The Venona Secrets: Exposing Soviet Espionage and America's Traitors

Rating:
Summary: Deja Vu All Over Again
Review: What a waste.

The Venona decrypts are the crown jewels of Cold War historiography, a set of documents providing a concrete and undeniable picture of what the U.S. was facing in one of the most dangerous and misunderstood eras in its history.

So what does Romerstein choose to do? (There are plenty of reasons to believe that Breindel had very little to do with writing the book.) Rather than utilize the decrypts as a source, building on the foundation of the data they contain, he instead chooses to repeat standard Cold War espionage history while using Venona as a kind of frame. There's a single chapter outlining the Venona story that could have appeared as a newspaper article (and for all I know did). Then we're off ringing all the familiar changes through Hiss, White, the Rosenbergs, the Cohens, Abel, and so forth. In some cases the connection to Venona is minimal, often enough merely a line at the end of a chapter stating, "Oh yeah -- this was mentioned in Venona too."

If you're looking for anything new, you won't find it here. The accusations against Einstein are laughable, and not backed up by the decrypts in any compelling fashion. Little better can be said about the Oppenheimer material. The Venona decrypts raise all kinds of interesting questions: why Omar Bradley arrogantly and inexcusably denied Truman even the knowledge of their existence, why they were withheld for decades when their release would have gutted the New Left, curtailed the rehabilitation of many ugly personalities from the postwar period, and ameliorated no end of domestic and international problems. But you won't find them discussed in this volume.

The real history of Venona remains to be written. Until then, Haynes and Klehr's "Venona. Decoding Soviet Espionage in America" will serve. This thing isn't even a start.