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HaynesIntelligence
and Klehr Activities in the United States during the Stalin Era
Soviet Intelligence Activities in the United States during the Stalin Era
espionage activities in America from the 1930s to the early 1950s.1 The Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), successor to the rst main directorate
of the Soviet Committee on State Security (KGB), had decided to assist a
project that partnered an active or retired KGB ofcer with a Western author
to produce a series of books on selected intelligence topics. Vassiliev, who had
resigned from the KGB in 1990 to enter journalism, accepted an SVR offer to
work with Allen Weinstein to prepare a book on KGB operations in the
United States.2
Vassiliev did not have access to all KGB les, but he was allowed to examine many operational les of the KGBs legal stations, some personal les of
both ofcers and sources, and the rst volume of the le on Project Enormoz
(Enormous), the KGB nuclear weapons intelligence project, which covered
the Soviet intelligence services assault on the Manhattan Project up to the
end of 1945. Although Vassiliev was prohibited from making photocopies, he
was allowed to make handwritten notes without restriction, including copying verbatim passages out of hundreds of individual documents. Under the
policies of the project, however, the notes were only for his own use and were
not to be shared with his American coauthor. Instead, under SVR guidelines
he prepared sanitized summaries of major topics and themes. With some exceptions, only the cover names of sourcesnot their real names or identifying
informationcould be disclosed. And certain matters could not be discussed
at all. Once the summaries were prepared, an SVR committee of senior ofcers reviewed them to conrm that the guidelines had been followed.
By the spring of 1996, complications had arisen. Crown Publishers,
which had arranged the publishing project, had run into economic difculties
and canceled the contract with the SVR in 1995. Although the books already
under way found new publishers (the Weinstein-Vassiliev volume was eventually published by Random House), the SVR attitude toward the project also
cooled. The SVR and its sister Federal Security Service (FSB, the main successor to the internal apparatus of the KGB) had regained their footing in Russian society, and the need for good press that had partly motivated the project
was no longer urgent. Elements in the agency, particularly its still strong
Communist faction, had always been hostile to any arrangement to publish
Russian secrets, regarding it as a breach of security. Moreover, in early 1996
1. Alexander Vassiliev, How I Came to Write My Notebooks, Discover Alger Hiss, and Lose to His
Lawyer, in John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev, Spies: The Rise and Fall of the
KGB in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), pp. xxviiliii.
2. The predecessors to the foreign intelligence agency best known in the West as the KGB went
through a number of organizational and title changes in the 1930s and 1940s. For reasons of simplicity, KGB will be used throughout this article to avoid the distraction of multiple titles and acronyms.
Soviet Intelligence Activities in the United States during the Stalin Era
Alexander Vassiliev recorded his notes in eight separate notebooks, labeled Black, White #1, White #2, White #3, Yellow #1, Yellow #2, Yellow #3,
and Yellow #4, plus a ninth collection of loose pages labeled Odd Pages. In total the notebooks come to 1,115 pages. Three versions of the notebooks exist:
the original handwritten versions, transcriptions into word-processed Russian, and translations into English. The latter two duplicate the pagination
and page formatting of the original handwritten version. Thus the material
on page 65 of the handwritten White #1 is parallel to the material on page 65
of the transcription and translation of White #1. Researchers wishing to verify
a passage because of a concern about translation or some other ambiguity can
move among the three versions with a minimum of confusion. In the spring
of 2009 Vassiliev donated the notebooks to the Library of Congress with no
restriction on access, although he retained rights to reproduction beyond individuals being authorized to make one copy for personal research use. The
notebooks were made available for research as soon as they were ofcially delivered to the library. In addition, les in Portable Document Format (PDF)
of the scanned original handwritten notebooks, transcriptions, and translations have been placed on the Internet.4 Accompanying the notebooks is a
lengthy concordance of proper names cross-indexed with cover names (in
English and transliterated Russian) that assists researchers in keeping straight
the often bewildering cast of characters, along with a guide listing the KGB
le numbers and titles found in each notebook and their page location.
