Venona

Book cover of Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America

Book description

Only in 1995 did the United States government officially reveal the existence of the super-secret Venona Project. For nearly fifty years American intelligence agents had been decoding thousands of Soviet messages, uncovering an enormous range of espionage activities carried out against the United States during World War II by its…

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Why read it?

2 authors picked Venona as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Neal Thompson

Author

Starting in World War II, American cryptanalysts broke Soviet codes and determined that hundreds of Americans working for the Soviet Union were active within the federal government during the New Deal and throughout the Second World War. Code named Venona, this operation was a closely guarded secret until declassification in 1996. When these intercepts were combined with information acquired from Soviet archives after the collapse of the USSR, they revealed not only a massive penetration of American government, science, and industry by Soviet spies but an American Communist Party that had assisted in these efforts, serving as an arm of…

From Neal's list on America’s path through the Cold War.

Larry Tye

Author

Haynes and Klehr are two of the few Cold War scholars who could be considered neutral, which means they enrage both colleagues who see the second Red Scare as a paranoid reaction and those who see it as a Godsend. In this volume, Haynes and Klehr use newly-unveiled cables between Soviet spies and spymasters to unwind fantasy from reality in the charges leveled by McCarthy and his fellow alarmists.

From Larry's list on red scares in the USA.