Return to Responses, Reflections and Occasional Papers

Russian Archival Identification of Real Names Behind Cover Names in VENONA

“Cryptology and the Cold War”

Center for Cryptologic History Symposium, 27 October 2005

John Earl Haynes

The Soviet cables decrypted by the Venona project contain three sorts of names. The texts themselves contained both real names and cryptonyms (or cover names or code names, depending on your terminology). Footnotes to the texts in a number of cases provided real names that lay behind the cryptonyms. In some cases, the identification of the real name behind a code name was given in the text of a message itself, as in the case of Venona 726-729 KGB New York to Moscow, 22 May 1942, where John Scott, an OSS analyst is identified as “our source IVANOV” or Venona 1754, 14 December 1944, KGB New York informs Moscow that KGB officer was beginning the recruitment of journalist Richard Lauterbach and that, quote, “henceforth,” Lauterbach would be referred to as “PA.”

In other cases, the deciphered messages provided enough personal information about the cover named person to allow FBI and NSA analysts to identify the real name behind the cryptonym. This information included where the person worked, what he or she did, what trips he took on a particular date, and so on. For example, the FBI’s file on Harry Dexter White and Venona, provides ample documentation of how careful comparison between White’s travels and that of the cryptonym JURIST, given in Venona 1119-1121 KGB New York to Moscow, 4-5 August 1944, assisted the FBI in identifying JURIST as White.^[1]

In all, hundreds of Venona cryptonyms are linked to real names. Harvey Klehr and I were particularly interested in those Americans identified in Venona as cooperating with Soviet espionage. In an appendix to the 2000 edition of our Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America we listed 349 names of American citizens, non-citizen immigrants, and permanent residents of the United States who had a covert relationship with Soviet intelligence confirmed in the Venona traffic.^[2] That list did not include Soviet intelligence officers operating legally under diplomatic cover. It did include three Soviet intelligence officers operating illegally and posing as immigrants. The nature of the clandestine relationship varied. Some were front-line spies such as Maurice Halperin, chief of the Latin American Division of the Research and Analysis section of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services who turned over dozens of American diplomatic cables and other sensitive documents to the Soviets. But every spy actually stealing secrets must be supported by an elaborate apparatus. These include talent-spotters who suggest likely candidates for recruitment, vetters who check on the background of prospective espionage sources, couriers who carry documents and instructions, and various support personnel who supply safe-houses, help set up cover businesses, and assist in procuring fraudulent identification. All are necessary parts of the espionage enterprise.

Of these 349 names, 171 were identified by true names and 178 were known only by a cover name found in the Venona cable traffic. There were in the Venona cables a great many other cryptonyms, some identified and others never identified. These, however, were not listed because the context indicated that the cover names referred to Soviet personnel operating in an official capacity, no judgment about the status of the person behind the cover name was possible, or the reference to the person indicates that although the person had a cryptonym there was no cooperative relationship with Soviet intelligence. Soviet intelligence assigned cryptonyms to both Prime Minister Churchill and President Roosevelt, for example, but this was for cryptographic convenience and security and did not, obviously, indicate a covert relationship.

Let here say a few words about the accuracy of the identifications provided by these Venona footnotes. In the academic world, as the paper by my colleague Harvey Klehr illustrates, there has been and continues to be a great deal of denial, avoidance, incompetence, and outright intellectual dishonesty in regard to American communism and Soviet espionage. For example, in a 2004 posting on the diplomatic historical discussion list H-Diplo, Dr. Amy Knight, who has written extensively about the Soviet Union under Stalin, dismissed the identifications in Venona as “dubious guesswork.”^[3] This is a most ill advised view. Venona has been public since 1995 and a small platoon of historians has subjected the decryptions to intense examination. If the real names provided by NSA/FBI were only dubious guesswork articles pointing out the many errors would have been published. But to my knowledge the number of seriously contested identifications are few, only two or three of the many hundreds in Venona that I know of, and with the exception of the identification of the cryptonym ALES, none of these few are figures of significance. ALES is of significance, but this is a single message and here the NSA/FBI was not willing to go beyond "probably Alger Hiss," which is surely true. Indeed, the evidence that ALES is Hiss is entirely convincing. For those who need convincing, I would refer them particularly to Eduard Mark’s essay “Who Was ‘Venona’s ‘Ales?’ Cryptanalysis and the Hiss Case” in the Intelligence and National Security” as well as the treatment of the issue in Klehr and my Venona and our later book In Denial: Historians, Communism, and Espionage.^[4]