The notebooks contain Vassilievs summaries of KGB archival documents
along with quotations, many very lengthy, from those documents, as well as
citations to the particular document, le, and page from which the information came. Because the SVR archive remains closed, Vassilievs notebooks are
as close as scholars are likely to get to the actual documents for many years or
even decades. As extracts or quotations from contemporaneous documents
that were written at the time the events were occurring or shortly afterward,
Vassilievs summaries have the virtue of being a record of how the very agency
that conducted the spying understood its operations. These ofcial communications are not the guesses, sometimes inspired, sometimes incorrect, of
counterespionage ofcers. Nor are they the reluctant, often minimal admissions from suspects or the statements from defectors who in some cases had a
personal agenda. Instead, the notebooks contain the accounts of the successes
and failures of the KGB by the KGB itself. They are not public spin offered
by a bureaucracy anxious to demonstrate its value to a public or protect the
organizations self-image.
4. See Vassiliev Notebooks, held by the Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. The PDF versions are available on the website of the Cold War International History Project, at http://
www.cwihp.org.
10
Soviet Intelligence Activities in the United States during the Stalin Era
transcribed some of the documents that passed through his hands. After he retired in 1984, he typed up his notes into ten manuscript volumes (eight geographical and two case histories), destroying the original notes. When the
British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) exltrated him to the West, he
brought with him the ten volumes of transcribed notes and some envelopes of
original notes not yet transcribed. This material formed the basis for two
highly valuable books on Soviet intelligence by Christopher Andrew and
Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield and The World Was Going Our Way, as
well as a KGB lexicon.8 Andrew is a leading historian of intelligence, and
Mitrokhins material is extremely rich, but valuable as the books are, scholars
would like to have the underlying material open for independent review. As of
2008, however, the SIS and the Mitrokhin family have released only a small
portion of the transcribed material and original notes, none of it dealing with
operations in the United States. (In any case, only a portion of Mitrokhins
material dealt with operations in the United States, whereas all of Vassilievs
material focuses on American-related subjects.)
Just as Mitrokhins material cannot be checked against the original KGB
documents still classied in Moscow, Vassilievs notebooks cannot be compared to the original les and folders he examined. Nevertheless, we are
condent that his material is genuine. The information is congruent with
other evidence on Soviet espionage that has emerged over the years, including
material from archives and intelligence agencies that was inaccessible at the
time Vassiliev was doing his research. Thus, cables translated by the Venona
project can be found in Vassilievs notes, with the undecrypted portions in
plain text. Cover names that U.S. and British counterintelligence were unable
to identify are linked in Vassilievs les to real people, who, upon examination, t the biographical details from the KGB cables deciphered by the
Venona project. The notebooks clarify occasional errors by U.S. counter8. Christopher M. Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and
the Secret History of the KGB (New York: Basic Books, 1999); Christopher M. Andrew and Vasili
Mitrokhin, The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World (New York:
Basic Books, 2005); Vasili Mitrokhin, KGB Lexicon: A Handbook of Chekist Terminology (London:
Frank Cass, 2001); CWIHP Note on the Mitrokhin ArchiveA Note on Sources (June 2000),
in The Mitrokhin Archive, Cold War International History Project (CWIHP) Virtual
Archive 2.0 (http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?topic_id?1409&fuseaction?va2.browse&sort
?Collection); and The Mitrokhin ArchiveA Note on Sources (1990), in The Mitrokhin Archive,
CWIHP Virtual Archive 2.0 (http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?topic_id?1409&fuseaction?va2
.browse&sort?Collection). The cables deciphered by the Venona project are available on-line at http://
www.nsa.gov/public_info/declass/venona/index.shtml. Hard copies of the cables are also available at
the National Cryptologic Museum, Fort Meade, MD. Histories of the Venona project include Robert
L. Benson, The Venona Story (Fort Meade, MD: Center for Cryptologic History, National Security
Agency, 2001); and Robert Louis Benson and Michael Warner, eds., Venona: Soviet Espionage and the
American Response 19391957 (Washington, DC: National Security Agency and Central Intelligence
Agency, 1996).
11
intelligence in assigning cover names to real people, and in each and every
case Vassilievs notes are more plausible: They contain details that no fantasist
or forger could possibly have invented.
This is not to say that there may not be some errors in transcription or
note-taking, only that they are minor. Vassiliev occasionally failed to indicate
where a quotation ended, sometimes could not recall what he meant by a
cryptic summary phrase, and may have miscopied words here and there. In
short, he might have committed some of the same errors to which any researcher working in an archive over an extended period is prone. But anyone
reading the notebooks will be impressed by the care and thoroughness of his
research and deeply grateful for the contribution he has made to our understanding of Soviet espionage in the United States.
