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[MosJan]

Gaik Ovakimian


Haik Badalovich Ovakimian (Hayk Hovakimyan), Major General, USSR (11 August 1898, Nakhichevan - 1967), better known as "the puppetmaster" in intelligence circles, was a leading Soviet NKVD spy in the United States.

Of Armenian background, he joined the NKVD in 1931 while a graduate student at Moscow's Bauman Higher Technical School and went immediately into foreign intelligence.

Ovakimian was sent to Germany on an assignment emphasizing scientific-technical espionage. In 1932 he returned to the Soviet Union for advanced technical training at the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army Military-Chemical Academy. In 1933 he was sent to the United States as deputy head of the NKVD's scientific-technical intelligence section, operating under the cover of being an engineer for Amtorg. While in the United States, Ovakimian ran the Golos spy ring and is credited with facilitating the assassination of Leon Trotsky. He was Jacob Golos primary contact. Ovakimian also received material from Klaus Fuchs through Harry Gold. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were recruited by Ovakimian in 1938.

In 1939 Ovakimian became chief of scientific intelligence in the United States while at the same time began studying for a doctorate in chemistry at a New York University.

Ovakimian was arrested during a meeting on 5 May 1941 with an agent who had been turned by the FBI. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, he was traded back to Moscow for the release of several Americans and left the United States 23 July 1941.

Ovakimian then became head of the NKVD's American desk in Moscow, responsible for espionage activities of Soviet agents within the United States and Canada. He was promoted to deputy chief of the NKVD's foreign intelligence in 1943 and attained the rank of major-general. A heretofore unknown memo from Ovakimian, head of the KGB's American desk, notes that "following our instructions," Harry Dexter White "attained the positive decision of the Treasury Department to provide the Soviet side with the plates for engraving German occupation marks."[1][2]

In 1946 Ovakimian left the NKVD to engage in full-time scientific work, as a chemical engineer. Possessing prodigious talent in mathematics as well as in chemistry, Ovakimian was responsible for the rapid development of the Soviet chemical arsenal in the 1950s as well as well as the application of agricultural chemistry for civilian purposes.

Ovakimian is identified in the Venona project decrypts as "Gennady".

[edit] References

* Schecter, Jerrold and Leona, Sacred Secrets: How Soviet Intelligence Operations Changed American History, Potomac Press, 2002

* John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, Yale University Press (1999).

[MosJan]

The VENONA project was a long-running and highly secret collaboration between United States intelligence agencies and the United Kingdom's MI5 and GCHQ that involved the cryptanalysis of messages sent by several Soviet intelligence agencies. There were known to be at least 13 code words for this effort used by the US and UK. VENONA was the last code word for the project, and has no known meaning.

In the early years of the Cold War, VENONA would be an important source on Soviet intelligence activity for the Western powers. Although unknown to the public, and even presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, it was a critical and guarded document behind many famous events of the early Cold War, such as the Rosenberg spying case.

[MosJan]

Background

U.S. Army Signal Security Agency (commonly called Arlington Hall) codebreakers had intercepted large volumes of encrypted high-level Soviet diplomatic intelligence traffic during and immediately after World War II. The British had stopped intercepting Soviet traffic, at Winston Churchill's orders, shortly after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, and had no traffic to contribute to the project after that time.

This traffic, some of which was encrypted with a one-time pad system, was stored and analyzed in relative secrecy by hundreds of cryptanalysts over a 40-year period starting in the early 1940s. Due to what turned out to be a serious blunder on the part of the Soviets - re-using pages of some of the one-time pads in other pads, which were then used for other messages - this traffic was vulnerable to cryptanalysis.

The Venona Project was initiated under orders from the deputy Chief of Military Intelligence (G-2), Carter W. Clarke[1], who mistrusted Joseph Stalin. He feared that Stalin and Hitler would sign a peace treaty in order to focus Germany's military forces on the destruction of Great Britain and the U.S.
The break-in

The Soviet systems in general used a code to convert words and letters into numbers, to which an additive key (from one-time pads) were added, further disguising the content. Cryptanalysis by American and British codebreakers revealed that some of the one-time pad material had incorrectly been reused by the Soviets (specifically, entire pages, although not complete books), which allowed decryption (sometimes only partial) of a small part of the traffic.

It was Arlington Hall's Lt. Richard Hallock, working on Soviet "Trade" traffic, who first discovered that the Soviets were re-using pages. Hallock and his colleagues (including Genevieve Feinstein, Cecil Phillips, Frank Lewis, Frank Wanat, and Lucille Campbell) went on to break into a significant amount of "Trade" traffic, recovering many one-time pad additive key tables in the process.
Meredith Gardner (left); most of the code breakers were young women.
Enlarge
Meredith Gardner (left); most of the code breakers were young women.

