Bill Weisband

William Weisband, Sr. (August 28, 1908 – May 14, 1967) was an American cryptographic code analyst and Soviet NKVD agent (code name 'LINK'), best known for his role in revealing U.S. decryptions of Soviet diplomatic and intelligence codes to Soviet intelligence.

Background

Weisband was born in Odessa, Russia in 1908 of Russian Jew parents. He emigrated to the United States in the 1920s and became a naturalized American citizen in 1938. He joined the United States Army in 1942, and was assigned to signals intelligence duties.

Espionage career

From 1941 to 1942 Weisband was the NKVD agent handler for Jones Orin York, who worked at the Northrop Corporation. After joining the Signals Intelligence Service (SIS) in 1942, he performed signals intelligence and communications security duties in North Africa and Italy, where he made some important friends before returning to Arlington Hall and joining its "Russian Section." Although not a cryptanalyst, as a "linguist adviser" who spoke fluent Russian, he was working closely with cryptographers. The gregarious and popular Weisband had access to all areas of Arlington Hall's Soviet work. Meredith Gardner recalled that Weisband had watched him extract the list of Western atomic scientists from the December 1944 KGB message mentioned earlier.

The Soviets apparently had monitored Arlington Hall's "Russian Section" since at least 1945, when Weisband joined the unit. Weisband's earliest reports on the work being done by U.S. crypto-analysts on Soviet diplomatic code systems were probably sketchy, but after Weisband began passing information on their work at the Russian section, Soviet authorities changed their code system and the Venona project decryptions dried up. His role as a Soviet agent was not discovered by counterintelligence officers until 1950, by which time the damage had been done. Where Weisband had sketched the outlines of the cryptanalytic success, British liaison officer Kim Philby received actual translations and analyses on a regular basis after he arrived for duty in Washington, D.C. in autumn 1949. Until a thorough review of Soviet KGB archives is made, the full scope of Weisband's role as a Soviet spy will probably not be known.

While suspended from SIS on suspicion of disloyalty, he skipped a federal grand jury hearing on the Communist Party USA. As a result, in November 1950 Weisband was convicted of contempt and sentenced to a year in prison. Weisband escaped prosecution for espionage because under the 1947 National Security Act "sources and methods" by law cannot be revealed, and authorities feared at the time that Weisband's trial would provide yet more information to Soviet intelligence. Weisband never revealed his status as an NKVD agent to anyone, and he remained in the United States, living quietly and working as an insurance salesman.

Death

He died suddenly of a heart attack in 1967. His son describes his death:

[My] father died in a very dramatic and impactive way. Every Sunday, my father would take me and my sisters to the zoo or the Smithsonian Institution or some other great place. This particular Sunday was Mother's Day, May 14th, 1967. We were driving down the George Washington Memorial Parkway, and he had a massive cardiac arrest and he died driving the car. You can imagine the havoc. I grabbed the wheel and pulled the car over to the side of the road, an old '56 Pontiac, and turned the key off. The next thing I remember is being out in the middle of the George Washington Memorial Parkway stopping traffic, running down the middle of the road, knocking on doors looking for a doctor. Sure enough, I found two gentlemen—one gentleman in particular, who came over and pulled my father out of the car, laid him on the ground, and tried to resuscitate him. [cite web |url=http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/venona/fami_weisband.html |title=Bill Weisband, Jr. |accessdate=2008-07-19 |quote= |publisher=Nova (TV series) ]

References

Further reading

* [https://www.cia.gov/csi/books/venona/preface.htm "Venona: Soviet Espionage and the American Response, 1939-1957"]
*Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, "The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America--the Stalin Era", (New York: Random House, 1999) ISBN 0-679-45724-0

External links

*David A. Hatch with Robert Louis Benson, [http://www.nsa.gov/publications/publi00022.cfm The Korean War: The SIGINT Background] , National Cryptographical Museum, 2001