To highlight the richness of the notebooks, just consider that they enable
us to attach real names to 61 previously unidentied cover names that
emerged from the Venona cables and provide information on more than 50
other individuals who cooperated with Soviet intelligence. In Spies we bring
out some of the highlights of Vassilievs notebooks, and the articles in this issue of the journal expand on these highlights.
No case of Soviet espionage has received as much attention as that of
Alger Hiss. Because he worked for the GRU, not for the KGB, we were surprised that the notebooks contained so much about him. But because both
the GRU and the KGB tended to recruit from the same pool of secret members of the CPUSA, their networks in Washington, DC kept tripping over
each other. Hiss appears in the notebooks under his various cover names, Jurist, Ales, and Leonard, and unambiguously under his real name in the
mid-1930s, the mid-1940s, and the late 1940s. A nal entry in 1950 noted
that the trial of the GRUs State Department source Leonard had resulted in
a guilty verdict and his imprisonment. The amount of material on Hisss work
for Soviet intelligence was sufcient to entitle the chapter on Hiss in our book
Case Closed. (The Hiss case is also the subject of Eduard Marks important
essay in this issue of the journal.)
One surprise in the notebooks was information that from 1934 to early
1937 the KGB had a highly valuable source at the U.S. State Department,
David Salmon, a veteran civil servant with no Communist background whatsoever, who was recruited for cash that was more than his government salary.
He was worth the money because he was chief of the State Departments Division of Communications and Records. Salmons division not only circulated
and archived all U.S. diplomatic communications but also ran the departments cipher ofce. Although Salmon was ideally placed for a spy, the KGB
lost contact with him in 1937 when it broke its relationship with his courier
and recruiter, Ludwig Lore. Once a prominent CPUSA gure, Lore had been
12
Soviet Intelligence Activities in the United States during the Stalin Era
cruiting two Soviet nuclear spies: one at Los Alamos (his long-known brotherin-law, David Greenglass) and one source at Oak Ridge (the hitherto unknown McNutt). Escaping public involvement in the postwar revelations of
Soviet nuclear espionage, McNutt enjoyed a distinguished career as senior engineer for Gulf Oil and was one of the developers of the planned community
of Reston, Virginia. (McNutt and the Rosenberg apparatus are discussed in
Steven Usdins essay in this issue of the journal.)
Yet another unidentied nuclear weapons spy in the Venona decryptions
was Eric, a source in Great Britain who reported on the British nuclear
bomb project and passed along detailed technical reports received from the
Manhattan Project. Vassilievs notebooks name Eric as Engelbert Broda, a
Communist and refugee Austrian physicist who worked at Cambridge Universitys Cavendish Laboratory. After the war, Broda became one of the luminaries of Austrian physics.
Well into 1944 most of the nuclear weapons intelligence the KGB received came from its sources in Great Britain. To Moscows great frustration,
recruitment efforts in the United States either failed entirely or proved far less
productive than originally hoped. Not until 1944when Klaus Fuchs, already a Soviet spy, arrived in New York from Great Britain, the young Los
Alamos physicist Theodore Hall volunteered to spy, and Julius Rosenberg recruited rst Russell McNutt and then David Greenglassdid the KGB begin
to receive a plentiful volume of high-quality nuclear intelligence from the
United States.
The notebooks also provide convincing evidence that the KGB never successfully recruited J. Robert Oppenheimer, despite his secret membership in
the CPUSA (membership he always denied). The notebooks show repeated
but failed KGB efforts to meet with him. By late 1945 the KGB reluctantly
concluded that its hopes for recruiting Oppenheimer were unrealistic.
Oppenheimer remained on a KGB list until 1950, but it was a roster of leading reactionary scientists to be discredited in a KGB disinformation campaign.9 (Gregg Herkens essay in this issue of the journal discusses Oppenheimer and the frustrations of the KGBs West Coast nuclear intelligence.)
