Case Study: The Venona
VENONA
In February of 1943, the United States Army’s Signal Intelligence Service (SIS) launched a secret program with efforts to gather and decrypt, and later exploit, Soviet diplomatic communications. It took nearly two years before American cryptologists were able to break the KGB encryption. The information that was gained – in more than 2,000 messages – provided “insight into Soviet intentions and treasonous activities of government employees” (“VENONA”). The Venona files are most famous for exposing Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, giving indisputable evidence of their association with the American Communist Party and involvement with the Soviet spy ring ("VENONA"). But what exactly made Venona possible? Who was involved? What did the program find? Arlington Hall’s Venona breakthrough in 1943-1946 was purely an analytic accomplishment, which was achieved without the benefit of either Soviet codebooks or plain-text copies of the original messages (Phillips). The messages were recovered over a period of years and were decoded from a “codebook” that crypto-linguist Meredith Gardner, reconstructed by the use of classic code breaking techniques. It should be known that the security of the encoding and decoding system used by the Soviet’s heavily depended on the randomness/unpredictability of the “key” and how …show more content…
In the summer of 1949, the Federal Bureau of Investigation gained knowledge that the secret of the construction of the atom bomb had been stolen and had been turned over to the Soviet Union. Further investigation revealed that Julius Rosenberg had begun associating with Ethel Greenglass (later Ethel Rosenberg) around 1932. Both became devoted communists between 1932 and 1935, after which they strongly believed that “nothing was more important than the communist cause.” ("The Atom Spy
In February of 1943, the United States Army’s Signal Intelligence Service (SIS) launched a secret program with efforts to gather and decrypt, and later exploit, Soviet diplomatic communications. It took nearly two years before American cryptologists were able to break the KGB encryption. The information that was gained – in more than 2,000 messages – provided “insight into Soviet intentions and treasonous activities of government employees” (“VENONA”). The Venona files are most famous for exposing Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, giving indisputable evidence of their association with the American Communist Party and involvement with the Soviet spy ring ("VENONA"). But what exactly made Venona possible? Who was involved? What did the program find? Arlington Hall’s Venona breakthrough in 1943-1946 was purely an analytic accomplishment, which was achieved without the benefit of either Soviet codebooks or plain-text copies of the original messages (Phillips). The messages were recovered over a period of years and were decoded from a “codebook” that crypto-linguist Meredith Gardner, reconstructed by the use of classic code breaking techniques. It should be known that the security of the encoding and decoding system used by the Soviet’s heavily depended on the randomness/unpredictability of the “key” and how …show more content…
In the summer of 1949, the Federal Bureau of Investigation gained knowledge that the secret of the construction of the atom bomb had been stolen and had been turned over to the Soviet Union. Further investigation revealed that Julius Rosenberg had begun associating with Ethel Greenglass (later Ethel Rosenberg) around 1932. Both became devoted communists between 1932 and 1935, after which they strongly believed that “nothing was more important than the communist cause.” ("The Atom Spy