Photo By Erin Thompson | Merideth Gardner (far left) with other cryptanalysts from the U.S. Army Signal...... read more read more
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by Erin E. Thompson, USAICoe staff Historian
SIS UNCOVERS SOVIET INFILTRATION OF MANHATTAN PROJECT
On Dec. 20, 1946, Army linguist Merideth Gardner and codebreakers from the U.S. Army Signal Intelligence Service (SIS) exposed a conspiracy to collect atomic bomb research from the United States. Through a secret program known as the VENONA project, the SIS worked to decrypt, translate, and exploit Soviet communications from World War II, ultimately identifying several high-profile Cold War spies.
The SIS established the VENONA project in February 1943. Schoolteacher-turned-codebreaker Gene Grabeel and 2d Lt. Leonard Zubko, a Russian linguist, were the first people assigned to the program. Their work consisted of sorting the communications traffic by “diplomatic mission and by cryptographic system or subscriber.” During World War II, five separate encrypted systems were used by different organizations: Soviet trading companies, the Soviet Foreign Ministry, the Soviet state intelligence agency (KGB), military intelligence agency (GRU), and naval intelligence. According to author Liza Mundy:
"The Soviets’ code system was widely considered unbreakable because it had so many layers. To encode a message, a clerk would consult a code book, a kind of dictionary that provided a four-digit code group. Each code group stood for a word or letter. To make snooping much more difficult, those numbers were converted into five-digit figures and then enciphered by adding a second set of numbers, known as ‘key’ or ‘additive.’ The Soviets drew their additives from a ‘one-time pad’: pads of pages, each containing about 50 random additives, each page never to be reused."
Between late 1943 and the end of the war, increased communications traffic and the movement of Soviet industry to the Ural Mountains caused the Soviets to begin reusing their “one-time pads.” This allowed VENONA cryptologists to begin deciphering one message at a time. U.S. Army Signal Corps reserve officer Lt. Richard Hallock made the first breakthrough in late 1943. One year later, Cecil Phillips, Lucille Campbell, and Genevieve Grotjan Feinstein, a notable cryptologist who made the first breakthrough of the Japanese diplomatic cipher (PURPLE) in 1940, decrypted the first KGB communication, though they were unaware who the code belonged to at the time. Despite these initial advances, the layers of encryption used on the communications made the work painstakingly slow.
Merideth Gardner, a professor of German linguistics at the University of Akron, enlisted in the Army after Pearl Harbor. He was soon recruited by the SIS to translate German codes, and, after teaching himself the Japanese language in just three months, he also began assisting with Japanese ciphers. After the war, he taught himself Russian and was assigned to the VENONA project where he began reconstructing a KGB codebook for the backlog of messages sent between 1944–1945. Gardner’s first breakthrough, with the help of linguist Marie Meyer, occurred in July 1946, when he deciphered “a discussion of clandestine KGB activity in Latin America.” In mid-December, he unearthed discussions about the 1944 U.S. presidential election. On Dec. 20, 1946, he deciphered yet another KGB message containing a list of scientists involved in the Manhattan Project, the secret U.S. program for developing the atomic bomb. This discovery proved the Manhattan Project had been infiltrated by Soviet spies.
Between 1943–1980, the VENONA project decrypted more than three thousand Soviet communications and uncovered numerous codenames of Soviet agents working on the Manhattan Project and in the War Department General Staff, State Department, U.S. Treasury, Office of Strategic Services, and the White House. With the help of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and British intelligence service, several spies were eventually identified, including Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Klaus Fuchs, Harry Gold, Alger Hiss, and numerous others.
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| Date Taken: | 12.13.2024 |
| Date Posted: | 12.13.2024 14:22 |
| Story ID: | 487461 |
| Location: | US |
| Web Views: | 51 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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