SIGINT Secrecy

John Prouty wrote a review of my book, Agent Link: The Spy Erased from History in the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence published in November 2024:

SIGINT Secrecy

BY JOHN PROUT

Raymond J. Batvinis: Agent Link: The Spy Erased from History
Rowman and Littlefield, Lanham, MD, 2024, 324 p., $120.00 (hardcover)

Col. (Ret) John Prout had a career in military intelligence. He spent thirty years working in the fields of HUMINT and counterintelligence. Upon retiring, he taught counterintelligence at the National Defense Intelligence College, the precursor of the National Intelligence University. The author can be contacted at adetto@juno.com

From the title, a reader might expect to learn of the exploits of a successful spy who somehow managed to evade being captured by the ever-watchful eyes of counterintelligence. That happened but it is only a tiny part of the expansive account Batvinis provides. He covers not only William Weisband’s espionage but he also weaves it into the framework of the development and successes of the U.S. SIGINT community.

Covering the period from the 1930s until the 1950s, the author provides the reader with a view of the development of the entire SIGINT community in the United States and the effect the espionage activities of William Wiesband had on its operations against the USSR.

SIGINT provides information from the interception of enemy communications. These communications may be unclassified and mundane or highly classified encrypted messages. The job of the SIGINT community is to make a cogent picture of the enemy from the material intercepted and decrypted.

The proponents of SIGINT are circumspect about their operations. They are reluctant to divulge information at times because just knowing the information itself could give the adversary a clue that their transmissions have been intercepted or that their codes have been broken. The result would be a change to messaging procedures or a modification of encoding procedures, which would considerably set the collection effort back. So sensitive are such operations that often people working in the same room are unaware of what the operative in the next desk is working on.

Eventually, William Weisband, the Agent Link of the title, worked in such an environment and was responsible, according to the author, for the loss of a highly valuable source of information from the intercept of Soviet communications between Moscow and its KGB agents in the United States.

William Wolfe Weisband was a Soviet spy. Like many other spies from that era, he was an ethnic Russian. His parents had fled from Russia in the wake of the Jewish persecutions in the early part of the twentieth century. Their departure from Russia was complicated because it was difficult for Russian Jews to obtain exit documents. His parents traveled south from Russia to Turkey. After some time there, they then emigrated to Egypt where Wolf Weisband was born in 1908.

He grew up in Egypt and attended British schools there. When he was in his teens, his family managed to obtain permission to enter the United States. They settled in the New York City area in 1925. Wolf, as he was known then, eventually began working it the hotel business in New York City. He began as a typist and moved from one hotel to another, always looking for a better paycheck and job.

When times became harder during the Great Depression, his pay was reduced and his level of responsibility was also reduced. At one point, he supplemented his income by sneaking friends and relatives into unused rooms in the Waldorf Astoria hotel where he worked. For which he would get some kind of kickback.

While Wiesband was bouncing from job to job in the 1920s the Soviet intelligence services were developing an espionage apparatus. The Soviets sought to gain access into the various successes of the American scientific community. Such an espionage effort required not only penetrants who could provide information on the actual scientific work but also a support structure upon which Moscow could depend to collect and transmit the information.

While Wiesband had no access to any information of interest, he did have a desirable ability: he could move about freely in American society and, as such, would be a valuable element in the support structure of Soviet intelligence operations. How Wiesband came to the attention of Soviet intelligence is unclear, but he was recruited as a support agent for the growing Soviet intelligence effort in the United States around 1934.

Beginning in the 1930s and through the period of World War II, the Soviet intelligence service had some success in recruiting sources. In some cases, they recruited second-generation Soviet emigres who had relatives in the “old country.” In other cases, they found sources among people who had an ideological affinity to communism and were eager to support the development of worldwide communism.

