World War II was raging, and the Americans were more watchful, making life difficult for Soviet spies.
That was the message of a long cable sent in 1943 from a KGB official in Washington to his bosses in Moscow. The message reads like a spymaster's primer."The basic document which gives proof of American citizenship is the birth certificate," the Washington agent informed Moscow.
But he said, "The ordinary, everyday documents are the driver's license, the draft registration card (for men) and various passes and identity papers issued by establishments, businesses, companies and firms."
The cable, which was included in material made public Wednesday by the National Security Agency, discusses the effort of Soviets to find a way to bring an agent identified only as `Australian Woman" into the United States.
A favored method was for an agent to come in as a crew member on a Soviet merchant ship. But U.S. officials were cracking down, making that more difficult.
"The Greens (a code word for U.S. counterintelligence) keep a watchful eye on our ships," the cable's author wrote.
He cited two cases in the fall of 1942 in which U.S. authorities conducted follow-up searches, in one case of a ship, in the other of members of the crew.
"Contrary to the previous arrangements, the Americans only admit the crews of our ships into the city if they show their passes," he said.
And then there was the problem of the Soviet women.
"In clothing and appearance our women on ships are clearly distinguishable from the local women," the cable said. "This is because of their stockings, their berets (American women wear hats), their handbags and their untidiness.
"They do not take any trouble over their hair or their makeup."
The cable was part of the fourth release of documents under a program code named Venona under which U.S. officials intercepted and, after many years, deciphered 2,200 telegrams mostly from 1942 to 1945. They were double encoded with a complex numerical system that used a different random pattern for each message. The code would have been impossible to crack had not the volume of traffic resulted in the Soviets sloppily repeating some of the patterns.
Only recently have the documents been declassified and made public.
As with most of the documents in the Venona series, portions of the cable are missing, or in NSA parlance "unrecovered."
One partial paragraph referred to detailed FBI checks of people applying for jobs, apparently in defense industries.