CRACKING A SOVIET CIPHER

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00552R000302660011-4
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: July 21, 2010
• Sequence Number: 11
• Publication Date: May 19, 1980
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/07/21 : CIA-RDP90-00552R000302660011-4
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19 'mAY 1980
The Rosen bergs in .195.1: U.S. code breakers picked up a trail leading to them
T he first clue landed on Robert I.arn-
phere's desk in the counterespionage
section at FBI headquarters in the spring of
1948. Just five orsix words, it was a decoded
fragment of a much Ion xer message sent by
radio fouryears earlierfrom the Soviet Con-
sulatein NewYorktoKGB headquarters in
Moscow. Working from that scrap and oth-
ers supplied by U.S. cryptanalysts, Lam-
phere says that the FBI was able to "pene-
trate and breakup network after network of
Soviet spies"-including thering organized
by Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were
convicted of stealing U.S. atomic bomb se-
crets and executed in 1953. The deciphered
infinite variety of combinations that
could be cracked only if cryptanalysts had
both the code book and the one-
time pad.
U.S. code breakers would have been sty-
mied. ButtheSoviets had made ablunder. In
1944, they had sent out duplicate sets of
additives to both KGB agents and commer-
cial representatives of the Soviet Govern-
ment Purchasing Commission. Before long,
the FBI had obtained a treasure trove of
documents stolen from thepurchasing com-
mission's New York offices; included in the
haul were the plain-text versions of en-
ciphered messages 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 and the plain text of those messages--
U.S. cryptanalysts could then figure out the
value of the additives.
Approach: Thejob was atedious one, and
itwasn'tuntil thespringof 1948 that theFBI
began to get results. One of the first messages
to be deciphered was a 1944 repo rtby a KGB
agent in New York that an unnamed Soviet
spy had approached a Navy Department
employee named Max Elitcher and an engi-
neernamed Joel Barr in an effort to get them
to start feeding information to the Soviets.
The FBI put Elitcher and Barr under inves-
tigation, but the bureau learned nothing of
interest.
The next year, however, in the summer of
1949, cryptanalysts read another KGB
message that turned out to be a verbatim
copy of a top-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-
messages were never introduced at the
Rosenberg trial because the government
didn't want theSoviets toknow thecodehad
been cracked. U.S. ofnciais still have not
declassified the documents, claiming they
provide clues to American counterespio-
nage methods-but the full story is now
coming out anyway.'
The story begins during World War II,
when U.S. intelligence agents recovered the
charred remnants of a Soviet code book
from a battlefield in Finland. By itself, even
a complete code book would have been of
little help in deciphering Soviet messages.
The Russians, in effect, had encrypted their
code by using a system of "additives"-
random five-digit groups of numbers that
were literally added to the five-digit groups
listed in the code book. The additives were
listed in a separate set of "onetime pads"-
which, as the name suggests, were used
once and then destroyed. The result was an
? Lamphere, who now works for theJohn Hancock Muttu-
al Life InsuranceCo. in Boston, hnsbeen trying for twoyear,
to publish a book about the case--with the intention of
laying to rest charges that the Roeenbergs were framed. But
the National Security Agency has been trying to persuade
him not to divulge the code break. When he heard that
NEWSWEEK's David C. Martin was about to disclose it in
his new book on the CIA. "Wildernessof Mirrors" (Harper
& Row. 236 pages $1250). which is being published this
week. Lamphere, decided to show his manuscript to
NEwsWEEK
STAT
ist w io la worfie at os ame,s-r,i,,,
Greenglass fingered his brother -in-i.tw, Jul-
ius Rosenberg, as the le3d_r of the soy rin 4
Rosenberg denied wor:ing for the KG1;.
But it turned out that he had gone to colleo,;:
with the two men mentioned in the 1944
KGB messages-Eliteher and Barr. Barr
had disappeared, but Elitcher admitted
that Rosenberg had asked him to spy for the
Russians in 1944. Rosenberg conceded that
he had visited Elitcher in 1944, but insisted
he was only an old school chum. The
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 that
Rosenberg had told him that Barr was one
of his espionage: contacts. The decoded
messages didn't provetbat Rosenberg was a
spy, but they did draw the circumstantial
net around him tightly enough 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
KGB had learned of the breach almost
immediately. Kim Philby-the British
double agent, 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 nnes-
sages. "He used to sit across from me in FBI headquarters and discuss some of the infor-
mation from this source," says Lamphere.
In any case, the Soviet Union changed its
entire cipher system in 1948.
`Mole': 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 the Rosenbergs, but on a
number of other spies aswell-among them
Phil by himself and Donald Maclean, who
served as second secretary in the British
Embassy in Washington in the late 1940s.
They also learned from a deciphered 1945
message that the Soviets had a spy in the
American delegation to the Yalta Confer-
once; the message gave no hint as to who the:
"mole" might be, but one member of that
delegation was Alger Hiss, who had been
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 Rosenbergs received a fair t
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 counterintelligence forces.
ALLAN J. MAYER with DAVID G MARTIN
/in Washineton
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/07/21 : CIA-RDP90-00552R000302660011-4