Venona Project - Critical Views

Critical Views

The relevance, accuracy, and even authenticity of Venona decrypts have been questioned. Critics claim the material is unverifiable, with some, such as left-wing activist William Kunstler, going so far as to claim NSA had forged Venona material in its entirety in order to discredit the Communist Party of the United States of America and its members. Research in Soviet Archives has added to the corroboration of some Venona material, including the identities of many codenamed individuals.

Some remain skeptical of both the substance and the prevailing interpretations made since the release of the Venona material. Victor Navasky, editor and publisher of The Nation, has written several editorials highly critical of John Earl Haynes' and Harvey Klehr's interpretation of recent work on the subject of Soviet espionage. Navasky claims the Venona material is being used to “distort … our understanding of the cold war” and that the files are potential “time bombs of misinformation.” Commenting on the list of 349 Americans identified by Venona, published in an appendix to Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, Navasky wrote, "The reader is left with the implication — unfair and unproven — that every name on the list was involved in espionage, and as a result, otherwise careful historians and mainstream journalists now routinely refer to Venona as proof that many hundreds of Americans were part of the red spy network." Navasky goes further in his defense of the listed people and has claimed a great deal of the so-called espionage that went on was nothing more than “exchanges of information among people of good will” and that “most of these exchanges were innocent and were within the law.”

According to Ellen Schrecker, "Because they offer insights into the world of the secret police on both sides of the Iron Curtain, it is tempting to treat the FBI and Venona materials less critically than documents from more accessible sources. But there are too many gaps in the record to use these materials with complete confidence."

Schrecker agrees the documents have genuinely established the guilt of many prominent figures, but is still critical of the hardline interpretation by scholars such as Murno Gladst, arguing, "complexity, nuance, and a willingness to see the world in other than black and white seem alien to Haynes' view of history."

Writing about Alger Hiss, lawyer John Lowenthal criticized the accuracy and methodology of the Venona analysts, charging they employed false premises and flawed comparative logic to reach the desired conclusion his client was the spy "Ales." Lowenthal states this conclusion was psychologically and politically motivated but factually wrong.

Nigel West, on the other hand, expressed confidence in the decrypts: "Venona remain an irrefutable resource, far more reliable than the mercurial recollections of KGB defectors and the dubious conclusions drawn by paranoid analysts mesmerized by Machiavellian plots."