The Venona Secrets

One of Krafsur’s contacts was Joseph Berger, the personal secretary of the chairman of the Democratic National Committee. The Rezidentura suggested that, since Krafsur’s NKVD boss, Pravdin, was in Washington, a New York–based NKVD officer be put in contact with him so that information he obtained could be received in New York promptly.¹ Although more details about Berger, who wrote under the pen name Jeremiah Digges, were sent to Moscow on May 25, 1945, including his close relationship with the American Communist Party, there is no evidence in Venona that Berger himself was ever recruited for Soviet espionage. Nevertheless, Krafsur, through this contact, was able to give the NKVD a priceless window on the inside doings of the Roosevelt administration during wartime.

By September 12, 1944, NKVD Moscow got around to checking Krafsur out with the Comintern. In a message to Dimitroff, Pavel Fitin asked that the Comintern archives be checked on “Samuel Krafsur, born in 1913 in Boston, member of the CPUSA since 1934, who was in Lincoln Brigade in Spain in 1937.” As with other such typed messages, a blank space was left and filled in by hand with the name of the agent. Even NKVD secretaries were not supposed to know the real names of agents. Dimitroff responded on September 23 that there was no derogatory information on Krafsur.²

Krafsur, as an American, could circulate among other journalists and sometimes attend off-the-record press conferences. On August 17, 1944, he attended one such press conference where Secretary of State Cordell Hull made some off-the-record comments, which Krafsur dutifully reported to the NKVD. Hull condemned groups that were trying to isolate the Soviet Union, which no doubt pleased the Soviets, and they had to be amused by some of his other comments: “What you think about the Russians’ temperament, customs, and manners should play no part in these questions.… The methods and system of the USSR may be shocking in questions of its internal policy. However, if you try to oust the USSR from the international arena, it will lead to serious consequences.” He went on to refer to “the repulsion which is felt toward individual Russian internal questions.”³

Soviet intelligence officers were trolling the waters of American journalists, trying to hook even bigger prey. NKVD officer Vladimir Pravdin maintained his own contacts with journalists, including Walter Lippmann, a leading opinion maker, with whom he met regularly. Sometimes Lippmann would tell Pravdin something the Soviets considered important. But the NKVD wanted more from him, so, as we shall soon see, it planted an agent in Lippmann’s office.

In September of 1944 Lippmann told Pravdin that there were disagreements between Roosevelt and Churchill on the question of the future of Germany and the role of Britain in the occupation.⁴ On September 9, and repeated again on September 14, the Rezidentura reported to Moscow that Krafsur had spoken with Baltimore Sun reporter Paul Ward, who confirmed Lippmann’s statement about Roosevelt/Churchill disagreements. At the same time, Joseph Bird, a Washington Star reporter, told the same thing to Lawrence Todd, another employee of TASS.⁵ Ward and Bird thought they were sharing information just with other American journalists, not with Moscow via the NKVD.

In October, Krafsur obtained a statement made by Averill Harriman, U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, before a closed meeting of American correspondents only. Harriman explained the Soviet plans to establish a puppet state in Poland: “The USSR wants to have friendly disposed neighbors and will not allow the seizure of power by the professional elements in the backward countries.”⁶ This view of an important American diplomat encouraged Soviet expansion and the takeover of these “backward countries,” which had achieved independence years earlier and had a higher culture and living standards than the Soviet Union.

Meanwhile, Pravdin and the New York Rezident, Stepan Apresyan, felt a personal antagonism. Each complained to Moscow about the other. On October 10 Apresyan sent a Venona message to Moscow outlining the dispute, saying that although Pravdin had brought Krafsur into the NKVD’s work, he was not utilizing the agent efficiently. Pravdin, undeterred, insisted that he had good contacts who “provide useful comments on the foreign policy” of the United States; nevertheless, he asked Moscow to transfer him to Washington so that he could recruit more “valuable people.” He suggested that he needed to make more use of the Communist Party USA in NKVD operations, including those against the FBI, and in setting up “safe houses.” According to Pravdin, “Without the help of the Communist Party USA we are completely powerless. Apresyan rushed in to add to the same message:

In this note Pravdin has put in a nutshell his whole conception of the reasons why he has made no real progress, and his approach to the next few months. His view that without [his moving to] Washington and [the help of] Earl Browder, we are doomed to vegetate is mistaken. It is not true that everything of value is in Washington and it is doubly untrue that without Browder we are “powerless.” I consider that in any case we shall have to have recourse to the help of the Communist Party USA, but they ought not to be the one and only base especially if you take into account the fact that in the event of Thomas Dewey’s being elected [president], this source may dry up.⁸

This Venona message makes clear both the importance of the American Communist Party to Soviet espionage and, in particular, the role of the Party’s leader, Earl Browder. Those who argue that the American Communist Party was not a significant factor in Soviet espionage are clearly wrong. Even more, and equally clear, those Russian writers who claim that headquarters was unaware of the use of Party members are concealing the truth. This message, and many others, show that the Rezidentura reported to headquarters whenever it used Communist Party members—the majority of its agents. The documents in the Comintern archives disclosed that Fitin, head of the Foreign Department of NKVD, was fully aware of the use of American Communists in espionage and personally checked their ideological purity with the Comintern.

Further on in the same message Pravdin reported that he was planning to recruit I. F. Stone and Joseph Barnes, foreign news editor of the New York Herald Tribune. Apresyan responded in the message to Moscow, “The signing up of Barnes is obviously not only inadvisable but unrealizable; however, it is desirable to use him without signing him up.”⁹ The message does not make clear why it was “obviously” inadvisable and unrealizable to recruit Barnes to the NKVD. One explanation may be that he was already working for the GRU. Whittaker Chambers, the 1930s liaison between the GRU and the American Communist Party underground, told the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security on August 16, 1951, that his superior, J. Peters, introduced him to Frederick Vanderbilt Field to assist in the recruitment of State Department official Lawrence Duggan for Soviet espionage. Peters told Chambers that Field was a member of a Communist Party underground cell together with Joseph Barnes and that “some difficulty had arisen between the two men about their wives.” The Communist Party’s underground apparatus gathered information which J. Peters provided to the GRU. Field’s recruitment of Duggan failed because he was already working for the NKVD. Barnes later married Field’s wife.¹⁰

The recruitment of I. F. Stone was reported to Moscow headquarters in subsequent Venona messages. In October 1944 Pravdin advised Moscow that he had finally met with Stone. He said that he had tried to contact Stone several times previously, both personally and through Krafsur, but Stone had been avoiding both of them. Stone told Pravdin when they finally met that he had avoided them, “fearing the consequences,” because the attempts to contact him had been made with “insufficient caution.” When Pravdin then attempted to recruit him, Stone “gave him to understand that he was not refusing his aid but one should consider that he had three children and did not want to attract the attention of the FBI.” Stone, in the end, agreed to work for the NKVD and meet regularly with an officer, but as he seldom went to New York, Pravdin suggested assigning someone to work with him in Washington. Although Stone explained that he was doing well financially, he said that “he would not be averse to having a supplementary income.” Pravdin suggested to Moscow that if it agreed to this “business” relationship, Stone had to do his part and really produce.¹¹

The NKVD “business” relationship with Stone worked out, as shown by a December 1944 Venona message which reported that a group of journalists, including Stone, provided Pravdin with information about the plans of the U.S. General Staff to cope with the German counteroffensive in the Battle of the Bulge and resume the Allied offensive.¹² Though the other journalists identified, Walter Lippmann and Raymond Gram Swing, did not know that Pravdin was an intelligence officer rather than a fellow journalist, Stone knew full well.

Stone’s Venona code name was “Blin,” the Russian word for “pancake” (similar to “blintze”). Stone complained in his column of November 11, 1951, that the New York Herald Tribune had reported on his leftist activities. He joked that he would not be surprised if he read in the Herald Tribune “that I was smuggled in from Pinsk in a carton of blintzes….”¹³ Intelligence tradecraft requires that agents not know their code names, but as Venona revealed, in a number of cases it seems that some did, and Stone was one of them. His inside joke was odd. You might talk about smuggling something from Russia in a vodka bottle or caviar jar or some other normal Soviet export, but blintzes?

