“Who Gave Away the Bomb?”: VENONA Project Codebreaking and Atomic Espionage (1943-1980), Conclusion

To recap the first part of this story about the top secret VENONA Project (1943-1980)- the most success the U.S. ever had in reading coded Soviet messages during the Cold War. The codebreaking was done by a Russian unit, mostly made up of young civilian women, based within a former girls’ school, Arlington Hall in northern Virginia (where all Army cryptography had moved in Aug. 1942). Initially it was created as a small-scale gamble, with little hope of success of reading the hundreds of thousands of intercepted messages, as the Soviets were using a normally unbreakable method, one-time pads. The crucial breakthrough, which didn’t happen until just after the end of World War II, was the realization that a minority of the messages (all between 1943-1946) were done through reuse of the pads. As the codebreakers began to read a few messages, they suddenly realized that they showed clear evidence of massive, and high-level, Soviet espionage within the U.S., at a time when the Americans and Soviets were allies against Nazi Germany.

Gene Grabeel, VENONA codebreaker from its start in '43 to '78 (Nat. Cryptologic Museum)

Most worrying of all, the spying included “atomic spies,” working within the very large, very expensive, and extremely secretive Manhattan Project that produced the world’s first three atomic Bombs (the first, tested in New Mexico in July 1945, and the two dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan in August that hastened the end of the war). This discovery happened right when the Soviet Union, under its brutal dictator, Joseph Stalin, was installing repressive and subservient governments across almost all of Eastern Europe (creating the so-called “Iron Curtain”, sealing off those nations from the democratic West). In reaction, Pres. Truman in 1947 announced the global struggle that would be called the “Cold War.” He promised that America would “contain” world communism, anywhere and everywhere. His conviction by now, and that of the majority of the American public, of the Soviet danger to national security, had been greatly influenced by two publicized defections in late 1945: of Igor Gouzenko, a cipher clerk at the Soviet embassy in Canada, and of Elizabeth Bentley, a courier (a messenger between spies, almost all of whom were non-Russian, and the Soviet spy agencies). Both had limited knowledge, but enough to alert the FBI (which had also received an anonymous letter naming some Soviet agents), and their revelations helped to provide the context for the “Red Scare” McCarthyism paranoia of the early 1950s.

Now the VENONA Project was beginning to provide hard evidence that no less than five spy networks had been operating within many parts of the federal government, stealing military, scientific and technological secrets! It did not show something else that was very important- that, on a small scale at first, also from Feb. 1943 on, the Soviets were steadily using the stolen information to work on an atomic weapon of their own!

I will be focusing on those spies specifically targeting the Manhattan Project’s atomic secrets (and even then I will need to be selective, as the estimate today is that there were “perhaps 50”, counting the British as well as those within the U.S.; not all have even been identified, even today!). The Project began to take shape in the spring of 1943, not long after Gene Grabeel was hired for the Russian unit that would become VENONA. Two of the concealed Project sites, each employing thousands, weren’t of much interest to spies: Hanford in Washington State and Oak Ridge in Tennessee. That’s because they were only concerned with processing the radioactive materials (uranium and plutonium) for the weapons- and most workers didn’t even know the overall purpose of what they were doing! The Soviet focus was on research facilities. They failed to penetrate one important example (the so-called “Rad Lab” at the University of California at Berkeley), though, tragically, the FBI persecuted one innocent scientist there, Martin Kamen, to the point that he lost his job and attempted suicide (fortunately he was able to win vindication years later, in 1955, and at the end of his career received one of the top world physics prizes!). They did succeed in recruiting a scientist, Alan Nunn May, within the British team that built the first nuclear reactor outside the U.S., at Chalk River in Ontario, Canada.

But their target of top priority was the gathering of scientists at the chief research site, Los Alamos, New Mexico (which included many Nobel laureates!). It was run by Gen. Leslie Groves, with Robert Oppenheimer as the top scientist, and was started in Apr. 1943. That’s where the countless theoretical and physical problems, of turning the concept of a runaway fission reaction into a working weapon of unsurpassed power, were actually to be solved. Not surprisingly, the Soviets aimed to infiltrate multiple spies, in order to gain as broad and accurate a picture as possible of the complex research.