Against the backdrop of the development of these Soviet intelligence operations, Batvinis weaves an account of the developments of U.S. SIGINT operations. Despite some setbacks the U.S. SIGINT efforts developed well. During the war, U.S. code breakers in conjunction with their counterparts in the U.K. were able to read significant transmissions from the Germans and the Japanese.

While the recruited agent “Link”— Wiesband’s code name—worked in New York hotels and provided services to the KGB, he also enrolled in several wireless communications courses in the New York area, doubtless paid for by the Soviet intelligence service. In 1938, his handlers directed him to relocate to the west coast. In California, he contacted recruited Soviet agents in the aerospace industry.

Although he lacked training as an agent handler, Wiesband met with sources and debriefed them, directed them on what to collect, obtained any material they had stolen from their place of employment, and, when necessary, photographed documents so they could be replaced without being missed. He would deliver all of this to the KGB. And for his efforts over the years, Wiesband was very well paid.

When war was declared, Wiesband was drafted. At the time of his induction into the Army, he spoke three or four languages, including Russian, and had a record of taking radio courses from civilian schools. He was identified early on as a valuable asset. He was selected for Officer Candidate School for the Army Signal Corps. After finishing the course at Fort Monmouth, NJ, he was commissioned a lieutenant in the Signal Corps. But because of his language skills, he was assigned to the signal security service—the SIGINT organization of the US Army—and was designated for overseas deployment.

Before he left on the deployment, he tried to contact his Russian handlers. However, there were some complications, and he was not able to make contact with Soviet intelligence before he shipped out. So, he missed out on his espionage paycheck for several years. He was deployed to North Africa and to Italy as a traffic analyst. He was able to make contact with Russians in Italy before he returned to the United States and signaled his desire to get back on the payroll.

Towards the end of World War II, Soviet intelligence activities in North America suffered some serious set backs as a result of three incidents.

First was the defection of a code clerk in Canada, the second was the “defection” of a woman who had worked as a Soviet spy for years, and the third was the intercept and decoding of Soviet coded messages between Moscow and its agents in the United States. The code clerk in Canada was named Igor Gouzenko. He had been charged with several security violations in his job as code clerk in the Embassy in Ottawa and was facing mandatory return to KGB headquarters and certain punishment. But because of the lack of capable code clerks, his return to the Soviet Union was delayed until a new code clerk could be trained and sent out to replace him.

While he was awaiting his fate, he copied many of the messages he had encoded. When he was told that his replacement was to arrive soon and that his return to the Soviet Union was imminent, Gouzenko took the copies of the messages he had made as well his code books home. With his wife and child, he defected to a Canadian official who lived in the same apartment complex. The material Gouzenko brought with him documented the scope of Soviet espionage operations in North America.

The second setback came with the “defection” of Elizabeth Bentley. Elizabeth Bentley had been a graduate student in Italy in the 1930s. When she returned to the United States, she could not find work commensurate with her level of education. At the suggestion of a friend, she joined the Communist Party of the United States. Her talents were discovered by the KGB who moved her from open Communist Party affiliation to the secret side of the Party.

In this organization she became the lover and coworker of KGB officer Jacob Golos. Golos operated several high level intelligence networks in Washington DC and Bentley was fully aware of the contacts and the method of contacting them. One summer evening Golos suffered a heart attack and died while with her. She carefully sanitized the apartment and removed any signs of his espionage. She then took over his very important espionage nets which included high ranking members of the Roosevelt Administration. She traveled to Washington by train and collected information which she passed on to the Soviet intelligence service.

The KGB was nervous that she was unstable and determined that Bentley needed to be removed. Bentley suspected incorrectly that she was about to be arrested by the FBI, She went to the FBI field office and gave them her story. In her debriefings, she provided the FBI with lists of people with whom she dealt in Washington, DC, and from whom she had obtained information that she passed to the Soviet intelligence service.

