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In 1995 the United States National Security Agency (NSA), the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation
(FBI) made public the story of a forty-year American intelligence
operation code-named Venona. Shortly after the Nazi-Soviet Pact in
1939, American military intelligence had ordered companies that were
sending and receiving coded cables overseas, such as Western Union, to
turn over copies to the U.S. government. Hundreds of thousands of
cables were sent or received by Soviet government bodies. Beginning in
1943, spurred by rumors and concerns that Stalin might conclude a
separate peace with Hitler, the U.S. Army's cryptographic section
began work trying to read these Russian cables. It had very limited
success until 1946, by which time the Cold War was already underway.
Some twenty-nine hundred cables dealing with Russian intelligence
activities from 1942 to 1946 eventually were decrypted successfully in
whole or in part as a result of Soviet technical errors in constructing
and using "one-time pads" that American code-breakers were
able to exploit. These cables implicated more than three hundred
Americans as having been involved with Soviet intelligence services
during World War II, a time when the United States and the USSR were
allies.