Bridge of Spies (4 page)

Fisher’s main task was to rebuild the Soviet spy network in America. If he succeeded, the flow of information from Los Alamos and the top secret fuel enrichment laboratory at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, would start again. Stalin’s scientists would conquer nuclear fission, then leapfrog the West to make a reality of fusion, and the H-bomb as well. Berlin, Washington, and London would quake without a shot being fired. That was the fantasy, and as long as Fisher was safely ensconced at a KGB training facility in the woods outside Moscow, there was no harm in fantasizing.

Fisher’s superiors had chosen him for his background and his personality. As far as they could tell he was a man of unswerving loyalty and discipline. He was educated but not overeducated. In the war he had shown respect for tradecraft and courage under fire. He was a genius with radios and able to deflect attention from himself as completely as a mirror.

He was quite unlike the KGB’s best-known British recruits, the so-called Cambridge Five, whom he detested. Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, John Cairncross, and Anthony Blunt were cosseted products of the English class system. Fisher was a stranger to privilege. He saw himself as a Soviet patriot and the others as traitors to their motherland. They were louche and libidinous. He was ascetic. They were dilettantes. He was a Bolshevik born and bred—yet he was also irresistibly human. “There was something—can I say that?—lovable about him.” That was the verdict of the man whom Fisher fooled most comprehensively about his true identity, the New York artist Burton Silverman.

Fisher was rail thin, with the countenance of a weasel and a mental toughness that still amazes those who knew him. He switched identities throughout his working life but never forgot his own. He could hold forth for hours on music theory or mathematics, both of which he taught himself. He was a soulful player of the classical guitar and a passable painter whose work Robert Kennedy would later try to hang in the White House.

He was born in Newcastle upon Tyne in the north of England in 1903 to German parents. He moved with them to Russia at age eighteen. Those bare facts of his biography gave him fluency in the three languages a secret agent of his era needed most. His father gave him his vocation: Heinrich Fisher was already a committed revolutionary when he first met Lenin in the 1890s. Having grown up on an aristocrat’s estate in central Russia, he turned to Marxism with the zeal and arrogance of the autodidact. He and Lenin taught and agitated at the Saint Petersburg Technological Institution until Fisher senior was arrested for sedition and exiled to Archangel in the Russian Arctic in 1896. After that, as an ethnic German, he faced deportation and compulsory service in the German army. England offered refuge. Heinrich sailed with his young wife to Newcastle upon Tyne, where they had two sons. The first was named Henry after his father. The second was William, but they called him Willie.

After the 1905 Russian revolution failed, Willie’s father turned to gunrunning to help the proletariat he had left behind. (One shipment that was discovered before being dispatched to the Baltic included more than a million rounds of ammunition, including some for the type of Mauser pistol used to assassinate Czar Nicholas.) After the 1917 revolution
succeeded, the Fishers returned to Russia to put themselves at its service.

Willie Fisher embraced the great Soviet experiment in utopia building, and it embraced him back. He joined the Communist Youth League, which put him to work as a translator. Then he served two years in the Red Army as a radio operator. He was young enough for his command of languages and experience of a foreign country to be a qualification, not grounds for suspicion. By the age of twenty-four, in the eyes of the ever-expanding Soviet intelligence apparatus, he was ripe for recruitment. He was also married to the illegitimate daughter of a Polish count.

Elena Lebedeva, a ballerina-turned-harpist at the Moscow Conservatory, met Fisher at a party in 1926. She glimpsed in him a loneliness and self-sufficiency at once intriguing and forbidding, which he carried with him all the way to Glienicke Bridge. When he proposed to her she asked him: “But do you love me?”

“How do I know if I love you?” he replied. “Your character is soft and warm. I’m the opposite, but we’ll make a good couple. We’ll complement each other.”

We’ll complement each other
. Such bleak detachment may have helped him withstand the strain of life as a covert agent, but it was born of tragedy. A few weeks after their arrival in Russia, in the summer of 1921, Willie and Henry had been helping to look after a large group of children camping on the banks of a river outside Moscow. One of the children had been dragged under by an unseen current. Henry had dived in and saved the child but drowned immediately afterward. Willie, who had never learned to swim, could only stand and watch. He was inconsolable.

