(Senator Joe McCarthy is advised by attorney Roy Cohn during Senate hearings).

There is a lot of talk about Russian interference in the US election recently- the cyber hacks that CIA insists were a Russian job and the FBI which has a more cautious view on the ability to attribute the thefts to Moscow. It will be a political football for the incoming Administration (assuming it does) with the idea that Mr. Putin wanted Mr. Trump to win the election, and took action to muddy the electoral waters.

I don’t know how that is going to turn out, but it is nothing new. The Soviets had been inside the United States government for decades, we still recall the witch-hunts that followed. Maybe we can have another one.

I remember talking with Mac at Willow sometime in March of 2012. There had been a flurry of news about an ancient Army counter-intelligence program called VENONA. We were trying to get him out when he felt up to it, and he is a rock star to the Regulars at the Amen Corner. I did not bother to take notes. My leg was bothering me still, and we talked about the future rather than the past, which included plans for the 70th anniversary celebration of the Battle of Midway, and whether or not we should wear tuxedos for the Ball (Mac said he wouldn’t). He is at an age where he gets to establish the dress code, and we all supported him.

We had been talking about the great pivot in his career- the chance meeting with Admiral Forrest Sherman in the passageway at Main Navy which stood over on Constitution Avenue, now the site of the Vietnam Memorial.

Mac had come back to DC from Hawaii in 1946, and the transfer to the Restricted Line- Special Duty Intelligence occurred just as the Admiral had told him. He joked later that he never ran into the guys whose name was dropped from the list. He married Billie, and served for a year in the Pentagon and at Foggy Bottom as an editor on the Diplomatic Cable, a summary product of the War Department, Navy and State. That written product is the lineal antecedent of today’s National Intelligence Daily, the famous ‘NID.’ I don’t know if President Truman got a daily brief on its contents (the literature suggests the Arlington Hall VENONA decryptions were not passed to FDR while he was alive, nor to Truman, though one would think that at least the magnitude of the penetration of the Roosevelt Administration by Communists and Fellow Travelers would have contributed to Harry’s muscular response to Uncle Joe Stalin in the great defense re-organization that culminated in the passage of the 1948 National Security Act.

Then there was the VENONA matter, which we touched on often on the way to understanding the immediate post-war challenges to the code-breakers in the Army and Navy, who would be brought together by President Truman in the Armed Forces Communications Agency, headquartered at Arlington Hall Station across the street from where I live. It was a spectacular breach of the Soviet clandestine communications security brought about by the exigencies of the German advance on Moscow: the print plant that produced one-time-use keys had screwed up and some 35,000 duplicate key number pages. The pads were distributed to Soviet NKVD agents in North America, among others, and made their communications vulnerable to cryptanalysis.

(1966 Analyst notes on a declassified VENONA intercept).

Nothing is easy, of course, and the body of the messages contained more code names for actual agents, but the stage was set for a serious controversy in the secret world. Army’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence (G-2) Carter W.Clarke, a fierce anti-communist with no love for Uncle Joe and the sneaking suspicion that he might strike a separate peace with Hitler. Clarke initiated the program in 1943 to examine the cables sent in 1942 and the end of the war, when Human Intelligence about the compromise was received from an NKVD asset in the G-2 organization. The pads were recalled and replaced by the NKVD, but there was enough material for hundreds of analysts to work for four decades on the identities of the Russian Agents.

Mac did not work on the project directly, but he had a knowledge of it from his time at Arlington Hall later, before moving the Navy element to Fort Meade. VENONA also set the stage and context for the Red Scare and the witch hunts to come, with a commie under every bed.

The slight problem was that the Soviets might not have been under every bed in Washington, but some of the ones they did hide under contained some very important people. Moscow had people in strategic places across the Agencies, and was tipped to the vulnerability fairly early on. The bulk of the successfully decrypted messages were harvested only up to 1945. An Army officer named Bill Weisband, a native Russian, was the mole who probably disclosed the success of the operation to his handlers in Moscow.

(William Weisband)

From 1941 to 1942, Weisband was an NKVD agent and handler of other moles in government and industry after service in North Africa and Italy. He was a gregarious fellow, and made fast friends in the community. Assigned to the Soviet Section at Arlington Hall in 1945, his fluent Russian made him valuable to both his ostensible and real employers. Weisband had access to all areas of Arlington Hall’s Soviet work, including the Western atomic scientists who cooperated with the Soviets at least as early as 1944.

