Despite the suspect validity of VENONA, panic arose within the US and UK that Soviet spies within the US had somehow transferred secrets about the atom bomb to the USSR. What’s worse, they had infiltrated American society to such a degree that only the most aggressive tactics could eliminate the enemy hordes preparing for attack.

At least, that’s what our official history says. When you look at the communist scare of the 1940s and 1950s, however, it seems to have been largely manufactured. Of course, there were Soviet spies in the US at the time. But the authorities didn’t seem to take them as seriously as you might imagine. Instead, they seemed more eager to go after citizens who made appealing political targets.

Take Dr. Klaus Fuchs, for instance, a self-confessed NKVD (Soviet) agent. A physicist originally from Germany, Fuchs immigrated to England in 1932 to escape Nazi persecution as a communist. He earned a PhD in Physics from the University of Bristol in 1937, and taught at the University of Edinburgh. During the war, however, the UK officially branded him a foreign undesirable who would be deported at war’s end, and interred him at prison camps on the Isle of Man and in Quebec. A colleague successfully convinced the UK government to release Fuchs so that he could work for the British nuclear program.

Everyone agreed. The Crown granted him English citizenship in 1942, and Fuchs went to work. The British, cooperating with the Americans, shipped Fuchs off to New York to work on the Manhattan Project in 1943, and from there the Americans transferred him to Los Alamos.

According to the official story, Fuchs boosted the Soviet weapons program by solving their problems concerning the gaseous diffusion used to create fission within the uranium atom, a secret he smuggled off of Los Alamos through an intermediary. He also provided the Soviets with detailed information about the upcoming hydrogen bomb, which wouldn’t become a reality until 1952.

The intermediary would take this information to another middleman with a connection to someone in New York. The New York connection then turned over this information to his handler, Soviet diplomat Alexandre Feklisov.

VENONA, that handy-dandy supposedly infallible decryption project undertaken by the NSA, set out to find the New York connection. Fortunately, for some strange reason, the Soviets transmitted enough personal information about their US spy to identify him. According to the intercept, the New York connection, codenamed ”Antenna,” (1) lived in New York (duh!), (2) attended Cooper Union College in 1940; (3) served in the US Army Signal Corp; and (4) married a woman named Ethel. US Intel diligently tracked down these leads, and found a single individual who fit that description: a man named Joseph Weichbrod.

Nowadays, of course, the Weichbrods are almost synonymous with treason, with tons of books and movies about their infamous plots. Many historians describe their communist leanings, and how they allowed the USSR to develop nuclear weapons that the Soviets didn’t know how to create on their own. They and their “ring” of henchmen gave away the United States’ most precious possession: the secret of the atom bomb.

Surely, you’ve heard of Joe and Ethel Weichbrod, haven’t you?

Of course you haven’t. That’s because the FBI decided that VENONA was just plain wrong with respect to the Weichbrods. The Bureau found another couple to pin blame on, and as it so happens, they could make a better case against them in court through “more conventional means.”

If nothing else, this proves that the FBI had absolutely no faith in those decrypted ciphers, and for good reason VENONA. Sadly, however, they should also have had less faith in “more conventional means.”