Another disputed identification, that of Venona 976, New York KGB to Moscow, 11 July 1944, where the cryptonym RELAY has a footnote that reads, “possibly Morton Sobell.” Morton Sobell himself has claimed that this is evidence of the unreliability of all Venona identifications because RELAY is identified as have an artificial leg or possibly using leg braces, and Sobell had neither.^[5] In fact, Sobell’s objection is without merit. There are four Venona messages relevant here. Venona 943, New York KGB station to its Moscow headquarters, 4 July 1944, mentioned a Soviet source cover named “RELAY,” whose identity is unknown. This is the message noting the RELAY had an artificial leg or a brace. The NSA/FBI footnote said that the RELAY covername was later changed to “SERB” and that SERB was as yet “unidentified.” as well. Venona 976, New York KGB to Moscow, 11 July 1944, also mentioned RELAY and here the NSA/FBI footnote said “possibly Morton Sobell.” However, Venona 1251, New York KGB to Moscow, 2 September 1944 stated that the RELAY covername had been changed to SERB with the NSA footnote stating, “RELAY has been tentatively identified as Morton Sobell. However, the only other reference to SERB is in New York’s no. 50 of 11 January 1945 and would not appear to refer to Sobell.” Finally, Venona 50, New York KGB to Moscow, 11 January 1945, has SERB in the message and SERB is unidentified in the NSA/FBI footnotes.

The reasonable way to look at the identification of RELAY/SERB is to look at all four messages, not just one. NSA/FBI analysts had RELAY or SERB unidentified in two messages, had a third in which RELAY is “possibly Morton Sobell” but then had a fourth in which the analysts withdraw their tentative Sobell identification. That NSA/FBI did not conclude RELAY or SERB as Sobell is clear to any reasonable researcher. Sobell’s objection is a contrivance.

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Now let me turn to my main topic, how documents in Russian archives allow us to identify the real names behind some of the unidentified cryptonyms in Venona. (I will here deal only with cryptonyms and names found in the American traffic.)

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Records of the Communist International

The records of the Communist International (Comintern) at the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI from its Russian acronym) provide the identification for one Venona cryptonym, SON. The cryptonym SON occurs in two Venona messages but the references to SON were not sufficient to provide a basis for identification. SON, however, occurs in a number of Comintern documents as the cryptonym for the head of the CPUSA’s underground arm, Rudy Baker.

In RGASPI’s collection of coded correspondence between the Comintern and the CPUSA (RGASPI fond 495-184) are dozens of messages from BROTHER in Moscow with FATHER and SON in the United States. Annotations on these messages identify BROTHER as Georgi Dimitrov, chief of the Comintern, and FATHER as Earl Browder, chief of the CPUSA. The identification of SON as Rudy Baker comes in two ways. First, in these messages SON is the head of the CPUSA’s covert arm, which Baker had taken over in mid-1938. None of the Comintern messages to SON occur until after Baker had been to Moscow in January 1939 and briefed Comintern officials on his assumption of leadership over the CPUSA secret apparatus. Further, located in a second Comintern collection, that of Dimitrov himself, is another document. It is from General Fitin, head of the KGB’s foreign intelligence directorate, to Dimitrov. This May 1942 message states “We are forwarding a telegram we received from New York addressed to you from Rudy” the enclosed message is signed by “SON.” The textual remarks about SON in the two Venona messages containing that cryptonym are compatible with their being references to Rudy Baker. While one cannot be completely certain, it is likely that the unidentified SON in two Venona messages is Rudy Baker.^[6]

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Unidentified Cryptonyms in Venona that are Identified in the Comintern Archive

Total: 1

SON = Rudy Baker

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SON is the only Venona cryptonym I know of to be identified from Comintern records. Let me note, however, that Comintern records offer corroboration of a different aspect of Venona in the form of messages to the Comintern from General Fitin of the KGB asking for background information on American Communists the KGB was recruiting into its American networks. Many of these, identified by real names, not cryptonyms, are also found in Venona.

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Real Names in Fitin Vetting Messages in the Comintern Archive

in Venona under Cryptonyms or as Real Names in the Venona Texts

Total: 13

Burns, Paul = Real name in Venona

Bursler, Norman = Real name in Venona

Coplon, Judy = SIMA

Davis, Marion Berdecio = LOU

Fitzgerald, Edward J. = TED (Real name also in Venona)

Flato, Charles = Real name in Venona

Glasser, Harold = RUBLE (Real name also in Venona)

Horwitz, Louis D. = Real name in VENONA

Krafsur, Samuel = IDE

Kramer, Charles = PLUMB (Real name also in Venona)

Magdoff, Harry Samuel = KANT (Real name also in Venona)

Perlo, Victor = RAIDER (Real name also in Venona)

Wheeler, Donald = IZRA (Real name also in Venona)

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KGB Archives, Cryptonyms, and the Dmitrii Volkogonov Papers

General Dmitrii Volkogonov was chief military historian for the Soviet Army and had unusual access to closed Soviet archives. During research for biographies of Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky, Volkogonov photocopied several thousand pages of documents from collections that are still closed even in the current post-Soviet period. In the mid-1990s Volkogonov gave his papers to the Library of Congress. Those documents corroborate three cryptonyms in Venona, that of KANT and TULIP, both cryptonyms for KGB agent Mark Zborowski who engaged in anti-Trotsky work in Europe and in the United States and the cryptonym POLECATS for Trotskyists. Volkogonov copied the documents confirming these cryptonyms at the Central Archive of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (TsAFSBRF) successor to the internal arm of the KGB.

