Far from being a political party, taking positions on issues and nominating candidates for elections, the CPUSA was organized to steal military and diplomatic secrets, to influence American government decision-making, and to keep ready a sabotage organization. The CPUSA was prepared to use violence if the moment came for an armed revolution inside the United States.
The U.S. Army’s Signal Intelligence Service was aware of the CPUSA’s activities. Sophisticated mathematics and technology were coordinated in the Venona Project, which confirmed “the involvement of American Communists with Soviet espionage during World War II,” in the words of Maurice Isserman.
The Venona project intercepted and decrypted messages to Moscow from operatives inside the U.S. These messages, directed to intelligence agencies in the Soviet Union, revealed details “about the involvement of several score (perhaps as many as 300) American Communists as accomplices of Soviet espionage during World War II.”
The Soviet Socialst government had a collection of intelligence agencies, with names like NKVD. The famous KGB wasn’t formed until 1954.
Although the Venona Project began yielding data as early as 1943, it was not made public until many years later. Even within the U.S. government, very few people knew about Venona. It was imperative to keep it secret, so that the Soviet Socialists didn’t know that Americans were able to intercept their communications, as Maurice Isserman writes:
“Venona” was the code name assigned a top-secret National Security Agency operation, whose existence was revealed to historians and the public only in 1995. During World War II, codebreakers from the United States Army’s Signal Intelligence Service (a precursor to the National Security Agency) began decrypting thousands of intercepted telegraphic cables sent from the Soviet Embassy and consulates in the United States to Moscow. Among the first decoded Venona cables was conclusive evidence that Soviet spies had managed to penetrate America’s most closely guarded wartime secret, the Manhattan Project. Later decoded messages helped lead F.B.I. agents to an American involved in atomic espionage.
Among other spies, Julius Rosenberg and his wife Ethel were discovered by the Venona Project. The Rosenbergs transmitted secret information about nuclear weapons to the Soviet. These transmissions enabled the Soviets to develop their own arsenal of highly destructive weapons. Small and large nations were hesitant to oppose or resist Soviet takeovers of weaker countries. Thus the Rosenbergs were complicit in the deaths of millions of people who died under these Soviet-sponsored dictatorships.
The Venona Project, which lasted in various forms until 1980, revealed not only contemporaneous Soviet espionage, but also earlier spy activity. Cases going back to the 1930s were uncovered:
From small beginnings in the 30’s, Soviet espionage efforts in the United States increased exponentially during the war years. Pro-Soviet Americans, many of them secret members of the Communist Party, working within such sensitive agencies as the State Department, the Treasury Department and the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the C.I.A., provided K.G.B. agents with reams of useful information, ranging from well-informed political comments to purloined classified documents. Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White are among those whose long-suspected involvement in such activities seems to be confirmed by the Venona cables.
Some individuals, confronted with evidence from the Venona Project, quickly “defected” and began working for the Americans, and were able to provide even more information about the Soviet Socialist spy network inside the U.S. One such individual was “Elizabeth Bentley, the notorious ‘spy queen’ who gathered information for transmission to Moscow from dozens of Federal employees.”
Other Soviet agents did not cooperate with the U.S. government after their crimes were discovered. They were dealt with, but in low-profile ways, so as not to attract attention and alert the Soviets to the fact the the Americans were able to intercept their communications:
Some of those compromised by their activities during the war left Government service voluntarily; others departed under suspicion and pressure. A few, most notably Hiss, suffered legal consequences. One of the ironies of the Venona Project was that while it helped the F.B.I. detect spies, it did little to enable their prosecution by the Justice Department; the last thing American intelligence services wanted to see at the height of the cold war was a lengthy courtroom discussion of the means by which they were able to ferret out the opposition's agents.
So even after being discovered by the U.S. intelligence agencies, the “hidden landscape of Soviet espionage in the United States in the 30’s and 40’s” remained largely unknown. Only a few specialists inside the U.S. government knew about the Soviet spies, their activities, and how the Americans eventually discovered and deactivated them.
Most of these spies did not do their work because they needed money, or because the Soviets were blackmailing them, although both of those scenarios did occasionally occur. Most of them did it because they embraced the Soviet ideology. Whether they understood what the Soviets were really doing, or whether they were under the illusion of an idealized version of Soviet Socialism, is difficult to discern. Maurice Isserman writes:
Many of them, of course, understood perfectly well the real purpose of the persistent inquiries from Bentley and the other American go-betweens who came by trolling for information. Looking back at their actions and the consequences of those actions, knowing what we now know about the horrific character of the Soviet Union in the Stalin years, knowing also the ultimate fate of the Communist system and ideology, I find it difficult to make the imaginative leap necessary to understand why they did it.
In any case, the danger from Soviet Socialist espionage, from the 1930s up to the 1980s, was greater than most Americans knew. Happily, the heroism of American cryptographers during those years was also greater than most people knew.