In 1992 a British journalist reported a speech at Exeter University by retired KGB general Oleg Kalugin. According to Andrew Brown, writing in The Independent:

Mr. Kalugin said that at the end of the Second World War people would come in dozens to volunteer to work for the Soviets, especially in France and Italy. But it was also true that in the United States the KGB “maintained very serious sources until the late-40s.” The crucial year was 1956. Khrushchev’s secret speech denouncing Stalinism (which leaked to the West and revealed the horrors of mass executions) revolted the whole world. After 1956, the intelligence service simply could not recruit people on ideological grounds. The invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 was another almost mortal blow. “We had an agent—a well-known American journalist—with a good reputation, who severed his ties with us after 1956. I myself convinced him to resume them. But in 1968, after the invasion of Czechoslovakia… he said he would never again take any money from us.”¹⁴

When the Soviet army crushed the Czechs’ attempt to organize what they called “Communism with a human face,” I. F. Stone wrote in his newsletter of September 23, 1968, that “the hopes of democracy under Communism have been destroyed….” But his main concern was that “the strengthening of the hard-liners in Moscow will strengthen the hard-liners in Washington.”¹⁶

In the years before the invasion of Hungary, Stone was an enthusiastic Stalin fan. In 1949, when Stalin reached his seventieth year, his disciples wrote special pamphlets in his honor. His closest associate, the director of the mass murders and slave labor camps, Lavrenti Beria, set the tone for KGB participation in promoting the Stalin cult: “On this memorable day, the words of greeting to our leader sound with new force in the world’s every tongue and dialect: Glory to Comrade Stalin. On to new victories, under the leadership of the great Stalin.”¹⁷

Stone used his column to honor Stalin’s birthday and compare him to those he called “pigmies,” such as Truman and Attlee, who then led the governments of the United States and England. Stone was also enamored with “the newly victorious Mao Tse-tung, Nehru and Tito.” But, he said, “They have a long way to go before they can match the tough and crafty old revolutionary who has ruled Russia for a quarter of a century.”¹⁸ Stone failed to mention the purges, the mass murders, the slave labor camps, and the increasingly obvious anti-Semitic campaign that symbolized Stalin’s rule.

Two days after Stone’s panegyric to Stalin, he wrote another nasty little piece about Harry Truman, complaining that the American president had invoked the name of God at a memorial to the war dead at Arlington Cemetery. According to Stone, “There is some doubt as to whether and how much Mr. Truman himself believes in God.”¹⁹ Stone found only good in Stalin and only bad in the American president.

Many other examples show how Stone promoted Soviet disinformation themes. Perhaps the most outrageous was his book The Hidden History of the Korean War. As everyone knows, on June 25, 1950, the North Korean army, unleashed by Stalin, invaded South Korea. The Soviet Union and its supporters predictably claimed that the South Koreans attacked North Korea. In his book, Stone used bizarre reasoning to back this bit of information. One example was his quotation from John Foster Dulles, who had predicted that “positive action” would help preserve peace in the Far East. Stone implied that he was referring to the Korean War, which began three days later.²⁰ The book was filled with this sort of deliberate misinterpretation of statements designed to conceal the fact that the Communist side started the war. Some of the false statements supporting the Soviet line were traceable to Soviet disinformation, but others appeared to be Stone’s own inventions.

During the Vietnam War, Stone again did his part for Soviet propaganda. In his newsletter of September 26, 1966, he reported a story about an American airman shot down in Vietnam who had escaped from a POW camp and was rescued:

Dengler said the villagers were friendly. No one asked him how they felt about U.S. bombings, or what kind of gas we were dropping on them—at a press conference 3 days earlier in San Diego, Dengler said that when he heard a plane overhead and smelled the gas it was dropping, he said to himself, “Man, that is Uncle Sam’s gas. That is real” and came out of hiding and laid down an SOS.²¹

The truth was that the Americans were not dropping gas on the Vietnamese, and Dengler hadn’t said that they were. Dengler told the story, misquoted by Stone, in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee. He described how the helicopters jettisoned gasoline while coming in for the rescue. He smelled the gas and knew they were coming down for him.²² When the story was exposed, Stone’s defenders argued that he had just made a mistake. Oddly, all his mistakes were anti-American; he never made mistakes in favor of the United States.

One technique used by the KGB was to release a disinformation story through overt channels, such as the official Soviet press. This would then be replayed not only in the legitimate Western press but also by Soviet agents, who would emphasize the particular disinformation themes. In January 1968, before the invasion of Czechoslovakia, which caused the KGB to lose Stone again, the Soviets released an interview with Kim Philby, the KGB agent who had escaped before the British could arrest him. In the interview Philby attacked the former deputy director of the FBI, D. Milton Ladd, saying, “This astonishingly dense personage tried to convince me in all seriousness that Franklin Roosevelt was a Comintern agent.”²³ The story was false but was repeated by Stone as part of a program to denigrate the FBI. On the same page, Stone printed a quotation from Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, then in a Soviet prison. Of all statements by Bukovsky condemning the Soviet slave labor camps and other atrocities, Stone sought fit to print a statement in support of freedom of speech and in the Communist Party’s right to exist in the United States.

