The Venona Secrets

Exposing Soviet Espionage and America's Traitors

By: Herbert Romerstein, Eric Breindel

Narrated by: 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

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.

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

The facts that were put together

I liked learning more about Communism and the negative influence it had on the American way of life. Also, it exonerated Elizabeth Bentley and her many charges she brought to bear.

Someone call an exorcist.

I thought I knew the history of traitors and treason in FDR's administration, but this book blew the doors off my knowledge. incredible story telling by the author to bring this scary history to light. Everything happening today is just the submerged left using the same old tactics. if you thought communism died with the Soviet Union and was watered down by China, you're wrong. Marxists have totally possessed the American culture. The old demon left its dying host and jumped to a fresh soul. Someone call an exorcist.