Computer Forensics & Data Recovery

The Venona Project

 

The Venona Project was a highly secretive assignment given to the best cryptographers the National Security Agency could find. Originally created to intercept Nazi-Soviet peace talks at the end of World War II VENONA was upgraded to complete the objective of deciphering any Soviet messages coming from Moscow into the United States. The United States government was concerned about Soviet spies in the U.S. and what they were learning about such things as the nuclear bomb and how the government was reacting to the Soviet offensive front.
The analysts found out that there where five different systems of cryptography, one system for each source of the information. The five sources were sending different information to the Soviets in the states. The first was the trade representatives that were made up of the Soviet government Purchasing Commission, the second was composed of the members of the Diplomatic Corps which were conducting legitimate Soviet Embassy and consular business. The KGB, Soviet espionage agency, was the third and was contacting Moscow from stations in the U.S., fourth was the Soviet Army General Staff of Intelligence or the GRU. The final one was also a military source, the GRU Naval.
There were many new scientists who worked on decrypting the Soviet messages but the ones who made the biggest difference were Richard Hallock, Cecil Phillips, Robert Lamphere, and Meredith Gardener. In October of 1943 Richard Hallock, a lieutenant with the Signal Corps reserve, discovered a weakness in the systems and was able to gain progress on four of the systems that where sending messages. Another important discovery on how the KGB deciphered the messages came in 1944; Cecil Phillips discovered that the messages were double-encrypted, even though he did not know that he was decrypting KGB letters. Robert Lamphere joined the VENONA Project in late 1948 and was the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) liaison and case controller for the project's investigations. He would help decode messages and relay the information to J. Edger Hover, the head of the FBI, so they could start investigations on the people that were suspected to be spies.
The parts of the messages deciphered by Lamphere held information about whom and where KGB spies were. These messages contained information about KGB in Latin America, the presidential campaigns during the 1944 elections, and the names of a few scientists that worked on the Manhattan Project (creation of the atomic bomb). The most important information found by Gardner was the cover names of the spies that were running missions in the United States, they also found out who or what some of the cover names stood for. Some of the cover names looked simple enough to figure out, President Roosevelt's cover name was Kapitan, but some less important people had names such as God. Arlington Hall was able to decrypt these names: Liberal - Julius Rosenberg, Babylon - San Francisco, The Bank - U.S. Dept. of State, Arsenal - U.S. War Dept., and Anton - Leonid Kvasnikov (the leader of the KGB atomic bomb espionage.