Pressley, Sue Anne. "10 Arrested on Charges of Spying for Cuba: Military Facilities Targeted, FBI Alleges." Washington Post, 15 Sep. 1998, A1. [http://www.washingtonpost.com]1. Amarylis Silverio Santos and Joseph Santos
2. Sharon W. Scrange
3. Glenn Souther
4. Michael Straight
5. Otto Verber (See Kurt Ponger)
6. Kelly Therese Warren (See Clyde Lee Conrad)
7. Ariel J. Weinmann
8. William Weisband
Material presented chronologically.
Pressley, Sue Anne. "10 Arrested on Charges of Spying for Cuba: Military Facilities Targeted, FBI Alleges." Washington Post, 15 Sep. 1998, A1. [http://www.washingtonpost.com]
Ten people allegedly operating as a Cuban spy ring "have been arrested and accused of collecting information on U.S. military installations and anti-Castro groups in Florida, federal officials announced [on 15 September 1998]. The arrests, carried out [on 12 September 1998], ended the most extensive espionage effort involving Cuban agents ever uncovered here, U.S. Attorney Thomas E. Scott said."
Clark comment: The number of arrests in this case eventually reached 14. In March 2000, Amarylis Silverio Santos and her husband, Joseph Santos, along with several others of the group, pleaded guilty to "charges of acting as unregistered agents of a foreign government." John Elvin, "Jail Time for Cuban Spies," Insight on the News, 6 Mar. 2000.
Sharon W. Scrange was a CIA operations support employee in Ghana. She was convicted of espionage on 27 September 1985 and sentenced to five years in prison. She was paroled after serving 18 months. See Allen and Polmar, Merchants of Treason (1988).
Kessler,
Ronald. The Spy in the Russian Club: How Glenn Souther Stole America's Nuclear War Plans and Escaped to Moscow. New York: Scribner's, 1990. New York: Pocket Books, 1992. [pb]
Surveillant 1.1: "U.S. sailor Glenn Souther defected to the USSR and ... sold U.S. plans on targets, on satellite surveillance photos, NSA intercepts of Soviet communications, and H-bomb delivery routes."
See Department of Defense Security Institute, Recent Espionage Cases: Summaries and Sources, August 1992 (Richmond, VA: Department of Defense Security Institute, 1992), p. 23, for brief information on Souther -- defected 1986, turned up in Moscow, suicide 1989.
"Michael Straight, the patrician former magazine publisher who described in a political memoir his lingering involvement with Soviet spies whom he first met when they were all students at Cambridge University," died on 4 January 2004. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, "Michael Straight, Who Wrote of Connection to Spy Ring, Dies at 87," New York Times, 5 Jan. 2004.
Straight, Michael. After Long Silence. New York: Norton, 1983.
Rocca and Dziak: "Apologia by the former editor of The New Republic who was recruited and handled for the Soviets by Anthony Blunt at Cambridge in the mid-1930s."
Hook,
Sidney. "The Incredible Story of Michael Straight." Encounter,
Dec. 1983, 68-73. [Rocca & Dziak]
Perry, Roland. Last of the Cold War Spies: The Life of Michael Straight, the Only American in Britain's Cambridge Spy Ring. New York: Da Capo, 2005.
According to Anderson, Washington Post, 8 Aug. 2005, the author "asserts in this damning biography" that Michael Straight "was a dedicated communist and a covert agent of the KGB" from "his undergraduate days at Cambridge in the 1930s.... Straight may still have friends who accept his claim that his spying ended when he entered the Army, but Perry argues persuasively that this polished son of American capitalism was indeed the last of the Cold War spies." Similarly, Bailey, cicentre.com, calls this "an immensely readable and well-researched biography."
On the other hand, Peake, Studies 50.1 (Mar. 2006), has some doubts about Perry's version of events. The author "presents only speculation about Straight's continuing espionage." He also "gets too many documented facts wrong." The reviewer's conclusion: "Whatever Straight's reality, Perry's has been distorted by poor research and analysis, which has led to assertions not proved."
For Schecter, I&NS 21.6 (Dec. 2006), the author "argues hard, but not convincingly, that Straight remained under Soviet control until the 1990s." His evidence for this "is more circumstantial th[a]n documented.... Perry's prodigious research lacks a series of smoking guns to prove some of his conclusions."
Associated Press. "Sailor Pleads Guilty to Espionage: Faces Life Sentence for Trying to Sell Classified Data in Austria in 2005." 4 Dec. 2006. [http://www.msnbc.msn.com]
On 4 December 2006, Petty Officer 3rd Class Ariel J. Weinmann "pleaded guilty ... to espionage, desertion and other charges." He was "accused of stealing a Navy laptop and peddling its classified contents to an undisclosed foreign government." He "faces a sentence of life in prison without parole, a dishonorable discharge from the Navy and forfeiture of all pay."
In the post-World War II period, the Army Security Agency (ASA) "had broken messages used by the Soviet armed forces, police and industry, and was building a remarkably complete picture of the Soviet national security posture.... Then, during 1948, in rapid succession, every one of these cipher systems went dark....
"Soviet intelligence had had an agent inside AFSA [Armed Forces Security Agency] who had revealed the extent of U.S. penetration of Soviet cipher systems. This was William Weisband, who had been recruited by the KGB in 1934. During and after World War II, Weisband was involved in the U.S. COMINT efforts, working (as a native speaker of Russian) in the Russian section in ASA and, later, AFSA. Although in 1950 the FBI uncovered information alleging espionage activities by Weisband..., he was never charged with espionage -- Weisband lost his job with AFSA and served a year in prison for contempt of a grand jury.2" [2. Robert Louis Benson and Michael Warner, VENONA: Soviet Espionage and the American Response, 1939-1957 ([Washington, DC:] NSA/CIA Publication, 1996).] David A. Hatch, with Robert Louis Benson, The Korean War: The SIGINT Background (Washington, DC: GPO, 2000).
John Earl Haynes, a historian at the Library of Congress, "was one of the first people outside the agency [NSA] to stumble across Weisband's name two years ago when sorting through post-World War II documents the agency declassified in 1996. 'He was a major figure, but has never had any kind of public profile because they never tried him,' Haynes said. 'He refused to show up in court [for a grand jury hearing]. The evidence was thoroughly convincing to those who saw it, but it could not have been brought to trial without revealing too many secrets.'"
Weisband "spent a year in prison for failing to appear before the grand jury and then returned home to Fairfax. He worked odd jobs in different offices until his death in 1967. NSA officials said [on 28 June 2000] recent documents pulled from Soviet archives reconfirm his extensive involvement." Laura Sullivan, "Spy's Role Linked to U.S. Failure on Korea: NSA Report Shows Why 1950 Invasion Came as Surprise," Baltimore Sun, 29 Jun. 2000.
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