Although the notebooks exonerate Oppenheimer, they incriminate another well-known gure often accused of covert ties to the KGB. I. F. Stone,
lionized by many as the very symbol of an independent journalist, rst went
to work for the KGB in 1936 and remained active until at least 1939. Nor was
Stone the most famous writer who volunteered to spy; the KGB also recruited
9. A. Raina, To Comrade J. V. Stalin, . . . Plan of oper. measures connected with Ch-ss case, 5 February 1950, KGB File 84490, v. 3, p. 44, in Alexander Vassiliev, Yellow Notebook #1, trans. by Philip
Redko (2007), pp. 9192. The nal page numbers given for all Vassiliev notebook citations refer to
the English translations by Philip Redko and Steven Shabad.
14
Soviet Intelligence Activities in the United States during the Stalin Era
Ernest Hemingway, but despite repeated efforts to use him, he failed to deliver any signicant information to the KGB. (Max Hollands article in this issue of the journal deals with Stone in far greater detail than we do in Spies.)
Other chapters in Spies deal with the wide-ranging and highly successful Soviet initiatives in scientic and technical intelligence, particularly the productivity of Julius Rosenbergs apparatus of Communist engineers in providing
information on cutting-edge U.S. military technology. The KGB successfully
penetrated the Ofce of Strategic Services (OSS), almost every government
agency dealing with condential matters, congressional staffs, and the White
House.
The subtitle of Spies is The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America. As the
story of nuclear weapons intelligence illustrates, espionage is not a static process. Periods of success are mixed with stretches of frustration and failure.
Apart from the vagaries of individual spies, KGB operations in the United
States rose and fell twice. After diplomatic recognition in 1933, the KGB established a large legal station at the Soviet consulate in New York, a large illegal station also operating from New York, and small operations at the Soviet
embassy in Washington and the Soviet consulate in San Francisco. By 1937,
after some teething problems, these stations had built up very impressive networks for scientic and technical intelligence and had developed good sources
at the U.S. State Department and Justice Department. But nearly everything
was destroyed or crippled in the years that followed, not by pressure from the
FBI but from Iosif Stalins own purge of his security services. The heads of the
legal and illegal stations and many of their ofcers were recalled and shot. The
illegal station was shut down entirely in late 1939 when the last remaining
ofcer was recalled. By mid-1941 the legal station was greatly reduced in personnel and no longer had any ofcers with extensive American experience.
Many of those only recently arrived spoke poor English. Not surprisingly,
most of the once-thriving networks of the mid-1930s had been deactivated.
After the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, Americas
importance to the USSRs survival was critical, and the Soviet authorities demanded a vastly expanded ow of intelligence from the United States. The
KGB responded by dispatching experienced senior ofcers, and the American
stations were rebuilt. But the need for immediate intelligence was so urgent
that the KGB stations resorted to converting CPUSA networks originally created for political goals into espionage rings and running them using CPUSA
channels. Despite realizing how risky and insecure such tactics were, the KGB
judged them acceptable to obtain quick results. In the short run, the results
were spectacular, including Rosenbergs large technical intelligence apparatus
and the two large Washington networks of U.S. government ofcials run by
Gregory Silvermaster and Victor Perlo. By 1944 the KGB had multiple
15
sources in nearly every U.S. government agency of interest to Soviet intelligence. But almost all of the KGBs new Washington sources had been recruited through Jacob Golos and his assistant, Elizabeth Bentley. After Golos
died in late 1943, the KGB stations, now up to full strength, sought to professionalize operations by gradually moving Bentley aside, taking over direct supervision of the several dozen sources she ran in Washington, cutting the
sources links to the CPUSA, and grouping them in small, compartmented
units reporting to a KGB ofcer or a long-serving American agent.
Bentley, however, resented being pushed aside, and in the fall of 1945
went to the FBI. The result was a second catastrophe as sweeping (although
not as lethal) as Stalins purge. Bentley had worked with most of the senior
ofcers and agents of the KGBs American stations, and Moscow feared that
Golos had informed her about others. In response to her defection, the KGB
recalled most of its experienced ofcers from the United States in 1946 and
1947, including the chiefs of the legal and illegal stations in New York and
Washington. Most of its agent networks were deactivated. The rst new
Washington station chief hastily dispatched in 1946 had actually been slated
for Japan, spoke almost no English, and quickly proved to be unable to cope
with the situation.
