[AR] Re: nuclear policy (was Re: Alternative propulsion...)
- From: Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Arocket List <arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 29 Dec 2019 22:32:57 -0500 (EST)
On Sun, 29 Dec 2019, Christopher Buchanan Shay wrote:
Perhaps just as likely that the Verona material included false leads in
case, for instance, someone was able to decrypt.
[It's Venona, or more pedantically VENONA.]
Impossible to totally exclude, but it seems very unlikely. The whole
point of going to the trouble of using the one-time-pad cipher is that it
is inherently unbreakable: there is provably not enough information in
the ciphertext to recover the plaintext. Provided, that is, that the key
sequences are never reused -- that's what the "one-time" part is about!
(For those not up on the history, at the peak of events on the Eastern
Front, whatever process the Soviets used to produce their one-time key
pads for spy communications was having trouble keeping up, and some
desperate bureaucrat decided to re-use some older pads -- who would ever
notice? But one of the NSA's predecessors *did* notice...)
There were also enough cases of security sloppiness in the messages, e.g.
they did occasionally use real names, to argue against the idea that they
were worried enough to insert deliberate disinformation. Especially, to
insert vague and cryptic deliberate disinformation! If you were doing
that, you'd surely want to make it easier to exploit...
Surprised in a way that a few (highly-competent, and very) innocent
people weren’t caught up like this and exonerated only after the damage
counterintelligence was able to do. Oh, wait, we couldn’t reveal that,
because it would tip our own hand...
While the Venona material was very revealing, and it sheds a lot of light
on otherwise-mysterious events of the time -- to the point that histories
of Soviet nuclear espionage written *after* Venona declassification are
rather better sources than ones written earlier -- the information from it
had to be used very circumspectly at the time. Not only was its very
existence extremely secret, but it was fragmentary and often uncertain, so
it didn't make a good basis for action unless it was confirmed by other
evidence.
Henry
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