Free A Covert Affair by Jennet Conant

APPENDIX
    In the summer of 1995, the CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA) released the first group of “Venona” decrypts, translations of coded Soviet intelligence messages dealing with espionage operations in America between 1940 and 1948. “Venona” was the fanciful code word assigned to the highly classified government project, which began in 1943 and was formally closed in 1980, in order to limit access to the cryptanalytic breakthrough that finally made it possible to crack the Russian secret code. Approximately 2,900 Soviet diplomatic telegrams, intercepted by the U.S. Army’s Signal Intelligence Service (a precursor to the NSA), have now been painstakingly decoded and deciphered, allowing experts to read portions of the secret cables. The majority of the KGB communications were translated and made available to the U.S. government by 1945, which meant that intelligence officials were in possession of evidence about a wide variety of Soviet espionage operations—everything from the Rosenbergs’ atomic spying to the Soble ring—that was not made public at the time of their controversial cases. The release of so much new evidence has inevitably led to a certain amount of revisionism in terms of the guilt of many of the accused Soviet spies from that era, and analyzing and interpreting the full meaning of the Venona haul will doubtless keep historians, journalists, and authors busy for years to come.
    The deciphered Venona cables pertinent to Jane Foster’s case suggestshe lied in her memoir about the purely social and happenstance nature of her contacts with Martha Dodd Stern, Jack Soble, and Boris Morros. A telegram from Vasily Zarubin, a KGB general operating in the United States under the alias Zubilin, informed Moscow in June 1942 of a possible new source: [UNRECOVERED CODE GROUP] LIZA [MARTHA DODD STERN], WE ARE CULTIVATING THE AMERICAN JANE FOSTER WITH A VIEW TO SIGNING HER ON. SHE IS ABOUT 30 YEARS OLD AND WORKS IN WASHINGTON IN THE DUTCH [TWO UNRECOVERED CODE GROUPS] TRANSLATOR OF MALAY LANGUAGES…. SHE IS A FELLOWCOUNTRYWOMAN [COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE SOVIET UNION, OR CPSU, MEMBER]. SHE IS DESCRIBED BY THE FELLOWCOUNTRYMEN [CPSU] AS A [UNRECOVERED CODE GROUP], DEDICATED PERSON. In subsequent Venona messages from 1943 and 1944, Jane, identified by her code name “Slang,” is described as providing information, but these memos are incomplete and extremely vague. It is impossible to tell if Jane was simply being indiscreet and talking about information gleaned from her job that the author of the memo felt would be of interest to Moscow or actually “reporting” the information to her Soviet handler.
    There are only a handful of Venona decrypts referring directly to Jane, and while incriminating they are not conclusive evidence that she was a Soviet spy. To begin with, the translations are woefully incomplete: the cryptanalysts were able to decipher only portions of the coded telegrams, leaving gaps that could alter the meaning of the messages. In addition, all of the messages are secondhand accounts by Zarubin or another Soviet handler reporting to the KGB about what various American sources—Martha Dodd Stern or Jack Soble or Morros—said or claimed to have done. As a result, inaccuracies abound. For example, Morros’s report in one cable that Jane told him she was recruited by Martha Dodd Stern in 1938, when she was actually still in Batavia, was wrong and demonstrates the danger of hearsay. Morros was either mistaken or misinformed. Adding to the confusion, they all were assigned code names, and these code names changed over time and are oftenonly half deciphered, so the cryptanalysts made educated guesses as to their identities.
    The decrypts are also ambiguous and open to interpretation. The Zarubin telegram from 1942 is speculative in nature, merely outlining their plan to recruit Jane in the future. While Zarubin was later convinced Jane