To compound the KGBs difculties, Bentleys defection also coincided
with the end of World War II, when the FBIs counterespionage focus shifted
from the German and Japanese threat to the Soviet Union. The FBIs personnel had grown enormously during the war, and the bureau now had ample
manpower to deploy against the CPUSA and Soviet intelligence. (John Foxs
article in this issue of the journal discusses the evolution of FBI counterintelligence.) Furthermore, U.S. cryptanalysts of the Venona project made
their rst breaks into World War II KGB message trafc in 1946, and a steady
ow of deciphered messages either directly identied or provided the FBI
with leads to scores of Soviet agents. In the late 1940s the KGB spent much of
its time on damage control, and repeated attempts to revive old networks or
build new ones in the anti-Communist atmosphere of the late 1940s came to
little. Use of the CPUSA as an auxiliary and recruiting pool was no longer
possible because of the FBIs close attention to party activities, and public revelations of the partys assistance to Soviet espionage by congressional committees and the FBI permanently tainted American Communism with treason.
Only two bright lights emerged for Soviet intelligence in the postwar period. Judith Coplon, recruited in 1945, used her position in the Foreign
Agents Registration section of the Justice Department, a key ofce that received FBI counterespionage reports, to keep the KGB informed about the
progress of FBI security investigations so that Soviet agents could be warned
when the FBI began to focus on suspected spies. But deciphered KGB cables
16
Soviet Intelligence Activities in the United States during the Stalin Era
allowed the FBI to identify her in late 1948. Although she was charged with
espionage-related crimes, her convictions were reversed on technical grounds.
Nonetheless, her exposure cost the KGB a valuable source.10
Coplon, in any case, was only helping the KGB respond defensively to
FBI initiatives. The most important spy in the postwar period inicted serious damage on U.S. interests and likely contributed to the enormous human
and material costs of the Korean War. For scholars of the Cold War, one of the
most signicant and fascinating stories that emerge from Vassilievs notebooks
is that of William Weisband, whose obscurity masks his key role in postwar
history.
Weisband claimed to have been born in Alexandria, Egypt, but might
have been born in 1908 in Odessa, Russia, and later moved to Egypt with his
parents, whom he accompanied to the United States in 1925. U.S. counterintelligence ofcers believed that he returned to the Soviet Union sometime
in the early 1930s, perhaps to study at the Cominterns Lenin School. Recruited by Soviet intelligence in 1934, he was working as a courier for the
KGBs New York station by 1936.11
The KGB transferred Weisband to California in mid-1941 to reestablish
contact with Jones York, an aeronautical engineer and paid Soviet source.
Over the next year, Weisband met with York about ten times, delivering lists
of specic aviation technical questions the Soviet government wanted addressed. The two became friendly, meeting at Yorks home as well as nearby
bars and restaurants, and York even learned his contacts family name, which
years later, when talking to the FBI, he remembered as Villesbend. After
Weisband was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1942, the KGB turned liaison
with York over to another courier, Amadeo Sabatini.12
Weisband had a talent for languages. Russian was his native tongue, but
10. Judith Coplon: The Spy Who Got Away with It, in John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Early
Cold War Spies: The Espionage Trials That Shaped American Politics (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2006), pp. 192207.
11. Robert Louis Benson, Weisband (paper presented at the Ninth Symposium on Cryptologic History, Maritime Institute, Linthicum, MD, October 2003); Robert Louis Benson to Harvey Klehr, 20
June 2007; Zero was handed over to Link, c. 1936, KGB File 3461, v. 2, p. 165, in Alexander
Vassiliev, Black Notebook, p. 17; Expense estimate for the NY station for the 2nd quarter of 1937,
KGB File 3464, v. 1, p. 84, in Vassiliev, Black Notebook, p. 27; and Agents: (3rd qtr. of 38), KGB
File 40159, v. 1, p. 253, in Vassiliev, Black Notebook, p. 101. See also Raymond J. Batvinis, Is
Counterintelligence an Affair of State or Justice? The Bureaucratic Struggle over Responsibility in Two
Wars, paper presented at the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations annual meeting,
Chantilly, Virginia, 2007.
12. KGB New York to Moscow Center, 17 July 1941, KGB File 40594, v. 5, p. 126, in Vassiliev, Black
Notebook, p. 103; FBI Washington Field Ofce Report, Jones York Deposition, 6 October 1953, reproduced in Benson and Warner, eds., Venona, pp. 167170; Background on Needle, 10 February
1947, KGB File 40129, v. 4, p. 257, in Alexander Vassiliev, White Notebook #1, p. 120; Hood to Director, 11 April 1950, Serial 53, in FBI Jones Orin York File 65-2223; and Hood to Director, 4 April
1950, Serial 57, FBI Jones Orin York File 65-2223.