Mary Price, Lippmann’s secretary, had been turning over information from his files to Soviet agent handler Jacob Golos since 1941.²⁴ A June 1943 Venona message shows that not only was Price, code name “Dir,” supplying information, but when making a trip to Mexico to visit her brother, she also carried NKVD messages to an agent in Mexico City.²⁵

Communist Party leader Earl Browder had decision-making power about how to handle the agents, which made the NKVD’s job difficult. In June 1944, for example, Elizabeth Bentley, who took over some of Golos’s agents, met with Browder and brought him together with Mary Price. When the two women were alone, Mary said that “she had informed Browder that she wanted to get out of the whole business and that he had said he would think it over and let her know.” A few days later, Browder told Bentley that he had decided to let Price go and that she should advise Price to that effect.²⁶

When Bentley told this to the FBI in 1945, she had no documentary evidence to uphold her story. But once again, Bentley’s word was confirmed years later when a Venona message was decoded. As discussed earlier, New York reported to Moscow:

Some weeks ago Bentley [“Umnitsa”] told Akhmerov [“Mer”] that Browder [“Rulevoj”], as a result of a conversation with Mary Price [“Dir”], had apparently decided that Price must be withdrawn completely from our work in order to employ her fully in Communist Party USA work. In Browder’s opinion Price’s nerves had been badly shaken and her health is poor, which renders her unsuitable for our work. In Akhmerov’s opinion it is possible to get Browder [who was Akhmerov’s wife’s uncle] to change his opinion about the advisability of this decision, which Akhmerov suspects was made under pressure from Bentley, who for some reason dislikes Price. Akhmerov has informed Bentley that if Price is really ill she will need rather to be withdrawn for a rest, but afterwards be used in liaison with a conspirative apartment [NKVD safe house], etc. She has been working for a long time and has acquired considerable experience. Akhmerov proposes that she should not be employed in active Communist Party work. Telegraph your opinion.²⁷

Although Nat and Janet Ross were already in Moscow, on October 10 Pat Toohey, the American Communist Party representative, suggested that they be sent back home to the United States, where they were needed because of the increased tension due to the Nazi-Soviet Pact.³⁰ He was overruled, and the two were kept in Moscow. In August 1940 Nat and Janet were assigned to a special training school of the Comintern.³¹

Janet would report to George Dimitroff on her conversations with American diplomats and journalists, and he in turn would send her reports to Foreign Minister Molotov. A number of the reports and Dimitroff’s transmittal memos to Molotov are still in the Comintern archives. A few, unfortunately, have been lost in the intervening years, but those that still remain tell a shocking story.

Dimitroff sent Molotov a report on August 8, 1942, from Janet Ross based on a meeting at the American embassy between American journalists and General Omar Bradley. Dimitroff’s note was marked top secret, but Ross’s report has been lost. On August 26 Dimitroff sent Molotov another of Janet’s reports. This one was preserved, and it concerned an informal party in honor of Ambassador William Standley given by the American correspondents in Moscow. Also present were military attachés. As a result of this discussion with the ambassador, the correspondents concluded that the Soviet demand for a second front in Europe would not take place soon. This helped confirm the official statements made to the Soviets themselves by the U.S. government.

In September of that year Wendell Willkie visited Moscow. Although a Republican who had run for president against Roosevelt in 1940, he had become a strong supporter of the president. Janet was able to get directly from Willkie, and indirectly through other journalists, further valuable information for the Soviets. According to Willkie, Roosevelt wanted to open a second front, but Churchill was delaying it. She also overheard part of a conversation between Willkie and Ambassador Standley in which they seemed to be arguing, but she couldn’t determine about what.

On November 27 Janet reported to Dimitroff that she was present at a dinner at the American embassy to which only Americans had been invited. She reported what she had heard there from the American military people and journalists. One of the military babbled that American successes in the Pacific war were due to something so secret that only a few people knew about it. We know now that it was the breaking of the Japanese codes—a most closely held secret.

