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The Venona Secrets: The Definitive Exposé of Soviet Espionage in America
The Venona Secrets presents one of the last great, untold stories of World War II and the Cold War. In 1995 the Venona documents secret Soviet cable traffic from the 1940s that the United States intercepted and eventually decrypted finally became available to American historians. Now, after spending more than five years researching all the available evidence, espionage experts Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel reveal the full, shocking story of the days when Soviet spies ran their fingers through America s atomic-age secrets.
Included in The Venona Secrets are the details of the spying activities that reached from Harry Hopkins in Franklin Roosevelt s White House to Alger Hiss in the State Department to Harry Dexter White in the Treasury. More than that, The Venona Secrets exposes: information that links Albert Einstein to Soviet intelligence and conclusive evidence showing that J. Robert Oppenheimer gave Moscow our atomic secrets How Soviet espionage reached its height when the United States and the Soviet Union were supposedly allies in World War II The previously unsuspected vast network of Soviet spies in America How the Venona documents confirm the controversial revelations made in the 1940s by former Soviet agents Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley.
The role of the American Communist Party in supporting and directing Soviet agents How Stalin s paranoia had him target Jews (code-named Rats ) and Trotskyites even after Trotsky s death How the Soviets penetrated America s own intelligence services The Venona Secrets is a masterful compendium of spy versus spy that puts the Venona transcripts in context with secret FBI reports, congressional investigations, and documents recently uncovered in the former Soviet archives. Romerstein and Breindel cast a spotlight on one of the most shadowy episodes in recent American history a past when treason infected Washington and Soviet agents were shielded, either wittingly or unwittingly, by our very own government officials.
608 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 2000
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
July 27, 2018
I'm adding the blurb in a spoiler. It's long but gripping reading. :-))
The other day someone asked me to explain Communism to her, and being so involved in the OBJECTIVE research of economic and community models for more than thirty five years already, I referred her to the lectures of Yuri Bezmenov to save myself a lot of time and effort :-)
Besides, Mr. Bezmenov trained the people who must expand the Soviet mantra all over the world. Who else could inform her the best, right?
And then of course, I compiled a list of books she could consider, such as Karl Marx's books. He was as much a philosopher as he was an economist. Few people know that. His most famous book, of course, is The Communist Manifesto. For a later rendition of this economic model, Saul Alinsky's Rules For Radicals could fill up the theoretical...more ideological side.
For the practical impact, the world will be her oyster, because it is the system that killed the most people in the history of mankind. Communism inspired the writing of millions of novels, biographies, autobiographies, papers, secret diaries, reports, lectures, and non-fictional tales.
One of the most interesting and profound books I've recently (past few years) read was Secondhand Time: The Last Of The Soviets by Svetlana Alexievich. The Russian author traveled her motherland and wrote an objective journal on the pre- and post Communist memories of the population. Some residents hated it, others loved it.
In earlier years, and as runaway bestseller, Wild Swans, Three Daughters of China by Yung Chang introduced the world to the situation in China. Then Isabelle Allende rang the bell on her mother country in South America. Then there's Vikram Seth in India. So many people, so many stories.
What triggered my interest in the American story of Communism, was a speech by Michele Obama, in which she almost verbatim quoted Saul Alinsky. Mmmmm, I thought, that's most interesting. And that's where my curiosity hit the road and lead me to authors such as David Horowits, Waldo Frank, Earl Browder, Jarvis Tyner, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, A.I. Bezzerides, Budd Schulberg, et al.
In fact, many of these authors were black-listed Communist authors in the McCarthy era. But they reappeared on Obama's Department of Labor’s (DOL) new “Books That Shaped Work in America” list celebrating the department’s 100th anniversary.
And somewhere along the line, digging even deeper, I discovered this book The Venona Secrets by Herbert Romerstein(2001). And what an interesting read it was.
I actually am still on my theme-read: Shadow Governments, but unexpectedly landed on this thread...sideline...deeper dimension. And it was like a gift that keeps on giving.
This book, being compiled from meticulous research over five years, lead the author and his wife to Russia, Germany, and Czechoslovakia in 1992/ 1993, when the Russian government opened their secret archives to international researchers. (Yung Chang made use of the same opportunity for her second book Mao: The Untold Story.)
In 1995 the FBI released the Venona papers. This book could finally be written. It is a fascinating peak into the secrets that would black-list Joe McCarthy in the 1950s, but now confirmed his allegations. Not that he was the biggest thorn in the Soviet spy rings. There were people long before him and a president after him, that made life even more difficult for the perpetrators.
