intelligence directorate in the late 1930s and served as an illegalin
Western Europe. With the beginning of World War II, he com-
manded a battalion of partisans deep in the enemy’s rear during the
Battle of Moscow. Vaupshasov specialized in deep raids, taking his
units on forced marches hundreds of kilometers behind enemy lines.
These raids had both political and military purposes: they disrupted
Germans logistics and lines of communication, and they allowed the
establishment of liberated areas deep in the enemies’ rear. In 1944,
after the liberation of Byelorussia, where he had operated for months,
Vaupshasov was made a Hero of the Soviet Union. Following the
war, he resigned from the service as a colonel and wrote several ac-
counts of the partisan war.VENONA.The American code name for the interception and decryp-
tion of more than 2,900 Russian intelligence messages in the late
1940s was “Venona.” (One of the British code names was “Bride.”)
The original breakthrough was made possible by errors committed by
Soviet code clerks, who continued to use the same one-time pads in
enciphering messages. In 1946 the U.S. Army signals intelligence
agency first began reading the Soviet intelligence messages. In
1947–1948, the information was shared with the Federal Bureau of
Investigation (FBI), but not the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
An FBI officer who worked with the information to identify Soviet
spies later wrote: “I stood in the vestibule of the enemy’s house, hav-
ing entered by stealth.”
The information in the intercepts identified more than 349 Ameri-
can citizens as Soviet agents. Of these, 171 are identified by their true
names and 178 are known only by their cover names in the Venona
cables. The messages also identified more than a hundred citizens of
Great Britain, France, Canada, and other countries as Soviet agents.
Information from Venona allowed the American and British security
services to identify scores of agents by name, including Julius
Rosenberg, Alger Hiss, and Donald Maclean. The information led,
however, to few prosecutions, because neither the United States nor
Great Britain wanted to risk compromising the sources.
The material was a critical counterintelligencetool for the British
and Americans as they began to cope with the Soviet intelligence ser-
vices. For example, messages indicated that in 1944 a Soviet agent276 •VENONA06-313 P-Z.qxd 7/27/06 7:57 AM Page 276