The Venona Secrets: Exposing Soviet Espionage and America’s Traitors by Herbert Romerstein and Eric Brandel

This is a book review.

This important book on the role of US Communist Party members as spies was published in 2000. The authors, both American Jews, have a long pedigree as anti-Communist researchers, though sadly Brandel, who also worked for Fox News, died in 1998 at age 42. We would advise those interested in learning the truth about Soviet penetration of US Government, to only tackle this work after reading detailed works that provide context such as those by Whittaker Chambers, Sam Tanenhaus, M Stanton Evans, and Haynes and Klehr, for by its very nature this book is patchy.

The Venona Project is the name given to the decoding by the US Army of over 3000 spy messages that passed between Red agents in the US and their masters in Moscow between 1940 and 1980. Many messages have never been decoded and others only partly understood, so those that became available to researchers in 1995 and which form the focus of this book do not present a whole picture. The authors spent some five years researching and still much remains to be discovered. What is clear is that the American Communist Party members were loyal to the Soviet Union and that the Party, always tiny in numbers, was never intended to win power through the ballot box. Rather it was a recruiting ground for the Soviet Intelligence Services both for spies and for those in important government positions who could influence US policy for the advantage of the USSR.

It is now beyond dispute that not only highly placed bureaucrats like Alger Hiss, Dexter White and Lauchlin Currie were enthusiastic traitors but that there were others who were not suspected until recent times. These include Harry Hopkins (who greatly influenced Truman) and J. Robert Oppenheimer the father of the atomic bomb. Even Albert Einstein emerges as a likely Soviet helper from the messages that have been decoded. Unfortunately, the door into further research of Russian archives has been closed, so many traitors will remain unmasked but it is clear that the Soviet penetration of the US was staggering. Joe McCarthy’s infamous list of agents was in fact pathetically short, though he was right to believe that even humbly-placed Communist public employees were a dire threat.

The authors, being Jews, claimed to demonstrate that Stalin was anti-Semitic and that Jews were victims in this espionage. My reading of their evidence is that at least half of the ungrateful immigrants who served the USSR were Jewish, as were very many of the Soviet agents sent to the US. I am not sure why so many Jews served and still serve Leftist causes that undermine the US that protects them but it has to be said that many other Jews have been in the forefront of unmasking US enemies. One explanation I have heard is that religious Jews are conservative and patriotic while those who abandon their religion are also suckers for Leftist substitutes?

A wide reading of books such as this, all thoroughly researched, reveals an uncomfortable truth – not just the extent of Soviet activities but that Leftist Academia and the Mainstream Media are wilfully wrong in painting anti-Communism as a baseless phobia.