On March 8, 1943, Janet was able to clue in the Soviets on the views of Ambassador William Standley about how the Soviets were concealing the extent of American Lend-Lease help. Janet’s secret report to Molotov, via Dimitroff, revealed that the ambassador had firsthand experience meeting Russians who did not know that the war materials they were using were American-supplied. The Soviets had been concealing this. At a closed meeting with a small group of American journalists, Standley suggested that although Soviet censorship would try to prevent it, the journalists should do their best to report the story to the American people. Janet’s report, of course, helped harden official Soviet attitudes toward the ambassador.

Two days later, Harry Hopkins pressed for the removal of Ambassador Standley on the grounds that the ambassador had lost Stalin’s confidence as a result of his complaint to the American journalists. Hopkins enlisted the support of former ambassador Joseph Davies to help him convince the president to fire Ambassador Standley. When the decision was made, Standley resigned and was replaced by Averill Harriman.³²

On June 30, 1943, Dimitroff sent Molotov a secret report from Janet on a meeting between American and British correspondents with Arthur Hays Sulzberger, owner of the New York Times. The conversation was wide-ranging, covering the second front, Japan, and even the forthcoming 1944 presidential elections. Ross treated Sulzberger’s views as coming from a well-informed American journalist but was unhappy that he was critical of the Soviet Union. She reported with glee that when New York Times foreign correspondent Cy Sulzberger, Arthur’s nephew, was leaving the meeting, he had said, knowing that she was a Daily Worker reporter, “It is well known to you that your newspaper hates my uncle. This talk is strictly unofficial. Do not disclose it, please.” Janet said she responded that she understood, adding that she would in any case be ashamed to “repeat such stupidity.” She did not tell Sulzberger that she reported everything to Dimitroff and Molotov.³³

As soon as the NKVD received Janet’s report (all such material, even if sent to Molotov, went to the NKVD) it asked the New York Rezidentura for a report on Sulzberger. The Rezidentura reported back immediately that he had been born in 1891, had graduated from Columbia University, and was a member of the Democratic Party. It also reported that he was connected with “reactionary circles in the State Department,” citing specifically Sumner Welles, undersecretary of state, and Loy Henderson, an expert on the Soviet Union.

It was extremely valuable for the Soviet Union to have an American available who could understand other Americans and had access to the U.S. embassy and to Western journalists in Moscow. Janet had joined the Communist Party in 1934, when she was twenty-five years old. Nat Ross had joined the Communist Party in 1928, when he was twenty-four. They were well-trained Communists and served the Soviet Union well. Nat Ross left the Communist Party in 1957 after reading Khrushchev’s secret speech denouncing Stalin but has refused to discuss what he knows about the Communist Party USA and its secret relationships with the Soviet Union.

With the end of World War II and the start of the Cold War, the Soviets lost most of their ideological assets. But of those that remained, journalists were considered very important. The KGB trained its subordinate intelligence services, such as the East German Stasi, to use journalists as agents and for “active measures”—that is, to influence operations. In a 1992 book, two former Stasi officers described how their service was taught its tradecraft by the KGB. They quote from a speech of the head of the active measures section of Stasi, Colonel Rolf Wagenbreth, at a lecture at the Stasi training school:

A journalist who is competent most of the time has a good reputation in society. Politicians esteem him, stiff-necked brass hats loosen up in his presence, vain artists seek contact with him, industrial bosses want to win him over for their own purposes…. Once he has been recruited as a spy or as a channel for disseminating certain types of information, he can and may do almost anything in the eyes of the public: He may question sensitive personnel with access to classified information without being suspected…. He may carry tiny cameras with him…. He can drive and jet all over the world…. He can also spread disinformation, he can try to trip up a political opponent, he can generate sympathy or aversion and mobilize the public for or against something. I am talking here, of course, about Western journalists. For all of these reasons, we work with this “media” target from the very beginning and, if I might say so, not without success.³⁴

A few journalists remained agents of the KGB out of conviction and some for money. But most journalists in the West became increasingly critical of Communist ideas and Soviet reality. The KGB, for its part, increased the activity of its disinformation service and continued to prey on often unwitting journalists to spread its message. As for Soviet Communist journalists, they lost their credibility in the West.

The Recruitment of I. F. Stone

Target: Lippmann

Mission in Moscow