American Cryptology during the Cold War - The Black Vault

At the Hall he had a reputation as a stroller. He wandered around, chatting and
picking up bits of gossip. He was also adept at getting himself on distribution for
documents that did not directly concern the work of his section. Highly gregarious,
Weisband had a wide circle of friends, and he entertained some of the top officers and
civilians in ASA. His postwar wedding party was talked about as a who's who of Army
cryptology.76
Although Weisband had been on an FBI list of suspected Communists since 1948, he
was first tagged as a possible spy through the VENONA project. In 1949 a Soviet agent
identified in VENONA traffic led the FBI to another agent, who led them to another, who
finally implicated Weisband as a "handler." The FBI began piecing together information
on this new identity and was aghast to learn in 1950 that Weisband was employed at
Arlington Hall, the very place whence the VENONA decrypts were coming. In April 1950
Wesley Reynolds of the FBI went to Carter Clarke, commanding general of ASA, to report
the news. Clarke told Reynolds that Weisband had transferred to AFSA. They went to
Admiral Stone.
At the time, Weisband was working as a section chief on the Soviet problem. Coworkers
had already reported him as a possible security risk, and he had been removed
from access to some of the more sensitive projects while security looked into it. He was
immediately suspended and interrogated. He denied everything. But the walls were
falling in on him even as he spoke. In August, as the subject ofan unrelated investigation,
he appeared before a federal grand jury in Los Angeles investigating West Coast
Communism. Ordered to return for further testimony, he did not comply, was arrested
and was convicted ofcontempt, for which he served a year in a federal prison.
He never returned to AFSA, and in 1951 he was mustered out of federal employment
by a loyalty-security board in San Fransisco, which, not surprisingly, found that removal
from federal employment was in the best interest of national security.77 He remained in
the Washington area, working as a car dealer and apartment manager, and died in 1967 in
Fairfax. He never admitted anything.
The FBI never found out what, ifanything, Weisband passed to the Soviets. But his
close involvement with the Soviet problem argued suggested some of the tightening up of
Soviet communications was a result of Weisband's activities. Many AFSA employees
believed, rightly or wrongly, that he was single-handedly responsible for "Black Friday."
His case instilled a certain paranoia within the profession, and accounted to some degree
for NSA's extremely close guarding ofCOMINT.
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