With Elena, he could at least find contentment and security. Through her family’s connections he landed his first job with the OGPU, precursor to the KGB. In 1931 they left Moscow with a baby daughter on his first long foreign assignment. Their destination: Norway.

When the Fishers crossed the frontier into Finland in September 1931, they crossed into the netherworld of Soviet “illegals.” The term is misleading, as all spies worth the label break the law. But in the language of the Cheka, the original Bolshevik terror apparatus, “illegal” had a special meaning. It recalled the revolutionary underground in
which the party’s founders had first confronted the czarist secret police; and the code names they had adopted; and the exploits of the first generation of Soviet agents sent abroad to spread the revolution when no other European country would recognize the murderous new regime.

“Lenin” was the code name of one Vladimir Ulyanov. “Stalin” was that of Joseph Dzhugashvili. Fisher’s code name, to begin with, was Frank. He did not keep it long, but the intelligence chiefs who ran his career remained fixated by the cult of the illegals until well after they had outlived their usefulness, and they remained convinced that Fisher was ideally suited to the job.

In a sense, he was. Like a nuclear submarine, he proved he could stay hidden almost indefinitely. But hiding took so much of his energy that it is doubtful whether he had much left over to find out anything useful about his enemy. “He was a brilliant and conscientious spy,” a retired KGB general who played a central role in securing Fisher’s eventual release insists to this day. “It is an obvious fact that he was handling agents about whom the Americans still know nothing.” In fact this is not obvious at all. There is no evidence that Fisher recruited any useful agents who have not yet been identified or transmitted any significant intelligence collected by those who have been. This did not stop both sides colluding in the creation of the legend of Willie Fisher—by another name—as the most effective Soviet spy of the cold war.

In Oslo, his work protected him. It was simple and unobtrusive: his job was to build his cover as an importer of electrical appliances and establish a network of radio relay stations to help Moscow communicate with other spies in northern Europe. For three years he busied himself in the attics of Communist sympathizers and unsuspecting clients, hiding and testing radio equipment. He and his young family lived quietly on the Baltic coast, while in Russia the Cheka began to devour its own.

For decades, Stalin’s reign of terror was understood as an expression of his own peculiar madness. But his purging of the intelligence apparatus that he relied on to control his empire may have a more rational explanation—that he had been a traitor himself. The claim was first published in the 1990s in a Russian biography of Stalin by Edvard Radzhinsky. Vasili Mitrokhin’s treasure trove of documents on Soviet
foreign intelligence, smuggled out of Russia as the Soviet Union collapsed, also contained evidence that Stalin may have been a paid informer of the czar’s secret police before 1917. If so, the information would go at least some way toward explaining his merciless paranoia toward anyone connected—however tenuously—to the Bolshevik old guard.

As a Chekist whose father had known Lenin, Fisher was lucky not to be woken in the night and summarily executed on his return to Moscow. Instead he was merely fired. A friend of his father’s found him a job in an aircraft factory before Hitler changed everything by invading Russia. From the moment the panzers rumbled into Minsk, Soviet national survival took precedence over personal—and national survival would need a functioning intelligence service. In September 1941, Fisher was reinstated as a lieutenant in the Cheka, by then renamed the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, or NKVD. “He was lucky,” his Russian biographer remarked later. “Russia was inefficient. If it had been Germany, he
would
have been shot.”

He had an outstanding war. Adopted as a protégé of Pavel Sudoplatov, the mastermind of Trotsky’s murder in Mexico the year before, Fisher edged, Gump-like, onto the main stage of the vast theater of the eastern front. On November 7, 1941, a day still etched in gold in Russia’s official history, he found himself in a blizzard in Red Square.

It was the anniversary of the revolution. The Germans had advanced to within a day’s march of the Kremlin, but Stalin decreed that the annual Red Army parade should proceed as normal. “My pass to the parade was stamped
PROKHOD VSIDY
, which meant I was allowed access to the leadership standing in review on top of Lenin’s tomb,” Sudoplatov recalled. He had been ordered by Lavrenty Beria, Stalin’s chief henchman, to report any military developments to him immediately on the rostrum on Lenin’s mausoleum. “The situation was critical: the German advance was only thirty miles from Moscow. I brought along with me to Red Square a young captain, William Fisher, chief of the radio communications section of my department.… We stayed in touch with NKVD headquarters and the brigade defending Moscow. It was snowing so heavily that the Germans could not send aircraft to bomb Red Square. However, the order for the troops participating in the parade was very strict: no matter what happens, stay calm and maintain discipline.”

