| 1 February 1943 |
|
Gene Grabeel begins VENONA at Arlington Hall. |
| |
| November 1943 |
|
Lieutenant Richard Hallock makes first break into Soviet diplomatic cipher;
break expanded by Frank Lewis. |
| |
| During 1943 |
|
VENONA program expands; Captain F. Coudert and Major William B. S. Smith
in charge. |
| |
| November 1944 |
|
Break made in KGB cipher by Cecil Phillips, Genevieve Feinstein,
Lucille Campbell. |
| |
| 1945 |
|
Gouzenko defects; Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers tell FBI
about Soviet espionage in U.S. |
| |
| May 1945 |
|
Military intelligence teams find Soviet codebooks in Saxony and
Schleswig, Germany. |
| |
| July-December 1946 |
|
Meredith Gardner begins to analytically reconstruct KGB codebook;
translates a few messages including one about the atomic bomb. |
| |
| 30 August 1947 |
|
Meredith Gardner's study of KGB covernames in the messages. |
| |
| September 1947 |
|
Carter W. Clarke of G-2 advises S. Wesley Reynolds, FBI, of successes
at Arlington Hall on KGB espionage messages. |
| |
| 19-20 October 1948 |
|
Robert J. Lamphere, FBI HQ, begins liaison with Meredith Gardner and
great number of espionage cases opened. |
| |
| 1948-1951 |
|
Exploitation of VENONA exposes major KGB espionage agents such as Klaus
Fuchs, Harry Gold, David Greenglass, Theodore Hall, William Perl, the
Rosenbergs, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Kim Philby, and Harry D. White. |
| |
| 1952-1953 |
|
An earlier KGB cryptosystem exploited; GRU messages attacked.
More espionage agents identified over the next two decades. |
| |
| 1953 |
|
CIA officially briefed on VENONA and begins to assist in
counterintelligence work. |
| |
| 1960 |
|
U.K. begins to exploit Naval GRU messages. |
| |
| 1960-1980 |
|
Hundreds of first-time translations of messages; many earlier
translations reissued. |
| |
| 1 October 1980 |
|
VENONA ends.
|