Klaus Fuchs's Los Alamos ID (c. 1944)- from Alamy

Their hopes rested on two spies in particular. The first, and most famous, was reserved and serious; balding, though only 32, with wire-rimmed glasses; and had a strong German accent. That’s because he, Klaus Fuchs, was German (in fact, when he fled Germany to Britain, he was sent for detention in Canada as a citizen of an enemy nation!). He had fled because he was a committed Communist (a party targeted for elimination by the Nazis). He was also a very talented physicist; that talent (as would happen repeatedly) won him liberation from the internment camp to work on Britain’s nuclear research, which predated the Manhattan Project, winning him British citizenship. It was also where he began his espionage. His courier, from the time he arrived in the U.S., was Harry Gold, a Russian immigrant chemist who had been in the same network with Bentley (Fuchs and Gold disliked each other from the first). They began to meet on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in early 1944, each (using a time-honored tactic also known to blind dates!) carrying a specified object (a handball in Fuchs’s case!). In July, Fuchs “disappeared”- greatly disturbing his Soviet superiors (as his material had already proved very valuable). But it was because he was sent to Los Alamos. While not among the Nobel elite, he was still chosen to be part of a handful of assistants brought by top British scientist Rudolf Peierls to Los Alamos. That put him right at the heart of Bomb research.

Ted Hall as a Los Alamos scientist at 19 (pbs.org)

The other top atomic spy, Theodore (“Ted”) Hall, was a true prodigy- the youngest of all the scientists at Los Alamos. He was born a Holzberg, but had changed his name to conceal his part-Jewish identity. He had just graduated from Harvard when he arrived a few months before Fuchs at Los Alamos, in Jan. 1944- at 18, having gone through college in two years! Yet he was soon appointed to lead his own team of physicists. He would not start spying until October, when he, and his college roommate Saville Sax (who would become a courier, rather than a scientist-spy), managed to make an amateurish contact with Soviet intelligence. His treason, as valuable as Fuchs’s, would not be revealed publicly until 1995! There’s no evidence that Hall and Fuchs ever knew of each other’s spying (an asset to the Russians, as they could thus reliably cross-check the information provided).

The Soviets also inserted a lower-level spy into the engineering part (the machine shop) of Los Alamos- David Greenglass (who would become infamous for incriminating his brother-in-law). He was one of those who would work on the explosive lenses that would be in the Bombs’ detonators. He did not have anywhere near the scientific expertise of Fuchs and Hall (indeed much of what he reported was so confused as to be useless), but he did provide a plan of the research buildings and a rough sketch of the Nagasaki Bomb. Gold and Greenglass did know each other, and as spies. Greenglass recruited his sister Ruth, and would be linked to the Rosenbergs (of whom more later). All of the spies were never referred to in messages by their own names (Fuchs was “Rest”, Greenglass “Kalibr”, and Hall was “Mlad”, Russian for “young”!).

By 1945, as the war, and the Manhattan Project, were headed to the end, the VENONA codebreakers had transcribed over 200,000 messages. With Germany and Japan on the brink of defeat, reading the Soviet messages now had the top priority, with over 500 working on them (this was when Bill Weisband, who would betray VENONA, was hired as a Russian linguist). As yet none of the atomic spies had been revealed (and another now came into the picture- George Koval, who was hired to work at the secret lab in Dayton, Ohio where the “initiator” for the implosion Bomb was being developed).

In July, Fuchs was present when the world’s first Bomb was tested in New Mexico (the Trinity Test, memorably portrayed in “Oppenheimer”). Truman, when told of its success, hinted vaguely in person to Stalin about possessing a new powerful weapon. As I covered in the first part, it took the actual devastating use of that weapon (at Hiroshima on Aug. 6, and Nagasaki on the 9th), followed in days by Japan’s surrender, to alert Stalin to the true ominous significance of the Atomic Age (and of America’s monopoly of the weapon!). At that point the dictator effectively launched the Soviet equivalent of the Manhattan Project- an all-out, no-expense-spared race to catch up. That project would need every scrap of technological information possible from Fuchs, Hall, and the other atomic spies. The Americans publicly handed the Soviets some useful information when they issued the Smyth Report, the unclassified history of the Manhattan Project, right after Nagasaki.

But, by 1947 on, with the Cold War begun and the first spies revealed (thanks to defectors Gouzenko and Bentley), there was another accelerating race- that of the American codebreakers at Arlington Hall, to break into the Soviet messages, and then to match codenames to specific individuals.