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Cryptonyms and real identities that are identical in Venona with Volkogonov’s KGB Documents

Total: 3

KANT = Zborowski, Mark

POLECATS = Trotskyists

TULIP = Zborowski, Mark

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The KGB Archives, Cryptonyms, and The Haunted Wood

The next source of true names behind unidentified Venona cryptonyms I would like to turn to is The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America -- The Stalin Era (1999) authored by the American historian Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, a former KGB officer.^[7] As background, after the collapse of the USSR, the Russian Intelligence Service (SVR), successor to the foreign intelligence arm of the KGB, shaken by the end of the Soviet order and in need of cash, made a deal with Western publishers to partner a Western author and a Russian with a KGB background to write on certain topics. The Russian coauthor was able to examine the KGB’s archives to extract selected documents on specified topics. Once the SVR regained its footing in the new Russian state in the mid-1990s, this arrangement ended and closed the small window that had opened on the KGB archive. Nonetheless, from the earlier opening, limited as it was, four books emerged, including The Haunted Wood.

The Haunted Wood quotes and cites a number of KGB documents that provide cryptonyms and real names. (The Haunted Wood, one should note, covered the 1930s as well as the 1940s, so only a segment of the book overlaps directly with Venona.) The first thing that must be noted is the large number of cryptonym -- real name parings that are identical in the two sources.

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Cryptonyms and real identities that are identical in Venona with The Haunted Wood

Total: 74

ABRAM (ABRAHAM)^[8] = Soble, Jack

ACORN = Gold, Bella

ADAM = Getsov, Eva

AILERON (ELERON) = Silverman, Abraham George

ALBERT = Akhmerov, Iskhak

ALES = Hiss, Alger

ALEXSEY = Yatskov, Anatoly

ANT = Heineman, Kristal Fuchs

ANTENNA = Rosenberg, Julius

ANTON = Kvasnikov, Leonid

ARNO = Gold, Harry

BECK = Kurnakov, Sergei

BLERIOT (BLERIO) = Stanaslav Shumovsky

BUMBLEBEE = Greenglass, David

CALIBER = Greenglass, David

CAMP-2 = Los Alamos

CAPTAIN = Franklin D. Roosevelt

CAREFUL = Joseph, Julius

CHARLES = Fuchs, Klaus

CLEVER GIRL (MISS WISE) = Bentley, Elizabeth

CONSTRUCTOR = Brothman, Abraham

CZECH = Soble, Jack

DEPUTY = Henry Wallace^[9]

DIR (Dear) = Price, Mary

DORA = Silvermaster, Helen

ECHO = Schuster, Bernard

ELSA = Lowry, Helen

ENORMOUS = Manhattan Project

FRANK = Duggan, Laurence

FROST = Morros, Boris

GENNADY = Ovakimyan, Gaik Badelovich

GOOSE = Gold, Harry

HARE = Halperin, Maurice

HELMSMAN = Browder, Earl

HOMER = Maclean, Donald D.

IZRA = Wheeler, Donald

KALISTRAT = Feklissov, Alexander

KOCH = Lee, Duncan C.

LAWYER = White, Harry Dexter

LIBERAL = Rosenberg, Julius

LIZA (LISA) = Stern, Martha Dodd

LOUIS = Stern, Alfred

LUKA = Pastelnyak, Pavel (Pavel Klarin)

MAKSIM = Zarubin, Vasily [Zubilin, Vasily)

MAYOR (MER) = Akhmerov, Iskhak

METER = Barr, Joel

MLAD [YOUNGSTER] = Hall, Theodore Alvin

MYRNA = Bentley, Elizabeth

NABOB = Morgenthau, Henry, Jr.

NEEDLE = York, Jones Orin

OLD MAN = Leon Trotsky

PAGE = Currie, Lauchlin

PAL = Silvermaster, Nathan Gregory

PICK = Coe, Frank

PILOT = Ullmann, William Ludwig

POLO = Ullmann, William Ludwig

PRINCE = Duggan, Laurence

RAIDER (RAID) = Perlo, Victor

REST = Fuchs, Klaus

RICHARD = White, Harry Dexter

ROBERT = Silvermaster, Nathan Gregory

RUBLE = Glasser, Harold

SERGEI = Pravdin, Vladimir

SIMA = Coplon, Judith

SOUND = Golos, Jacob

STAR [OLDSTER] = Sax, Saville

TED = Fitzgerald, Edward J.