The Soviets apparently had monitored Arlington Hall’s “Russian Section” since at least 1945. Weisband’s earliest reports tipped off the Russians, and accordingly, Soviet authorities changed their diplomatic code and the VENONA Project decrypts dried up. He and Mac were posted to London at about the same time. Weisband never was accused of espionage, for fear that he would publicly disclose VENONA’s existence.

The massive number of cables archived were still very useful and helped investigators to build evidence against the Rosenberg Atom Ring and British spies Klaus Fuchs, Donald McLean and Guy Burgess. The sensational trials that ensued were based on evidence and identity provided by the cryptologic source that had to be protected. The ambiguity of the code names in the VENONA documents made complete certainty on other suspected Soviet assets like Alger Hiss, organizer of the 1945 founding conference of the United Nations Conference in San Francisco, or Presidential Adviser Harry Hopkins problematic until the material was eventually released

The issue was an uncomfortable one for Progressive New Dealers who had supported our wartime Soviet ally and who had become embedded throughout the government during FDR’s long tenure in office.

As professionals in the business, I do not have to delve too deeply into the Sources and Methods aspect of the story, and a lot of the bar-room conversation had a sort of cryptic wink-and-a-nod aspect to it. VENONA was a gift that kept on giving. Although only the years 1942-44 yielded much actionable data, the files were worked all the way up to 1980 before cryptologic resources were moved on to more pressing issues.

As professionals, we have all followed the remarkable opportunity for the analysts to cross-index the code-word agents with the Archives of the KGB in the early 1990s, smuggled out of Russia by former archivist Vasili Mitrokhin about his thirty years in the First Directorate Records Section.

That is the correlation between Alger Hiss and former Communist Whittaker Chambers in the Pumpkin papers and the Trial of Some Other Century. Enter Tail Gunner Joe, Dick Nixon and Ray Cohn the great witch-hunt, the real dimensions of which would have startled Old Joe, had he known the extent of all the networks.
all take their turn on the stage as Mac was off having lunch with Tito (among others) during his assignment with CINCNELM in Naples and London.

The ambiguity of guilt became a litmus test of political views across Our Fair City, since the very basis of the then-available evidence was likewise ambiguous. Senior army officers, in consultation with the FBI and CIA, made the decision to restrict knowledge of VENONA within the government. Army Chief of Staff Omar Bradley was concerned about the White House’s history of leaking sensitive information, leading to the conclusion that senior aids to FDR were also Soviet sources,

The consensus today, after 40 years of analysis, is “yes.” in the person of Harry Hopkins- and with Hiss at State and Harry Dexter White at Treasury, the Soviets had their bases thoroughly covered. Based on the news, I guess they still do.

Bradley decided to deny President Truman direct knowledge of the project, and the “fact of” (absent the proof of the decrypts) in the CI and Intel summaries contributed to the…ambiguity. To some degree, Bradley’s decision to keep the secret was counter-productive; Truman was distrustful enough of J. Edgar Hoover at FBI, and suspected the reports of Soviet penetration were exaggerated to obtain political leverage for the Bureau.

(Alger Hiss testifies in the Pumpkin Papers trial).

As we knew at the Willow Bar, Alger Hiss dined out on his persecution by McCarthy for decades, maintaining his innocence to the end. Only with the Moynihan Commission in the 1990s did the truth come out that Hiss was in fact identified as a Soviet agent through VENONA. In a crowning burst of rhetoric, hired legal gun Bill Kunstler made one of his last great quotes in 1995 (he died that year) when the Commission on Government Secrecy reported out. He claimed the Army had forged the whole VENONA project to discredit honest Americans.

I miss Senator Moynihan. He was a reliable Democrat, but he was also a legislator who thought, and was not afraid of where the facts might lead his formidable intellect. We all have our limitations, though. Legislative insiders advised to try to do necessary business with the Senator before lunch on a working day.

I liked that version of Washington a lot better than today’s edition, though it appears that some of the players are constant. At least it was a lot slower back then, and less daily evil could be accomplished.

Copyright 2016 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com