By then, much had happened to the atomic spies. The spies of the Canadian network (most importantly Alan Nunn May), thanks to Gouzenko, had been rounded up. Greenglass had left the Army, to run a small machine shop in New York. As for Fuchs, the British were still so unaware of Fuchs’s espionage that they recruited him for their own Bomb project- flying him in June 1946 right to their secret research lab at Harwell outside Oxford! Hall, not yet 21 (!), left Los Alamos soon after- to work on a doctoral degree at the University of Chicago (where he met his wife. Similarly, George Koval left the Army and earned a degree in electrical engineering at City College of New York (before leaving for the USSR). Julius Rosenberg, also in New York, was now working for a defense contractor (Emerson Radio). Harry Gold, Fuchs’s courier, had been dropped by the Soviets in 1946 for a security breach.

Meredith Gardner, VENONA's linguistic prodigy & most prominent codebreaker (Wikipedia)

“Peacetime” life for most of these spies would be upended when Meredith Gardner’s VENONA report alerted the FBI that broad espionage had been going on (Sept. 1947). In June 1948, the first major Cold War confrontation began, when Stalin abruptly cut all land access to West Berlin (the half of the city, well within Soviet-run eastern Germany, which was controlled by the three Western Allies- the U.S., Britain, and France)- hoping, without using military force, to push his former allies out. In response, the Americans and British began an extraordinary, and successful, effort to supply West Berlin with fuel and food (the Berlin Airlift).

At that point events, both in the public and secret spheres of the Cold War, dramatically accelerated. First, some very bad news. American counterintelligence received a very serious blow- what it would call “Black Friday” (my sources disagree on the date- either Aug. or Oct. 1948)- when the Soviets abruptly ended the use of radio and cables for classified messages (now to be landline only), and changed their ciphers. On the eve of true breakthrough, the VENONA Project workers would no longer be handed any more new intercepts; as it turned out, for almost 30 years, the U.S. would not have any more access to classified Soviet communications (it would have to get information by other means!). Only a minority of the 1943-46 messages would ever be deciphered.

Soviet message about recruitment of Ted Hall & Saville Sax, translated by VENONA (pbs.org)

Right after Black Friday, the hard work of VENONA began to pay off; about 20,000, less than 10% of the intercepted messages, would be read in whole or in part. Those showed that there was a “mole” (top-level agent) within British intelligence (more on that to come), and the FBI was able to make its first arrest- of a spy within the Justice Department (Judith Coplon- Mar. 1949). She was caught as she was about to hand documents to a KGB agent, and was put on trial (though her conviction was eventually overturned). VENONA material also revealed extensive Soviet espionage within a Cold War ally, Australia.

Announcement of first Soviet Bomb test (Harry S Truman Nat. Historic Site, Sept 23, 1949)

Then another event dramatically raised the stakes for American counterintelligence. An American plane, loaded with special equipment, flew close to Russian airspace on Sept. 3, 1949, and it picked up a massive recent release of radioactivity into the atmosphere. Upon analysis, there was only one possible explanation: the Soviet Union had detonated its first atomic Bomb (in the sparsely inhabited grassland of what is now the nation of Kazakhstan).

This discovery (which Pres. Truman revealed to the public) came as a profound shock. The new CIA had predicted a Soviet Bomb, but not for several more years. The obvious question was- how had the USSR caught up so quickly?? Another big Cold War setback followed, when on Oct. 1 China became the second Communist nation (the “People’s Republic”).

The hunt for spies now had tremendous urgency, and the spies knew it. A very important set of spies now came to the fore- but in Britain. This was the so-called “Cambridge Five”- five young men at that elite university who had been recruited in the 1930s. They had all gone on to have very high-level posts within the government, and even within Britain’s spy agencies! None had yet been exposed, but one of them, Donald Maclean, had already been posted to the U.S. and had had access to atomic secrets (he would turn out to be the “mole” that VENONA had identified). Another, “Kim” Philby, was at this very moment being assigned to Washington as the MI6 liaison officer with the FBI and CIA; before he left, his boss briefed him about VENONA and the investigation of atomic spies!! Philby made sure to visit Arlington Hall, where he “dropped in” on Gardner’s decrypting. Philby apparently sent actual copies of decoded messages to Moscow. He also immediately warned both Maclean and Fuchs, and probably Weisband too (fired in May 1950). Alger Hiss, a top State Department official, already under suspicion, underwent a second trial and was convicted (of perjury).

