Project and other agencies in the American, British, and Canadian governments. Ottawa quicklyconveyed this information to Washington. Significantly, the stories of subversion from the various sourcesfitted together.By the latter part of 1945, the White House was aware of accusations against a substantial number of U.S. government employees, including such high officials as the State Department's Alger Hiss, WhiteHouse aide Lauchlin Currie, OSS executive assistant Duncan Lee, and Assistant Secretary of the TreasuryHarry Dexter White. Although the Truman administration was alarmed by these revelations, it only slowlybegan to take action. This sluggishness stemmed largely from political concerns. Undoubtedly, the naturalreaction of a politician would be to keep such skeletons locked in the closet—and Truman and his closestassociates were fearful of public scandals that might discredit the Democratic Party and its policies andthereby bring the Republicans into power. In short, Truman put domestic politics above American security.Examples of the Truman administration's inaction and cover-up included deliberate efforts within theJustice Department to bury the
Amerasia
case.
8
And, despite receiving an FBI report on Harry DexterWhite's subversive activities, Truman in 1946 nominated White as American representative to theInternational Monetary Fund.
9
Republican charges of Communists in government, which helped them win control of Congress in the1946 election, induced Truman to take action. In an effort to control the subversion issue and preventcongressional investigations that might benefit the Republicans, Truman issued Executive Order 9835 inMarch 1947, which instituted loyalty and security checks in the government. Truman believed the executivebranch alone could effectively prevent Soviet subversion, and he used the executive order to restrictcongressional access to security information.
10
Even after initiating the executive order, however, Truman refused to acknowledge the immense scopeof Soviet subversion. Thus, in 1948, Truman characterized the House Un-American Activities Committee'sinvestigation of Alger Hiss as a "Red Herring." And Truman would write in his memoirs in 1956, "Thecountry had reason to be proud of and have confidence in our security agencies. They had kept us almosttotally free of sabotage and espionage during the war."
11
But while Truman publicly downplayed the scope of Soviet infiltration, the U.S. government had anadditional secret source of information that showed the vast extent of this Soviet enterprise. This was theVenona Project. "Venona" was the top-secret name given by the U. S. government to an extensive programlaunched in 1943 to intercept and decipher communications between Moscow and its intelligence stations inthe West. Most of the messages were decoded and read between 1947 and 1952, though the effort continueduntil 1980. While 200,000 messages were intercepted, only a small number were ever deciphered, and thewhole effort was kept top secret for years. While Venona's existence became publicly known in the early1980s,
12
it was not until 1995 that the National Security Agency began releasing the documents to thepublic, and fewer than 3,000 partially or fully decrypted Venona messages have been declassified. Venonacorroborated stories that the U.S. government was heavily infiltrated by Soviet espionage agents. However,because Venona was a totally secret operation, no evidence obtained from its intercepts was ever introducedin any court, since Washington considered Venona's secrecy to be more important than jailing Sovietagents.The first comprehensive examination of the subject is
Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America
, authored by two establishment historians of American Communism, John Earl Haynes and HarveyKlehr.
13
Haynes, Twentieth Century Political Historian at the Library of Congress, and Klehr, Andrew W.Mellon Professor of Politics and History at Emory University, are coauthors of other works in YaleUniversity’s “Annals of Communism” series.
14
Haynes and Klehr maintain that Venona conclusively shows that the U.S. Communist Party "wasindeed a fifth column working inside and against the United States in the cold war,"
15
and that most of those individuals accused of aiding the Soviets in the 1940s had actually done so. The authors point outthat Venona not only supplied information through its intercepts of Soviet traffic, but, because of its"inherent reliability," also provided a "touchstone for judging the credibility of other sources, such asdefectors' testimony and FBI investigative files."
16
Venona decrypts revealed that Soviet spies had infiltrated every major agency of the U.S. governmentduring the war years, from the State and Treasury departments to the Manhattan Project. Venona confirmedthe guilt of the atomic spies Klaus Fuchs, Theodore Hall, and Julius Rosenberg. Among the highgovernment officials identified by Venona as Soviet agents were State Department official Alger Hiss;Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Harry Dexter White; the chief of the State Department’s Division of Page 3 of 1504/12/2006file://C:\WINDOWS\TEMP\7ZXHJFJI.htm
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