Bridge of Spies (18 page)

The call came through to Jim Donovan at his summer cottage in the Adirondacks two weeks after the indictment. It was placed by a colleague but instigated by the Brooklyn Bar Association, whose job it was to ensure that everyone indicted in the borough had an adequate defense. The association was used to finding lawyers for the Mafia, less used to finding them for spies. But the chairman of its selection committee was a neighbor of Donovan’s on Prospect Park West and knew his background. The choice seemed obvious.

James Britt Donovan was an oaken pillar of Brooklyn society and the New York legal establishment. Tall and heavyset, he had the face of a man who boxed in college but had the sense to leave it there. His first degree was from Fordham University, where his classmates voted him “best all-round man.” When he graduated he wanted to work in newspapers, so he asked his father, a wealthy Irish-American surgeon, to buy him one. His father agreed on condition that he acquire a law degree first, so Harvard Law School followed. Donovan’s dream of moguldom
was wrecked by the war, in which he served as general counsel for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), precursor to the CIA. In 1946 he assisted in the prosecution of Göring and Hess at Nuremberg, showing the court harrowing footage of the liberated concentration camps. As a result he had much in common with the man he was being asked to represent. They had both been spies on the right side in the fight against Fascism. And then they had both gravitated to Brooklyn, “Abel” apparently to sabotage capitalism, Donovan to uphold it. (He prospered mightily in private practice and had spent most of 1957 defending a life insurance company against claims by the Polish government.)

He could have turned the Abel case down. His wife and four children doubtless wished he had, and the golf pro at his club near Lake Placid believed he should have.

“Why in hell would anyone want to defend that no-good bum?” the pro demanded as his client tried simultaneously to ponder the request and work on his swing. Donovan reminded him that under the U.S. Constitution “every man, however despised, is entitled to counsel and a fair trial.”

Donovan enjoyed belonging. There was the golf club, the Montauk Club with its self-consciously palatial premises in Brooklyn’s Park Slope, the Brooklyn Museum (he was a governor), the New York City Art Commission (he was a member), and the Rembrandt Club, “one of Brooklyn’s oldest societies,” whose all-male membership met monthly in one another’s homes for cultural lectures followed by a champagne supper. It was black tie, he noted, “and most enjoyable in a reserved way.”

The all-round man from Fordham and Harvard comported himself at times as if afflicted by a ramrod in a painful place, but appearances could be deceptive. He was a workaholic whose idea of a good breakfast after working through the night was black coffee, ice water, and a cigarette. He was a fearless negotiator who later freed nearly ten thousand Cubans and Americans from Havana, clearing up the mess left there by the Bay of Pigs adventure. For all his loyalty to Brooklyn, his experience in Europe during and after the war had made of him a true citizen of the world. He was not blind to Fisher’s merits because of ideology. In fact, he became a devoted admirer, ignoring the torrent of abuse that came with defending what one senior judge called the least
popular legal cause since that of Captain Preston in the Boston Massacre of 1770. Donovan had a high opinion of himself, but he had an even higher opinion of the law. As he told the prosecution in a pretrial conference: “We want all other countries to recognize that there is no higher justice than that found in American courts.”

After his round of golf, Donovan drove to the village of Lake Placid and borrowed a local lawyer’s library. Reading through the espionage statutes he found that since the Rosenberg case, spying on behalf of a foreign power had become a capital offense even in peacetime. Abel might have hoped for deportation, but he was looking at the electric chair.

Donovan had supper with his wife, then caught a night train to New York. “I sat alone in the club car, nursing a Scotch,” he wrote in his journal. “Before the train reached Utica, about one o’clock in the morning, I decided to undertake the defense of Colonel Abel.”

*  *  *

For the FBI it was no great honor to have unknowingly hosted a KGB colonel for nine years. Nor did it help, from a public relations point of view, that without Hayhanen he would never have been caught.

The Bureau set about looking busy. Evidence was minutely inspected, leads chased down, potential witnesses located and interviewed. The contents of Fisher’s room at the Hotel Latham and his studio and storeroom were laid out on twenty-five large trestle tables in the FBI field office in Manhattan. They included a hollow-handled shaving brush, a complete set of cipher tables on edible silver foil, a lathe, three pairs of reading glasses, an Aladdin’s cave of specialist photographic equipment, a small library including
The Ribald Reader
and a volume on thermonuclear weapons, dozens of Sucrets throat lozenge boxes, and a half-empty box of Sheik brand condoms. (It is a mystery whom, if anyone, Fisher was having sex with. When walking with one of Burt Silverman’s friends he was once startled to be greeted by a woman whom he pretended not to know, but he was never seen inviting anyone up to his studio or propositioning the models who occasionally took their clothes off for life classes in the Ovington building, much as he might have liked to. He may of course have paid for the services of professionals elsewhere, but none came forward when he was unmasked. Or he
may have been as monastic as he seemed and used the condoms to keep cash dry in Hayhanen’s dead drops.)

Agents tracked down everyone whom Hayhanen identified and many whom he didn’t. They went to Colorado and Atlantic City. They quizzed the superintendent of the Ovington building and Mrs. Donnelly and Mrs. Ash of the Vanderveer Estates, who had once passed a hollow nickel to an unsuspecting newsboy. And they put a tail on the newsboy.

In the four years the hollow nickel had lain undeciphered, James Bozart had grown up. By the summer of 1957 he was still a freckled redhead, but he was seventeen and going places. Having graduated high school in Brooklyn, he had won a place at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, to study engineering. He would come home on weekends, returning on the Monday milk train to Albany, from where he caught a bus to Troy. The train left Grand Central at one in the morning and arrived at six, and he often had a carriage to himself.

One Friday soon after starting at Rensselaer he came home to find two reporters from the
Daily News
waiting to ask him about the hollow nickel and a Russian spy. He told them what he could about the coin; couldn’t help them with the spy. The next Monday morning he woke up pulling into Albany to find that he had company—another night owl dozing in a corner seat and hoping not to miss his stop. They both got off at Albany; both took the bus to Troy.

“I didn’t think anything of it,” Bozart says. “But this happened twice, and the second time the train was delayed and I missed the bus. Class was at nine thirty. I was distressed. So the guy from the train comes up and asks if everything’s OK. ‘I’m here to make sure nothing happens to you,’ he says. He shows his badge, calls Albany Police Department, and I go to class in a police car.”

The next Friday the same man was on the train back to New York, and the following morning he was in a car outside the Bozarts’ front door on Avenue D in Brooklyn. With an FBI tail
and
a place at the third-best engineering school in the country, it was hard to see how life could get much better. Bozart met up with friends to go to Lynbrook on Long Island and told them about the Fed with the badge. “ ‘Let’s lose him,’ we said, and we lost him down on the waterfront. But he was waiting when I got home.”

Assistant U.S. Attorney William Tompkins had decided that Jimmy Bozart was a vital witness in the biggest case of his career and didn’t want to lose him playing cat and mouse on the Long Island Railroad. Bozart was subpoenaed and ordered not to leave the city while waiting his turn in the witness box. “I sat and waited for a month,” Bozart recalls. “The court arranged a tutorial at Brooklyn Polytechnic, where I ended up staying.” His place at Rensselaer went to someone else.

*  *  *

Burt and Helen Silverman sailed for Europe on August 12. Considering Burt’s closeness to the top-ranking Soviet spy in North America, he had not been too seriously disturbed. He took a call from a
New York Times
reporter wanting to confirm that “Abel” had attended their wedding, and the FBI paid him a second visit, this time to pick up a Remington portable typewriter that he had borrowed from their suspect. Otherwise, nothing.

The newlyweds were anxious not to have their Grand Tour interrupted. It would last three and a half months, they told the Bureau. They had a rough idea where they were going but not many hotel reservations. “OK,” said the agent who picked up the Remington. “Have a good trip.”

They had been gone six weeks when someone stuck a needle in a tire on their rental car. It made for a less-than-triumphal entry into Rome: they realized they had a flat as they were driving past the Forum. As Burt tried to bolt on a spare wheel, Helen’s shoulder bag was snatched from the passenger seat by a thief on a Vespa, and with it went both their passports and their money. Had they dodged the needle their tour might have continued more or less as planned, and the trial of Rudolf Abel might have turned out very differently. Instead, the Silvermans were forced to turn to officialdom for help.

“We had to go to the consulate to get new passports and a loan of money and everything else,” Burt remembers. “We were feeling kind of shitty.”

Two days later a visitor from the consulate asked for them at their hotel. Burt got ready to be impressed by the State Department’s speed at reissuing lost passports. “And this guy comes in and says, no, I’m a special attaché from the U.S. Justice Department and I’ve been trying to find you for three weeks.”

It must have been a congenial three weeks. The long arm of the U.S. Attorney’s Office had followed the Silvermans east along the Côte d’Azur from Nice to Monaco and thence to Venice, Florence, and now Rome, where its representative had spent four days scouring hotels without thinking to check the register at the American Express office. Had he done so he would have located the by-now-unhappy couple instantly, since they were hoping to meet up with friends and, as an irritated Helen pointed out, had put “a huge star by our names.”

The attaché gave a vague warning that Burt might be required at the unfolding Abel trial and left. He phoned back at two o’clock the next Saturday morning. Passport or no passport, Silverman was booked on the next day’s plane to New York to await the court’s instructions.

“Suppose I don’t go?” Silverman said.

“We’ll get a warrant. We’ll arrest you.”

The honeymoon was over.

*  *  *

As the Silvermans lay fretting in their bedroom in Rome, the world was changing around them at eighteen thousand miles an hour. Earlier that night, a Soviet R7 rocket shortened to reduce weight and maximize velocity had wrapped itself in curtains of white flame as it left the secret launchpad deep in Kazakhstan, from where the chief designer, Sergey Korolyov, had vowed to win the race to orbit at whatever cost.

The R7 was a fat and brutal thing, a giant cone of liquid oxygen and kerosene feeding five main rocket engines and twelve more directional thrusters. At blastoff, temperamental turbo pumps rammed fuel into the engines at a rate of nearly half a ton per second
per engine
. With the liquid oxygen cooled to below–183 degrees Celsius, pumps and fuel lines could freeze solid in an instant if not purged first with pressurized nitrogen. For a machine designed above all to be functional, there was an awful lot about it that could go wrong.

Eight seconds into its flight, still only one thousand feet above the steppe, the rocket’s telemetry reported a fault in one of its four forty-two-ton boosters. For nearly two minutes Korolyov and his exhausted team watched the readouts and the night sky in silence. Four of their last six test launches had ended in disaster, and the misfiring booster could destroy the rocket at any moment.

It didn’t. The first downrange tracking stations, clusters of parabolic dishes pointing skyward from beside the old imperial road to Samarqand, reported climb rates and acceleration that were within Korolyov’s margins of error. At 315.3 seconds, 250 miles above Siberia, the rocket’s nose cone opened and a polished aluminum sphere popped out.

By the time the Silvermans took their unwelcome call from the Justice Department’s special attaché,
Sputnik
was on its sixth orbit of planet Earth. Korolyov had waited one full orbit before telephoning Khrushchev and another before informing the rest of the Politburo. But by 2:00 a.m. Rome time—8:00 p.m. in Washington—the Soviet triumph was public and official and its implications were coursing like adrenaline through every newsroom in the world. The official Soviet news service broadcast details of the satellite’s wild, dancelike trajectory, which lurched from just 150 miles up to more than 500. Television networks plotted
Sputnik
’s course across the Northern Hemisphere, and viewers in their millions ran outside to scan the western horizon for a fast-moving silver dot.

Eisenhower feigned unconcern. He did not convene a meeting to discuss
Sputnik
until three days after its launch, and he waited yet another day before taking questions on it from the press. He acknowledged that the Russians had achieved “a very powerful thrust in their rocketry” but insisted that from a security point of view the satellite “does not raise my apprehensions.”

The trouble was, it raised everybody else’s. Lyndon B. Johnson said that when he looked up he saw a sky that suddenly “seemed almost alien.” He demanded an all-out drive to build a rocket with a million pounds of thrust. Senator Stuart Symington seized on
Sputnik
to launch the argument that the Soviets had opened up a missile gap far scarier than any bomber gap before it. Symington was not above grandstanding, but he understood perfectly that
Sputnik
was, as NASA’s administrator put it half a century later, “an almost unimaginable embarrassment for the United States.”