Agent Link: The Spy Erased from History

William Wolfe Weisband was a Cold War codebreaker who worked with cryptanalysts to decipher numbers, but he was also a KGB spy who passed information to his masters. His story has never been told, and he did more damage to American national security than later traitors.

Format: Hardback
Length: 354 pages
Publication date: 15 March 2024
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Agent Link: The Spy Erased from History is a biography of William Wolfe Weisband, a "charter member" of America's top-secret Cold War codebreaking pioneers. Weisband worked with cryptanalysts daily, helping them unravel secrets from a mind-numbing jumble of numbers. As breakthroughs emerged, codebreakers sought his insights and meanings before passing them to US policy makers. However, what no one knew was that Weisband was keeping his KGB masters informed about American progress. The Army Security Agency, NSA's codebreaking predecessor, had swept the scandal under the rug. Government leaders said "nothing about the case in public, and little in private either," according to an NSA history recorded. The codebreaking hierarchy "simply wanted the case ... to go away." Weisband was air-brushed out of history, and the new NSA organization wanted it kept that way. This one insider spy experts say "did greater damage to America's national security" than later traitors like Jack Dunlap, William Martin, Bernon Mitchell, and Ronald Pelton, even more than Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen. Weisband's story has never been told. A half-century after his death, the mystery surrounding this man remains.

Weight: 653g
Dimension: 236 x 159 x 26 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781538184899