Venona project

And he was kept off that committee and Martin Dyes and others were put on instead.

And the discovery was the Venona transcript.

Is that that's how we found out?

We did.

The woman's obsessed.

She's so good at it, though.

I suspected she was an agent of someone, but it turns out so far she's not on the Venona transcripts, to my knowledge.

Okay, not yet anyway.

Um- And, and then in the 1990s as well, KGB files related to the Gouzenko affair, uh, became available because of, uh, uh, Alexander Vassiliev's work, uh, mostly for Crown Publishing in New York, which is a, a whole other story.

And the national, uh, security people in the States, um, released, uh, their Venona, uh, decryptions.

Uh, these are decryptions of, uh, KGB and GRU, KGB being Russian internal security, GRU being military intelligence.

Uh, they released, uh, these, these decryptions and, uh, several are quite important in relation to, um, [lips smack] uh, the book.

Um, uh, and, and then in the 1990s as well, KGB files related to the Gouzenko affair, uh, became available because of, uh, uh, Alexander Vassiliev's work, uh, mostly for Crown Publishing in New York, which is a, a whole other story.

And the national, uh, security people in the States, um, released, uh, their Venona, uh, decryptions.

Uh, these are decryptions of, uh, KGB and GRU, KGB being Russian internal security, GRU being military intelligence.

Uh, they released, uh, these, these decryptions and, uh, several are quite important in relation to, um, [clicks tongue] uh, the book.

Um, uh, and then in the 1990s as well, KGB files related to the Gouzenko affair, uh, became available because of, uh, uh, Alexander Vassiliev's work, uh, mostly for Crown Publishing in New York, which is a whole other story.

And the national, uh, security people in the States, um, released, uh, their Venona, uh, decryptions.

Uh, these are decryptions of, uh, KGB and GRU, KGB being Russian internal security, GRU being military intelligence.

Uh, they released, uh, these, these decryptions, and, uh, several are quite important in relation to, um, [clicks tongue] uh, the book.

And then in the 1990s as well, KGB files related to the Gusenko affair became available because of Alexander Vassilyev's work, mostly for Crown Publishing in New York, which is a whole other story.

And the national security people in the States released their Venona decryptions.

These are decryptions of KGB and GRU, KGB being Russian internal security, GRU being military intelligence.

They released these decryptions and several are quite important in relation to the book.

Anybody that got close to Trotsky was either already recruited by the GPU or was about to be recruited.

And we can talk about this now because so much has been declassified in the past recent years, in particular the Venona traffic.

So whereas before there was always some doubt about some of the people who were surrounding Trotsky, we now know from the Venona material that was declassified in nineteen ninety-five an absolute certainty of the people who were or were not spies.

There are occasional people, Astina being a good example, where there is an ambiguity in reading the traffic, and it's fair to say But when you look at the Venona material, and there are dozens and dozens of messages from Mexico City and from the New York residentura, some of it is absolutely damning, and other parts of the material is ambiguous.

And so reading and interpreting the Venona material is more of an art than a science.

And in particular, the punctuation you have to take with a pinch of salt, because the National Security Agency analysts who produced this material made their own paragraph endings, and that changes a lot of the Venona material.

But we went through all the messages, and there were only a few people who we felt were ambiguous, and we couldn't be absolutely certain of their loyalties.

Let me add to that, building on the work that Nigel wrote a great book on the Venona secret, all this material.