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2005
NSA Cryptologic History Symposium
"VENONA
and Cold War Historiography in the Academic World"
by
Harvey Klehr
27
October 2005
The collapse of the Soviet Union and
its East European satellites and the subsequent opening of a variety of
once-closed archives have led to an enormous expansion of fascinating new
material for military, diplomatic and political historians of the 20th
century. Those of us whose field of
interest is domestic American politics have not been unaffected. As a result of a deluge of documents and
files detailing the history of the Communist Party of the United States, the
Abraham Lincoln Brigade that fought in Spain and the Communist International,
among others, there has been renewed interest in the role of the American left
in recent American history. The release
of the Venona documents just over ten years ago and nearly simultaneous access
by a handful of scholars like Allen Weinstein to summaries of KGB files
prepared by Alexander Vassiliev or Christopher Andrew to Vasili Mitrokhin’s KGB
archive have resulted in a stunning expansion of our knowledge of the scope and
significance of Soviet espionage.
When new archives become accessible,
historians are usually eager and enthusiastic to mine their riches and exploit
the insights they offer into the past.
The Venona material was as rich and significant a trove of documents as
one could imagine but professional historians have not reacted with universal
enthusiasm to this material. To anyone
who has followed the story of the political and ideological conflicts that have
roiled the academic world in the past decade, the varied reactions to Venona
should be no surprise, but they might well be depressing.
As I assume most people in this room
are aware there have been a number of books using the Venona material. From my own admittedly biased perspective,
the Klehr-Haynes Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, Nigel
West’s Venona and Mortal Crimes, Romerstein and Breindel’s The
Venona Secrets, and David MacNight’s Australia’s Spies and Their Secrets
have laid out with admirable clarity the story of Soviet espionage. When supplemented by Weinstein and
Vassiliev’s The Haunted Wood, and Andrews The Mitrokhin Archive
these books provided a thorough grounding in the topic, whatever differences of
interpretation and nuance among them.
As John Haynes and I explained in our
book, In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage, not all historians
of this era or topic were in agreement.
The study of American communism has been a contentious area, with wildly
differing interpretations about the independence and autonomy of the
CPUSA. The issue of anti-communism and
the McCarthy era has generated intense debate with charges that it represented
a witchhunt and responses that there was a significant internal security threat. So, the Venona material was sifted through
deeply held ideological prisms.
Apart from those who have written the
afore-mentioned books on Venona, I would identify three different kinds of
responses to the material from those who had previously argued the case for the
relative autonomy of the CPUSA and a view of the McCarthy era as an age of
paranoia. The first, exemplified most
prominently by Maurice Isserman, is a recognition that Venona changed the game. Whatever differences he still has with historians
like John Haynes and myself about the American Communist party, Isserman is too
good and honest a historian to ignore documentary evidence. Originally, he thought that the CPUSA’s
involvement in Soviet espionage was only sporadic and ad hoc, but as more and
more evidence accumulated, he agreed that there was no question but that scores
of American Communists had cooperated with Soviet espionage agencies with the
approval and assistance of the Party’s leadership.
The second response is to doubt the
credibility of the Venona material. One
of the first examples came at an earlier Cryptologic History Symposium (1997)
when Professor Brian Villa of the University of Ottawa claimed with no evidence
that the United States government had lied about when the decoding of Venona
occurred and there was a second, still-hidden Venona project that contained the
real story. But Professor Villa, who
never pursued that line of thought, was not the last to suggest that Venona was
a hoax. Professor Bernice Schrank of
Memorial University in Canada valiantly if incoherently argued for the
Rosenbergs’ innocence by suggesting that the NSA had doctored the Venona
messages, although her examples only showed that she did not understand the
process by which messages were decrypted, declassified or disseminated. Professor Norman Markowitz of Rutgers
University, a proud, self-confessed member of the Communist Party of the United
States, similarly labeled the decoded cables “discredited” before pronouncing
the Rosenbergs victims of a government frame-up in a volume of the prestigious American
National Biography series, a standard reference source found in most
libraries.
Dismissing the Venona documents as frauds or forgeries is,
however, not terribly productive. There
is too much information, too many veterans of the project to attest to its
methods and history and too much corroboration of its major findings by retired
Soviet intelligence officers, once-closed Russian archives and other sources. Instead, some historians who find the
information revealed by Venona to be unpalatable have tried to suggest that,
while the documents are genuine, they are not necessarily accurate. KGB agents, it is alleged, were busy telling
their Moscow superiors what they wanted to hear and boasting about non-existent
sources within the American government.
