>>VENONA Chronology

Gene Grabeel begins VENONA at Arlington Hall.

Lieutenant Richard Hallock makes first break into Soviet diplomatic cipher; break expanded by Frank Lewis.

VENONA program expands; Captain F. Coudert and Major William B. S. Smith in charge.

Break made in KGB cipher by Cecil Phillips, Genevieve Feinstein, Lucille Campbell.

Gouzenko defects; Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers tell FBI about Soviet espionage in U.S.

Military intelligence teams find Soviet codebooks in Saxony and Schleswig, Germany.

Meredith Gardner begins to analytically reconstruct KGB codebook; translates a few messages including one about the atomic bomb.

Meredith Gardner's study of KGB covernames in the messages.

Carter W. Clarke of G-2 advises S. Wesley Reynolds, FBI, of successes at Arlington Hall on KGB espionage messages.

Robert J. Lamphere, FBI HQ, begins liaison with Meredith Gardner and great number of espionage cases opened.

Exploitation of VENONA exposes major KGB espionage agents such as Klaus Fuchs, Harry Gold, David Greenglass, Theodore Hall, William Perl, the Rosenbergs, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Kim Philby, and Harry D. White.

An earlier KGB cryptosystem exploited; GRU messages attacked. More espionage agents identified over the next two decades.

CIA officially briefed on VENONA and begins to assist in counterintelligence work.

U.K. begins to exploit Naval GRU messages.

Hundreds of first-time translations of messages; many earlier translations reissued.

VENONA ends.