TULIP = Zborovsky, Mark

TVEN = Semenov, Semen Markovich

VADIM = Gorsky, Anatoly

VARDO = Zarubina, Elizabeth

WASP = Greenglass, Ruth

X = Katz, Joseph

ZHENYA = Sonia Gold

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The corroboration of these seventy-four cryptonyms between Venona and The Haunted Wood is impressive and reinforces one’s confidence in the reliability of both sources. But, of course, what of those unidentified cryptonyms in Venona? The Haunted Wood yields the real identities of fifteen unidentified cryptonyms in Venona.

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Unidentified Cryptonyms in Venona that are Identified with Real Names in The Haunted Wood

Total: 15

BERG = Koral, Alexander

CHAP = Franklin, Zalmond

CHROME YELLOW = Brothman, Abraham

COLLEAGUE = Joseph, Mrs. Julius (Bella)

LESLEY = Cohen, Lona

MOLE = Kramer, Charles

MUSE = Tenney, Helen

NELLY = Lowry, Helen

RAMSAY = Hiskey, Clarence

REDHEAD = Massing, Hede

RUFF = Neumann, Franz

SAX = Adler, Solomon

STORM = Peters, Joseph

TAN = Harry Magdoff

VOLUNTEER = Cohen, Morris

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Most of real names behind cryptonyms newly identified in The Haunted Wood are familiar to historians. Brothman, Tenney, Joseph, Tenney, Magdoff, and Adler were all identified by Elizabeth Bentley as participants in her espionage networks. Klehr and I discussed Morris and Lona Cohen’s participation in Soviet espionage in The Secret World of American Communism, and their activities were more thoroughly examined in Bombshell: the Secret Story of America's Unknown Atomic Spy Conspiracy, authored by Albright and Kunstel.^[10] (This latter book also supplied identification for the VOLUNTEER cryptonym.) Whittaker Chambers discussed Joseph Peters’ role in Soviet espionage and Hede Massing was a KGB defector. Army counter-intelligence had observed Clarence Hiskey, then a chemist working in the Manhattan Project, meeting with a GRU agent in 1943 and dealt with the problem by having him drafted and assigned to duties in Alaska. The FBI had identified Koral as a Soviet courier, and when confronted he made a partial confession. Franklin was a new name, at least to me, but he appears to have chiefly worked as a courier.

Franz Neumann, a left-wing German exile who worked at the OSS was a bit of a surprise. Neumann was little known in the United States except among political theorists who were impressed by his analysis on Nazi totalitarianism in his 1942 book, Behemoth: the Structure and Practice of National Socialism.^[11] Neumann, however, was a major figure in post-World War II German intellectual life, particularly among socialists, where he was a leading revisionist Marxist. Neumann was known in the post-war era, however, as an opponent of Soviet communism, which makes his identification as a Soviet source in the OSS initially surprising. When one looks back on Neumann’s political history, however, this episode makes more sense. In the 1930s Neumann had been a young left-wing militant in the German Social Democratic Party who hoped for a blending of German Social Democratic traditions with communism. When he returned to Germany after World War II he attempted to promote a merger of the two movements, but after observing the brutal suppression of the SPD by Communists in the Soviet zone of occupation, he abandoned his notion that democratic socialism could be combined with communism and supported maintaining SPD independence of communism.

Let me also note, by the way, that The Haunted Wood refers to a number of persons by cryptonyms but does not provide a real name for that person. In thirteen cases, Venona provides the real name for an unidentified acronym in The Haunted Wood.

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Unidentified Cryptonyms in The Haunted Wood that are Identified with Real Names in Venona

Total: 13

ART = Koral, Helen

BLACK = Black, Thomas

BLIN = Stone, Isidor Feinstein

CONDENSER = Richardson, Kenneth

JULIA = Khlopkova, Olga

GNOME = Perl, William

NAZAR = Shudenko, Stepan Nikolaevich

SATYR = Sylvia Lorraine Callen Doxsee

SLAVA = Wolston, Ilya Elliott

TALENT = Malisoff, William M.

TULIP = Mark Zborowski

YAKOV = Perl, William

ZORA = Wovschin, Flora Don

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There is one instance where an identification of a cryptonym in Venona and The Haunted Wood are in conflict. In Venona the cryptonym ARENA is identified as Mary Price. The Haunted Wood, however, while not providing a real name, described ARENA’s background in some detail, noting, for example that that ARENA was male and worked for the U.S. Civil Service Commission and then obtained a commission in U.S. Navy in 1943, all of which would exclude Mary Price.

