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4
The I(G B and the Venona Project
... Paul [Guy Burgess], and Yan [Anthony Blunt] consider that
the situation is serious.
Message from the KGB station in London to Moscow,
February 1950 1
The 'Venona Project' was possibly the most astounding codebreaking
effort of the early Cold War. 2 Employing perhaps no
more than a hundred people, it exploited a weakness in KGB
communications and decoded some of the messages sent by Soviet
intelligence. As a result, it revealed key Soviet agents and illuminated
the unexpectedly vast scope and scale of KGB espionage in
the West during the 1940s. This material was so significant that
even though no new messages were collected after 1948, British
and American code-breakers continued to work on the residue
until October 1980. Initiated by the Americans, Venona collected
new partners - first the British, and later the Australians, the
Canadians, the Dutch and even the 'neutral' Swedes. It is justly
famous for revealing some of the 'giants' of Russian espionage,
including Klaus Fuchs and Donald Maclean, but the vast pool of
messages that remain unsolved is also significant. Even now, it
points unambiguously to many other cases yet to be resolved.
Anxiety about the compromise of sigint secrets was always
central to the code-breaking profession. Back in 1927, Prime
Minister Stanley Baldwin's infamous exposure of the reading of
Soviet high-grade systems in the House of Commons had taught
a whole generation of interwar code-breakers the price of careless
talk. Thereafter, anxiety about the Ultra secret persuaded more
than ten thousand people to keep their wartime vow of silence