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William Weisband, Sr. (August 28, 1908 – May 14, 1967) was a Ukrainian-American
cryptanalyst Cryptanalysis (from the Greek ''kryptós'', "hidden", and ''analýein'', "to analyze") refers to the process of analyzing information systems in order to understand hidden aspects of the systems. Cryptanalysis is used to breach cryptographic sec ...
and
NKVD The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (russian: Наро́дный комиссариа́т вну́тренних дел, Naródnyy komissariát vnútrennikh del, ), abbreviated NKVD ( ), was the interior ministry of the Soviet Union. ...
agent (code name 'LINK'), best known for his role in revealing U.S. decryptions of
Soviet The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen nation ...
diplomatic and intelligence codes to
Soviet intelligence This is a list of historical secret police organizations. In most cases they are no longer current because the regime that ran them was overthrown or changed, or they changed their names. Few still exist under the same name as legitimate police fo ...
.


Background

Weisband was born in Odessa, Russian Empire (now Ukraine), in 1908. He emigrated to the United States in the 1920s and became a naturalized United States citizen in 1938. He was drafted into the
United States Army The United States Army (USA) is the land warfare, land military branch, service branch of the United States Armed Forces. It is one of the eight Uniformed services of the United States, U.S. uniformed services, and is designated as the Army o ...
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 Northrop Corporation was an American aircraft manufacturer from its formation in 1939 until its 1994 merger with Grumman to form Northrop Grumman. The company is known for its development of the flying wing design, most successfully the B-2 Sp ...
. After joining the
U.S. Army The United States Army (USA) is the land service branch of the United States Armed Forces. It is one of the eight U.S. uniformed services, and is designated as the Army of the United States in the U.S. Constitution.Article II, section 2, cl ...
's
Signals Intelligence Service The Signal Intelligence Service (SIS) was the United States Army codebreaking division through World War II. It was founded in 1930 to compile codes for the Army. It was renamed the Signal Security Agency in 1943, and in September 1945, became th ...
(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 the "Russian Section" at
Arlington Hall Arlington Hall (also called Arlington Hall Station) is a historic building in Arlington, Virginia, originally a girls' school and later the headquarters of the United States Army's Signal Intelligence Service (SIS) cryptography effort during Wor ...
, where SIS had established its headquarters in June 1942. Although not a
cryptanalyst Cryptanalysis (from the Greek ''kryptós'', "hidden", and ''analýein'', "to analyze") refers to the process of analyzing information systems in order to understand hidden aspects of the systems. Cryptanalysis is used to breach cryptographic sec ...
himself, as a "linguist adviser" who spoke fluent
Russian Russian(s) refers to anything related to Russia, including: *Russians (, ''russkiye''), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries *Rossiyane (), Russian language term for all citizens and peo ...
, Weisband worked closely with cryptanalysts. The gregarious and popular Weisband had access to all areas of Arlington Hall's Soviet work. The codebreaker Meredith Gardner recalled that Weisband had watched him extract a list of Western atomic scientists from a December 1944 NKVD message. The Soviets apparently had monitored Arlington Hall's "Russian Section" since at least 1945, when Weisband joined the unit. Weisband notified the Soviets that the
Venona Project The Venona project was a United States counterintelligence program initiated during World War II by the United States Army's Signal Intelligence Service (later absorbed by the National Security Agency), which ran from February 1, 1943, until Octob ...
was on the verge of success. To make sure that the
FBI The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is the domestic intelligence and security service of the United States and its principal federal law enforcement agency. Operating under the jurisdiction of the United States Department of Justice, t ...
was unaware that they knew that the code was about to be broken, they continued to use it. The "operatives" were instructed "every week to compose summary reports or information on the basis of press and personal connections to be transferred to the Center by telegraph." As
Allen Weinstein Allen Weinstein (September 1, 1937 – June 18, 2015) was an American historian, educator, and federal official who served in several different offices. He was, under the Reagan administration, cofounder of the National Endowment for Democracy in ...
pointed out, "Soviet intelligence's once-flourishing American networks, in short, had been transformed almost overnight into a virtual clipping service." In February 1948 a Soviet official wrote an internal memorandum about the work of Weisband:
For one year, a large amount of very valuable documentary material concerning the work of Americans on deciphering Soviet ciphers, intercepting and analyzing open radio-correspondence of Soviet institutions (the Venona project), was received from (Weisband). From these materials, we came to know that, as a result of this work, American intelligence managed to acquire important data concerning the stationing of the USSR's armed forces, the productive capacity of various branches of industry, and work in the field of atomic energy in the USSR... On the basis of Weisband's materials, our state security organs carried out a number of defensive measures, resulting in the reduced efficiency of the American deciphering service. This has led to the considerable current reduction in the amount of deciphering and analysis by the Americans.
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 U.S. cryptanalytic success,
British British may refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * British people, nationals or natives of the United Kingdom, British Overseas Territories, and Crown Dependencies. ** Britishness, the British identity and common culture * British English, ...
liaison officer
Kim Philby Harold Adrian Russell "Kim" Philby (1 January 191211 May 1988) was a British intelligence officer and a double agent for the Soviet Union. In 1963 he was revealed to be a member of the Cambridge Five, a spy ring which had divulged British secr ...
received actual translations and analyses on a regular basis after he arrived for duty in
Washington, D.C. ) , image_skyline = , image_caption = Clockwise from top left: the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall, United States Capitol, Logan Circle, Jefferson Memorial, White House, Adams Morgan, ...
, in autumn 1949. Until a thorough review of Soviet
KGB The KGB (russian: links=no, lit=Committee for State Security, Комитет государственной безопасности (КГБ), a=ru-KGB.ogg, p=kəmʲɪˈtʲet ɡəsʊˈdarstvʲɪn(ː)əj bʲɪzɐˈpasnəsʲtʲɪ, Komitet gosud ...
archives is made, the full scope of Weisband's role as a Soviet spy will probably not be known. In 1950 Jones Orin York told the FBI that he had passed secrets to the Soviets and that his handler was Bill Weisband. The Venona messages do not hold a definite reference to Weisband. Nevertheless, three messages mention a "ZVENO" (the Russian word for "link") and one of them suggests procedures for the
London London is the capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary dow ...
residency to use in contacting ZVENO, who was awaiting a transfer to
England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...
. ZVENO, according to one message, had spent the last four weeks in an Italian-language course in
Virginia Virginia, officially the Commonwealth of Virginia, is a state in the Mid-Atlantic and Southeastern regions of the United States, between the Atlantic Coast and the Appalachian Mountains. The geography and climate of the Commonwealth ar ...
and would leave for Britain by mid-July. In fact, Weisband spent that June honing his skills in a language (probably Italian) at Arlington Hall, shipped out on 17 July, and arrived in London by 29 July. While suspended from SIS on suspicion of disloyalty, Weisband failed to appear for a federal grand jury hearing on the Communist Party USA, for which he had received a summons. As a result, in November 1950, Weisband was convicted of
contempt Contempt is a pattern of attitudes and behaviour, often towards an individual or a group, but sometimes towards an ideology, which has the characteristics of disgust and anger. The word originated in 1393 in Old French contempt, contemps, ...
and sentenced to a year in prison. Weisband escaped prosecution for espionage, as authorities feared that a trial would divulge yet more information to Soviet intelligence on U.S. intelligence "sources and methods". 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 until his death.


Death

He died suddenly of a heart attack in 1967. His son describes his death:
yIt was Mothers Day, May 14th 1967 my father was taking me and my sisters to the Smithsonian Institute icfor a traditional Sunday afternoon outing. We were driving down the
George Washington Memorial Parkway The George Washington Memorial Parkway, colloquially the G.W. Parkway, is a parkway that runs along the south bank of the Potomac River from Mount Vernon, Virginia, northwest to McLean, Virginia, and is maintained by the National Park Service ( ...
, and he had a massive cardiac arrest. He literally died driving the car. It was horrifying, I grabbed the wheel and pulled the car over to the side of the road, an old '56 Pontiac, and turned the key off. I stood out in the middle of the George Washington Memorial Parkway and stopped traffic, I ran in between the two lanes knocking on windows and doors looking for a doctor or someone to help. Two men helped pull my father out of the car, they laid him on the ground and tried to resuscitate him. An ambulance arrived on the scene and took my father to the hospital. He was pronounced dead on arrival. My father was a great father and I've missed him very much.


References


Further reading

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PDF
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Allen Weinstein Allen Weinstein (September 1, 1937 – June 18, 2015) was an American historian, educator, and federal official who served in several different offices. He was, under the Reagan administration, cofounder of the National Endowment for Democracy in ...
and
Alexander Vassiliev Alexander Vassiliev (russian: Александр Васильев; born 1962) is a Russian- British journalist, writer and espionage historian living in London who is a subject matter expert in the Soviet KGB and Russian SVR. A former officer ...
, ''The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America—the Stalin Era'', (New York:
Random House Random House is an American book publisher and the largest general-interest paperback publisher in the world. The company has several independently managed subsidiaries around the world. It is part of Penguin Random House, which is owned by Germ ...
, 1999) - See Vassiliev Notebook "Black Notebook", Page 75. *


External links

*David A. Hatch with Robert Louis Benson
The Korean War: The SIGINT Background
National Cryptographical Museum, 2001 {{DEFAULTSORT:Weisband, Bill 1908 births 1967 deaths Espionage in the United States Odesa Jews American spies for the Soviet Union Signals Intelligence Service cryptographers NKVD Ukrainian people of World War II Soviet emigrants to the United States