ARENA appears in Venona 984 KGB New York to Moscow, 23 June 1943 and is unidentified. In Venona 588 KGB New York to Moscow, 29 April 1944, ARENA appears and is footnoted as Mary Price. ARENA is also in Venona 769-771 KGB New York to Moscow, 30 May 1944 as Mary Price.

In The Haunted Wood ARENA is cited to documents dated in November 1944, June 1945, and November 1945. It is possible that there is no real conflict, that ARENA was Mary Price earlier but in late 1944 and 1945 the cryptonym ARENA was shifted to the person described in The Haunted Wood. However, on reviewing the discussion of ARENA in The Haunted Wood I am inclined to think that in this one instance Venona was wrong.

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Cryptonyms Identified in the Gorsky Memo that

Contradict Venona identifications

Total: 1

ARENA = Price, Mary [Venona]

ARENA = Unidentifed male [The Haunted Wood]

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The KGB Archives, Cryptonyms, and Alexander Vassiliev’s Notes

The real names and cryptonyms used in The Haunted Wood were based upon quotations and summary extracts Alexander Vassiliev made of files from the KGB archive. However, only a portion of Vassiliev’s notes was used in The Haunted Wood. Several pages of those unused notes were entered into evidence in Vassiliev v Frank Cass & Co Ltd., a 2003 libel case in the United Kingdom. This is a case that Vassiliev brought against John Lowenthal, a fierce defender of Alger Hiss and his attorney for many years. Lowenthal had some very unkind things to say about Vassiliev in an essay, “Venona and Alger Hiss,” published in the journal Intelligence and National Security, and Vassiliev responded with a libel action.

I obtained a few of these pages, encompassing Vassiliev’s notes on a single document, earlier this year from Eduard Mark, a historian who’s “Who was ‘Venona’s ‘Ales’? Cryptanalysis and the Hiss Case,” also published in Intelligence and National Security, which responded to John Lowenthal’s earlier article.^[12] Mark had obtained the notes from David Lowenthal, the brother of the then deceased John Lowenthal. Vassiliev’s notes are in handwritten Russian, and two colleagues of mine at the Library of Congress transcribed the notes into printed Russian Cyrillic and translated them into English. I placed all of this on the web at: < http://www.johnearlhaynes.org/page48.html >

Vassiliev’s notes extract a 1948 memo by Anatoly Gorsky. The memo, “Failures in the U.S.A. (1938-48),” is a remarkable document. First, just the sheer volume of paired cryptonyms and real names is astounding, ninety-seven. Second, equally impressive is the identification of Americans who assisted Soviet espionage, seventy-eight. Third, it allows the identification of a number of cover names found in the deciphered Venona messages that could not be connected to real names by NSA/FBI analysts. Fourth, it reinforces the view that Soviet espionage in the United States took a heavy blow immediately after World War II with the defection of Elizabeth Bentley and others. Fifth, while the credibility of Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley has been amply corroborated by other evidence, and the Gorsky memo adds just an additional bit, the credibility of Louis Budenz and Hede Massing was not as ample; here the Gorsky memo, consequently, is of greater weight.

One point to be kept in mind: these are Alexander Vassiliev’s notes on Gorsky’s memo entitled “Failures in the U.S.A. (1938-48).” The original is still held in a closed archive and Vassiliev’s notes are all that is available. Obviously, one would prefer to have the original, but that option is not at present available. Historians must work with what is available, not with what one would like to be available.

The Gorsky memo is dated December 1948. In the autumn of 1947 the Soviet government reorganized its foreign intelligence agencies. What historians usually refer to as the KGB (and its institutional predecessors MVD, MGB, NKGB, NKVD, OGPU, GPU, Cheka) was then the foreign intelligence directorate of the MGB, Ministry of State Security. In the fall of 1947 the MGB foreign intelligence directorate was combined with the foreign intelligence arm of Soviet military intelligence (GRU, Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravleniye or Chief Intelligence Directorate of the Soviet General Staff) to form an entirely new combined agency, the Committee of Information or KI. The MGB remained as a separate agency but with only domestic responsibilities. The new KI not only combined the human intelligence arms of the former MGB and GRU, it also combined the MGB’s Fifth (cipher) Directorate with the GRU’s cipher arm to form the Seventh Department of the KI.

The KI was not, however, a happy merger. The Soviet military argued strongly that it needed a dedicated foreign military intelligence agency as well as a battlefield intelligence arm. In the summer of 1948 the military personnel in KI were returned to the Soviet military to reconstitute a foreign military intelligence arm of the GRU but under guidelines to stick strictly to military matters. KI sections dealing with the new Soviet dominated Eastern European regimes as well as Soviet émigrés were returned to the MGB in late 1948. Finally, in 1951 the KI’s foreign intelligence functions were returned to the MGB, and the latter evolved into the KGB in 1954.

