The Venona Secrets

Exposing Soviet Espionage and America's Traitors

De: Herbert Romerstein, Eric Breindel

Narrado por: Jim McCance

The Venona Files are several intercepted communiques between the Soviet Union and American Communists following WWII. Some historians and journalists are starting to regard the Cold-War-era American Communist Party as nothing more than a quaint club of polite if misguided ideologues.

In The Venona Secrets, Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel intend to create a new impression of treacherous Americans "who willfully gave their primary allegiance to a foreign power, the USSR.... For Communists, true patriotism meant helping to make the world a better place by advancing the interests of the Soviet Union in any way possible." By using the now-celebrated Venona documents - top-secret Soviet cables sent between Moscow and Washington, D.C., in the 1940s - Romerstein and Breindel tell a frightening story of how deeply spies penetrated the U.S. government.

©2000 Herbert Romerstein (P)2012 Regnery Publishing

Great Story. Odd Narrator.

This is an amazing story, one that every American should be made aware of. The problem I have with the book is the narrator’s style. Imagine someone in a public place telling you a long and complex story in a voice so that nobody nearby could hear what he’s saying.

This narrator made the book tough to get into and hard to listen to for any length of time.

a should read

a little redundant at times, a lot of skipping back and forth. monotone but helps to speed up the pace of reading

Exhausting but informative

My hope was that this would explain in more detail on the code makers who made the codes, clerks who used them, and the the code breakers who broke the codes. In a book with “Venona” would have liked more detail on the step by step process on breaking the code. Instead there are hundreds of names and connections to other names and organizations. Each of which comes with background information and quotes from interviews and testimonies. Following this without a chart showing all the personalities, events, and groups along with a timeline makes this an exhausting experience. There is a lot of good information here and I would have read/listened to this material either way, but I think this book missed the mark. I could not wait for this one to end.

Lurch was the narrator

The Venona intercepts should be required reading for everyone as some of the liberal shibboleths are put to rest like, for example, the Rosenberg's innocence and Alger Hiss' relationship with the Soviet Union. However, the authors take, in my opinion, literary license with other facts such as Harry Hopkins' being a soviet agent, a charge that has never been conclusively sustained by any credible investigation. All in all, the raw Venona data is very, very interesting. The narrator is a member of the Addams family as his narration is not only colossally mind numbing but creepy. I had the sensation that I was listening to a medical examiner dictate an autopsy report.

Americans as Soviet Spies? Surprising & Chilling

If you could sum up The Venona Secrets in three words, what would they be?

Complex, documented, chilling.

What was one of the most memorable moments of The Venona Secrets?

The murder of Trotsky.

Which scene was your favorite?

The attempted murder of Trotsky--how can bullets be flying everywhere but Trotsky survives?

If you were to make a film of this book, what would be the tag line be?

The truth is much stranger than fiction.

Any additional comments?

Great narration.