Thirty years ago the U.S. National Security Agency released translations of Soviet cables decrypted back in the 1940s by the Venona Project. Venona was a top-secret U.S. effort to gather and decrypt messages sent in the 1940s by agents of the KGB and the GRU, the Soviet military intelligence agency. The cables revealed the identities of numerous Americans who were spies for the Soviet Union.
Liberals are still in denial about what the Venona cables revealed. They still are bent on depicting the “Red Scare” of the 1950s as a “witch hunt” that had no basis in reality – and is in fact the same impulse that is underneath today’s MAGA movement. Why not? I mean, if they can deny Russiagate despite the evidence staring them in the face, they can deny anything.
I came across stories about Venona again recently while doing research for the Anti-Communist Film Festival. I’m planning a film festival in 2026 to highlight some of the great anti-communist films, from My Son John to The Lives of Others. It’s a project to inoculate young Americans to the false religion of socialism and to have a big fun party for conservatives.
Part of my research involves reading books about anti-communist figures and actions. One of them, Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America by Clay Risen, was published this year. Risen is a writer for the New York Times, and I was curious to see what his book would say in light of the Venona cables. As suspected, he glosses over Venona quickly in order to get to the real issue – how the Red Scare was about American paranoia and authoritarianism and how we hear its echo in Donald Trump. Risen:
I am in general fascinated by the way in which culture influences politics, and vice versa, how unspoken but widely shared ideas and hatreds and passions drive historical change. I was also skeptical of the conventional explanations for the Red Scare, that it was merely an American witch hunt. Around the time I graduated high school, the federal government revealed the Venona program, which had captured secret Soviet communications and which, once decoded, offered compelling proof that figures like Hiss and the Rosenbergs and the leadership of the American Communist Party had, in fact, worked for the Soviet Union and against the United States. There was substance to concerns about Soviet infiltration. But it remained clear that the response, in the form of blacklists and congressional investigations and book bans and loyalty tests, went so far beyond what was necessary that something else was in the mix. Explaining that “something else” became a driving force for this book.
Of course. Ruled out of bounds is the possibility that, in the Cold War era, most Americans reasonably came to the conclusion that the Soviet Union was out to destroy us, and that their spies and sympathizers were evil and needed to be feared and rejected. No, there’s just something in the American blood that makes us paranoid and authoritarian.
I was also interested in Risen’s take on anti-communist movies, and he did not disappoint: “Along with Reagan’s hardline stance came a revival of anti-Soviet, anti-Communist culture. First Blood, a thoughtful, taut thriller about a troubled Vietnam veteran released in 1982, was followed by two blunderbuss sequels, in which John Rambo is sent to various corners of the world to fight sneering Communists. He was just one of many such heroes in an era overflowing with patriotic dross: Red Dawn, Firefox, Rocky IV, Top Gun. We had video games like Rush’n Attack and Conflict and NATO Commander, and books by Tom Clancy, Harold Coyle, and Len Deighton. It was inevitable that, in such a time, insults like “commie” and “pinko” were commonplace, and, at least in the Southern suburban world of my childhood.” They were common because Southerners knew what was up.
The best historians of the Venona cables are John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr. In their book Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (Annals of Communism), Haynes and Klehr detail just how extensive the spying was during the Cold War, and how damaging to America. They first lament how the fact that the government took decades to release the Venona cables has given a distorted view of the Cold War:“Unfortunately, the success of government secrecy in this case has seriously distorted our understanding of post-World War II history. Hundreds of books and thousands of essays on McCarthyism, the federal loyalty security program, Soviet espionage, American communism, and the early Cold War have perpetuated many myths that have given Americans a warped view of the nation’s history in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s.”
They go on:
Communists were depicted as innocent victims of an irrational and oppressive American government. In this sinister but widely accepted portrait of America in the 1940s and 1950s, an idealistic New Dealer (Alger Hiss) was thrown into prison on the perjured testimony of a mentally sick anti-Communist fanatic (Whittaker Chambers), innocent progressives (the Rosenbergs) were sent to the electric chair on trumped-up charges of espionage laced with anti-Semitism, and dozens of blameless civil servants had their careers ruined by the smears of a professional anti-Communist (Elizabeth Bentley). According to this version of events, one government official (Harry White) was killed by a heart attack brought on by Bentley’s lies, and another (Laurence Duggan, a senior diplomat) was driven to suicide by more of Chambers’s psychiatric problems.
Haynes and Klehr also argue that because the Venona cables were kept classified for decades after World War II, it prevented historians from separating communists from innocent liberals:
Some painted the entire New Deal as a disguised Communist plot and depicted Dean Acheson, Truman’s secretary of state, and George C. Marshall, the Army chief of staff under Roosevelt and secretary of state and secretary of defense under Truman, as participants, in Senator McCarthy’s words, in “a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, when it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men.”There is no basis in Venona for implicating Acheson or Marshall in a Communist conspiracy, but because the deciphered Venona messages were classified and unknown to the public, demagogues such as McCarthy had the opportunity to mix together accurate information about betrayal by men such as Harry White and Alger Hiss with falsehoods about Acheson and Marshall that served partisan political goals.
Haynes and Kelhr conclude that ,during the Cold War, Stalin was waging a hot espionage war on the United States. It did damage to the country and was an existential threat. Alger Hiss was guilty, and the “Hollywood Ten” who got blacklisted in the 1950s were all members of the Communist Party and out to destroy the United States. They were no different from the Russigate and pro-crime socialists out to ruin us today.
As Venona proved, many Americans helped the Soviets do just that. The anti-Communist Film Festival will remind people of this reality.
Note: You can contribute to the festival’s support by donating through the GoFundMe page for the project.