The point here is that at the time Gorsky wrote this memo Soviet intelligence organization was in flux. The Gorsky memo is a Committee of Information memo, a memo of an agency that had been created with a mandate of combine and coordinating all Soviet intelligence and briefly did control both GRU and what became the KGB.

The memo’s author, Anatoly Veniaminovich Gorsky, joined the predecessor to the KGB in 1928 and worked in its internal political police section until he transferred to foreign intelligence in 1936. He became deputy chief of the KGB’s station in London in 1936 and chief in 1940. In this position he managed the “Cambridge Five” and the initial KGB penetration of the British atomic bomb project. He returned to the USSR in 1944 for work at the central KGB headquarters but was then hastily sent to Washington to become chief of the KGB station in the U.S. after the sudden recall of Vasily Zubilin. In the U.S. Gorsky, using the name Anatoly Gromov, officially held a position as a senior Soviet diplomat at the Soviet embassy in Washington. He returned to Moscow in 1947 to take a supervisory position in foreign intelligence and in 1953 shifted to internal security work. He attained the rank of colonel and was awarded the Orders of the Red Banner, the Red Banner of Labor, Badge of Honor, and the Red Star.

Vassiliev’s notes do not state the context for Gorsky preparing this memo in late 1948. The subject, however, is clear. The five lists of groups are preceded with the title “Failures in the U.S.A. (1938-48),” and there is no doubt that Soviet espionage in the United States took sever blows from a series of defections. The groups are not listings of espionage networks, although several networks such as the Silvermaster and Perlo apparatuses managed by Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers’ own network are encompassed. Rather, the groups are lists of Americans who cooperated with Soviet intelligence as well as the Soviet intelligence officers who worked with them who were compromised or likely compromised by a defector (Whittaker Chambers, Elizabeth Bentley, Louis Budenz, and Hede Massing) and an agent who broke under FBI interrogation (Alexander Koral).

But what I am talking about today is cryptonyms and real names, and here the Gorsky memo is truly an amazing list because it provides ninety-five real names and cryptonyms pairings.

So, let us look at how the Gorsky memo corroborates Venona.

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Cryptonyms Identified in the Gorsky Memo that Match Venona identifications

Total: 42^[13]

ACORN = Bella Gold

ADAM = Eva Getsov [Rebecca Getzoff]

AILERON = Abraham George Silverman

ALBERT = Iskhak Abdulovich Akhmerov

ALEXEY [ALEKSEY] = A. A. Yatskov

ART = Helen Koral

BERG = Alexander Koral

BOB = Robert Menaker

CAUTIOUS = Julius Joseph

CHAP = Franklin Salmond [Zalmond Franklin]

DIR [DEAR] = Mary Price

ECHO = Bernard Schuster

ELZA (ELSA) = Akhmerova [Helen Lowry]

EXPRESS MESSENGER = Richard Setaro

GENNADY = Gaik Badelovich Ovakimian.

HARE = Maurice Halperin

INFORMER = Joseph Katz

IZRA = Donald Wheeler

JULIA = O. V. Shimmel^[14]

KOCH = Duncan Lee

MYRNA = Elizabeth Bentley

PAGE = Lauchlin Currie

PAL = Gregory Silvermaster

PEAK = Frank Coe

PILOT = Ludwig Ullmann

PRINCE = Laurence Duggan

RAID [RAIDER] = Victor Perlo

RICHARD = Harry White

ROBERT = Gregory Silvermaster

RUBLE = Harold Glasser

SATYR = Sylvia Caldwell [Sylvia Callen]

SERGEI = Vladimir Pravdin

SHAH = K. A. Chugunov

SOUND = Jacob Golos

STOCK = Mikhail A. Shaliapin

TED = Edward Fitzgerald

TWAIN = S. M Semenov

VADIM = Anatoly Gorsky

VARDO = E. Y. Zarubina

VIM = Lauchlin Currie

X = Joseph Katz

ZHENYA = Sonya Gold

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Cryptonyms Identified in the Gorsky Memo that Supply Identifications for Cryptonyms that are Unidentified in Venona

Total: 18 / 21

CHARLIE = Cedric Belfrage^[15]

CORA = Emma Phillips

DAN = Stanley Graze

FLORA = Ruth Rivkin

GOR [HOR?] = Joseph Gregg

HURON = Byron T. Darling

MIRAGE = Robert Miller

MOLE = Charles Kramer

MON = Bernard Redmont

MUSE = Helen Tenney

REDHEAD = Hede Gompertz [Gumperz] [Hede Massing]

RUFF = Franz Neumann

SAX = Solomon Adler

SISKIN = Eduardo Pekino [Pequeño?]

