Saks [Sax, Sachs]

A code name appearing in a single NKGB foreign intelligence cable, which was one of the Soviet intelligence World War II period communiqués that were partially decrypted in the course of the American Venona operation, and released in 1995-1996. At the time of this release, “Saks” was not identified by the Venona translators. In 2005, however, “Saks” was identified as Solomon Adler, a British-born economist and U.S. Treasury Department expert in international finance; the identification became possible when notes on a late-1940s KGB report on the failures suffered by Soviet intelligence in the United States were posted on the H-HOAC website. These notes, since then known as the Gorsky List, were made in 1994 in the course of archival research by a former KGB officer and journalist, Alexander Vassiliev, for a never-completed book undertaken as part of a joint Russian-American publishing project. (This research later became the basis for a book named The Haunted Wood, co-authored by Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev.)