Maggie's Farm

VENONA Project

In Ann Coulter’s column “Dare Call It Treason” of June 25, 2003, she wrote, “The myth of 'McCarthyism' is the greatest Orwellian fraud of our times.  Liberals are fanatical liars, then as now. The portrayal of Sen. Joe McCarthy as a wild-eyed demagogue destroying innocent lives is sheer liberal hobgoblinism.  Liberals weren't hiding under the bed during the McCarthy era.  They were systematically undermining the nation's ability to defend itself, while waging a bellicose campaign of lies to blacken McCarthy's name.  Liberals denounced McCarthy because they were afraid of getting caught, so they fought back like animals to hide their own collaboration with a regime as evil as the Nazis.  As Whittaker Chambers said: ‘Innocence seldom utters outraged shrieks. Guilt does.’

“At the time, half the country realized liberals were lying.  But after a half century of liberal myth-making, even the disgorging of Soviet and American archives half a century later could not overcome their lies.  In 1995, the U.S. government released its cache of Soviet cables that had been decoded during the Cold War in a top-secret undertaking known as the VENONA Project.  The cables proved the overwhelming truth of McCarthy's charges.  Naturally, therefore, the release of decrypted Soviet cables was barely mentioned by the New York Times.  It might have detracted from stories of proud and unbowed victims of ‘McCarthyism.’  They were not so innocent after all, it turns out.”

The National Security Agency’s web site has this incredible story of espionage and treason and also all the materials. Yet it remains almost totally unknown. Here’s an excerpt from their preface:  

On 1 February 1943 the U.S. Army’s Signal Intelligence Service, a forerunner of the National Security Agency, began a small, very secret program, later codenamed VENONA. The original object of the VENONA program was to examine, and possibly exploit, encrypted Soviet diplomatic communications. These messages had been accumulated by the Signal Intelligence Service (later renamed the U.S. Army Signal Security Agency and commonly called "Arlington Hall" after the Virginia location of its headquarters) since 1939 but had not been studied previously. American analysts discovered that these Soviet communications dealt with not only diplomatic subjects but also espionage matters.

Six public releases of VENONA translations and related documents have been made. These releases covered the following topics and are all discussed in this monograph.

1. Soviet atomic bomb espionage

2. New York KGB messages of 1942 and 1943

3. New York and Washington KGB messages of 1944 and 1945

4. San Francisco and Mexico City KGB messages; GRU New York and Washington messages; Washington Naval GRU messages

5. KGB and GRU messages from Europe, South America, and Australia

6. Messages inadvertently left out of the previous five updates of previously issued translations. Updates some translations by restoring names that had been protected for privacy reasons in the original releases.