The problem would have been quite impossible, except for poor tradecraft on the part of the Russians.

Their mistake was the occasional re-use of one-time enciphering keys. It was not most, nor even often. But the repeated use, when recognized, gave the analysts of Arlington Hall the ability to break a tiny portion of the thousands and thousands of intercepted messages.

I can't begin to adequately describe the deciphering process, which in those days was an art practiced only by those who had a gift. The easiest way to appreciate it might be to imagine the messages as numeric crosswords, combining the properties of the Sunday Times crossword in a foreign language without clues and the Japanese Sudoko.

Add a wrinkle; it is not just the puzzle you are looking at that has the clues, but all the Sunday sections placed atop one another in a three dimensional heap.

To bring order and pattern from the encrypted messages was the highest art of Arlington Hall. The ones who practiced it were among the most unusual people ever to work for the government. Many were young women, eager to support the war effort; Arlington Station was packed with them. Miss Gene Grabeel had been a schoolteacher until February of 1943; she was an adept, and represented hundreds of young women on the campus.

There were young men, too, filtered through the draft process or hired as low-level government employees. Meredith Gardner and been a language instructor at the University of Akron; Cecil Phillips had been hired by a harried Army recruiter in North Carolina, not knowing what his assignment might be. He arrived at Arlington Hall in 1943 at the ripe age of eighteen, freshly hired as a level “2” on the General Schedule of employees, making $1,440 a year.

He started out as a cryptographic clerk; his first job was stamping the date on incoming messages, and graduated quickly to stapling them. Next came an assignment on analyzing Japanese weather codes in “A” Building, one of two huge temporary structures built on the grounds to accommodate the bulging work-force. He had a break-through there, pure chance, and was selected for a special assignment.

In the rear of that building was a small and very sensitive office that dealt with a very dark secret. It was tasked with analysis of “the Russian Problem.”

The office was held as a US-only matter, and not disclosed to British liaison officers who were full partners in all other aspects of code-breaking. The Russian section's portion of “A” Building was partitioned off by plywood barriers. Desks were covered at the end of the work-day, and no maps or other materials were allowed to be posted in plain sight.

The Army had to hire a lot of people, and process them quickly. Another of the workers in the Russian Section was a fellow named Bill Weisband. His skill was language, not code-breaking, and he had come by naturally, since he was born in Odessa, Russia.

His folks emigrated to America in the 1920's and he joined the Army in 1942, which recognized his skill and assigned him to signals intelligence at Arlington Hall.

He was a funny and popular guy, with access throughout all the parts of the Station that worked the Russia problem.

Meredith Gardner was the man who made the big break on the Russian code. He recalled later that Bill had watched him extract the list of Western atomic scientists from a Russian message sent in 1944.

The problem with Bill was that he had been working for the NKVD, the predecessor to the KGB, since 1934.

Tomorrow: Spy Games

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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