A very young Meredith Gardner (of what would become the National Security Agency) then used this material to break in to what turned out to be NKVD (and later GRU) traffic, by reconstructing the code used to convert text to numbers. Samuel Chew and Cecil Phillips also made valuable contributions. On 20 December 1946, Gardner made the first break into the code, revealing the existence of Soviet espionage in the Manhattan Project. [1] Other alleged Soviet spies worked in Washington in the State Department, Treasury, Office of Strategic Services, and even the White House. Very slowly, using assorted techniques ranging from traffic analysis to defector information, more of the messages were decrypted.

Claims have been made that information from physical theft of code books (a partially burned one was recovered by the Finns) to bugging embassy rooms in which text was entered into encrypting devices (analyzing the keystrokes by listening to them being punched in), contributed to achieving as much plaintext as was recovered. These latter claims are less than fully supported in the open literature.

One significant aid (mentioned by the NSA) in the early stages may have been work done in co-operation between the Japanese and Finnish cryptanalytic organizations; when the Americans broke into Japanese codes during WWII, they gained access to this information. There are also reports that copies of signals purloined from Soviet offices by the FBI were helpful in the cryptanalysis.

There has been speculation that the reason for the key material duplication was the increase in work (including key pad generation) in the period after the German attack in June of 1941. Other suggestions have it that it was Guderian's tanks just outside Moscow in early December that year which forced Moscow Centre to make such a fundamental error.
Results

The NSA reported that, according to the serial numbers of the Venona cables, thousands were sent, but only a fraction were available to the cryptanalysts. Approximately 2,200 of the messages were decrypted and translated; some 50 percent of the 1943 GRU-Naval Washington to Moscow messages were broken, but none for any other year, although several thousand were sent between 1941 and 1945. The decryption rate of the NKVD cables was:

* 1942 1.8%
* 1943 15.0%
* 1944 49.0%
* 1945 1.5%

Out of some hundreds of thousands of intercepted cyphertexts, it is claimed that under 3000 have been partially or wholly decrypted.

The Soviets eventually stopped reusing key pad material, possibly after learning of the US/British work from several of their agents, after which their secure traffic reverted to completely unreadable.
Public disclosure

Some of the earliest detailed public knowledge that Soviet code messages from WWII period had been broken came with the release of Robert Lamphere's book, The FBI-KGB War, in 1986. Lamphere had been the FBI liaison to the code-breaking activity, had considerable knowledge of the details of the "breakin," and was deeply involved in the counter-intelligence work that followed.

Many inside the NSA had argued internally that the time had come to publically release the details of the Venona project, but it was not until 1995 that a bipartisan Commission on Government Secrecy, with Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan as chairman, released the Venona project materials.

Moynihan wrote that "the Venona intercepts contained overwhelming proof of the activities of Soviet spy networks in America, complete with names, dates, places, and deeds." [2]
Significance

Main article: Significance of Venona

In 1940, Soviet cables flowed frequently from London to Moscow to report mostly on the German military situation. Some of these early intercepts provide interesting first-hand accounts that suggest Soviet agents or collaborators were well spread throughout Europe. One such intercept illustrates how the Nazi fifth column placed mirrored metal near objects to give bombers stronger bearings when they dropped light signals. An example of the extent of this espionage is how the Soviets were informed in the August of 1940 that the Turkish ambassador had told the Americans of an expected Italian attack on Salonika in Greece, and warned that "Turkey will scarcely be able to help Greece since they consider that their northern frontier is secure."(NSA) The NSA followed Soviet intelligence traffic for only a few years in World War II, and decrypted only a small portion of that traffic. The Venona project was a thirty-eight year investigation conducted by the NSA and FBI counter-intelligence, and held classified for an additional fifteen years after the program ended. Researchers, historians, and the public continue to debate its significance and meaning. A few writers are skeptical of some claims made by certain analysts of the Venona documents, and urge a more cautious interpretive approach.[3] This debate is discussed at Significance of Venona.
Document release issues

The release of VENONA translations involved careful consideration of the privacy interests of the individuals mentioned, referenced, or identified in the translations. Some names were not released because to do so would constitute an invasion of privacy. [4] However, in at least one case, independent researchers identified one of the subjects whose name had been obscured.

The NSA has failed to release all the VENONA documents as machine-readable text files. This is significant because text processing technology could be used to extract information from the decrypts for historical research.

The NSA website states:

These historical documents are GIF images of formerly classified carbon paper and reports that have been declassified. Due to the age and poor quality of some of the GIF images, a screen reader may not be able to process the images into word documents." [...] "individuals may request that the government provide auxiliary aids or services to ensure effective communication of the substance of the documents. For such requests, please contact the Public Affairs Office at 301-688-6524.

[AntranigBey]

It's amazing as I grow older, I learn about how much a part of the cold war we were.
I'm still trying to unravel the mysteries revolving the persecutions for pro-soviet Armenians in the early 1940's, decline and persecution of Hunchags in the 1950's (in the US, in Beirut with the help of ARF in the 1960's-70's).

I wish I could research it for a book, the Armenians and Armenia and the Diaspora and the Cold War.

[MosJan]

[MosJan]