As the parade was coming to an end, Captain Fisher received a request from the front for reinforcements. He passed it to Sudoplatov, who passed it to Stalin, who gave perhaps the most cinematic military order of his career. Through driving snow, several battalions marched directly from Red Square to the front, where they covered themselves in glory by deflecting the German advance.

The following year Fisher was involved in what Sudoplatov called “the most successful radio deception game of the war.” The game was played with the cooperation of Lieutenant Colonel Heinrich Scherhorn, a German artillery commander trapped by Soviet forces in the forests of Belorussia in the summer of 1944. On August 19, a Soviet double agent code-named Max reported to German intelligence that Scherhorn was surrounded by 2,500 men but still able to fight. In fact he was a prisoner of the Russians and remained one for the rest of the war, while the German high command wasted precious resources re-supplying his fictitious force. One supply run involved sixty-seven transport planes, thirteen portable radios, and ten million rubles in cash. Some of the aircraft were allowed to land and return to prolong the hoax. The rest were impounded and their crews taken prisoner.

Fisher was modest to a fault and, later in life, never made the mistake of believing his own publicity. But if his daughter ever asked him what he did in the war, he could reasonably have replied that he helped to win it. That was certainly the view of his bosses in the KGB. His reward was the most prestigious post in Soviet foreign intelligence: America.

*  *  *

“I would rather perish than betray the secrets entrusted to me.… With every heartbeat, with every day that passes, I swear to serve the Party, the homeland and the Soviet People.”

In late October 1948, Willie Fisher swore the illegals’ oath at a solemn meeting with his handlers in the Lyubianka, where the NKVD had its headquarters. He was then summoned to the offices of Vyacheslav Molotov, the former Soviet foreign minister, in the old foreign ministry building on Kuznetsky Most Street. They talked about Fisher’s mission and were joined afterward by his family for dinner. It was an astonishing amount of attention to lavish on a mere illegal. Whatever happened to him in America, in Russia he had arrived.

Apart from Stalin himself, no one personified Soviet power and
cunning like Molotov. He had dined with Hitler, signed away Poland and the Baltics in the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact, girded the Soviet empire for resistance when Hitler invaded, and inspired his very own cocktail, the anti-Soviet petrol bomb. Now he was anointing Willie Fisher as his secret weapon in the new war against America. Old Heinrich Fisher would have burst with pride.

After the dinner Willie returned with his wife and daughter to their dacha and said good-bye. He would not see them again for seven years.

He was driven to the Leningradsky station in a black limousine and seen off by Viktor Abakumov, the founder of SMERSH (in English, Death to Spies, whose Russian acronym Ian Fleming borrowed in his search for a worthy rival for James Bond).
^*
From there Fisher took a train to Warsaw and another to Cuxhaven. Alone and surely lonesome, he boarded the SS
Scythia
. His genuine American passport bore his own picture but the name Andrew Kayotis. Fisher never used his real name again.

The real Kayotis, Lithuanian born and Detroit bred, had conveniently died while visiting relatives in Vilnius the previous year. His papers had been spirited to Moscow. His life story, gleaned from his surviving Lithuanian family, had been absorbed by the tall, spare passenger who ate by himself and read quietly for hours at a time as the
Scythia
and its complement of hopeful emigrants set course via Le Havre for the New World.

*  *  *

On paper, Fisher’s workload was crushing. Besides reviving the spy network that had kick-started the Soviet nuclear program, he was tasked with single-handedly softening up the North American continent for the Third World War. “His mission would be to gain access to military installations, warehouses, and stored supplies of ammunition,” Sudoplatov wrote, as if none of that should have presented a problem for a competent undercover radio ham. “We badly needed to know how
quickly American reinforcements could appear in Europe.” Later, Sudoplatov’s biographers cast Fisher’s role in even grander terms: “He directed preparations to take over the Western Hemisphere in case the rising tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union turned into a new world war.”