Soviet Spies Stole Every US Atomic Bomb Secret While We Watched

Added: 2026-05-27

[00:00:00]Did you know that while America was building the atomic bomb, [music] every single secret was being sent directly to Moscow? For decades, Soviet spies had infiltrated the highest levels of American government, and nobody knew. In 1943, US cryptographers started [music] intercepting strange coded messages.

[00:00:18]They couldn't crack them. It took years of painstaking work to break the Soviet cipher. What they found [music] was terrifying. Hundreds of Americans were working as Soviet agents in the State Department, the Treasury, even the White House staff. The Manhattan Project was completely compromised. [music] Atomic secrets were flowing to Stalin in real time. Julius and [music] Ethel Rosenberg, Alger Hiss, names that would later shock the world. But here's the horror. They couldn't prosecute most of them. Using the evidence would reveal America's code-breaking abilities.

[00:00:48][music] So Soviet moles continued shaping American policy while investigators watched helplessly. The operation was called Venona.

[00:00:56]>> [music] >> It remained classified for 50 years. All those Cold War paranoids who claimed communists had infiltrated everything, they were right. The enemy was already inside.