SMART = Elliot Goldberg

STORM = Joseph Peters

TAN = Harry Magdoff

TEACHER = Melamed [cover name has female ending]

There are three other cryptonym identifications that flow logically from these seventeen for a total of twenty. The Gorsky memo’s identification of CORA as Emma Phillips not only provides identification of an unidentified cover name in Venona, “CORA,” it also provides identification of two other unidentified cryptonyms, AMPERE and ROY. The Venona cables about AMPERE and ROY identify him as CORA’S husband. The identification of HURON as Byron Darling also supplies an identification for the unidentified Venona cryptonym ERNEST in as much as in October 1944, the HURON cryptonym was changed to EARNEST, only to be changed back to HURON in February 1945 for reasons that are not clear.

AMPERE = Phillips, husband of Emma Phillips

ERNEST = Darling, Byron

ROY = Phillips, husband of Emma Phillips

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As with those of THE HAUNTED WOOD, most of the real names supplied by the Gorsky memo for unidentified cryptonyms in Venona are know from other sources to have been associated with Soviet espionage. Elizabeth Bentley testified about the role of Belfrage, Gregg, Miller, Kramer, Redmont, Rivkin, Tenney, Adler, and Magdoff in spying for the USSR. Whittaker Chambers wrote of Peters’ role as head of the CPUSA covert apparatus and liaison to Soviet intelligence, Hede Massing was a KGB defector, and Neumann I discussed in regard to THE HAUNTED WOOD. I know nothing about Pekino, Goldberg, or Melamed.

The most interesting identification here is that HURON. HURON was an unidentified Soviet scientific source in Venona assigned at one point to contact Manhattan project physicists and to carry out other tasks related to atomic espionage. Because of his involvement with atomic espionage, HURON’s real identify has been of considerable interest. Who was Byron Darling? Byron Thorwell Darling received a Ph.D in physics at the University of Wisconsin in 1939. He was a research physicist at the U.S. Rubber company, Detroit, from 1941-46 and a consultant to U.S. Office of Scientific Research & Development in 1944. In 1953 he was an associate professor of physics as well as working on a U.S. Air Force research contract at Ohio State University. At that time he refused to answer question about CPUSA ties when testifying before the House Committee on Un-American Activities and was fired by Ohio State. He then moved to Canada and taught at Laval University. Darling has been portrayed in several books popular in the academic world as an innocent victim of McCarthyism.^[16] Instead he was a Soviet spy.

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Cryptonyms Identified in the Gorsky Memo that

Contradict Venona identifications

Total: 1

ARENA = Price, Mary [Venona]

ARENA = Graze, Gerald [Gorsky Memo]

I already discussed the matter of ARENA and Mary Price in regard to THE HAUNTED WOOD. But in the latter ARENA was not identified. The Gorsky memo supplies a real name, Gerald Graze. And note that the Gorsky memo also supplied a real name for another cryptonym, Stanley Graze, Gerald’s brother. Specialists in the field also know the Graze brothers. Both were on Robert Lee’s circa 1947 list of unresolved security risk cases at the U.S. Department of State. The Lee list was likely the basis for Senator Joseph McCarthy’s 1950 list of what he claimed were Communists in the State Department. James Burnham named Stanley Graze as part of what he called the “web of subversion” in the U.S. government.^[17] In 1952, Stanley Graze, citing his right to refuse to provide testimony that might subject him to criminal prosecution, refused to answer questions before the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security about having been secret Communist Party members or ever having engaged in espionage. At that time he worked for the United Nations.

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Now I would like to briefly note some likely identifications of real names behind unidentified Venona cryptonyms as well as corroborations of real names behind cryptonyms provided by Venona, all of which appear to be based on Russian archival sources.

Additional Real Names Provided for Unidentified Venona Cryptonym

Total: 3

ARTHUR (ARTUR) = Grigulivich, Iosif^[18]

LESLEY = Cohen, Lona^[19]

VOLUNTEER = Cohen, Morris^[20]

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A Summary

So, where does that leave us? Soviet archives have corroborated the real names attached to eighty-eight cryptonyms in Venona

Corroborated

Total: 88

ABRAM = Soble, Jack

ACORN = Gold, Bella

ADAM = Getsov, Eva

AILERON = Abraham George Silverman

ALBERT = Akhmerov, Iskhak

ALES = Hiss, Alger

ALEXSEY = Yatskov, Anatoly

ANT = Heineman, Kristal Fuchs

ANTENNA = Rosenberg, Julius

ANTON = Kvasnikov, Leonid

ARNO = Gold, Harry

ART = Helen Koral

ARTHUR (ARTUR) = Grigulivich, Iosif

BECK = Kurnakov, Sergei

BERG = Alexander Koral

BOB = Robert Menaker

BUMBLEBEE = Greenglass, David

CALIBER = Greenglass, David

CAMP-2 = Los Alamos

CAPTAIN = Roosevelt, Franklin D.