VENONA WAS THE TOP SECRET NAME given by the United States government to an extensive program to break Soviet codes and read intercepted communications between Moscow and its intelligence stations in the West. The program was launched in February 1943....
...For a long time it has been an article of faith among apologists of the Left that Communist Party members were loyal citizens merely engaged in dissent and only bent on reform of the American system. Venona proves the opposite—their loyalty was to the Soviet Union, and many of the Party’s leadership and some of the hard-core membership served as spies in the Soviet cause. Venona and other recently available materials help explain why American Communists betrayed their democratic country to a totalitarian dictatorship.
One of the more outstanding elements in the book, is the Jewish spies, who fled Europe, arrived in America, and then betrayed the country who welcomed them. For the Jewish author, it became a dilemma in trying to find answers to this riddle. Most of the traitors were Jewish.
Who in America spied for the USSR?” and “What were the overriding principles that animated domestic Communists?”—has long been grounded in falsehood. Notwithstanding claims pervasive in the academy and, by extension, in standard history texts, the Communist Party USA was never a legitimate, indigenous political movement; never, in short, was the Communist Party merely a left-of-center political faction consisting of “liberals in a hurry” (to borrow a widely used, Popular Front–era concept). The Communist Party USA leadership and its rank and file were composed of Americans who will-fully gave their primary allegiance to a foreign power, the USSR.
More quotes from the book:
Between 1948 and 1951 Venona helped the FBI identify a number of Soviet agents including Klaus Fuchs, Harry Gold, David Greenglass, Theodore Hall, William Perl, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Harry Dexter White, and later Kim Philby. By World War II, White was considered a world-class economist. Many of White’s policies came into being, and some—the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, to name two— survive to this day. White was also the assistant secretary of the treasury under Roosevelt and Truman. Born in 1892 in Boston to Jewish immigrants from Lithuania, White represented the classic American success story. He attended Columbia University, served in World War I, and obtained B.A. and M.A. degrees from Stanford prior to earning a Ph.D. at Harvard. In Soviet terms White was a “non-Party Bolshevik.”
oOo
Intelligent and sensitive, often highly educated and sophisticated, they were willing to spy for an aggressive, totalitarian dictatorship that was responsible for the murder of tens of millions. The majority of these “Soviet patriots” had never been to the Soviet Union.
oOo
When Chambers broke with Communism, he saved samples of the documents that he had provided to Soviet intelligence as an “insurance policy.” These were the famous Pumpkin Papers—documents Chambers hid one night on his farm in a hollowed-out pumpkin in fear that the Soviets might try to steal and destroy them. While most of the papers were handwritten or typed by Alger and Priscilla Hiss, one of the Pumpkin Papers was in White’s handwriting. Chambers turned the papers over to the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1948.
oOo
Eventually—but not until 1953—the CIA joined the effort, and still more KGB agents were identified.
oOo
As early as 1944 high officials in the Roosevelt White House were formally alerted that the army was attempting to break Soviet codes. That year, Lauchlin Currie, a close personal aide to the president and a Soviet agent, was able to report to his spy controllers, through Elizabeth Bentley, that “the United States was on the verge of breaking the Soviet code.
oOo
Today the decryptions are more than a historical artifact. As we will see, the Venona cables are the mortar that holds together information from Soviet archives and U.S. government investigations. Together, they give a clear picture of Soviet World War II espionage against the United States.
oOo
Many years after the event, history are re-written as more information become available, and more questions can be answered. For instance, the author contemplate the roll of the Jewish Americans who, as he stated, will-fully sabotaged America's efforts to help Britain against Hitler and Russia.
In a January 30, 1939, speech to the Reichstag, Hitler greeted repeatedly by thunderous applause—pledged that “if the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, the result will be not the bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe” (our italics). Although it was Hitler, of course, not the Jews who started the war, the Nazis, during their alliance with the Soviet Union, abandoned antibolshevism but continued to persecute the Jews.
When the American Communist Party with its thousands of Jewish members, finally discovered that Lenin invited his top spies to Russia and then murdered them there, they turned their backs on their Soviet Masters. It was too late, though. Millions of people, in the end more than 100 million, already perished.
The fascination of this kind of book, exposing the secrets of the Venona papers, lies in the new information becoming available to historians. The information demand the rewriting of hundreds of historical books on the subject. Of course it won't happen.
