From belarus@solar.rtd.utk.edu Wed Oct 2 19:30:59 1996 Received: by bwalk.dm.com (1.65/waf) via UUCP; Wed, 02 Oct 96 20:43:54 EDT for dlv Received: from SOLAR.RTD.UTK.EDU by uu.psi.com (5.65b/4.0.061193-PSI/PSINet) via SMTP; id AA20681 for dlv@bwalk.dm.com; Wed, 2 Oct 96 19:30:59 -0400 Received: from (LOCALHOST.rtd.utk.edu) by solar.rtd.utk.edu; Wed, 2 Oct 96 19:25:40 EDT Date: Wed, 2 Oct 96 19:25:40 EDT Message-Id: <2.2.32.19961002203102.006d4274@direct.ca> Errors-To: kasaty@seanet.com Reply-To: belarus@solar.rtd.utk.edu Originator: belarus@solar.rtd.utk.edu Sender: belarus@solar.rtd.utk.edu Precedence: bulk From: Stefan Lemieszewski <stefanl@direct.ca> To: Multiple recipients of list <belarus@solar.rtd.utk.edu> Subject: VENONA Project; KGB files reveal clue that broke British spy X-Listprocessor-Version: 6.0b -- ListProcessor by Anastasios Kotsikonas X-Comment: BELARUS issues and communication
Fyi for any researchers in this field, accompanied by a related article in The Daily Telegraph. Stefan Lemieszewski ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------ The VENONA Project "In July 1995 the Intelligence Community ended a 50-year silence regarding one of cryptology's most splendid successes - the VENONA Project. VENONA was the codename used for the U.S. Signals Intelligence effort to collect and decrypt the text of Soviet KGB and GRU messages from the 1940's. These messages provided extraordinary insight into Soviet attempts to infiltrate the highest levels of the United States Goverment.=20 Today, we are proud to offer these exceptional documents on the NSA home page and we invite you to study and interpret them in the context of history. NSA will declassify over 2200 messages related to VENONA. We believe they will not only provide a window into Soviet espionage during the 1940's, but will also give you a glimpse of the important contributions signals intelligence and cryptographic expertise make to our nation's security. " The above quote is from from the introduction to the VENONA Project by Mr. William P. Crowell, Deputy Director, National Security Agency You can find Venona at:=20 http://www.nsa.gov:8080/docs/venona/ddir.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------- The article below is from The Daily Telegraph, October 2, 1996: ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------- KGB files reveal clue that broke British spy ring By Michael Smith=20 The name's Bond, Vladimir Bond THE intercepted KGB messages that detail Moscow's dealings with the British spies Kim Philby, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess were released by GCHQ yesterday. The move was forced on the Cheltenham spy base by the Americans, who released on to the Internet the results of Operation Venona, the top-secret project to decipher Moscow Centre's communications with its foreign stations. The files placed in the Public Record Office at Kew yesterday include the vital clue that led to the collapse of the Cambridge spy ring. They also name another Cambridge-based spy, Dr Theodore Hall, an American who worked inside the Manhattan Project, the secret programme to develop the atom bomb. He was never prosecuted and still lives in England. But it is Maclean, recruited by Philby while he was still a Cambridge student, who emerges as the jewel in the KGB's crown. In April 1944, as a rising star in the Foreign Office, he was posted to the Washington embassy. The deciphered messages show he gave the Russians a wealth of information on Anglo-American relations and their secret post-war agreements, including the exchanges of atomic secrets. Since his wife Melinda was pregnant and living with her mother in New York, Maclean had the perfect excuse to go there every weekend to pass the information on to his KGB control, away from the routine surveillance of diplomats in Washington. MI5 narrowed down those names to a handful of people who would have had access to the top-secret exchanges between London and Washington It was not until 1949 that the Venona team managed to break into the messages from New York to Moscow containing the information provided by Maclean, who was identified by the cover name Homer. Philby, who was posted to Washington as an intelligence liaison officer shortly after the messages were deciphered, described how the FBI concluded that any one of 6,000 people might have been Homer. "It had so far occurred neither to them nor the British that a diplomat was involved, let alone a fairly senior diplomat," he said. "Instead, the investigation had concentrated on non-diplomatic employees of the embassy." But slowly, MI5 narrowed down those names to a handful of people who would have had access to the top-secret exchanges between London and Washington. Then in April 1951, the Venona cryptanalysts found the vital clue in one of the messages. For part of 1944, Homer had had regular contacts with his Soviet control in New York - using his pregnant wife as an excuse. The names had been narrowed down to just one - Donald Maclean. Tipped off by Philby, who had access to the Venona material, he fled to Moscow with Burgess. Dr Hall is the Cambridge scientist named in the files as the KGB's main spy in the Los Alamos complex in New Mexico, where the US atomic bomb was developed. He refused to comment last night. He came to Britain in the 1950s after US intelligence discovered that he was Mlad, the man who along with his British colleague Klaus Fuchs gave the Russians the technical details of the so-called Manhattan Project. Fuchs, a German emigr=E9 who became a naturalised British citizen, became a KGB spy in 1941 Because he never confessed, the authorities could not prosecute him without giving away the extent to which the KGB messages were being read. Dr Hall, who is now 70 and suffering from terminal cancer and Parkinson's disease, still lives with his wife Joan in a semi-detached house in Cambridge. Within the university, where he worked until the mid-1980s, he is renowned for his pioneering work on biological X-ray microanalysis, which allows scientists to work out the presence of various elements within living matter. Hall was a brilliant man who was already a Harvard graduate when, at the age of 19, he was recruited first by the Manhattan Project and then, almost immediately, by the KGB. As well as providing technical explanations of the atomic processes, Dr Hall gave Moscow a complete list of universities doing work on the Manhattan Project so the KGB could seek out other agents within them. The files show that he and Fuchs were far more important than the more famous Julius Rosenberg, cover named Liberal, and his wife Ethel, who were both sent to the electric chair. Fuchs, a German emigr=E9 who became a naturalised British citizen, became a KGB spy in 1941. He confessed and in 1950 was sentenced at the Old Bailey to 14 years' jail. In the mid-1950s he was allowed to go to East Germany, where he died in= 1988.