Venona Project: How The US Cracked Top Secret Soviet Codes 

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.

Venona proved that Joseph McCarthy was right.

So glad you guys are doing videos on topics like this!

"in the fictional upside-down nation of Australia"... I literally LOLed. Love the subtle, dry humor (and the top-notch production value, of course).

the Naruto runner comment caught me off guard🤣 you infiltrated my laugh box

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 ....

The Cold War, can you please make a video on West Germany's post-war economic miracle. Thank you very much.

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.

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. 🖖💯✌

Accidentally repeated THIRTY THOUSAND TIMES. This is the perfect poster boy for the YOU HAVE ONE JOB meme.

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.

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.

What not even the naruto runners, damn thats some secret stuff then

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.

I love history. Could you cover how the cold war affected the Mushroom Kingdom with the Soviet puppet state ran by "Princess" Peach?

Excellent video, loved it! Keep up

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.

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.

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 is a really cool episode !👍

Just noticed you have a SMITH CORONA on your desk!!! same one that I have! Lovely!

a very good video 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.

Top videos, id like to see a video on Kasputin Yar in the USSR.

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.

So joe mccarthy was correct.but his method were crude and counter productive.

At 8:34 mentions President Truman but shows former President Herbert Hoover inspecting ancient Chinese vases(?) Perhaps meaning J. Edgar Hoover?

I like the bobble head act!

Gonna be real, I wasn't expecting this episode to be as interesting as it was

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.

When speaking of J Edgar Hoover, you are showing video of Herbert Hoover. Same last name, completely different individuals.

Being sceptical of Hoover and his motives just seems sensible.

Great video, as always 💜 Though it's pronounced Ay-zee-oh, also hello ASIO 👋

Damn that's cool

Could you do a counterpoint about the Soviet codebreaking efforts? I have no idea how successful or unsuccessful they were

As a result of the German invasion, the Soviets were hard pressed to generate and distribute code materials to agents world wide. Also with the advent of the war, communications traffic, particularly regarding Lend Lease shipments, expanded exponentially. The Soviets got around the problem by reusing the one-time pad materials on different communications channels (KGB, trade missions, diplomatic) and in different ways (reverse order, diagonal) in the hopes these techniques would prove secure. They didn't. Army cryptographers eventually realized the Soviets were reusing their one-time pads and that lead to the Venona code break. So it wasn't a mistake by some "company" but a necessary step to make up for the inability to produce enough coding materials during the war.

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.

Can we get a compilation of all the bell button notification lines please

make videos on those exposed as spies

With real spy-life like this, who needs James Bond?

what's the song at the end of the video?

Did Venona prove Alger Hiss' guilt?

"Code cipher" is just gobbledygook. It's either a code or a cipher. The equivalent would be "beef chicken."

David I'm disappointed you didn't make a Body Break reference with Don Maclean

Why no mention of Bill Weisband?

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.

10:39 a little asynchronous

To be fair the Soviets just used “in Minecraft” and once that was figured out it wasn’t too big of a deal.

What happened to the guy who printed the page 35k times?

No Such Agency and their Enigma.

That’s president Hoover not J Edgar

I don't have the correct code book for my bell button. 🤣🤣🤣

Did the Soviet Union break any US, UK or other Allied codes?

Where is Indy Neidell?

The Cold War, please do a video on the failed Bay of Pigs invasion.

Who is QUANTUM..?

...that's not J Edgar Hoover! That's HERBERT Hoover! Come on guys!

We want David to replace our History teacher

41 why thwy are 3 dislikes? Ehat are theor.probelm

I can see the copy of another great RU-vid channel that started this trend...#timeghostarmy

Wrong Hoover in yourvideo.

Second! (Btw good video!)

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 🙏🏽