In fact, books like these, will for many reasons be ignored and even rejected. In some quarters of our academic world, the ideology is more important than the facts. Or to be more blunt, books like these are not welcome everywhere. Opinions dare not be challenged. What a tragedy for students in the end.
For those who are curious though, this is a MUST-READ. A multiple number of documents, photos and decoded messages have been added to the book. It is a privilege to read for those of us who will otherwise never have access to these documents.
This book confirms why it is so important that more than one author write our history. It provides more options to the reader to form a better understanding.
Sometimes you don't need to read a novel to experience a suspense thriller. Sometimes non-fiction are a much better bet! :-))
I'm still on my Shadow Government theme-read.
The other day someone asked me to explain Communism to her, and being so involved in the OBJECTIVE research of economic and community models for more than thirty five years already, I referred her to the lectures of Yuri Bezmenov to save myself a lot of time and effort :-)
Besides, Mr. Bezmenov trained the people who must expand the Soviet mantra all over the world. Who else could inform her the best, right?
And then of course, I compiled a list of books she could consider, such as Karl Marx's books. He was as much a philosopher as he was an economist. Few people know that. His most famous book, of course, is The Communist Manifesto. For a later rendition of this economic model, Saul Alinsky's Rules For Radicals could fill up the theoretical...more ideological side.
For the practical impact, the world will be her oyster, because it is the system that killed the most people in the history of mankind. Communism inspired the writing of millions of novels, biographies, autobiographies, papers, secret diaries, reports, lectures, and non-fictional tales.
One of the most interesting and profound books I've recently (past few years) read was Secondhand Time: The Last Of The Soviets by Svetlana Alexievich. The Russian author traveled her motherland and wrote an objective journal on the pre- and post Communist memories of the population. Some residents hated it, others loved it.
In earlier years, and as runaway bestseller, Wild Swans, Three Daughters of China by Yung Chang introduced the world to the situation in China. Then Isabelle Allende rang the bell on her mother country in South America. Then there's Vikram Seth in India. So many people, so many stories.
What triggered my interest in the American story of Communism, was a speech by Michele Obama, in which she almost verbatim quoted Saul Alinsky. Mmmmm, I thought, that's most interesting. And that's where my curiosity hit the road and lead me to authors such as David Horowits, Waldo Frank, Earl Browder, Jarvis Tyner, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, A.I. Bezzerides, Budd Schulberg, et al.
In fact, many of these authors were black-listed Communist authors in the McCarthy era. But they reappeared on Obama's Department of Labor’s (DOL) new “Books That Shaped Work in America” list celebrating the department’s 100th anniversary.
And somewhere along the line, digging even deeper, I discovered this book The Venona Secrets by Herbert Romerstein(2001). And what an interesting read it was.
I actually am still on my theme-read: Shadow Governments, but unexpectedly landed on this thread...sideline...deeper dimension. And it was like a gift that keeps on giving.
This book, being compiled from meticulous research over five years, lead the author and his wife to Russia, Germany, and Czechoslovakia in 1992/ 1993, when the Russian government opened their secret archives to international researchers. (Yung Chang made use of the same opportunity for her second book Mao: The Untold Story.)
In 1995 the FBI released the Venona papers. This book could finally be written. It is a fascinating peak into the secrets that would black-list Joe McCarthy in the 1950s, but now confirmed his allegations. Not that he was the biggest thorn in the Soviet spy rings. There were people long before him and a president after him, that made life even more difficult for the perpetrators.
VENONA WAS THE TOP SECRET NAME given by the United States government to an extensive program to break Soviet codes and read intercepted communications between Moscow and its intelligence stations in the West. The program was launched in February 1943....
...For a long time it has been an article of faith among apologists of the Left that Communist Party members were loyal citizens merely engaged in dissent and only bent on reform of the American system. Venona proves the opposite—their loyalty was to the Soviet Union, and many of the Party’s leadership and some of the hard-core membership served as spies in the Soviet cause. Venona and other recently available materials help explain why American Communists betrayed their democratic country to a totalitarian dictatorship.
One of the more outstanding elements in the book, is the Jewish spies, who fled Europe, arrived in America, and then betrayed the country who welcomed them. For the Jewish author, it became a dilemma in trying to find answers to this riddle. Most of the traitors were Jewish.