Predictably, the Soviet spy networks were abruptly disrupted. Gold was visited by a Soviet agent, who urged him to defect. Hall stopped spying and focused on biology (where he would make important contributions). The courier for the Cambridge Five, known as “Sonia,” fled to East Germany. In Dec. 1949, a member of MI6, which had no arrest power, questioned Fuchs (after Fuchs’s father also moved to East Germany).

Fuchs at first wouldn’t cooperate at all, but, in Jan. 1950, he confessed (and, in a very brief trial, was convicted and sentenced to 14 years in prison). Even then he insisted that he knew of other agents only by codenames, with one exception. He did identify his courier, Harry Gold. The revelation to the public that Fuchs, a top atomic physicist, was a spy was another major Cold War shock to the American (and British) public. An obscure Wisconsin Republican congressman, Joseph McCarthy, took advantage of the hysteria and announced in a speech in Feb. 1950 that he had a list (a lie!) of spies within the State Department; soon, as he began to haul people in for Congressional hearings, he would become one of the most feared politicians in American history.

On May 23, the FBI arrested Gold (he was sentenced to 30 years in December). In turn he named two other atomic spies- David Greenglass and Julius Rosenberg (both not nearly as important as Fuchs). Just as they were being arrested, Cold War tensions moved up even further. The Communist North Koreans, armed with Soviet tanks, suddenly invaded non-Communist South Korea on June 25, 1950; within days Truman had committed the U.S. to the (undeclared) Korean War (followed soon by the new United Nations). Greenglass was given a 14-year sentence; in a controversy that continues today, the FBI sought to pressure Julius to confess by charging his wife Ethel with espionage as well (historians now agree that her role was minimal). When he refused, both were sentenced to death (and were executed in 1953, after the new president, Eisenhower, refused to pardon them!). This outcome, on top of McCarthy’s ruining of others’ careers, deeply hurt top codebreaker Meredith Gardner, who, while not questioning the spies’ guilt, was quoted as saying about VENONA: “I never wanted it to get anyone into trouble.” In November, Bill Weisband failed to appear for a grand jury meeting, and was sentenced to a year in jail (which he never served).

As for Hall, the other truly important atomic spy, he did come under FBI suspicion, and in March 1951 was interviewed by an agent for three hours in Chicago. He admitted nothing; the agent remained convinced of his guilt; and right afterward, Hall and his wife cleared their apartment of any papers that were possibly incriminating, and dumped them in a drainage canal! A wise move- his espionage would remain unrevealed for four more decades.

On to the British spies: the Americans, thanks to VENONA, warned British authorities about two of the Cambridge Five (Burgess and Maclean, both in Washington). Philby, the most important spy of all (especially for exposing VENONA), was recalled to Britain, and came under suspicion when Burgess and Maclean suddenly fled from Britain to the Soviet Union! But, after interrogating him in June 1951, MI6 could not find enough evidence, and he was allowed to “retire quietly” (he fled to the USSR in 1963). In all of these cases, there remained the issue that VENONA and its evidence were still classified and hence couldn’t be used directly in court (the American government remained unaware that the project was already well known to the Soviets!).

Meantime the Cold War rolled on. The Korean War ended in deadlock and a ceasefire in 1953; first the Americans, and then the Russians, tested the far more destructive fusion Bomb (the “H-Bomb”- “H” for hydrogen); and the British tested their own atomic weapon (off Australia). The VENONA Project continued on, but its days of big revelations appear to have been over (there is almost no mention of it beyond the early 1950s in the sources I’ve found). As the years went by, the information in what could be read, which was only from the early 1940s, became more and more outdated.

The Army cryptography operation, along with the Navy’s and others, were all centralized under a big new agency in Nov. 1952: the National Security Agency (NSA). All those who worked on reading other nations’ communications moved to a massive new complex in Ft. Meade, Maryland, though for decades even the agency’s existence was classified! (the joke was that “NSA” stood for “No Such Agency”!). VENONA remained a secret even within the NSA.