17
he spoke English almost without accent and had picked up some Arabic from
his childhood in Egypt. The Army recognized his skills and sent him to a language school to study Italian and to Ofcer Candidate School. He received a
commission and, at his request, assignment to the U.S. Army Signal Security
Agency (predecessor of the National Security Agency). He left for Great Britain in July 1943 and later served in North Africa and Italy. A KGB New York
station cable in June alerted Moscow that Weisband had nished his Italian
course and suggested a password for approaching him in Britain. While
Weisband was overseas, he also kept in touch with the KGB by writing to
Lona Cohen, another KGB courier, via his brother. A February 1945 KGB cable only partly deciphered by the Venona project suggested that Weisband
had some contact with Soviet naval intelligence; this likely related to his Army
assignment in Italy as liaison with several Soviet naval ofcers.13
In late 1944 KGB ofcer Semen Semenov returned to Moscow and wrote
a summary report on his tour of the United States. He had worked with
Weisband and offered this assessment:
Link [Weisband]. Helped me in receiving materials from Emulsion
[unidentied technical source] and Brother [unidentied technical source].
Was connected to agents Smart [oil industry source Elliot Goldberg] and
Needle [Jones York]. Has a great desire to work with us. Shows composure and
calm at work. Considering his nice work in the West and indisputable growth
during his time in the army (Africa, Italy, Britain, France), he should be utilized
upon his return as an illegal in technology and assigned as the handler of a
group.14
Weisband, however, had a brighter espionage future than a return to courier and agent-handling work. After his discharge at the end of the war, the
Army Signal Security Agency rehired him as a civilian linguist assigned to
Arlington Hall, the militarys super-secret code-breaking facility then in the
process of shifting from German and Japanese codes to Soviet codes. With his
native Russian, Weisband became a lead translator for decrypted Soviet messages. With the exception of nuclear weapons espionage, one could hardly
imagine a post of greater interest to Soviet intelligence. In October 1945, following Igor Gouzenkos defection in Canada, Moscow issued a warning to
13. Venona 981 KGB New York to Moscow, 23 June 1943; Venona 1239 KGB New York to Moscow,
30 August 1944; Venona 154 Moscow to KGB New York, 16 February 1945; and Semenov to Fitin,
c. 1944, KGB File 40129, v. 3a, pp. 212213, in Vassiliev, White Notebook #1, pp. 112113. See also
Victor to Anton, 23 February 1945, KGB File 40159, v. 3, p. 474, in Vassiliev, Black Notebook,
p. 133.
14. Semenov to Fitin, 29 November 1944, KGB File 40129, v. 3a, p. 213, in Vassiliev, White Notebook
#1, p. 113.
18
Soviet Intelligence Activities in the United States during the Stalin Era
protect six valuable American agents, including Weisband, by then codenamed Zhora:
Surveillance has been increased. Safeguard from failure: Homer [Donald
Maclean], Ruble [Harold Glasser], Raid [Victor Perlo], Mole [Charles
Kramer], Zhora [Weisband], and Izra [Donald Wheeler]. Reduce meetings
with them to once or twice a month. Minor agents should be deactivated. Carefully check out against surveillance when going to meetings, and if anything
seems suspicious, do not go through with them.
19
The one bright light in U.S. intelligence capabilities in the early postwar
period was Arlington Hall and signals intelligence. The NSAs Venona project
allowed the FBI to build on the information provided by such defectors as
Bentley to neutralize most of the KGBs impressive Communist Partybased
espionage networks of World War II origin. Of even greater immediate importance to the Cold War, the NSA in 1946 broke into the radio codes used
by the Soviet armed forces. Two years later the NSA was reading Soviet military logistics trafc almost as soon as the messages were sent. By tracking the
movement of Soviet military equipment and supplies, U.S. military commanders and the president could condently judge Soviet military capabilities, separate Stalins diplomatic bluffs from serious threats, and spot preparations for invasions or attacks that needed serious diplomatic or militarily
attention.
