Bill Weisband
| William Weisband, Sr. | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
August 28, 1908 Egypt or Odessa, Russian Empire (now Ukraine) |
| Died | May 14, 1967 (aged 58) Virginia |
| Cause of death | Heart attack |
| Children | William Weisband, Jr. |
William Weisband, Sr. (August 28, 1908 – May 14, 1967) was an American cryptanalyst and NKVD agent (code name 'LINK'), best known for his role in revealing U.S. decryptions of Soviet diplomatic and intelligence codes to Soviet intelligence.
Weisband was born in Odessa, Russia, in 1908 of Russian Jewish parents. 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 in 1942, and was assigned to signals intelligence duties.
From 1941 to 1942, Weisband was the NKVD agent handler for Jones Orin York, who worked at the Northrop Corporation. After joining the U.S. Army's 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 the "Russian Section" at Arlington Hall, where SIS had established its headquarters in June 1942. Although not a cryptanalyst himself, as a "linguist adviser" who spoke fluent Russian, 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.
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