The need of the U.S. government for detailed information about Soviet activities remained at least as great as ever. There were a few important defectors, who exposed the new head of spying within the U.S. (known as “Rudolf Abel”). In 1956, an entirely different method of spying on the Soviets was introduced. This was a top-secret aircraft, which could fly far higher than any previous airplane, and which was armed with cameras of revolutionary precision: the U-2. President Eisenhower authorized a handful of overflights, which revealed that the Soviets had far fewer missiles than they had claimed. But the U-2 program was revealed to the world in 1960, when one was shot down by Soviet antiaircraft and the pilot was captured (to be traded for “Abel”- the theme of another Hollywood movie, “Bridge of Spies”!). The next spying technology would be satellites…

As the years went by, the various characters I have mentioned in this story began to retire and die. One common sideline for active or retired codebreakers became the designing of fiendishly difficult crossword puzzles! In 1978, the NSA decided to phase out VENONA, by then ongoing for 35 years. This was the point at which Gene Grabeel, the young schoolteacher who had cofounded it in 1943, finally retired. On Oct. 1, 1980, it ended, having recovered about 5,000 of the 35,000 pages of Soviet diplomatic messages for 1942-46. Its documents, like the Project itself still classified, were moved to the NSA Archives.

Soon after, the first hints in print about the program began to appear. But it took the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union (Dec. 1991) before the decision was made by the NSA to reveal VENONA to the public. The first revelations about Soviet espionage from the Russian side were already being published. Pressure to declassify came from a congressional committee headed by New York Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. On July 12, 1995, more than 52 years after it began, a grand press conference was held to announce the declassification, and over 1,200 of the actual translated messages were released (in 6 batches). According to the partially declassified official history, they had revealed 349 Soviet spies, operating in five networks, though a large number remain unidentified. At last the surviving Project workers, now in their 70’s and 80’s, could speak and be interviewed, most notably for two books: “Bombshell” by Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel, and more recently “Code Girls” by Liza Mundy. They could now be openly proud of their excruciatingly tedious, but very innovative and successful, code work. The VENONA story was also the subject of a PBS documentary in 2002. The biggest revelation was that Ted Hall, terminally ill, at last admitted his important role in betraying atomic secrets (which he insisted was in the interest of world peace, in preventing an American nuclear monopoly; he, like most of the spies, never accepted money).

In sum, the hardworking men and women of VENONA carried out the most successful American operation of the Cold War in terms of exposing spies (and not just any spies, but those who speeded up the development of Soviet nuclear weapons, by about 12-18 months is the estimate!). However, the timing matters in considering the Project’s legacy- it revealed those spies only just after they’d already delivered that crucial technical information!

That’s it for my account of this aspect of the Cold War! Hope you’ve enjoyed it! In my next post, I’m going to make another big shift in topic- to Native American archaeology (my original focus in college and grad school). I’ll be looking at the one true pre-Columbus “city” in North America (roughly 800-1350)- Cahokia in Illinois, the largest site of the widespread Mississippian culture. It should be out soon!

Resources:

-Albright, Joseph, and Marcia Kunstel. “Bombshell: The Secret Story of America’s Unknown Atomic Spy Conspiracy.” (1997)

-Alvarez, David. “Secret Messages: Codebreaking and American Diplomacy, 1930-1945.”

-Batvinis, Raymond. “VENONA: The Opening Moments.”

(https://fbistudies.com/2019/05/21/venona-the-opening-moments/)

-Benson, Robert L. “The Venona Story” (https://www.nsa.gov/portals/75/documents/about/cryptologic-heritage/historical-figures-publications/publications/coldwar/venona_story.pdf)

-‘’-“Venona: Soviet Espionage and the American Response.”

-Blum, Howard. “In the Enemy’s House: The Secret Saga of the FBI Agent and the Code Breaker Who Caught the Russian Spies.” (2019- Gardner & Lamphere)

-Breindel, Eric, and Herbert Romerstein. “The Venona Secrets.”- see video talk by Romerstein (https://www.c-span.org/video/?160036-1/the-venona-secrets)- 2000.

-“Cracking the Code: The Venona Project.”

(https://coldwarhistoryblog.com/f/cracking-the-code-the-venona-project)

-Budiansky, Stephen. “Battle of Wits: The Complete Story of Codebreaking In World War II.” (2002)

-Cain, Frank. “Venona in Australia and Its Long-term Implications.” (https://www.jstor.org/stable/261205)- 2000.

