@FBI: In the Enemy's House: Venona (Counterintelligence)

[ffr]

In the Enemy’s House: Venona and the Maturation of American Counterintelligence
<snip>

The Bureau Learns About Venona
<snip>

Within a week of the dissemination of the Elitcher information, the Washington office sought headquarters’ permission to institute a technical surveillance on Elitcher “to determine if [he] is engaged in espionage or related activities on behalf of the Soviet Government...” per evidence cited in Headquarters’ earlier letter. Headquarters, in turn, sought the Attorney General’s permission for the surveillance, reporting the disguised information as Lamphere originally wrote it and the Washington Office parroted it. Such surveillance requests were routine and were handled by several people in the Bureau and DOJ. It is not surprising that such a sensitive source would not be named outright in the request, even one that remained Top Secret. Even so, there is nothing that suggests that Attorney General Tom Clarke was ever briefed on Venona even though he received intelligence from the program from time to time. The only evidence I found of the Bureau informing persons outside of the Bureau about the nature of this source during the period this paper covers was when Director Hoover briefed AG Brownell in 1953 about the intelligence regarding Ethel Rosenberg.

Through the summer and fall of 1948, therefore, the FBI was making significant strides in exploiting NSA’s breaks in the Venona traffic. At the same time, the issue of Soviet penetration was becoming a significant political issue that would greatly hamper the FBI’s work, though not its relationship with NSA. President Truman had accepted the Democrat Party nomination that July, and within two weeks, the Republican-controlled Congress began hearings based on Soviet penetration of the US government.
<snip>

Conclusion

In the six years following World War II, the Bureau had moved from having a shadowy perception of the Soviet intelligence threat to having a clear picture of the extent of Soviet penetration of the U.S. government and the damage that its agents had done to America’s interests. Venona had been vitally important to this change as Alan Belmont’s 1951 update to his earlier summary showed. His memo noted that through Venona, the FBI had identified 108 persons involved in Soviet espionage, 64 of whom had been unknown to the FBI prior to the project. The memo also showed that the FBI had greatly expanded the detail about the Soviet networks broken with the help of Venona intelligence. The FBI now had a clear view of other Soviet intelligence operations in the US too, including its efforts against Trotsky and his followers, the White Russians, and US technical targets. And, according to the memo, the FBI’s work on many of these cases continued in earnest.

- FBI.GOV

Subject: Venona

Link to tweet

Link to tweet

[Wwcd]

1. K & R This Outstanding & Fascinating Read.

I'd hide under the covers & cry if the FBI was trolling me!

Maybe Dotard is too tonight


Good. .."Cry you dirty treasonous fkr" C.R.Y.