Thus, Anna Kasten Nelson of American University is confident that
“Agents tend to tell their superiors what they want to hear” and Scott Lucas of
Birmingham University in England discerns “the tendency of any intelligence
officer to exaggerate, for political superiors, the number and importance of
agents they are controlling.” And Ellen
Schrecker of Yeshiva University repeats the same charge. None offered any evidence.
The most determined effort to read Venona messages to
exonerate a Soviet source is provided by Roger Sandilands of the University of
Strathclyde, a biographer of Lauchlin Currie.
Sandilands attempted to parse the Venona messages implicating Currie to
demonstrate his innocence. By providing
implausible readings of each of the messages, wrenched out of context and
divorced from other evidence about the operations of Soviet espionage,
Sandilands offers what he himself describes as a “fanciful, but not completely
implausible conjecture” that Currie was either indiscreet with his friends or
an authorized back channel to the Soviets although the two conjectures are
logically contradictory.
James Boughton, formerly of Indiana University and the
official historian of the International Monetary Fund also adopted the argument
for indiscretion. In response to the
fifteen Venona messages dealing with White, including those in which he
provided the Soviets with American bargaining positions and details about how
far the US was willing to go on issues related to the Polish
government-in-exile, Boughton concedes only that “White was indiscreet in
discussing policy issues with the Soviets” during meetings that “were a regular
and important part of White’s official duties at the U.S. Treasury throughout
the wartime period.” When White met with Vladimir Pravdin, a KGB officer
working as a Tass correspondent prior to the UN meeting in San Francisco and
offered tactical advice on how to deal with American proposals, Boughton sees
only “frank discussions with a Russian journalist (who was actually a KGB
agent).” When White conveys information
to the Russians via Greg Silvermaster, Boughton is reassured that it was normal
for White “to keep his Soviet contacts apprised” of relevant official
activities, as if Silvermaster, a secret Communist and a spy, was the normal
conduit for official information to be passed to Soviet officials. And then, there is the Venona message in
which a KGB officer reports meeting White, who warned that any exposure of his
activities could lead to a political scandal, lamented that there was no
suitable place to meet in the future and proposed “infrequent conversations
lasting up to half an hour while driving in his automobile.” Boughton thought all of this was nothing
more than a “means of keeping an ally informed of pertinent developments” as if
it was normal practice during wartime to meet with a foreign official while
driving about Washington to evade surveillance.
If one response to Venona has been to ignore or deride it
and another has been to seek benign explanations for its damaging revelations,
a third has been to accept that it has confirmed the involvement of hundreds of
Americans with Soviet intelligence but to seek to stop discussing the matter or
reinterpret the meaning of espionage.
Ellen Schrecker claimed in 2001 that nothing found in
recently opened archives required “that the past 30 years of scholarship will
need to be rewritten.” She recently
changed her mind in a hostile review of In Denial in which she confessed that
“enough evidence about the KGB’s espionage operations had accumulated to
convince most historians in the field, myself included” that more than 100
American communists had spied for the Soviet Union, including Alger Hiss,
Julius Rosenberg and most of those accused by Elizabeth Bentley. After this backdoor admission that she and
much of the historical profession had been wrong for more than thirty years,
she quickly concluded that it is in bad taste to ask why or to suggest that
historians might have been driven by an ideological or partisan cause. These issues are “redolent of political
antiquarianism,” Schrecker argued at a panel at the American Historical
Association and she urged historians to move one since the Cold War is
over. Scholars should stop obsessing
about espionage and study the CPUSA’s other activities and their “impact on the
rest of American society.” Such a bizarre plea- the McCarthy ear that Schrecker has made her life work is also
over- is actually confirmation that she is uncomfortable with the implications
of the Venona material for her own blinkered view of the past.
After acknowledging that Venona demonstrates widespread
espionage by American communists, Schrecker offered an ex post facto
rationalization: they “did so for political, not pecuniary reasons… As
Communists these people did not subscribe to traditional forms of patriotism;
they were internationalists whose political allegiances transcended national
boundaries. They thought they were
‘building… a better worlds for the masses,’ not betraying their country.”
Schrecker has complained that Haynes and I are misinterpreting her work; she is
only describing the motives of the spies not condoning their activities. But, anyone who contrasts Schrecker’s
account of those whom she admits spied with her evaluation of those who exposed
them (Elizabeth Bentley- “not a reliable informant,” unstable and alcoholic,”
and “slightly hysterical”- or Whittaker Chambers, to whom she is equally contemptuous),
will not doubt that Schrecker is making moral judgments.
Victor Navasky wanted to parse the concept of
espionage. “There were a lot of
exchanges of information among people of good, many of whom were Marxists, some
of whom were Communists, some of whom were critical of US government policy and
most of whom were patriots. Most of
these exchanges were innocent and were within the law. Some were innocent but nevertheless were in
technical violation of the law. And
there were undoubtedly bona fide espionage agents- on both sides.” Not only can Navasky not point to any
information flowing from Soviet scientists and government officials to
Americans as part of this exchange- what secrets were the KGB agents passing on
to Harry White and Ted Hall? - he does not provide any details about American
spying on the Soviet Union during World War II.
Several historians have concluded that Soviet spies actually
served the interests of the United States and humanity by helping to prevent
World War III. Michael Parrish of the
University of California San Diego endorsed Ted Hall’s rationale for giving the
USSR atomic bomb secrets, that it prevented an American monopoly of nuclear
weapons. “Who is to say that Hall’s
decision and those of Fuchs, Morris Cohen, Rosenberg and the others who gave
atomic secrets to the Soviets did not contribute significantly to what John
Lewis Gaddis has called ‘the long peace’ that followed World War II? Would the United States have been as prudent
in times of crisis in the absence of Soviet nuclear weapons? The world has not been a kinder and gentler
place since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dismantling of its sphere
of influence in Eastern Europe.”
Athan Theoharis of Marquette University also minimized the
damage done by spies. He pooh-poohed
the KGB and Venona records as largely consisting of trivial surveillance of
Trotskyists, White Russians and other Soviet enemies. As for the spying aimed at technological and military secrets, he
opines that “the information about U.S. industrial productivity and military
strength provided by the Silvermaster group- the numbers being overwhelming-
might have deterred Soviet officials from pursuing an aggressive negotiating
strategy.”
The most sophisticated effort to rehabilitate Soviet spies
is Bruce Craig’s biography of Harry Dexter White, Treasonable Doubt. Craig admits that “there remains little
doubt that Harry Dexter White was involved in a species of espionage.” He accepts the stories of Bentley and
Chambers about White’s cooperation with their rings and acknowledges that White
gave oral reports, written summaries and actual documents to KGB agents. But he is reluctant to call what White did
espionage, referring to “what have come to be considered ‘spy’
operations.” Craig believes that White
was so distressed by Harry Truman’s hard-line policies towards the Soviet Union
and so intent on advancing the cause of American-Soviet friendship that he
began to meet directly with KGB agents in 1945, although his argument ignores White’s
long cooperation with Soviet intelligence going back to 1938. When called before the House Committee on
Un-American Activities to answer the charges of Bentley and Chambers, White
lied, Craig argues, to protect his friends, the Democratic Party and the cause
of world peace, although he had no compunction about lying to the FBI and to
those friends and superiors, including Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau and
Presidents Truman and Roosevelt who had trusted his integrity and loyalty. Craig concludes that when White died, “he
knew that his was a life that had been fully and fruitfully lived” and no
reader of his book will doubt that he shares that positive judgment.
As this very brief summary suggests, many in the academic
community have responded to the Venona revelations with a mixture of defiance
and denial, a reaction that should depress anyone who wants to obtain an
accurate view of the American past. Two
years ago, I looked at how American history textbooks used in high schools were
treating the Venona material. Several
widely used texts, including some commonly employed in advanced placement
courses, continued to treat the internal security threat posed by Soviet spies
as a cynical ploy developed by the American government and not only refused to
accept the guilt of the Rosenbergs or Alger Hiss, but insisted that there was
no credible evidence about them even today.
Others have made pro forma acknowledgment of the new evidence but have
yet to consider what the enormous Soviet espionage directed against the United
States means for our efforts to understand the post World War II world and
American anti-communism. Fortunately,
however, the documents and their significance cannot be hidden away again and efforts
to minimize them or apologize for those they expose will continue to run
head-first into those stubborn little facts that ultimately constrain
foolishness.
End
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