But in 1948, over a period of a few months, the Soviet military cipher
systems that the United States had broken went dark, in code-breaker terminology, when the Soviet military implemented new and much more secure
encryption systems. (In NSA lore this event is known as Black Friday, although it was actually spread over several months as the Soviet Defense Ministry changed different military cipher systems.) The consequences were
grave. Stalin approved Communist North Koreas plans for an invasion of
South Korea in early 1950. The North Korean military depended entirely
on the Soviet Union for the logistics of war, and a massive transfer of weapons, aircraft, artillery, tanks, trucks, ammunition, fuel, and supplies from
the USSR to North Korea that began in the spring of 1950 allowed the invasion to proceed in June of that year. Had the NSA retained the ability to
read Soviet military logistics communications, the United States might
have had sufcient warning of the threat of invasion and possibly been able
to use diplomatic or military action to block it. As it was, the massive North
Korea attack surprised and overwhelmed the unprepared South Korean
and U.S. armed forces. The war cost more than 58,000 American lives and
several million Korean and Chinese lives and gravely enhanced Cold War tensions.
In 1950 the FBI identied Weisband as having been a Soviet spy in the
early 1940s. He never admitted anything, and no independent evidence appeared, but given his position assisting in the translation of decrypted Russian
messages, the NSA concluded that Weisband had most likely alerted the
Soviet Union to the NSAs break into Soviet military communications and
enabled the USSR to change its cipher systems and protect its messages
from U.S. cryptanalysts. An NSA report obtained by The Baltimore Sun
in 2000 surmised that because of Weisbands betrayal, In rapid succession,
20
Soviet Intelligence Activities in the United States during the Stalin Era
every one of [the] cipher systems went dark, and this dreary situation
continued up to the Korean War, denying American policy makers access to
vital decrypts in this critical period. A 1995 internal NSA history (released in
2008) stated:
The FBI never found out what, if anything, Weisband passed to the Soviets. But
his close involvement with the Soviet problem [strongly suggests that] some of
the tightening up of Soviet communications was a result of Weisbands activities.
Many AFSA employees believed, rightly or wrongly, that he was single-handedly
responsible for Black Friday.
One puzzle remained, however. Weisband had been at Arlington Hall from
late 1945 onward. Why had it taken the Soviet Union until 1948 to realize
that the United States was reading its military radio trafc?16
Documents in Vassilievs notebooks establish that it was indeed William
Weisband who single-handedly betrayed the NSAs success against the Soviet
military codes. The notebooks also explain why it was not until 1948 that the
Soviet Union took remedial action: ZhoraWilliam Weisband, Amer. citizen, employed by the decryption service of the U.S. Dept. of Defense. Our
agent since 34. From 45 to 48, he was inactive. In Feb. 48, the connection
was restored. Thus, not until February 1948 was the KGB able to reestablish
liaison with Weisband, who had been deactivated in late 1945 in the wake of
Bentleys defection. Until the KGB spoke with Weisband in early 1948, Soviet
authorities had no idea that the United States was reading Soviet military
communications.17
A 1949 KGB report explained in detail what happened after the KGB restored contact with Weisband:
In a single year, we received from Zhora [Weisband] a large quantity of highly
valuable doc. materials on the efforts of Americans to decipher Soviet ciphers
and on the interception and analysis of the open radio correspondence of Sov.
agencies. From materials received from Zhora, we learned that as a result of
this work, Amer. intelligence was able to obtain important information about
the disposition of Soviet armed forces, the production capacity of various
branches of industry, and the work being done in the USSR in the eld of
atomic energy. . . . On the basis of materials received from Zhora, our state se16. On the NSA background to the Weisband story, see Who Was William Weisband? in Benson
and Warner, eds., Venona, p. xxviii; Laura Sullivan, Spys Role Linked to U.S. Failure on Korea, Baltimore Sun, 29 June 2000, p. 1A; Benson, Weisband; John Schindler, Weisband, paper presented
at Symposium on Cryptologic History, Maritime Institute, Linthicum, MD, 2003; and Thomas R.
Johnson, American Cryptology during the Cold War, 19451989, 2 books (Ft. Meade, MD: Center for
Cryptologic History, U.S. National Security Agency, 1995, declassied 2008), Book 1, pp. 277278.