Who in America spied for the USSR?” and “What were the overriding principles that animated domestic Communists?”—has long been grounded in falsehood. Notwithstanding claims pervasive in the academy and, by extension, in standard history texts, the Communist Party USA was never a legitimate, indigenous political movement; never, in short, was the Communist Party merely a left-of-center political faction consisting of “liberals in a hurry” (to borrow a widely used, Popular Front–era concept). The Communist Party USA leadership and its rank and file were composed of Americans who will-fully gave their primary allegiance to a foreign power, the USSR.
More quotes from the book:
Between 1948 and 1951 Venona helped the FBI identify a number of Soviet agents including Klaus Fuchs, Harry Gold, David Greenglass, Theodore Hall, William Perl, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Harry Dexter White, and later Kim Philby. By World War II, White was considered a world-class economist. Many of White’s policies came into being, and some—the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, to name two— survive to this day. White was also the assistant secretary of the treasury under Roosevelt and Truman. Born in 1892 in Boston to Jewish immigrants from Lithuania, White represented the classic American success story. He attended Columbia University, served in World War I, and obtained B.A. and M.A. degrees from Stanford prior to earning a Ph.D. at Harvard. In Soviet terms White was a “non-Party Bolshevik.”
oOo
Intelligent and sensitive, often highly educated and sophisticated, they were willing to spy for an aggressive, totalitarian dictatorship that was responsible for the murder of tens of millions. The majority of these “Soviet patriots” had never been to the Soviet Union.
oOo
When Chambers broke with Communism, he saved samples of the documents that he had provided to Soviet intelligence as an “insurance policy.” These were the famous Pumpkin Papers—documents Chambers hid one night on his farm in a hollowed-out pumpkin in fear that the Soviets might try to steal and destroy them. While most of the papers were handwritten or typed by Alger and Priscilla Hiss, one of the Pumpkin Papers was in White’s handwriting. Chambers turned the papers over to the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1948.
oOo
Eventually—but not until 1953—the CIA joined the effort, and still more KGB agents were identified.
oOo
As early as 1944 high officials in the Roosevelt White House were formally alerted that the army was attempting to break Soviet codes. That year, Lauchlin Currie, a close personal aide to the president and a Soviet agent, was able to report to his spy controllers, through Elizabeth Bentley, that “the United States was on the verge of breaking the Soviet code.
oOo
Today the decryptions are more than a historical artifact. As we will see, the Venona cables are the mortar that holds together information from Soviet archives and U.S. government investigations. Together, they give a clear picture of Soviet World War II espionage against the United States.
oOo
Many years after the event, history are re-written as more information become available, and more questions can be answered. For instance, the author contemplate the roll of the Jewish Americans who, as he stated, will-fully sabotaged America's efforts to help Britain against Hitler and Russia.
In a January 30, 1939, speech to the Reichstag, Hitler greeted repeatedly by thunderous applause—pledged that “if the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, the result will be not the bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe” (our italics). Although it was Hitler, of course, not the Jews who started the war, the Nazis, during their alliance with the Soviet Union, abandoned antibolshevism but continued to persecute the Jews.
When the American Communist Party with its thousands of Jewish members, finally discovered that Lenin invited his top spies to Russia and then murdered them there, they turned their backs on their Soviet Masters. It was too late, though. Millions of people, in the end more than 100 million, already perished.
The fascination of this kind of book, exposing the secrets of the Venona papers, lies in the new information becoming available to historians. The information demand the rewriting of hundreds of historical books on the subject. Of course it won't happen.
In fact, books like these, will for many reasons be ignored and even rejected. In some quarters of our academic world, the ideology is more important than the facts. Or to be more blunt, books like these are not welcome everywhere. Opinions dare not be challenged. What a tragedy for students in the end.
For those who are curious though, this is a MUST-READ. A multiple number of documents, photos and decoded messages have been added to the book. It is a privilege to read for those of us who will otherwise never have access to these documents.
This book confirms why it is so important that more than one author write our history. It provides more options to the reader to form a better understanding.
Sometimes you don't need to read a novel to experience a suspense thriller. Sometimes non-fiction are a much better bet! :-))
I'm still on my Shadow Government theme-read.
February 11, 2012
The book is an account of Soviet espionage in the United States, and how much of it was proved by the unveiling of messages between the Soviet Union and its agents in the USA. Venona is the name given to the decoding to these classified Soviet messages by the US government, which the National Security Agency finally opened to the public in 1995.
It's truly sad and frustrating to see the stupidity and partisan politics played by American presidents and heads of major government agencies, particularly FDR and Truman, who despite being warned about Soviet penetration at very high levels in American government, chose to do nothing about it lest they embarrass their administration, or the previous administration (in Truman's case).
