(Hardcover)
The Venona Files are several intercepted communiques between the Soviet Union and American Communists following WWII.
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January 05, 2001: ''Venona'' is the code word given to the secret taping of Soviet wire communications between their diplomatic sites in the U.S. and Moscow during WWII. You may recall all those rantings by extreme right-wing nuts about commies stealing atomic secrets and infesting our State Department, well it turns out Whitaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley were right after all. Harry Hopkins, Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White and others in government WERE agents of the Soviet Union and while they influenced government policy to favor the Soviets the Oppenheimer brothers, the Rosenbergs and others involved in American research efforts sold out their country and made the world a much more dangerous place by giving the Soviets technology that resulted in their getting the Atom bomb at least 5-6 years before they could have otherwise developed it. In ''The Venona Secrets: Exposing Soviet Espionage and America's Traitors'' the authors cross-reference previously known facts from the investigations of the 40s and 50s with Soviet files opened since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s and the Venona transmissions just released for the first time in 1995 for a compelling look at a chapter in American history almost completely unknown by the general public and one given little credence in current high school history texts.