Apparently it wasn't all drudgery inside the old KGB spy agency. Somebody was chipper enough to come up with clever code names like "Babylon" for San Francisco, "Enormoz" for the U.S. atomic bomb project and "Boar" for Winston Churchill.
President Franklin Roosevelt was "Kapitan," Mexico was called "Countryside," and North Africa was "Shore," according to newly declassified intelligence documents from the 1940s.The CIA and National Security Agency on Tuesday released four dozen intercepted messages between KGB operatives in New York and their bosses in Moscow during the mid-1940s, a period when seeds of the Cold War took root as the two countries raced to develop nuclear capability.
Top officials releasing the documents at the CIA said they were painstakingly decoded over years to reveal Soviet efforts to recruit Americans and steal atomic and other defense secrets. Mentioned extensively by the code names "Liberal" and "Antenna" was Julius Rosenberg, who, with his wife Ethel, was executed in 1953 for conspiracy to pass atomic secrets to the Soviets.
Rosenberg's son, Robert Meeropol, of Springfield, Mass., who has worked to clear his parents' names, said Tuesday the materials prove nothing because the messages themselves do not translate the code names and could refer to anyone.
The translation of code names was provided in footnotes by U.S. cryptology experts.
"How are we ever going to know that they didn't make a good portion of this up?" Meeropol said, calling the CIA a "master of disinformation."
However, David Kahn, NSA historian-in-residence, said Tuesday that it was the encoded messages that "set the FBI on the trail of the Rosenbergs." The material was not used at their trial because the government wanted to keep it secret, officials said.
Among other spy figures mentioned in the messages: British atomic scientist Emil Klaus Fuchs is described as providing information on reticence by the United States to share secrets with Britain in 1944. Fuchs was arrested for espionage in 1950. Then his courier Harry Gold, called "Goose" by the KGB, was arrested and helped to implicate the Rosenbergs.
Ethel Rosenberg's brother, David Greenglass - code-named "Calibre" - is described as providing the layout and mission of the Los Alamos, N.M., nuclear research facility where he worked.
He and his wife, Ruth, were named co-conspirators but were not indicted in exchange for cooperating against the Rosenbergs.
Large portions of the messages remain undeciphered because of the sheer difficulty of cracking the complex numerical systems the Soviets used to encode them.
In reviewing the documents, "Much to my astonishment, one finds evidence of KGB humor," said CIA Director John Deutch. "Washington is referred to as Carthage, San Francisco is Babylon and New York is referred to as Tyre - all ancient cities that came to ruin."
The United States was simply "Country," the State Department was "the bank" and the War Department, forerunner of the Pentagon, was "Arsenal."
"Fellowcountryman" was the code word for a member of the Communist Party. The British were "Islanders."
U.S. officials were unable to identify many apparently key spies in the Soviet ring.
In one case, for instance, a June 16, 1944, message from a Soviet operative in New York states that "Fogel" provided "two secret plans of the layout of the Enormoz plant." Fogel is listed as "not identified" in the analysts' footnotes.
Code names are nothing new to U.S. officials. The Secret Service often tries to pick a name with some symbolic connection to the person.
President Clinton's tag is "Eagle" and Hillary Rodham Clinton is "Evergreen." Daughter Chelsea is "Energy" and Clinton's brother, Roger, says his name is "Headache." Former President Bush was "Timberwolf," Barbara Bush was "Tranquility," and golf fanatic Vice President Dan Quayle was "Scorecard."