Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America - Hardcover

Haynes, John Earl; Klehr, Mr. Harvey

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0300077718 ISBN 13: 9780300077711

Publisher: Yale University Press, 1999

Synopsis

Reveals telegrams to prove Soviets spied in the 1930s and 1940s

About this title

Review:

With this new volume, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr build upon their groundbreaking work in The Secret World of American Communism and solidify their reputations as the foremost historians of Soviet espionage in America. In Venona, they provide a detailed study of how the United States decrypted top-secret Communist cables moving between Washington and Moscow. This account, based on information unavailable to researchers for decades, reveals the full extent of the Communist spy network in the 1940s. At least 349 citizens, immigrants, and permanent residents of the United States had a covert relationship with Soviet intelligence agencies, among them Harry White (assistant secretary of the treasury in FDR's administration and the Communists' highest-ranking asset) and State Department official Alger Hiss, whose association with the Soviets had been hotly debated since the moment he was first publicly accused in 1948.

"The Soviet assault was of the type a nation directs at an enemy state," write Haynes and Klehr. They go on to suggest that Venona's code-breaking "indicated that the Cold War was not a state of affairs that had begun after World War II but a guerilla action that Stalin had secretly started years earlier." Moreover, "espionage saved the USSR great expense and industrial investment and thereby enabled the Soviets to build a successful atomic bomb years before they otherwise would have." Haynes and Klehr deliver what is at once a real-life spy thriller and a vital piece of scholarship. A grand achievement. --John J. Miller

From the Inside Flap:

This extraordinary book is the first to examine the thousands of documents of the super-secret Venona Project-an American intelligence project that uncovered not only an enormous range of Soviet espionage activities against the United States during World War II but also the Americans who abetted this effort. The stunning revelations of the Venona papers, only made public in 1995, illuminate in a new way the Stalin era and early Cold War years. "John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr have squeezed the pulp from five thousand pages of deciphered cables that verify the grim picture of the Communist underground given many decades ago by defectors such as Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers."-Sam Tanenhaus, The New Republic

About this edition

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0300077718
• ISBN 13: 9780300077711
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 512