Soviet Espionage on American TV: The VENONA Story

Television programme reviewed in this article: Secrets, Lies and Atomic Spies As we now know, dozens of American citizens spied for the Soviet Union during and immediately after World War II. And as we also now know, some American intelligence agencies were aware of that espionage, but kept it a secret until 1995. They had learned about the Russian spying from the VENONA project, a highly secret code-breaking operation that deciphered thousands of intercepted telegrams exchanged between the KGB's Moscow headquarters and its American operatives. As the makers of the PBS documentary “Secrets, Lies, and Atomic Spies” imply, had we known about the VENONA decrypts earlier, that knowledge might have changed our perceptions of the espionage cases of the early Cold War, confirming the guilt of dozens of suspected spies, revealing the identities of some unknown ones, and perhaps even preventing the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.1 VENONA...