-Canadian Security Intelligence Service. Image of One-time Pad (https://web.archive.org/web/20130627165316/http://www.csis-scrs.gc.ca/hstrrtfcts/rtfcts/trdrtfcts001-eng.asp)

-Close, Frank. “Trinity: The Treachery and Pursuit of the Most Dangerous Spy in History.” (2019- on Google Books)

-“A Counterintelligence Reader, Volume 2 Chapter 4, VENONA” (https://irp.fas.org/ops/ci/docs/ci2/chap4.pdf)

-Fox, John F., Jr. “In the Enemy’s House: Venona and the Maturation of American Counterintelligence” (https://www.fbi.gov/history/history-publications-reports/in-the-enemys-house-venona-and-the-maturation-of-american-counterintelligence)- role of FBI

-Hankin, Cassandra. “Project VENONA: Breaking the Unbreakable Code.”- honors thesis, Georgia Southern Univ., 4-17-20 (https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1568&context=honors-theses)

-Hastings, Max. “The Secret War: Spies, Ciphers, and Guerrillas, 1939-1945” (2016)

-Haynes, John Earl, and Harvey Klehr. “Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America.” (1999)- (https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1npk87)

-review of Haynes & Klehr (https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/99/05/09/reviews/990509.09issermt.html)

-excerpt (https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/h/haynes-venona.html)

-video talks by Haynes (https://www.c-span.org/video/?123915-1/venona-decoding-soviet-espionage-america)- 1999 & (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPUKu3jhtyo)- 2011.

-“History of Venona.” NSA (https://archive.org/details/history_of_venona-nsa), 1995. The best information declassified so far (includes info from interviews with participants).

-“Introductory History of VENONA and Guide to the Documents.” (https://fau.digital.flvc.org/islandora/object/fau%3A32454/datastream/OBJ/view/Introductory_history_of_VENONA_and_guide_to_the_translations.pdf)- Center for Cryptologic History, NSA.

-Klehr, Harvey. “The Venona Men: Review of 'In the Enemy’s House' By Howard Blum.” (https://www.commentary.org/articles/harvey-klehr/the-venona-men/)- Mar. 2018.

-Kross, Peter. “Opening the Venona Files.” (https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/opening-the-venona-files/)- Spring 2011.

-“The Manhattan Project: an interactive history.”

(https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-history/index.htm)

-Martin, David. “The Code War” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/magazine/1998/05/10/the-code-war/a78021af-6264-4427-9ab1-445391cf2f95/)- WP 5/9/98

“-“Wilderness of Mirrors: Intrigue, Deception, and the Secrets That Destroyed Two of the Cold War’s Most Important Agents.” (2003)

-Mundy, Liza. “Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II.” (2017)

-“ “The Women Code Breakers Who Unmasked Soviet Spies.” (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/women-code-breakers-unmasked-soviet-spies-180970034/)- Sept. 2018.

-Polmar, Norman, and Thomas B. Allen. “Spy Book: The Encyclopedia of Espionage.” (1997)

-Rhodes, Richard. “Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb.” (1995)

-Richelson, Jeffrey T. “Spying on the Bomb: American Nuclear Intelligence from Nazi Germany to Iran and North Korea.” (2006)

-Schneir, Walter and Miriam. “Cables Coming in From the Cold.” (https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/cables-coming-cold-0/)- Apr. 16, 2009.

-“Secrets, Lies, and Atomic Spies.” (https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/venona/)- PBS, NOVA, 2002 (with accompanying video).

-Theoharis. Athan. “Chasing Spies: How the FBI Failed in Counter-Intelligence But Promoted the Politics of McCarthyism in the Cold War Years.”- (2002)- Chap. 1 excerpt (https://irp.fas.org/eprint/theoharis.htm)

-Warner, Michael. “Venona- Soviet Espionage & American Response.” (1996)

-Weinstein, Allen. “The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America.” (1999)

-West, Nigel. “Venona: The Greatest Secret of the Cold War.” (2000)

-“”Mortal Crimes: The Greatest Theft in History- Soviet Penetration of the Manhattan Project.” (2004)

-Wikipedia.org, “Venona Project,” “Arlington Hall”, "Meredith Gardner"

-“Venona Project.” (https://spartacus-educational.com/Venona.htm)

-Williams, Jeannette. “The Invisible Cryptologists: African Americans, WWII to 1956”, US Cryptologic History, Series V, Vol. V, NSA, 2001 (https://www.nsa.gov/Portals/75/documents/about/cryptologic-heritage/historical-figures-publications/publications/wwii/invisible_cryptologists.pdf)

-Williams, Robert Chadwell. “Klaus Fuchs: Atomic Spy.” (1987)