WEISBAND, WILLIAM

A Soviet spy who  penetrated the U.S. Armed Forces Security Agency in 1944, Weisband had been born in Russia but claimed he had been born to Russian parents in Alexandria, Virginia. Before World War II he was servicing dead drops in New York; he was eventually identified by James Orin York as his prewar contact in California. Later Weisband was mentioned as having held a clandestine meeting with the NKVD’s Aleksandr Feklisov in a Manhattan movie theater in 1940, and he is thought to have compromised the VENONA project as soon as he was granted access to it, as a Russian linguist, at Arlington Hall in 1948. Never convicted of espionage, Weisband was imprisoned in November 1950 for lying about his Communist Party of the United States of America membership and died in May 1967.