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VENONA revisited

Subject:   VENONA revisited

Dear Colleagues -

Back in Sept. 1996, in one of the early mailings to this list,

http://www.yale.edu/engineering/eng-info/msg00154.html

I discussed the release of the NSA's Venona files, decoded messages
between Moscow Centre and their "residences" in the West and the
US. At the time this inspired a gathering of friends to watch John
le Carre's "Smiley's People", that triumph of the spy genre, with
Alec Guinness as George Smiley.

Venona caught my eye again today in the Fall/Winter 1999 issue of
ENDPAPERS, the newsletter from the Yale University Press

http://www.yale.edu/yup/endpapers.html
  (but the Fall/Winter 1999 issue is not yet online)

The lead article is about Venona, and prominently features the 1999
Yale Press book by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr "Venona:
Decoding Soviet Espionage in America."

http://www.yale.edu/yup/books/klehrS99.html
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0300077718/

The first chapter of the book is online (an increasingly frequent
practice at most publisher's Web sites). It looks like a remarkable
book. Too bad a new semester is just starting.

Instrumental in the declassification of the Venona files was
Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan who had read the earlier 1992 book
by Haynes and Klehr "The Secret World of American Communism". At
the time he was heading the Senate Commission on Protecting and
Reducing Government Secrecy. In testimony before the Commission,
Klehr and Haynes pointed to the irony that American scholars could
find messages linked to Moscow-US cable traffic in open Russian
archives, but the messages themselves were still locked up in
closed American archives. Moynihan's efforts led to the official
1995 opening of the Venona Project archives.

In 1998 Yale University Press published Moynihan's own book
"Secrecy", which, with Venona as starting point, carries the role
of secrecy in American government toward the present: Bay of Pigs,
Watergate and Iran-Contra. One of Moynihan's major themes is
government agencies keeping secrets from one another as a means of
shoring up their power, and the divisive consequences this has had
on American society's perception of government operations.

The links in my Sept.96 message have gone stale. The NSA's current
Venona page is at

http://www.nsa.gov:8080/docs/venona/index.html

It makes fascinating reading. Maybe it's time to go to Best Video
again, get "Smiley's People", and be drawn into the hypnotic chess
match between Karla and Smiley, one of Guiness's finest roles.


  --Peter Kindlmann
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