Agent Link: The Spy Erased from History

Agent Link: The Spy Erased from History by Raymond Batvinis, PhD, is a biography of William Wolfe Weisband, who one colleague described as a “charter member” of America’s top-secret Cold War codebreaking pioneers.

Every day for years, Weisband worked with cryptanalysts as they struggled to tease out secrets from a mind-numbing jumble of numbers.

As breakthroughs emerged, codebreakers sought his help for insights and meanings before the startling revelations were passed to US policy makers.

What no one knew, however, was that with every new breakthrough, Weisband was keeping his KGB masters informed about American progress.

The Army Security Agency, NSA’s codebreaking predecessor, had simply swept the scandal under the rug.

Government leaders said, “nothing about the case in public, and little in private either,” an NSA history recorded. America’s codebreaking hierarchy “simply wanted the case … to go away.”

Weisband was airbrushed out of history and the new NSA organization wanted it kept that way.

Spy experts say that this one insider spy, “did greater damage to America’s national security” than later traitors like Jack Dunlap, William Martin and Bernon Mitchell, and Ronald Pelton, and even more than Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen.

Weisband’s story has never been told until now in Agent Link: The Spy Erased from History.

A half a century after his death, the mystery surrounding this man remains.

Author Raymond J. Batvinis is also a lecturer, historian, retired FBI agent and former Professional Lecturer at The George Washington University. He holds a doctorate from The Catholic University of America and is the author of two previous books on the history of the FBI’s counterintelligence program.

Book Prologue

On the warm Tuesday morning of May 9, 1950, William Weisband, 41 and plumpish with his dazzling young wife Mabel at his side, pulled his Buick Roadster away from his South Adams Street apartment in Arlington, Virginia for the daily, 15-minute commute to work.

They had first met near the end of World War II when they both worked for the Army Security Agency. She had stayed on after the war because a government paycheck beat anything waiting for her back in small town Tennessee.

He had stayed because he was an agent of the KGB, a Soviet spy, perfectly positioned to give away some of America’s most precious secrets and be handsomely rewarded in return.

After stopping at the front gate to display their identification badges, the couple drove onto the grounds of Arlington Hall Station, a former girls’ school which had been transformed into the top-secret nerve center of the Army’s code breaking operations— first against Japan and, now that the Cold War had begun, against the Soviet Union.

Weisband was a Russian linguist assigned to a new and—even by Arlington Hall standards—deeply secret unit that was painstakingly breaking into Soviet codes and reading messages the Kremlin sent to its military, diplomatic and espionage outposts around the world, revealing, among many things, the existence of a vast network of spies inside the United States and inside the Manhattan Project that built the atomic bomb.

For months as he helped translate the decoded cables from their original Russian into English, Weisband had felt the walls closing in, constantly worrying that one of the messages would reveal his own identity as a Soviet spy, but he had no inkling that before this day was out, he would be confronted by the FBI which had finally—and too late—stumbled across his trail.

Weisband had long since warned his Soviet handlers that Arlington Hall had succeeded in breaking into their supposedly unbreakable codes.

On a day known as “Black Friday” at the end of 1948, Moscow had suddenly changed all its codes, making all its messages once again indecipherable and strangling at birth one of America’s greatest intelligence coups —a disaster of historic consequence known only to the select few who had access to what was delicately called “the Russian problem.”

Coming just 18 months before the outbreak of the Korean War, Black Friday blinded the United States to any advance knowledge of Soviet intentions in a war which cost tens of thousands of American casualties.

It was all due to one man—William Weisband, whose free-booting lifestyle should have set off red flares long before he was in a position to do such serious and lasting harm. He was well known at Arlington Hall as a heavy drinker and malingerer with a high stakes gambling habit who somehow on a government salary took Mabel on regular weekend getaways to New York, staying at swank hotels, dining at upscale restaurants and catching the latest Broadway show.

How did such flagrant behavior slip through the security surrounding one of the most secret projects in the entire government?

Why, even after he was finally caught, was Weisband never prosecuted for espionage?

And why did U.S. officials want the Weisband case to simply disappear into the fog of history never again to see the light of day?

After I retired from 25 years of chasing Soviet spies for the FBI, I filed a Freedom of Information Act request for all 2000 pages of the Bureau’s files on the Weisband case. In 2002 I filed a similar request with NSA for its file.

Sixteen years later a package containing nearly 1000 pages appeared at my front door. Both sets of records now make up the spine of the story told here, much of it for the first time.

Then I got lucky and came across information the FBI had never seen—notes taken from Weisband’s KGB file in Moscow and published after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Weisband, one note read, had supplied “large quantities of highly valuable material”—so valuable that one week after he died the KGB delivered $40,000 in cash (over a quarter million dollars today) to his long-suffering and still-loyal wife Mabel as final payment for his services.

This then is the saga of William Weisband, The Spy Erased from History.

Read the First Chapter of the Book