Bridge of Spies (17 page)

In his treatise on “homo Sovieticus,” Allen Dulles wrote: “Since the ingrained Soviet approach to the problems of life and politics is conspiratorial, it is no surprise that this approach finds its ultimate fulfillment in intelligence work. When such a man does finally see the light, as has happened, his disillusionment is overwhelming.”

Fisher’s moment to be overwhelmed came that morning on that bed.
Nine years
. He had spent nine years in this country, pushing his own identity to the very back of his mind and impersonating the unreal people created for him by Moscow Center so perfectly that no one had even heard him whisper his wife’s name in his sleep. His wife, a harpist in a children’s orchestra in Moscow, had grown used to the life of a single mother. His daughter, a teenager when he left her, had grown up and married. He had followed orders. He had traveled the length and breadth of the Main Adversary trying to revive the spy networks of the war years. He had failed, but this was hardly his fault and he had not been blamed. His tradecraft had been masterly—not a single dead drop discovered or cable intercepted on his watch—and his cover was as deep and unquestioned as any in the history of the illegals. He was a war hero, a devoted Communist, and a colonel in the KGB. He had been inducted, like Stalin and Zhukov before him, into the Order of the Red Banner. And then he had been sent Reino Hayhanen, who had imploded and betrayed him. For want of a fake passport he had been
left to wait for this moment in a cheap New York hotel room, where his only options were to keep the faith and pay the price or to implode himself.

“Colonel, we have received information concerning your involvement in espionage,” Agent Gamber said.

Fisher kept the faith. Gamber’s use of “colonel” confirmed that his information came from Hayhanen, since no one else outside Russia knew Fisher’s rank. But he was not about to join the wretched Vik—Hayhanen—in that special circle of hell reserved for traitors. He would admit nothing, reveal nothing, volunteer nothing. That was the Chekist way, and Fisher understood it perfectly.

He would be arrested if he did not cooperate, Gamber said. Fisher, now in underpants, just sat there. It looked passive but it was the biggest, most inspired decision of his life. From that moment the legend of the master spy began to grow; he had found his calling as a stonewall.

It was not, in fact, a difficult decision. Part of Fisher’s reasoning was that this whole embarrassing mess might be part of a plan to turn the otherwise inexplicable Hayhanen into a double agent. Despite everything, he still trusted his employers: when his lawyer suggested later that Russia had written him off, he snapped back that he did not believe it and resented the idea. Being written off and being sacrificed for the cause were very different things.

But there was also Fisher’s family and his self-respect. “Cooperation” with the FBI was the one way to guarantee he never saw his wife and daughter again. If he kept his counsel there was always the chance, however slight, of being traded in years to come for someone the Americans wanted back. If he kept his counsel, furthermore, no one need know that he had almost nothing to reveal. And what they didn’t know they could only imagine.

After twenty-three minutes of staring at Willie Fisher and his Adam’s apple and getting nothing out of him, Agent Gamber and another agent conferred sotto voce in the corner. They asked the INS men to come in and make the arrest, and it was done. The Kremlin’s most secret weapon had been detained under section 242 of the Immigration and Nationality Act. From where Fisher sat things looked so bad that they could only get better, and that is exactly how they turned out.

He outwitted the INS men almost as soon as they had arrested him,
or so he claimed years later in an interview with
Moskovskyi Komsomolets
newspaper in Moscow. Remembering he had left a potentially incriminating sheet of paper from a onetime code pad on a table under the window, he asked if he could tidy up some paints and other artist’s materials above it on the windowsill. They said he could, so he calmly wiped his palette clean with the sheet of paper, then flushed it down the lavatory. With it went his last message from Moscow.

He was told to dress and pay his bill and then was taken to the INS office to be booked, photographed, and questioned some more. He looked pissed off but rakish in his mug shot, like an angry reporter.

For seven hours, as the heat wave finally broke outside, he was given reasons and opportunities to cooperate. For seven hours he turned them down, which meant his status did not change. Improvised categories of detainee, such as “enemy combatant,” were for the future. Fisher was a suspected illegal alien and subject to well-established procedures. As night fell, he was driven across the Hudson and put on a waiting DC-3 that took off with only him and two INS officers aboard and headed south by southwest.

Fisher wanted to know where he was being taken, but no one would tell him, so he worked it out. He kept an eye on the stars and made estimates of his time and speed in the air. When the plane stopped to refuel at 11:00 p.m. he said, “We’re in Alabama,” and he was right. They flew on across the Gulf of Mexico to Brownsville, Texas, then drove in darkness to McAllen, ten miles from the Rio Grande.

On leaving New York, Fisher disappeared from all official records for five days. Was this rendition? His lawyer tried to make something of it at his trial, but the judge was unimpressed. Fisher was hit in the face once while being questioned in McAllen but was never blindfolded, drugged, or tortured. That, too, was for the future. The truth was that the INS was going by the book: McAllen was the site of the Federal Alien Detention Facility, and Fisher was held there for six weeks.

In that time his hopes rose briefly when he realized that most of his fellow inmates were being deported to Mexico. To Mexico! The last refuge of Trotsky was the first choice of escape route for any Soviet spy in trouble in America. If Fisher could only get out of solitary he could practically swim there.

He reached McAllen on a Saturday and was questioned in relays over
the weekend by the INS men who had flown out with him, and by Gamber and Special Agent Paul Blasco of the FBI, who followed. He gave them nothing. But then, on Monday morning, he was handed a leaflet setting out the rights of an illegal alien, which included a prompt deportation hearing. Fisher changed tactics; he told a story.

“I decided to state that my real name was Rudolf Ivanovich Abel,” he wrote in an affidavit, “that I was a Russian citizen; that I had found a large sum of American money in a ruined blockhouse in Russia; that I then bought in Denmark a forged American passport and with this passport I entered the United States from Canada in 1948.”

Two days later he had his hearing and retold his story. No one believed it. The name stuck but nothing else did, because by this time the FBI had found in Fisher’s New York hotel room four thousand dollars in twenties wrapped in brown paper; a hollow ebony block containing a 250-page Russian codebook; a hollow pencil full of encrypted messages on microfilm; and the key to a safe-deposit box crammed with another fifteen thousand dollars in cash. They had also taken two slips of paper that Fisher had tried to hide up his jacket sleeve before being led away. On each were directions to meetings in Mexico City, the first of which would have been outside a screening of a film called
Balmora
at a cinema on Avenida Oberón and would have started with a script:

The blockhouse story might explain the money, but not the directions or the microfilm. Fisher was denied deportation. For another month Blasco and Gamber tried to turn him. They offered better food and hard liquor for his cooperation, then a hotel room, air-conditioning, and a ten-thousand-dollar-a-year government job. Nothing worked. The master spy was courteous and patient but as forthcoming as a sphinx. “You had to admire him,” Gamber said.

No one much admired Hayhanen—even when he changed his mind. Sometime in the first week of August he agreed to testify against his boss. In Washington, Assistant U.S. Attorney William Tompkins turned on a dime and had his high-priority alleged illegal alien turned
into an even higher-priority alleged spy. On August 7 Fisher was flown back to New York to answer the indictment. This time the press was there to meet him, and the man calling himself Rudolf Abel looked straight into their cameras.

*  *  *

Burt Silverman—artist, illustrator, ex–National Serviceman, and left-leaning Brooklyn liberal—was going to Rome. He was going elsewhere in Europe too, but Rome would be the start and finish of a grand tour in the old style for the old reasons, because the Old World begat the New and still had something to impart to the inquiring soul.

The trip would also be, among other things, a honeymoon. On March 27 Silverman had married Helen Worthman, the longtime girlfriend with whom “Emil” had found him half naked on a divan in Silverman’s studio three years earlier when asking for a cup of turpentine. Emil had been among the guests at a cocktail party at the Hotel Bolivar on Central Park West before the ceremony and had been the last to leave. It was a Jewish wedding. The men were required to wear yarmulkes and the groom said afterward that Fisher looked “like a Hassidic buck on feast day.”

Since then he had been away a lot. There had been the extended sinus cure in Florida. Then he had scarcely shown his face at the Ovington building before disappearing again. During the second absence Silverman and several of his friends were visited by agents of the FBI. Dave Levine, another painter, received a letter from Emil dated July 24, asking him to “help me in the disposal of whatever remains of mine in 252 Fulton Street.” The letter was shot through with vintage Emil mystery making, but it left little doubt that he was in trouble. “I have no specific desires except that you go through my paintings and preserve those you think worth keeping until—if ever—I may be able to get them again.” There was no explanation for the return address—a firm of lawyers in McAllen, Texas.

As for Silverman, the Bureau caught up with him one sweltering July evening as he returned home from a day’s work in Manhattan at the
New York Post
. There were two agents, as ever. They gave him the choice of talking in his studio or their car. He chose the car and found himself in the middle of the backseat with no quick exit, answering questions
about Goldfus and a mysterious coconspirator (“Did you ever see a fat man who fell asleep while he was talking?”) and asking some of his own. He got no satisfactory answers. The agents would only say it was a matter of “the highest national security.” Silverman’s first thought was that the FBI was using Emil to get to someone else. The McCarthy madness had peaked, but several of his friends were members of the Communist Party—if only for the pizza—and the House Un-American Activities Committee was still in vigorous session. It did not enter his mind that Emil might himself be the national security concern. In the business of covering his tracks, faint as they were, Fisher was that good.

Silverman had not traveled abroad since leaving the army. To go to Rome, he and Helen needed passports, which is why he was in Manhattan again on August 8, passing a newsstand and realizing in a flash that something strange and disorientating had happened.

“I saw his face on the front page of the
New York Times
,” he says. “I recognized it instantly. I’d drawn him and painted him many times, hours and hours. His features were so very striking and clear-cut. I didn’t buy the paper—didn’t even read the headline. I said, ‘Why is Emil in the news?’ ”

Silverman telephoned his wife, who went out and bought a copy. And there was Emil for their scrapbook, torn from their amusing private world of painting and pontificating and rendered in grainy black and white under the headline “Russian Colonel Is Indicted Here as Top Spy in U.S.” He wore a dark jacket, a white shirt buttoned to the neck with no tie, and his familiar heavy spectacles. His eyes behind them were anxious, the eyebrows curling up toward the center of his forehead.

Mildred Murphy of the
New York Times
disagreed with Silverman about Fisher’s appearance. She called him (paragraph one, line one) “An ordinary looking little man,” whose ordinariness was the more extraordinary for his indictment “as the most important Soviet spy ever caught in the United States.”

She did not question his identity or provenance: “He is Rudolf Ivanovich Abel, a 55-year-old, Moscow-born citizen of the Soviet Union.” She did qualify as an assertion William Tompkins’s lie that “Abel” had been under investigation for a year, but she quoted him without comment on what Abel was supposed to represent—“as professional and
intricate an operation as we have ever worked on.” The master spy legend was now received wisdom, the starting point for whatever was to follow.

Silverman rode the subway home in a daze that in a sense has yet to lift. Here was an answer to the Emil question, but it was other people’s answer; an answer announced by people who didn’t even know him. “The disconnect between public and private was wrenching,” he says, half a lifetime later. “In fact, I still view this as a story somebody made up about my life, a chapter which is totally untrue.”

*  *  *

The made-up stories were, of course, all Fisher’s. His latest—the one he told his interrogators about having found a stash of money in a blockhouse in Russia—was intended partly as a signal to Moscow that even though he had been caught, he was revealing nothing. It had also given the Soviet embassy in Washington a chance to recognize him as an errant Soviet citizen and request his deportation. That chance had not been taken. His fate as an illegal was to be disowned when things went wrong, and when they did, he was.

He needed a change in his luck, or at least a decent lawyer. The wheels of American justice turned to find him one.