17. Plan of measures, March 1949, KGB File 43173, v. 2c, p. 25, in Vassiliev, Black Notebook, p. 75.
21
Inasmuch as Weisband was the agent involved, he had reason for concern.20
The KGB Washington station used a variety of methods to pick up
Weisbands stolen material. Dead drops were preferred for picking up documents, with face-to-face meetings every two to three months in 1948 at a restaurant outside Washington so that his KGB contact could provide instruc18. Plan of measures, pp. 25, 27, in Vassiliev, Black Notebook, p. 75.
19. Zhora is asking, c. 1948, KGB File 43173, v. 4, p. 230, in Vassiliev, Black Notebook, p. 70; In
Dec. 48, KGB le 43173, v. 7, p. 18, in Vassiliev, Black Notebook, p. 91; Vasin signed, c. 1950,
KGB File 40159, v. 2, p. 101, in Vassiliev, Black Notebook, p. 96; and We consent, c. 1950, KGB
File 43173, v. 11, p. 87, in Vassiliev, Black Notebook, p. 95.
20. At a meeting, 16 July 1949, KGB File 43173, v. 11, p. 85, in Vassiliev, Black Notebook, p. 91.
22
Soviet Intelligence Activities in the United States during the Stalin Era
tions. To increase security the Washington station had placed the restaurant
under surveillance prior to the meetings to watch for FBI interest. In September 1949 documents were handed over in an automobile brush pass (in
which one party was in a parked car next to which a second car pulled up, allowing the documents to be passed through the windows and the second car
then to depart). A KGB memorandum noted:
On days that he meets with operatives [KGB ofcers], Zhora [Weisband] removes documents from his agency twice: once during lunch, and the 2nd
timeafter work. On his person, under his shirt. He hides the materials taken
the 1st time around in the trunk of his car. He had been instructed not to keep
them in his car. To choose only the most valuable ones. He asked for a camera,
but he shouldnt be given one. Careless storage or use could lead to failure [exposure].
Twice in 1950 the Center indicated a desire to shift liaison with Weisband
from the legal (diplomatic cover) ofcers of the Washington station to an illegal (covert) ofcer in order to increase security, but it is a measure of the
KGBs difculties in the late 1940s and early 1950s that it did not have one
available for the task.21
The KGB was careful with Weisband because he was easily the most valuable agent it possessed in this era. The Center delivered a highly critical review
of the work of its American stations in 1948, nding it extremely weak and
ineffective, complaining that the information delivered was questionable
and that less than a fth was even thought worthy of reporting to higher Soviet ofcials. However, the Center carefully exempted Weisbands material
from its condemnation. In 1950 it sent an angry message to the Washington
station chief when it received a report that Statskevich had gone to a meeting
with Weisband even though he suspected he was under surveillance: Such
an attitude toward meetings with Zhora [Weisband] is completely at odds
with our repeated instructions about the need to observe all precautions during work with this valuable agent.22
Weisbands undoing, however, did not come from tradecraft errors by the
KGB Washington station. The NSAs own Venona project (a project on which
Weisband had assisted in translating messages) is what led to his exposure.
21. Pavels lines, KGB File 43173, v. 2c, pp. 2627, in Vassiliev, Black Notebook, p. 75; Materials
from, 13 September 1949, KGB File 43173, v. 7, p. 100, in Vassiliev, Black Notebook, p. 91; On the
days, c. 1949, KGB File 43173, v. 7, p. 114, in Vassiliev, Black Notebook, p. 91; Moscow Center to
KGB Washington, 28 February 1950, KGB File 43173, v. 2c, p. 70, in Vassiliev, Black Notebook,
p. 81; and Moscow Center to KGB Washington, 28 March 1950, KGB File 43173, v. 11, p. 51, in
Vassiliev, Black Notebook, p. 94.
22. The stations info, c. 1948, KGB File 43173, v. 8, p. 84, in Vassiliev, Black Notebook, p. 92; and
Moscow Center to Vladimir, 3 January 1950, KGB le 43173, v. 11, pp. 1112, in Vassiliev, Black
Notebook, p. 94.
23
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Soviet Intelligence Activities in the United States during the Stalin Era
Cold War will nd valuable these reports of what Soviet intelligence was telling the highest leaders. Researchers will nd in the notebooks much to write
about that we did not deal with and may recognize matters of importance that
we missed entirely. We are condent that a large number of dissertations and
books and many journal articles will use these notebooks.
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