At the time, these cases were major news stories and were known to the general public. The public did not know about the third setback to Soviet espionage operations. In the late 1940s, Soviet intelligence learned the extent to which their communications had been compromised. Among the successes the United States had against the Soviet Union was a program code named Venona. This code breaking effort had allowed code breakers to read communications between the KGB in Moscow and its operatives in the field. These messages clearly showed the large extent to which the KGB and other Soviet intelligence services had penetrated the U.S. government at all levels.

The decoded messages revealed over 600 code names of people who had been actively working with the Soviet intelligence services. Several of these Soviet agents had multiple code names, Although some of the named agents were identified, a large number of them never were. These messages confirmed that the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss had positively been working for Soviet intelligence.

But in the late 1940s, the U.S. SIGINT effort suddenly was no longer able to decode any of the Soviet transmissions. The Soviets changed codes and became more cautious with their transmission procedures. One explanation at the time was the defection of Kim Philby, a highly placed British spy who knew about the Venona project and other successes of the code breakers. But Batvinis offers another possible explanation—William Wiesband, Agent Link.

Weisband returned from overseas as an Army Lieutenant Colonel in late 1944 and was assigned to the Armed Forces Signal Service at Arlington Hall Station, Virginia just outside Washington DC. He had made contact with the KGB and assured them that he was eager to resume his duties as an espionage agent and was willing to provide them with details of the code breaking efforts at Arlington Hall. During the war, it was here that the code breakers had worked on German, Italian, and Japanese transmissions.

As the war wound down, the code breakers added Soviet communications to their list of targets. Wiesband was brought into the group with no additional security checks, checks which might have revealed some questionable activities in his past which might have eliminated him from consideration in the SIGINT field. Because of his knowledge of the Russian language, he became a floating aide who would assist the decoders in understanding the Russian messages they were working on. Although Wiesband was not directly involved in Venona operations he surely assisted those who were reading the messages in their understanding of Russian. He was well aware of the successes of the Arlington Hall group’s ability to read Soviet communications and despite the security precautions was probably aware of the Venona successes.

In May of 1946, Wiesband prepared to leave the the military, but he had no intention of leaving the code breaking organization. He transitioned to being a civilian employee at Arlington Hall without any additional security investigations. There were a number of suspicious things in his background that would have attracted the attention of astute security people. For instance, he always seemed to have more money than his government salary would have provided. He explained to coworkers that the money came from his late father’s will, but an investigation would have shown this to be false. Wiesband was hired, however, without any further investigation.

In 1950 the FBI became aware of one of the sources Wiesband had handled in California. This source identified Wiesband as the operative who had contacted him frequently in California. The FBI confronted Wiesband with this information but he denied having been a Soviet agent.

The FBI only had the word of a former Russian spy against that of a former U.S. Army officer. But indicting Wiesband and taking him to court would create the real possibility that the SIGINT efforts of the people at Arlington Hall would be discussed in open court, something the government certainly did not want. So Wiesband was never charged with espionage. He was, however, subpoenaed before a grand jury. It would have been a simple task for Wiesband go to court and plead the fifth, but he chose to ignore the subpoena. He was held in contempt of court and sentenced to a year in jail.

That developed into his loss of clearance and the loss of his job. He finished out his life as an insurance salesman, never having been punished for the damage he did to the U.S. SIGINT effort or the damage to U.S. national security.

Batvinis adds a postscript regarding Oleg Kalugin, who had been the KGB head of counterintelligence at the Russian embassy in Washington and had been ordered to find Wiesband and make contact with him. Kalugin located Wiesband’s home and after traveling a circuitous route appeared at Wiesband’s front door. He learned then that Wiesband had died several weeks earlier in 1967. After expressing his condolences, he passed a package of cash to Weisband’s widow, a last payment from a grateful intelligence service.

The value of this book to the intelligence professional lies partly in the account of this highly interesting story of the U.S. intelligence collection operations that were going on at the time. Batvinis’ volume is copiously footnoted and the bibliography provides a fertile source of references of intelligence activities during this period. One criticism, however, is that the book would benefit from an index.

First published in the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence