2025/05/28 by Martin McCauley · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Intelligence, Security, War Strategy
paper · doi:10.4324/9781003593836-23
openalex publication_date 2025/05/28 · openalex created_date 2025/05/29 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
The National Security Agency’s (NSA) predecessors began to collect enciphered Soviet telegrams in 1939, but paid little attention to them as Japanese and German codes were more important. In 1942, success in deciphering Japanese codes between Tokyo and its military attachés in Berlin and Helsinki led to intriguing information. Finland, an ally of Germany from 1941 to 1944, had been working on Soviet codes and had passed on this information to the Japanese. In 1943, US military intelligence heard rumours of Soviet-German peace negotiations and began attempting to read Soviet telegrams. Only in 1946 were the first Soviet telegrams decoded, and what they revealed shocked the Americans as the information was not about diplomacy but about economic and military espionage. They were not sent by diplomats to the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, in Moscow, but between intelligence officers and General Pavil Fitin, head of the First Directorate, foreign intelligence, of the NKGB (secret police), in Moscow. By 1948, it was clear that Soviet intelligence had penetrated almost all major government agencies of military, economic and diplomatic importance. Large numbers of Soviet agents, aided by hundreds of Americans, many of whom were members of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), had passed on to Moscow masses of valuable information. The Venona project identified 349 citizens who had a covert connection with Soviet intelligence. Since only a part of the cipher cache was decoded, it is reasonable to assume that many more agents went undetected.