It's also amazing that the only traitors who lost their lives because of their treason were Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, when there were literally hundreds of others who should have been shot.
Despite Soviet disinformation, Venona vindicated the accounts of former Communists who came forward, like Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley, and exposed so many of their former coworkers, like Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, and Harry Hopkins, yet Chambers and Bentley were vilified in the mainstream media. History has once again proved they were correct and truthful.
It's truly sad and frustrating to see the stupidity and partisan politics played by American presidents and heads of major government agencies, particularly FDR and Truman, who despite being warned about Soviet penetration at very high levels in American government, chose to do nothing about it lest they embarrass their administration, or the previous administration (in Truman's case).
It's also amazing that the only traitors who lost their lives because of their treason were Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, when there were literally hundreds of others who should have been shot.
Despite Soviet disinformation, Venona vindicated the accounts of former Communists who came forward, like Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley, and exposed so many of their former coworkers, like Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, and Harry Hopkins, yet Chambers and Bentley were vilified in the mainstream media. History has once again proved they were correct and truthful.
November 18, 2011
The historical facts are interesting, but the authors leave no opportunity to bash the reader over the head with "LEFT = BAD" commentaries. I get it, anyone non-right-wing is a communist.
So in summary: The book is pretty much utter garbage, and you can get all the interesting tid-bits by reading the Venona Files entry on Wikipedia.
So in summary: The book is pretty much utter garbage, and you can get all the interesting tid-bits by reading the Venona Files entry on Wikipedia.
December 26, 2010
This is probably the worst book I have ever read. The authors do a poor job of hiding their biases and the writing is excruciatingly poor. "Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America" by Haynes and Klehr is written and researched infinitely better than Romerstein's work. "The Venona Secrets" is a hack job of history.
September 11, 2012
Long and somewhat dry, but great information on the rise of communism in the US. Most of all, it proves Joe McCarthy was right.
December 22, 2020
A very detailed but somewhat sloppy work.
The book gives a lot of information about VENONA, in a lot of detail but not much that’s new. Romerstein and Breindel don’t seem that interested in the program; instead, it seems like they wrote this to uncover “new” Soviet spies (I.F. Stone, for example, despite the lack of hard evidence)
There could have been more coverage of how the Soviets used the information they obtained. Also, the authors report as fact that Oppenheimer was a Soviet agent, and downplay the role played by McCarthy in the Red Scare atmosphere. At one point they claim, inaccurately, that all of Trotsky’s family members were “killed ot forced to commit suicide.” They also write that the KGB used the code name “Rats” for both Zionists and for Jews in general; I don’t know where they got the latter idea. The book’s other problem is the dull writing; it usually reads like a government report. The narrative is also disjointed and a bit repetitive at times.
An informative and readable work, but not not without its problems.
The book gives a lot of information about VENONA, in a lot of detail but not much that’s new. Romerstein and Breindel don’t seem that interested in the program; instead, it seems like they wrote this to uncover “new” Soviet spies (I.F. Stone, for example, despite the lack of hard evidence)
There could have been more coverage of how the Soviets used the information they obtained. Also, the authors report as fact that Oppenheimer was a Soviet agent, and downplay the role played by McCarthy in the Red Scare atmosphere. At one point they claim, inaccurately, that all of Trotsky’s family members were “killed ot forced to commit suicide.” They also write that the KGB used the code name “Rats” for both Zionists and for Jews in general; I don’t know where they got the latter idea. The book’s other problem is the dull writing; it usually reads like a government report. The narrative is also disjointed and a bit repetitive at times.
An informative and readable work, but not not without its problems.
Read
September 10, 2019A revelation of how extensive and successful Soviet espionage was in the U.S. during the Cold War. A bit exaggerated: the author's aim seems to be a justification of at least the motivation for 1950s anti-communism.
It's an even more astounding read today given the American right's indifference to Russian penetration and poisoning in our political system today.
It's an even more astounding read today given the American right's indifference to Russian penetration and poisoning in our political system today.
July 1, 2022
Summary: Soviet espionage in the United States was extensive and well planned, starting from before World War 2 and not concluding until the Cold War, although Soviet activities in the US were greatly curbed by Communist purges in the 1940's and 50's. The Soviet Union used the Communist Party USA, a political movement that supported communism, to promote communist ideas and help place communists in official positions in the government. This should not be surprising, since all communist parties were treated as extensions of the Soviet state and swore their allegiance to creating the dictatorship of the proletariat as opposed to any form of representative democracy. The USSR also used an unofficial "illegal" apparatus to conduct activities such as espionage, sabotage, and to carry out other acts such as assassinations.
The Soviets targeted many groups of people, including Jewish organizations (despite being very anti-semitic, especially in the later years of Stalin's reign), African Americans (with whom they had little success), journalists, Hollywood film producers and crew, American intelligence services such as the OSS, scientists working on government projects, and government officials, especially those working in the New Deal. The list of people for whom there is at least some evidence of active collaboration with the Soviets is astounding; it includes Harry Hopkins, the Secretary of Commerce and head of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) under FDR, Harry Dexter White, a senior official in the treasury department and the architect of much of the post-world war global financial infrastructure, Alger Hiss, a U.S. State Department official and a founding member of the United Nations, I.F. Stone, a prominent American journalist, and J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the scientists working on the Manhattan project. Those who were not spies themselves but were influenced or spied upon included FDR himself, Walter Lippmann, and Albert Einstein, all of whom at one point or another were influenced by or acted in concordance with Soviet espionage strategy.
The general story told about post-war communism in the United States was that it was an unfortunate overreaction to left wing ideas in the United States. But the Venona files, a series of FBI documents collected from before the Cold War into the 70's, as well as KGB files on the subject, confirm that the United States had been infiltrated to a large degree, to the point where it was possible that Stalin knew about top secret projects in the United States such as the Manhattan project before the Vice President Harry Truman knew about them. Furthermore, the "Red Scare" was effective; left wing organizations began to clear their ranks of communists, and labor unions, civil rights groups, newspapers, and other institutions began to become much more vigilant about who was allowed into their ranks.
The Soviets targeted many groups of people, including Jewish organizations (despite being very anti-semitic, especially in the later years of Stalin's reign), African Americans (with whom they had little success), journalists, Hollywood film producers and crew, American intelligence services such as the OSS, scientists working on government projects, and government officials, especially those working in the New Deal. The list of people for whom there is at least some evidence of active collaboration with the Soviets is astounding; it includes Harry Hopkins, the Secretary of Commerce and head of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) under FDR, Harry Dexter White, a senior official in the treasury department and the architect of much of the post-world war global financial infrastructure, Alger Hiss, a U.S. State Department official and a founding member of the United Nations, I.F. Stone, a prominent American journalist, and J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the scientists working on the Manhattan project. Those who were not spies themselves but were influenced or spied upon included FDR himself, Walter Lippmann, and Albert Einstein, all of whom at one point or another were influenced by or acted in concordance with Soviet espionage strategy.
The general story told about post-war communism in the United States was that it was an unfortunate overreaction to left wing ideas in the United States. But the Venona files, a series of FBI documents collected from before the Cold War into the 70's, as well as KGB files on the subject, confirm that the United States had been infiltrated to a large degree, to the point where it was possible that Stalin knew about top secret projects in the United States such as the Manhattan project before the Vice President Harry Truman knew about them. Furthermore, the "Red Scare" was effective; left wing organizations began to clear their ranks of communists, and labor unions, civil rights groups, newspapers, and other institutions began to become much more vigilant about who was allowed into their ranks.
December 28, 2022
Alot of information that really makes you rethink certain events and historical figures. The authors wrote in depth about each, sometimes I feel they went into too much detail. Could've used a glossary too for different people, terms, and acronyms, because there was just alot to remember. Overall though, would reread.
June 19, 2021
Largely corroborates my previos understanding
I do not have any reason NOT to find these obsefvations correct, sad as they are. I would have like to have seen more analysis, context. Perhaps, I am just already TOO familiar with these facts. Not a real serious negative
I do not have any reason NOT to find these obsefvations correct, sad as they are. I would have like to have seen more analysis, context. Perhaps, I am just already TOO familiar with these facts. Not a real serious negative
February 3, 2022
Quite an interesting read how Venona exposed Americans who were Soviet spies...
April 1, 2022
The book is a bit long, but its really illuminating in terms of showing the extent of Soviet espionage in the U.S.
May 3, 2013
As I watch the news, of various May Day celebrations, for those that want to know exactly HOW this nation came to be communist at it's core, read it in the words of those that worked tirelessly to make it so.
Read about the prevarications, the infiltrations, the purges, the murders. All from decrypted message traffic.
Read about the prevarications, the infiltrations, the purges, the murders. All from decrypted message traffic.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews