One of my favorite sayings is, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you." Kind of sums up people accusing the US agencies of being paranoid and seeing a red under every rock. It was actually only every other rock they were under.
@@Polymath9000 It was Imperial Russia's 'secret police' that was replaced by the bolsheviks (communists) with their own even more brutal secret police the 'Cheka'
Has the "spy in a red bikini" ever been covered? She was a Soviet spy in Australia who defected to Australia, but she did so by jumping off a Soviet ship heading out of Sydney harbour in a red bikini. A photograph exists of it happening and it was pretty scandalous at the time. Many Australians thought we were so far away from the great powers that the cold war didn't really affect us, but they didn't realise our spy bases (like Pine Gap) were perfectly located for spying over all of Asia, that MASER (the precursor to laser) was developed here, nuclear tests were underway in South Australia and we were the first country to develop over the horizon radar. The Soviets certainly had a presence here.
And so do agencies of the Chinese Communist Party and state, now ( especially in Universities, for whatever reasons - and of course technology fields, sciences, etc. ).
Julius Rosenberg gave the Russkies a few crude hand sketches of the lens mold used in fashioning the implosion system on the Fat Man device, which were drawn from memory by his brother-in -law, David Greenglass (Ethel's brother). Greenglass had a high school education and worked as a machinist at Los Alamos. David became a cooperating witness and sent his sister to the electric chair. They weren't executed for what they did. Dulles and Hoover sat the Rosenbergs down in the electric chair to send a message to the dozens, maybe hundreds, of spies they knew were out there from Venona, but couldn't identify. There were about 300 cryptonyms in the traffic, only half of whom have ever been identified. (You failed to mention that over half the Venona traffic has never been decrypted -- something the NSA doesn't like to talk about either.) The message was, if we catch you, not only will we give you the electric chair, but your wife will ride the lightning as well. Apparently it worked like a charm. Within a year Beria was demanding to know why his officers in the U.S. were producing next to nothing and threatening to ship the NKVD residentura in D.C. to the gulag. He cabled back to Moscow that the U.S. had become a fascist state and if Beria didn't like things, he should come over himself and run the station.
Guilty of treason is guilty of treason, the fact that there were not effective at it doesn't change the fact that they gave classified material to the enemies of the USA.
One time pads should be 100% secure but, in the real world, managing the keys is so difficult that pads aren't used much. Amazingly, there was another ww2 era one-time-pad system the allies cracked. Germany had high-level cipher using OTPs. The keys were distributed in books. The books were printed by specialized printing presses. The press had a series of number stamps that printed a page at a time. After each page, the stamps automatically progressed to the next number generated by a pseudo-random sequence. Allies got a hold of one key book. By itself, that book was useless. If the book still existed it means they keys had not been used yet. (you normally destroy those keys after use to make sure you don't resuse them). Allies figured out the concept on how the book was made and studied the number sequences. The derived the pseudo-random generator and were able to generate matching keys for books they didn't have.
The setting keys for Enigma machines were also distributed in "books" that were easily destroyed by water immersion ( Navy / sub force ), or fire ( some other military or Nazi forces ). They wanted to be secure, but ease of use, and "books" getting captured, code breaking, are always risks with these analog type coding systems. ☺
8:30 The older gentleman shown here is neither Harry Truman nor J. Edgar Hoover. I'm pretty sure it's Herbert Hoover, 31st President of the United States, from 1929 to 1933.
@henryj.8528 Not likely, as this video was posted over two years ago. It was more likely an error on the part of a clerk who originally filed the video clip in the video library. The clerk likely misidentified the subject of the clip, and the person who pulled the clip to include in this video assumed it was correct.
It was hardly a miracle when you consider the vast amounts of money hidden partly in South America and through German owned companies across Europe by Martin Bormann towards the end of WW2, this was gradually brought back into Germany from the mid 1950's and wow a economic miracle ;)
@@philstaples8122 and the marshall plan! even though east germany didn't receive it, they were doing pretty good! not counting the limited resources they had
Having their prewar debt that was mostly used to fund their military completely wiped free. Along with no major demands for reparations despite trillions in economic damage throughout Europe. And billions in aid from the Marshall plan. Yeah, that will do it! Same goes for Japan, neither really paid for the war in terms of monetary compensation. With Japan never really apologizing. At least the Germans owed up to their crimes.
My Aunt was a cryptologist in the navy during the late cold war. We never knew when she left the country, etc. and to this day never says a word about it.
1941 finnish troops capture sovjet four digit codebook consulat of sovjetunion in petsamo. Same book going to OSS 1944 and they open pre war and wartime messages on embassy of the sovjetunion. Thats how they find out sovjets spions of Roosevelt admistration.
This was a very good video, but I have to say that I disagree with the implication that the Venona Program meant that the US was spying on the Soviets when they were not "really aware that a game had started." It is well known that the Soviet Union began infiltrating the US with agents, recruiting networks of Americans who sympathized with communism and/or the USSR, and spying on America in great earnest in the late 1920s. If anything, it was the Soviets that began playing the game before the USA even knew it was afoot. 🖖💯✌
@@EarthForces It is not so much that this channel is giving unwarranted sympathy, at least I think not in this case. I think that these folks simply do not consider events before the end of World War 2 to be part of the Cold War...with only a few exceptions. It does not matter that much to them that the USSR was actively and massively spying on the US and Britain and other "western" countries from the 1920s onward...those events do not count as Cold War events to them. 💯
Good point . Although the U.S did have individual intelligence contacts in the Soviet Union , it did not have a coordinated Spy network inside the Soviet Union . There was a growing membership of the american Communist Party in the 1920's and the leading membership did receive there marching orders from Moscow . The height of recruitment of western agents and top US Gov't. officials spying for the USSR against the US began in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War ,when sympathy for the underdog, communist Republicans, viewed as rural workers and the oppressed common man , was at its highest . The exodus of many of those operatives occurred at the time of the Molotov Ribbentrop pact or German Soviet non- aggression pact of 1939 , when most of the communist idealists believed Stalin had sold out the movement to the fascists. The remaining Soviet spies were obviously die hard, committed Communists such as Harry Dexter White and Alger Hiss . Also the narrator talks about Truman during the video , while showing old vids of President Hoover . Just an observation of inaccuracy .
Peach, represented by the symbols of the working koopa the Hammer Bros and Sickle, only held her kingdom together through the power of the Bullet. Bill.
If codes are reused, it provides "depth" that makes it more likely the encrypted messages will be decrypted by parties other than the intended recipients.
@@axelpatrickb.pingol3228 Not really. Procedure was every German Enigma operator would reset the rotors and the plugboard at midnight to match the settings in their Army, Navy, or Air Force issued codebook. The use of many common phrases like Sieg Heil, Heil Hitler, Nothing to report, and so on was strictly forbidden. For a while, there was a flaw in the process where each operator was allowed to use a made up, hopefully random string to start their day's messages. Once the Abwehr realized how poorly this was working, the procedure was improved. However, the British knew German coastal patrol boats had Enigma machines. British bombers would drop Sea mines near these boats and then wait for a broadcast likely containing words like "mine" and "bomber". These were "planted cribs" so these operations were called "gardening" by the British. A crib is a phrase or word you try to get your enemy to send in code so your codebreakers have something specific to search for. The British also knew the German grid square system, so the patrol boats were likely to send those locations in their coded messages as well. More cribs.
@@amerigo88 Not unlike what the US did when they knew a Japanese attack was coming (thanks to MAGIC), but did not know where as the Japanese only referred to their target as "AF". So they had their remote bases send poorly encrypted messages with a code they knew the Japanese had already broken and each with a different problem. One in particular was an island base reporting their water desalinization plant had failed. And they hit pay dirt when the Japanese in an order to the assault force informed them to bring their own water purification systems because "AF was out of water". That was how the US knew that the attack was going to be at Midway.
Great video. It was very informative. And hey have you people ever considered doing a video on "Operation: Solo." It also could be really informative. My compliments to all those who made this video a reality.
@@TheColdWarTV---Thanks I remember it when I saw this video and thought it would be great to see what you have to say about it. I think it's one amazing story to tell. Hope to see the video up soon.
Great video, but it does not answer one question, "Where did the name 'Venona' come from?" I have read other works, but the origin of the name is never explained. At first I understood the name to be "Verona" as in the Italian city and the play, "Two Gentlemen of Verona." Any enlightenment on this pre-Cold War question would be appreciated.
