Venona

Starred review from April 15, 1999
Those who were convinced that the Soviets were spying on us during the 1930s and 1940s were right. Haynes and Klehr have provided the most extensive evidence to date that the KGB had operatives at all levels of American society and government. Where Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassilievs The Haunted Wood (LJ 11/15/98) provided a peek at Soviet spying, Haynes and Klehr throw open the door, revealing a level of espionage in this country that only the most paranoid had dreamed of. Building on the research for their earlier books, The Secret World of American Communism (LJ 6/1/95) and The Soviet World of American Communism (Yale Univ., 1998), Haynes and Klehr describe the astonishing dimensions of spying reflected in the cable traffic between the United States and Moscow. Venona is the name of the sophisticated National Security Agency project that in 1946 finally broke the Soviet code. This is better than anything John le Carr could produce, because in this case, truth is really stranger than fiction. Highly recommended.Edward Goedeken, Iowa State Univ. Lib., Ames

April 1, 1999
The Venona Project, a U.S. secret revealed only in 1995, decrypted Soviet intelligence's wartime cable traffic. It purportedly not only exposed an astounding scale of Soviet espionage but also undermined the liberal critique of the postwar Red scare. "The Nation" irately denounced Venona as a government forgery. The authors systematically recount Venona's references to approximately 350 Soviet spies in U.S. government and industry--some of them highly placed, most notoriously Alger Hiss. The damage wrought by Hiss and others is not yet known, as Venona does not contain the actual documents they stole, but their espionage appears now irrefutable. Apparently U.S. intelligence was aware of that in the 1940s, raising the historical question of whether keeping Venona secret was worth it, given how liberal and conservative vitriol over causes celebres such as Hiss and the Rosenbergs poisoned U.S. politics at the time. "Venona" may open a fundamental revision of U.S. history and lend foundation to "The Haunted Wood" by Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev. ((Reviewed April 1, 1999))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1999, American Library Association.)