Were there really Soviet spies in the US government?

The codebreakers’ evidence

The proof came from the American side. On February 1, 1943, the Army’s codebreaking service set a small team, starting with a former home economics teacher named Gene Grabeel, to work on Soviet diplomatic and intelligence cables at Arlington Hall, a requisitioned girls’ school in Virginia. Soviet code clerks under wartime pressure had used some pages of their one-time pads twice, and from 1946 the linguist Meredith Gardner began to recover names and phrases, from 1948 with the FBI agent Robert Lamphere.

Only a fraction of the traffic ever gave way: about 3,000 messages were read in whole or in part. The program, later called Venona, stayed secret until July 1995, when the National Security Agency began releasing the decrypts to the public. Venona is the codebreakers, not a spy ring.

What the cables show

The cables show Soviet intelligence running sources in the State Department, the Treasury, the wartime intelligence agency OSS and the Manhattan Project. Among those they identify under cover names are the physicists Klaus Fuchs and Ted Hall at Los Alamos, the engineer Julius Rosenberg and his ring, and the senior Treasury official Harry Dexter White. One cable describes a source code-named Ales whom many historians identify as Alger Hiss; others still dispute it.

The historians John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr counted more than 300 Americans and residents with covert ties to Soviet intelligence in the decrypts, many never identified by their real names. The cables also backed much of what two former couriers had told investigators: Elizabeth Bentley, who went to the FBI in 1945, and Whittaker Chambers, who testified to Congress in 1948.

Why most networks were gone by 1948

The networks did not last. In September 1945 a Soviet cipher clerk in Ottawa, Igor Gouzenko, defected with documents. That November, Bentley began naming names to the FBI. Moscow pulled its officers back and told its agents to go quiet. By 1948 it had also learned of the codebreaking itself, through William Weisband, a Soviet agent working at Arlington Hall. Most of the networks the cables describe had shut down by then, two years before McCarthy spoke at Wheeling.

The spies and the lists

So both things are true, and they are different things. Codebreakers, defectors and FBI agents found the real spies, with decrypts and confessions as evidence. McCarthy never saw Venona. His list came from old State Department files, and a Senate subcommittee called his charges “a fraud and a hoax.” One of his best-known targets, the Asia scholar Owen Lattimore, whom he called the top Soviet agent in the country in March 1950, was never shown to be one, and a later perjury case against him was dropped. Venona does not identify Lattimore as a source.

Historians still weigh the two halves differently. Haynes and Klehr read Venona as proof that the danger was real and that many of the accused of the 1940s were guilty. Others, such as Ellen Schrecker, accept the espionage but argue that the purges of the 1950s mostly fell on people who had nothing to do with it. Herald’s story closes on a line that holds both halves: “the spies were real, and so were the ruined lives.” The phrase the era left behind is in What was McCarthyism?.