CAREFUL = Joseph, Julius

CAUTIOUS = Julius Joseph

CHAP = Franklin Salmond [Zalmond Franklin]

CHARLES = Fuchs, Klaus

CLEVER GIRL (MISS WISE) = Bentley, Elizabeth

CONSTRUCTOR = Brothman, Abraham

CZECH = Soble, Jack

DIR [DEAR] = Price, Mary

DORA = Silvermaster, Helen

ECHO = Schuster, Bernard

ELSA = Lowry, Helen

ENORMOUS = Manhattan Project

EXPRESS MESSENGER = Richard Setaro

FRANK = Duggan, Laurence

FROST = Morros, Boris

GENNADY = Ovakimyan, Gaik Badelovich

GOOSE = Gold, Harry

HARE = Halperin, Maurice

HELMSMAN = Browder, Earl

HOMER = Maclean, Donald D.

INFORMER = Joseph Katz

IZRA = Wheeler, Donald

JULIA = O. V. Shimmel

KALISTRAT = Feklissov, Alexander

KANT = Zborowski, Mark

KOCH = Lee, Duncan C.

LAWYER = White, Harry Dexter

LIBERAL = Rosenberg, Julius

LIZA = Stern, Martha Dodd

LOUIS = Stern, Alfred

LUKA = Pastelnyak, Pavel (Pavel Klarin)

MAKSIM (MAXIM) = Zarubin, Vasily [Zubilin, Vasily)

MANHATTAN PROJECT = Enormous

MAYOR (MER) = Akhmerov, Iskhak

METER = Barr, Joel

MLAD [YOUNGSTER] = Hall, Theodore Alvin

MYRNA = Bentley, Elizabeth

NABOB = Morgenthau, Henry, Jr.

NEEDLE = York, Jones Orin

OLD MAN = Trotsky, Leon

PAGE = Currie, Lauchlin

PAL = Silvermaster, Nathan Gregory

PICK = Coe, Frank

PILOT = Ullmann, William Ludwig

POLCATS = Trotskyists

POLO = Ullmann, William Ludwig

PRINCE = Duggan, Laurence

RAIDER (RAID) = Perlo, Victor

REST = Fuchs, Klaus

RICHARD = White, Harry Dexter

ROBERT = Silvermaster, Nathan Gregory

RUBLE = Glasser, Harold

SATYR = Sylvia Caldwell [Sylvia Callen]

SERGEI = Pravdin, Vladimir

SHAH = K. A. Chugunov

SIMA = Coplon, Judith

SOUND = Golos, Jacob

STAR [OLDSTER] = Sax, Saville

STOCK = Mikhail A. Shaliapin

TED = Fitzgerald, Edward J.

TULIP = Zborovsky, Mark

TVEN (TWAIN) = Semenov, Semen Markovich

VADIM = Gorsky, Anatoly

VARDO = Zarubina, Elizabeth

VIM = Lauchlin Currie

WASP = Greenglass, Ruth

X = Katz, Joseph

ZHENYA = Sonya Gold

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Soviet archives have also provided real names for twenty-nine cryptonyms that were unidentified in Venona.

Identified

Total: 29

AMPERE = Phillips, husband of Emma Phillips

BERG = Koral, Alexander

CHAP = Franklin, Zalmond

CHARLIE = Belfrage, Cedric

CHROME YELLOW = Brothman, Abraham

COLLEAGUE = Joseph, Mrs. Bela

CORA = Phillips, Emma

ERNEST = Darling, Byron

FLORA = Rivkin, Ruth

GOR [HOR?] = Gregg, Joseph

HURON = Darling, Byron

LESLEY = Cohen, Lona

MIRAGE = Miller, Robert

MOLE = Kramer, Charles

MON = Redmont, Bernard

MUSE = Tenney, Helen

NELLY = Lowry, Helen

RAMSAY = Hiskey, Clarence

REDHEAD = Massing, Hede

ROY = Phillips, husband of Emma Phillips

RUFF = Neumann, Franz

SAX = Adler, Solomon

SISKIN = Pekino, Eduardo

SMART = Goldberg, Elliot

SON = Baker, Rudy

STORM = Peters, Joseph

TAN = Magdoff, Harry

TEACHER = Melamed

VOLUNTEER = Cohen, Morris

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Soviet archival documents disagree with Venona only on the real name behind a single cryptonym.

Total: 1

Arena = Price, Mary [Venona]

Arena = Graze, Gerald [The Haunted Wood and Gorsky’s 1948 memo]

END

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