I agree but McCarthy’s accusation that Chief Of Staff General McCarthy was communist and meeting with a communist official on December 7, 1941 (Pearl Harbor) and that the U. S. Army was communist absolutely destroyed his credibility.
@@italukr Russian intelligence picked up on the information of the pearl harbor attack they relayed the information among themselves. Through venona we got the information of the attack and yes some of our officials knew about it. Russia England and China wanted us in ww2 to help because lend lease was not enough and we were squeamish about war after ww1. Keep in mind we were allies at the time with russia and it wasn't until the end of ww2 the cold war started. The brains behind venona gene grabeel broke the russian code back in ww2 and russia hadn't changed it until 1981. Stanislav lunev had said the mcCarthy hearings dismantled the russian spy network in the u.s. at the time and they never really recovered from it. So when the socialist and communist get caught they attack the credibility of the good people because it's the only defence they have. McCarthy was 100% right 100% of the time and the release of the venona papers prove it.
@@italukr A lot of that is propaganda and misrepresentation. He never argued that the US Army WAS communist, his original assertion was that there was reason to suspect that the Army signal corp was compromised, which does NOT mean that they were staffed by deliberate communists, just that the secret information was being leaked somehow, and McCarthy was requesting an investigation into the matter. The later McCarthy vs Army hearings were not about his assertions, it was about whether or not the Army was retaliating against his investigation by denying appointments to individuals with connection with McCarthy, and if McCarthy was making recommendations based on cronyist means. The ruling of the trial is that McCarthy was cleared of all wrongdoing, but that Roy Cohn, his lawyer, was guilty of some misconduct. However the Trial revealed on public television that McCarthy was a bully in the courtroom, so regardless of if he was right or wrong, public perception turned on him. It wasn't him being right or wrong that destroyed his credibility, it was him being perceived as a bully.
@@Meton2526 I don't disagree with any of your assertions. Public opinion definitely turned on McCarthy because of his style of bullying (sound like a current Presidential candidate?). But this was aided by the fact that the U.S. had been flooded by Communist sympathizers during the 1930's. Prominent writers, artists, and intellectuals flocked to Communist-dominated groups such as the League of American Writers, The American Youth Congress, The Popular Front Alliance, American Labor Party and Education Unions. Hollywood was deep in Communism sympathizers. My main point was that the Venona Intercept Project made the National Security Agency aware of a web of Communist spies in the government and the movies and, after the Soviet Union fell, researchers were allowed into the Comintern files and confirmed their existence. They published "The Secret World of American Communism" in 1995 which reveals their findings. It proved that the American government and its society was riddled with Communists and their sympathizers, confirming McCarthy's accusations.
Yes. In all likelihood, the FBI was turned onto him originally by Venona itself, but in order to keep secret the mechanism by which they found out, you had to invent a court case around proving his guilt without any reference to Venona or anything that could be tracked back to it, otherwise the Soviets would have caught on and fixed the vulnerability.
Something missing here though. How can compromized OPT's from the 40's still be giving insight into Soviet codes all the way into the 80's. There must be a lot more to it than just that.
The Left/communists knew that they were going to be investigated so they made the best of it by ensuring that the investigator was an incompetent (McCarthy's Democratic party allies were the Kennedy's - staunch Roman Catholics and virulent anti-communists). Given the state of the media, Hollywood etc today, the Lefts scam worked.
I hope you will cover the story of Whittaker Chambers. From reading his biography, I learned that German used to be the international language of communists. Chambers thought that one of the purposes of the Hitler Stalin pact was to eliminate German competition for leadership in the international communist movement. I know his story takes place mostly before the official start of the Cold War. Still, just because you aren't at war with them doesn't mean they aren't at war with you. I know there is the thought that Chambers was important in shifting public opinion from not taking communism seriously to taking it seriously. First, as an editor at Time magazine, he brought his perspective on communism to the public eye and secondly as a witness he revealed Stalin's spy network in the US government dating back to the New Deal.
Because of a lack of computing power, they mostly relied upon agents in the US. One of the most effective was the "Walker Spy Ring", led by a US Navy Warrant Officer who worked in cryptography starting in the 1960s. In 1967 he approached the Soviets and offered to sell them information on our cryptography systems. He even got his brother to join the ring as a spy as well as his son, who were both in the Navy. He tried to get his daughter who was in the Amy to join but she became pregnant and got out. The seizing of the USS Pueblo by North Korea was done under order of the Soviets in 1968 so they could get their hands on the cryptography systems that Walker had informed them were being used. This did a tremendous amount of damage to US security as it for a brief time allowed the Soviets to read the US communications until they could change the systems used. From all records the Soviets were never anywhere near as successful as the US was in decoding communications, mostly as said because their computers were nowhere near as good. But they were much better at the human side of intelligence.
You know, once upon a time I had a book published by the John Birch Society back in the 50s that accused President Eisenhower of being a Communist, born in the Canal Zone, false birth certificate, doing sweet deals with the Soviets etc. I have also done a little bit of research on Richard Nixon’s origins, particularly the “businessmen“ who funded his campaign against the incumbent in his district, who happened to be an important member of the house unAmerican activities committee that Moscow wanted gone. I assert with some evidence that Nixon was a dedicated Communist; he posed as an anti-Communist, yet in the end he sold the country to Mao and destroyed the US dollar. (This is the assertion of Philip K Dick’s posthumous novel *Radio Free Albemuth* which I adored as a youth in the mid 80s, and it has stuck with me all these years.) I am curious if you know about any of this. Because, if the President of the United States himself can be a Soviet agent, that has deep implications. Maybe ALL of them were/are? Trump’s 1987 visit to Red Square is another interesting topic for your amazing channel. Thanks 🙏🏽
One of my favorite sayings is, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you." Kind of sums up people accusing the US agencies of being paranoid and seeing a red under every rock. It was actually only every other rock they were under.
Difference is acting upon it.
Stalin was definitely paranoid, even if it was justified at times.
@@Marinealver He was paranoid because he feared being exposed as a rat for the Okhrana.
@@rusoviettovarich9221 what exactly is a Okhrana?
@@Polymath9000 It was Imperial Russia's 'secret police' that was replaced by the bolsheviks (communists) with their own even more brutal secret police the 'Cheka'
Czarist secret police
"in the fictional upside-down nation of Australia"... I literally LOLed. Love the subtle, dry humor (and the top-notch production value, of course).
So glad you guys are doing videos on topics like this!
How did you get early access?
Patreon membership has it's perks...
@@TheColdWarTV Ahh yes. I forgot. 😂
@@TheColdWarTV how about channel membership 🐢
the Naruto runner comment caught me off guard🤣 you infiltrated my laugh box
Has the "spy in a red bikini" ever been covered? She was a Soviet spy in Australia who defected to Australia, but she did so by jumping off a Soviet ship heading out of Sydney harbour in a red bikini. A photograph exists of it happening and it was pretty scandalous at the time. Many Australians thought we were so far away from the great powers that the cold war didn't really affect us, but they didn't realise our spy bases (like Pine Gap) were perfectly located for spying over all of Asia, that MASER (the precursor to laser) was developed here, nuclear tests were underway in South Australia and we were the first country to develop over the horizon radar. The Soviets certainly had a presence here.
And so do agencies of the Chinese Communist Party and state, now ( especially in Universities, for whatever reasons - and of course technology fields, sciences, etc. ).
Accidentally repeated THIRTY THOUSAND TIMES. This is the perfect poster boy for the YOU HAVE ONE JOB meme.
There was a great deal of confusion at the time due the Nazi invasion.
Julius Rosenberg gave the Russkies a few crude hand sketches of the lens mold used in fashioning the implosion system on the Fat Man device, which were drawn from memory by his brother-in -law, David Greenglass (Ethel's brother). Greenglass had a high school education and worked as a machinist at Los Alamos. David became a cooperating witness and sent his sister to the electric chair.
They weren't executed for what they did. Dulles and Hoover sat the Rosenbergs down in the electric chair to send a message to the dozens, maybe hundreds, of spies they knew were out there from Venona, but couldn't identify. There were about 300 cryptonyms in the traffic, only half of whom have ever been identified. (You failed to mention that over half the Venona traffic has never been decrypted -- something the NSA doesn't like to talk about either.) The message was, if we catch you, not only will we give you the electric chair, but your wife will ride the lightning as well. Apparently it worked like a charm. Within a year Beria was demanding to know why his officers in the U.S. were producing next to nothing and threatening to ship the NKVD residentura in D.C. to the gulag. He cabled back to Moscow that the U.S. had become a fascist state and if Beria didn't like things, he should come over himself and run the station.
Guilty of treason is guilty of treason, the fact that there were not effective at it doesn't change the fact that they gave classified material to the enemies of the USA.
Give a shout out to those “employees” of the Kingston Horel looking out for the comings and goings from the Russian Embassy compound in Canberra ....
One time pads should be 100% secure but, in the real world, managing the keys is so difficult that pads aren't used much.
Amazingly, there was another ww2 era one-time-pad system the allies cracked. Germany had high-level cipher using OTPs. The keys were distributed in books. The books were printed by specialized printing presses. The press had a series of number stamps that printed a page at a time. After each page, the stamps automatically progressed to the next number generated by a pseudo-random sequence.
Allies got a hold of one key book. By itself, that book was useless. If the book still existed it means they keys had not been used yet. (you normally destroy those keys after use to make sure you don't resuse them). Allies figured out the concept on how the book was made and studied the number sequences. The derived the pseudo-random generator and were able to generate matching keys for books they didn't have.
The setting keys for Enigma machines were also distributed in "books" that were easily destroyed by water immersion ( Navy / sub force ), or fire ( some other military or Nazi forces ). They wanted to be secure, but ease of use, and "books" getting captured, code breaking, are always risks with these analog type coding systems.
☺
8:30 The older gentleman shown here is neither Harry Truman nor J. Edgar Hoover. I'm pretty sure it's Herbert Hoover, 31st President of the United States, from 1929 to 1933.
I saw that too - definitely Herbert Hoover
Anyhow it's a hoover, suck it up...
@henryj.8528 Not likely, as this video was posted over two years ago. It was more likely an error on the part of a clerk who originally filed the video clip in the video library. The clerk likely misidentified the subject of the clip, and the person who pulled the clip to include in this video assumed it was correct.
The Cold War, can you please make a video on West Germany's post-war economic miracle. Thank you very much.
It was hardly a miracle when you consider the vast amounts of money hidden partly in South America and through German owned companies across Europe by Martin Bormann towards the end of WW2, this was gradually brought back into Germany from the mid 1950's and wow a economic miracle ;)
@@philstaples8122 and the marshall plan! even though east germany didn't receive it, they were doing pretty good! not counting the limited resources they had
Having their prewar debt that was mostly used to fund their military completely wiped free. Along with no major demands for reparations despite trillions in economic damage throughout Europe. And billions in aid from the Marshall plan. Yeah, that will do it! Same goes for Japan, neither really paid for the war in terms of monetary compensation. With Japan never really apologizing. At least the Germans owed up to their crimes.
The Wirtsschaftwunder would probably be an interesting episode
Not to mention the money covertly poured into West Germany purely to impress East Germany with the riches of capitalism...
My Aunt was a cryptologist in the navy during the late cold war. We never knew when she left the country, etc. and to this day never says a word about it.
1941 finnish troops capture sovjet four digit codebook consulat of sovjetunion in petsamo. Same book going to OSS 1944 and they open pre war and wartime messages on embassy of the sovjetunion. Thats how they find out sovjets spions of Roosevelt admistration.
Soviets RAN the Roosevelt administration.
Funnily enough, given that this channel has 313k subscribers at time of writing, the bell button probably HAS been pressed over 35'000 times total.
This was a very good video, but I have to say that I disagree with the implication that the Venona Program meant that the US was spying on the Soviets when they were not "really aware that a game had started." It is well known that the Soviet Union began infiltrating the US with agents, recruiting networks of Americans who sympathized with communism and/or the USSR, and spying on America in great earnest in the late 1920s. If anything, it was the Soviets that began playing the game before the USA even knew it was afoot. 🖖💯✌
@@EarthForces It is not so much that this channel is giving unwarranted sympathy, at least I think not in this case. I think that these folks simply do not consider events before the end of World War 2 to be part of the Cold War...with only a few exceptions. It does not matter that much to them that the USSR was actively and massively spying on the US and Britain and other "western" countries from the 1920s onward...those events do not count as Cold War events to them. 💯
Well during the war also Soviets were mostly aware of American nuclear program from 1942.
Good point . Although the U.S did have individual intelligence contacts in the Soviet Union , it did not have a coordinated Spy network inside the Soviet Union .
There was a growing membership of the american Communist Party in the 1920's and the leading membership did receive there marching orders from Moscow .
The height of recruitment of western agents and top US Gov't. officials spying for the USSR against the US began in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War ,when sympathy for the underdog, communist Republicans, viewed as rural workers and the oppressed common man , was at its highest .
The exodus of many of those operatives occurred at the time of the Molotov Ribbentrop pact or German Soviet non- aggression pact of 1939 , when most of the communist idealists believed Stalin had sold out the movement to the fascists. The remaining Soviet spies were obviously die hard, committed Communists such as Harry Dexter White and Alger Hiss .
Also the narrator talks about Truman during the video , while showing old vids of President Hoover .
Just an observation of inaccuracy .
@@iKvetch558 They had so deeply penetrated even Manhattan that Stalin knew about the atomic bomb program before President Truman did.
Turns out McCarthy wasn't really crazy....
I love history. Could you cover how the cold war affected the Mushroom Kingdom with the Soviet puppet state ran by "Princess" Peach?
you mean when the cia supported bowser in an attempt to replace the peach government?
@@sebastianwolfmayr dont listen to the propaganda of Peach and her Toadies. Bowser wants to uplift the poor, or throw them in lava
Peach, represented by the symbols of the working koopa the Hammer Bros and Sickle, only held her kingdom together through the power of the Bullet. Bill.
And how do the Italian Brothers fit in...?
@@HptfwO the PCI obviously supported peach. all the talk about socialism didn't keep the brothers from taking gold coins in exchange for their help
At 8:34 mentions President Truman but shows former President Herbert Hoover inspecting ancient Chinese vases(?) Perhaps meaning J. Edgar Hoover?
What not even the naruto runners, damn thats some secret stuff then
If codes are reused, it provides "depth" that makes it more likely the encrypted messages will be decrypted by parties other than the intended recipients.
Highly recommend the book "Spycatcher." It's amazing!
I mean, isn't that what helped Bletchley Park decrypt Enigma codes because the operators didn't change their encryption setting due to being fatigued?
@@axelpatrickb.pingol3228 Not really. Procedure was every German Enigma operator would reset the rotors and the plugboard at midnight to match the settings in their Army, Navy, or Air Force issued codebook. The use of many common phrases like Sieg Heil, Heil Hitler, Nothing to report, and so on was strictly forbidden. For a while, there was a flaw in the process where each operator was allowed to use a made up, hopefully random string to start their day's messages. Once the Abwehr realized how poorly this was working, the procedure was improved.
However, the British knew German coastal patrol boats had Enigma machines. British bombers would drop Sea mines near these boats and then wait for a broadcast likely containing words like "mine" and "bomber". These were "planted cribs" so these operations were called "gardening" by the British. A crib is a phrase or word you try to get your enemy to send in code so your codebreakers have something specific to search for. The British also knew the German grid square system, so the patrol boats were likely to send those locations in their coded messages as well. More cribs.
@@amerigo88 I read it several decades ago. It is discussed that "Wright" himself has been a Soviet agent.
@@amerigo88 Not unlike what the US did when they knew a Japanese attack was coming (thanks to MAGIC), but did not know where as the Japanese only referred to their target as "AF". So they had their remote bases send poorly encrypted messages with a code they knew the Japanese had already broken and each with a different problem. One in particular was an island base reporting their water desalinization plant had failed. And they hit pay dirt when the Japanese in an order to the assault force informed them to bring their own water purification systems because "AF was out of water".
That was how the US knew that the attack was going to be at Midway.
a very good video thanks a lot
Just noticed you have a SMITH CORONA on your desk!!! same one that I have! Lovely!
Excellent video, loved it! Keep up
Thanks a lot!
Great video. It was very informative. And hey have you people ever considered doing a video on "Operation: Solo." It also could be really informative. My compliments to all those who made this video a reality.
Great suggestion!
@@TheColdWarTV---Thanks I remember it when I saw this video and thought it would be great to see what you have to say about it. I think it's one amazing story to tell. Hope to see the video up soon.
Top videos, id like to see a video on Kasputin Yar in the USSR.
Great video, but it does not answer one question, "Where did the name 'Venona' come from?" I have read other works, but the origin of the name is never explained. At first I understood the name to be "Verona" as in the Italian city and the play, "Two Gentlemen of Verona." Any enlightenment on this pre-Cold War question would be appreciated.
Gonna be real, I wasn't expecting this episode to be as interesting as it was
Venona proved that Joseph McCarthy was right.
I agree but McCarthy’s accusation that Chief Of Staff General McCarthy was communist and meeting with a communist official on December 7, 1941 (Pearl Harbor) and that the U. S. Army was communist absolutely destroyed his credibility.
@@italukr
Russian intelligence picked up on the information of the pearl harbor attack they relayed the information among themselves. Through venona we got the information of the attack and yes some of our officials knew about it.
Russia England and China wanted us in ww2 to help because lend lease was not enough and we were squeamish about war after ww1.
Keep in mind we were allies at the time with russia and it wasn't until the end of ww2 the cold war started.
The brains behind venona
gene grabeel broke the russian code back in ww2 and russia hadn't changed it until 1981.
Stanislav lunev had said the mcCarthy hearings dismantled the russian spy network in the u.s. at the time and they never really recovered from it.
So when the socialist and communist get caught they attack the credibility of the good people because it's the only defence they have.
McCarthy was 100% right 100% of the time and the release of the venona papers prove it.
@@italukrThe US would only go on to hand over North Korea and Vietnam to the communists...
@@italukr A lot of that is propaganda and misrepresentation.
He never argued that the US Army WAS communist, his original assertion was that there was reason to suspect that the Army signal corp was compromised, which does NOT mean that they were staffed by deliberate communists, just that the secret information was being leaked somehow, and McCarthy was requesting an investigation into the matter.
The later McCarthy vs Army hearings were not about his assertions, it was about whether or not the Army was retaliating against his investigation by denying appointments to individuals with connection with McCarthy, and if McCarthy was making recommendations based on cronyist means. The ruling of the trial is that McCarthy was cleared of all wrongdoing, but that Roy Cohn, his lawyer, was guilty of some misconduct.
However the Trial revealed on public television that McCarthy was a bully in the courtroom, so regardless of if he was right or wrong, public perception turned on him. It wasn't him being right or wrong that destroyed his credibility, it was him being perceived as a bully.
@@Meton2526 I don't disagree with any of your assertions. Public opinion definitely turned on McCarthy because of his style of bullying (sound like a current Presidential candidate?). But this was aided by the fact that the U.S. had been flooded by Communist sympathizers during the 1930's. Prominent writers, artists, and intellectuals flocked to Communist-dominated groups such as the League of American Writers, The American Youth Congress, The Popular Front Alliance, American Labor Party and Education Unions. Hollywood was deep in Communism sympathizers. My main point was that the Venona Intercept Project made the National Security Agency aware of a web of Communist spies in the government and the movies and, after the Soviet Union fell, researchers were allowed into the Comintern files and confirmed their existence. They published "The Secret World of American Communism" in 1995 which reveals their findings. It proved that the American government and its society was riddled with Communists and their sympathizers, confirming McCarthy's accusations.
Did Venona prove Alger Hiss' guilt?
Yes. In all likelihood, the FBI was turned onto him originally by Venona itself, but in order to keep secret the mechanism by which they found out, you had to invent a court case around proving his guilt without any reference to Venona or anything that could be tracked back to it, otherwise the Soviets would have caught on and fixed the vulnerability.
Something missing here though. How can compromized OPT's from the 40's still be giving insight into Soviet codes all the way into the 80's. There must be a lot more to it than just that.
This is a really cool episode !👍
thanks!
When speaking of J Edgar Hoover, you are showing video of Herbert Hoover. Same last name, completely different individuals.
I like the bobble head act!
Why no mention of Bill Weisband?
So joe mccarthy was correct.but his method were crude and counter productive.
The Left/communists knew that they were going to be investigated so they made the best of it by ensuring that
the investigator was an incompetent (McCarthy's Democratic party allies were the Kennedy's - staunch Roman Catholics
and virulent anti-communists). Given the state of the media, Hollywood etc today, the Lefts scam worked.
With real spy-life like this, who needs James Bond?
The video shows President Herbert Hoover- not J. Edgar Hoover.
I hope you will cover the story of Whittaker Chambers. From reading his biography, I learned that German used to be the international language of communists. Chambers thought that one of the purposes of the Hitler Stalin pact was to eliminate German competition for leadership in the international communist movement. I know his story takes place mostly before the official start of the Cold War. Still, just because you aren't at war with them doesn't mean they aren't at war with you.
I know there is the thought that Chambers was important in shifting public opinion from not taking communism seriously to taking it seriously. First, as an editor at Time magazine, he brought his perspective on communism to the public eye and secondly as a witness he revealed Stalin's spy network in the US government dating back to the New Deal.
what's the song at the end of the video?
To be fair the Soviets just used “in Minecraft” and once that was figured out it wasn’t too big of a deal.
Great video, as always 💜 Though it's pronounced Ay-zee-oh, also hello ASIO 👋
Good to know for next time
Could you do a counterpoint about the Soviet codebreaking efforts? I have no idea how successful or unsuccessful they were
Because of a lack of computing power, they mostly relied upon agents in the US. One of the most effective was the "Walker Spy Ring", led by a US Navy Warrant Officer who worked in cryptography starting in the 1960s. In 1967 he approached the Soviets and offered to sell them information on our cryptography systems. He even got his brother to join the ring as a spy as well as his son, who were both in the Navy. He tried to get his daughter who was in the Amy to join but she became pregnant and got out.
The seizing of the USS Pueblo by North Korea was done under order of the Soviets in 1968 so they could get their hands on the cryptography systems that Walker had informed them were being used. This did a tremendous amount of damage to US security as it for a brief time allowed the Soviets to read the US communications until they could change the systems used.
From all records the Soviets were never anywhere near as successful as the US was in decoding communications, mostly as said because their computers were nowhere near as good. But they were much better at the human side of intelligence.
What happened to the guy who printed the page 35k times?
35k years hard labor in Siberia, unfortunately
Being sceptical of Hoover and his motives just seems sensible.
He got too near the bone for the traitorous scum that still pollute the media, academia and 'elites' in the west.
...that's not J Edgar Hoover! That's HERBERT Hoover! Come on guys!
"Code cipher" is just gobbledygook. It's either a code or a cipher. The equivalent would be "beef chicken."
Who is QUANTUM..?
10:39 a little
asynchronous
Did the Soviet Union break any US, UK or other Allied codes?
make videos on those exposed as spies
David I'm disappointed you didn't make a Body Break reference with Don Maclean
wasn't that Hal Johnson and Joanne McLeod?
@@TheColdWarTV You know you're right, I must be losing my mind in old age.
Can we get a compilation of all the bell button notification lines please
Damn that's cool
I don't have the correct code book for my bell button. 🤣🤣🤣
Where is Indy Neidell?
The Cold War, please do a video on the failed Bay of Pigs invasion.
That’s president Hoover not J Edgar
We want David to replace our History teacher
in violent, CIA-backed coup? Or by a peaceful and lawful transfer of power backed by open, free, and fair elections?
Yes
@@TheColdWarTV both involves violence
No Such Agency and their Enigma.
Venona cables
Second! (Btw good video!)
@@Solaxe ok
Wrong Hoover in yourvideo.
41 why thwy are 3 dislikes? Ehat are theor.probelm
I can see the copy of another great TH-cam channel that started this trend...#timeghostarmy
Barely anyone knows or talks about this in detail...
Soft on communism.
You know, once upon a time I had a book published by the John Birch Society back in the 50s that accused President Eisenhower of being a Communist, born in the Canal Zone, false birth certificate, doing sweet deals with the Soviets etc. I have also done a little bit of research on Richard Nixon’s origins, particularly the “businessmen“ who funded his campaign against the incumbent in his district, who happened to be an important member of the house unAmerican activities committee that Moscow wanted gone. I assert with some evidence that Nixon was a dedicated Communist; he posed as an anti-Communist, yet in the end he sold the country to Mao and destroyed the US dollar. (This is the assertion of Philip K Dick’s posthumous novel *Radio Free Albemuth* which I adored as a youth in the mid 80s, and it has stuck with me all these years.) I am curious if you know about any of this. Because, if the President of the United States himself can be a Soviet agent, that has deep implications. Maybe ALL of them were/are? Trump’s 1987 visit to Red Square is another interesting topic for your amazing channel. Thanks 🙏🏽