CRACKING A SOVIET CIPHER

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00552R000605590009-9
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 19, 2010
• Sequence Number: 9
• Publication Date: May 19, 1980
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/08/19 :CIA-RDP90-005528000605590009-9
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Tite Rosenher,~s in .I9.S.f: U.S. code brenkerrpickad up o trail leading to them
R
^t~'' he first clue landel on Hobert Latn-
y~, phere's dek in t,~~ counterespiona,t:
section at FBI headqu~u-tcrs in the spring of
1948. Just fiveorsi,e ~vords, it was a det:udeti
Fragment of a much longer rnt-sage sent by
radio fburyears earlierf'ram the Soviet Con-
sulateinNew York to I%ti 8lre"ices; included in the
haul were the plain-text versions of en-
cipheredmessages that had previously been
intercepted by U.S. authorities. With three
parts of the puzzle in their possession-the
code-book remnants, the encrypted mes-
sages an.~i the plain text of those messages-
U.S. cryptanalysts could then figure out the
value of the additives.
Approach: The job was a tedious one, and
it wasn't until the spring of 1948 that the FB I
began to get results. One ofthe first messages
to be deciphered vas a 1944 report by a KGB
agent in New York that an unnamed Soviet
spy had approached a Navy Department
employee named Max Elitcher and an engi-
neernamedJoel Barr in an effort toget them
to start feeding information to the Soviets.
The FBI put Elitcher and Barr under inves-
tigation, bttt the bureau learned nothing of
interest.
Thenext year, however, in the summer of
1949, cryptanalysts read another KGB
message that turned out to be a verbatim
copy of atop-secret report written by Brit-
ish scientist Klaus Fuchs while he was part
of the team working on the Manhattan
Project at Los Alamos. Interrogated by
British authorities, Fuchs confessed that he
had been spying for the Russians, and he
named Philadelphia chemist Harry Gold as
his contact man. In turn, Gold led the FBI
to David Greenglass, a U.S. Army machin-
Grecnglass finoer:-d his brother-in-law, Jul-
ius Rosenberg, as t:!e leader of the soy ring.
Rosenberg denied working for the Y.GB. !
But it turned out That he had gone to colleaC i
with the two men mentioned in the 1944
KGB messages-Elitcher and Barr. Barr
had disappeared, but Elitcher admitted
that Rosenber;had asked l~im to spy for the
Russians in 1944. Rosenberg conceded that
he had visited Elitcher in 194=}, but insisted
he was only an old school chum. The j
decoded message supported Elitcher's ver- ~
Sion by placing a Soviet spy at his house at
the same time Rosenberg admitted being
there. Similarly, another KGB message
supported testimony by Greenglass t}tat
Rosenberg had told him that Barr was one I
of his espionage.:contacts.:The decoded
messages didn't prove that Rosenberg was a
spy, but they did draw the circumstantial
net around him tightly enoug`- to convince
U.S. authorities of his guilt.
Rosenberg never knew about the incrimi-
nating messages. And the government,
with the evidence from Greenglass and ;
others in hand, did not need to introduce
the deciphered messages at the trial and did
not want the Soviets to know the code had
been broken. But it now seems that the i
KGB had learned of the breach almost
immediately. Kim Philby-the British
double went, who currently lives in Mos-
cow-was the British liaison with the CIA
and FBI in Washington at the time, and he
received copies of deciphered KGB mes-
sages. "He used to sit across from me in FBI
headquarters and discuss some ofthe infor- I
motion from this source," says Lamphere.
In any case, the Soviet Union changed its
entire cipher system in 1948.
`iliole': On the basis of the 1944 and 1945
KGB messages they were able to read, U.S.
counterintelligence agents drew a bead not
only on Fuchs and theRosenbergs, but on a
number of other spies as well-among them
Philby himself and Donald Maclean, who
served as second secretary in the British
Embassy in Washington in the late 1940s. i
They also learned from a deciphered 1945 1
message that the Soviets had a spy in the
American delegation to the Yalta Confer-
ence; the message gaveno hint as to who the
"mole" might be, but one member of that ~
. delegation was Alger Hiss, who had been f
accused of espionage.
For all its detail, the disclosure of the 30- ~
year-old code break is not likely to settle the `
Rosenberg controversy. The questions of
whether the Rosenbargs received a fair 1
trial-and whether execution was the ap-
propriate penalty for their crimes-will
continue to be debated. But the story of the
broken cipher unquestionably strengthens
the case against the Rosenbergs-and adds
a bit of luster to the reputation of the
nation's counterinkelligence forces.
ALLAN J. bfAYER with DAVID G 1.iARTIN ~'
/inWashinatnn
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/08/19 :CIA-RDP90-005528000605590009-9