Venona women

Angeline “Angie” Nanni, the last survivor of the Venona Project, has finally given an interview at age 99.  Venona was one of the greatest counter-espionage triumphs of the Cold War, a top secret effort to break encrypted Soviet spy messages.  In 1945, the uneducated Angie sought a better job and was found to be a virtuoso mathematician in a government test.  Previously she had worked as bookkeeper in dad’s grocery and sisters’ hair salon.  The Venona Project was mostly women mathematicians—Gloria Forbes, Mildred Hayes, Carrie Berry, Joan Callahan, Gene Grabeel, and Angie.  They were rural women, hired during WW II when men were in short supply-- ferocious intellect, and powerful linguists, attention to details and math. Over the years many dropped out.  It was terrifically lonely work and forbid discussion. You couldn’t date without risk that the date might be a Soviet plant.  Angie feared even joining church or going to mass.

            Soviets were known for unbreakable codes.  A letter would be assigned a 5-digit number which was then multiplied and divided mysteriously by 5-digit “keys” which varied daily, and digits were then shifted around in the document.  This is all done with non-carrying arithmetic (example: 8 + 6 = 4, not 14). Reverse this to decipher. But the women figured how to decode without knowing the keys.  They did it analytically by noticing repeated numbers representing common words and phrases in Russian. (Like English ‘the’, ‘and’, ‘yes’,’no’) They would then back out the mathematics. And they learned tricks in deciphering from the Nazis, who were trying to do the same and left records after the war.  Theirs was one of the greatest feats in the history of US cryptology. 

            Near the end of the forties, a Russian defected and implicated Whitaker Chambers, an American.  Under interrogation, Chambers named a few names in our government working for the Soviets.  The whole episode blew up when it was discovered that Soviets had stolen our atomic bomb secrets. The House Un-American Activities committee met and Sen. Joe McCarthy named 51 American government workers suspected of being Soviet spies. The Venona women knew who among that group was actually a spy.  They had cracked messages that implicated Julius and Ethel Rosenberg as the bomb secret snitches.  And they knew that high-ranking Alger Hiss was also a spy. Yet they couldn’t speak.  Nor could a deciphered message be used in trial or the Soviets would know the Americans had cracked their code.  Often the OSS/CIA would use ancillary information in a message to prove a conviction. At other times, the guilty lucked out and were told sternly that their cover was broken and that they’d better find a new life.  William Weisband, a fluent Russian speaker, was a deep mole in the NSA but never prosecuted.  Angie said she suspected him because he was so ‘snoopy’ and she always hid her papers on her desk when he came around.

            The Venona women had only a familial fellowship with one another.  Going out to lunch in housedresses and purses, they looked like very low level government workers.  But Angie found her faith in much Bible reading as Luther had done 500 years before. What she found made her “almost a Protestant”. Her 23 nieces and nephews were her surrogate children.  She was their Favorite Aunt. Jim DeLuca moved to DC for grad school at George Washington U. in part because Aunt Angie was there. She never shared what she had been doing for 35 years at NSA. But Mary Ann DeLuca tells about how in the waning days of the Obama Admin some were discussing the Rosenbergs sympathetically wanting them exonerated.  Aunt Angie overheard and said, “Oh, honey, they can’t.  We had them.  They are guilty.” Then she walked away.  In 2001 Jim DeLuca was online reading about the de-classified Venona Project and there was Angie’s name! He asked her about it. “Oh,” she said, “That was nothing.” But it was.  When Russian citizens stormed the KGB office in Moscow, 1993, files were divulged.  It turned out Joe McCarthy was wrong.  There were actually 406 Soviet spies in the US government, most of whom were known by the quiet Venona women.