Bridge of Spies (5 page)

In practice Fisher had been unleashed on the Western world with few realistic obligations and no serious deadlines. He had ten days in which to make his way by bus through New England to keep a prearranged appointment in New York. There a contact from the Soviet consulate general gave him a thousand dollars in cash and a new identity in the name of Emil Goldfus. As Goldfus he went walkabout.

Willie Fisher was by this time forty-five, happily married, and a deeply committed Communist. He was also more alone than he had ever been, as forcibly reliant on himself as a cosmonaut cut loose from his space station. It is hard to imagine his state of mind as he simultaneously scouted the country for ammunition dumps and fought to reconcile the Soviet caricature of America with his first impressions of the reality—of the richest nation on earth, unscarred by war. He would have had the solo traveler’s heightened awareness, the salivary overload of the half-starved Soviet worker released into a place of unimaginable bounty, and the gradually abating paranoia of a spy at large in the land of the free.

It is even harder to know for certain where Fisher went or what he did—though all the clues suggest he headed for the sun. He was drawn first to California. He had orders to find out if the United States was still shipping arms to Chiang Kai-shek and his Chinese nationalists from the port of Long Beach (it was). While in California Fisher also found time to create a brand-new network of “agent informers” recruited mainly from German Jewish émigrés, according to Sudoplatov. Their role in the event of a “Special Period” (a U.S.-Soviet war) would be to join forces with illegals disguised as seasonal workers streaming north from Central America to paralyze the giant defense contractors of the West Coast with a campaign of coordinated sabotage. There never was a Special Period, however, so we may never know how much of Fisher’s ambitious agenda was real and how much camouflage for a richly deserved vacation.

On his way back to New York, he probably paused in Santa Fe.

The adobe plaza of New Mexico’s favorite tourist destination was the closest a Soviet intelligence officer could get to Los Alamos without attracting too much attention from the FBI. It was fortunate, then, that the KGB already had a safe house there, disguised as a pharmacy. This has been identified by Jerrold Schecter, a former
Time
magazine Moscow bureau chief who smuggled Khrushchev’s autobiography out of Russia for publication in the 1960s, as Zook’s Drugstore. It no longer exists, but it did in the 1940s. It had a decent lunch counter, and there are reasons to believe it served the purpose Schecter says it did: Santa Fe had been a vital staging point for the NKVD team that murdered Trotsky in a villa outside Mexico City in 1940.

Santa Fe was also the obvious collection point for stolen diagrams from the Manhattan Project, and a former pupil of Fisher’s had spent a year there during the war passing secrets from physicists to couriers. Her name was Kitty Harris. The bigamous wife of the head of the Communist Party USA and former lover of the suave British traitor Donald Maclean, Harris had been recruited by Soviet intelligence in the early 1930s. As part of her basic training she had been taught how to use a radio by Willie Fisher.

So many roads led to Santa Fe that he almost certainly dropped by, if only in the spirit of Curious George. And so it was, in all likelihood, that the spearhead of Stalin’s foreign intelligence operation, the man Molotov had ordered to wreak havoc across America should the looming clash of ideologies come to war, stepped off a Greyhound bus into the clear light and astringent air of northern New Mexico sometime in the early spring of 1949. He liked to wear a straw hat to cover his balding pate. His tailored Daks trousers conveyed a hint of style and affluence. He dabbed his nose constantly with white linen handkerchiefs and carried a suitcase. If asked, he had lived across the Midwest and worked variously as an accountant, engineer, and photofinisher but was now “semi-retired and self-employed.” He lived in New York City.

Forced to live in unfamiliar countries and under layer upon layer of disguise, many illegals went to pieces, or to the other side, or both. Fisher did not. His straightforward devotion to Communism was one reason. His devotion to his family was another: they were the KGB’s guarantee that he would not defect. But there may have been a third
explanation for his loyalty: a desire to emulate the great illegals in whose footsteps he was following. One of these was Arnold Deutsch, recruiter of the Cambridge Five and indulger of their sexual shenanigans. Deutsch had been rewarded during the war with the promise of the post of senior illegal in New York—in effect, Fisher’s job—but he had drowned on the way there when his ship was torpedoed in the mid-Atlantic. Another was Alexander “the Swede” Orlov, code name “Schwed.” Orlov had endeared himself to the Kremlin by spiriting the entire gold reserves of the Spanish government to Moscow during the Spanish civil war. He then enraged Stalin by defecting to Chicago and threatening to expose him as a czarist informer should any harm come to the family Orlov had left behind.

If Fisher was in awe of such chutzpah, he did not show it. Around July 11, 1949—his forty-sixth birthday—he returned to New York for another scheduled meeting, this time with a “legal” KGB resident at the Soviet consulate general who refilled his wallet with cash and took him for a walk in Bear Mountain State Park. At one point the resident was about to ask a park ranger the time when Fisher jumped in and did the talking to save his contact from having to reveal his Russian accent.

Two spies, and not a watch between them.

Soon afterward, Fisher was ordered to reactivate the Volunteer network that had handled most of the logistics for the smuggling of nuclear secrets to Russia. This was easier said than done. Most of the network’s sources had stopped cooperating. Security at Los Alamos had been tightened since the war, and Fisher was obsessed above all with not getting caught. Even so, he went through the motions. His first move was to contact Lona Cohen, formerly a housekeeper to a wealthy Manhattan family, now married to Morris Cohen and half of a famous KGB double act. Lona and Willie had arranged to meet at the Bronx Zoo, but on the way there she sensed she had a tail. She did; it was Willie, dusting off his tradecraft. She doubled back, changed subway lines, and stepped in and out of train cars as the doors were closing but couldn’t shake him. Eventually they sat down next to each other on a bench outside the bird house and introduced themselves.

The Cohens ran the Volunteer network and were veteran couriers themselves. It was Lona, in fact, who had hidden a diagram of the bomb used in the Trinity test of July 1945 in a box of tissues in case she was
searched on her way back to New York. Like Fisher, the Cohens would have been much busier in 1949 if Elizabeth Bentley—the Soviet spy who gave her secrets to the FBI in 1945—and J. Edgar Hoover had not between them muzzled many of Moscow’s best sources of nuclear intelligence. Yet these sources had not dried up completely.

Soon after the end of the war, Niels Bohr, the Danish genius of atomic structure, had nervously agreed to help Igor Kurchatov achieve a stable nuclear reaction. Klaus Fuchs, the German-born physicist, was also still leaking valuable information, though by this time from the Harwell research laboratory outside London. And yet another Soviet mole, George Koval, who was not unmasked until 2007, provided the critically important recipe for a polonium initiator without which the Los Alamos team had found that a plutonium-based bomb would not achieve a chain reaction. Kurchatov had long since been focused on plutonium—he had found that even with all the uranium in Bulgaria he did not have enough of it—and on August 29, 1949, his plutonium bomb at last went off. Willie Fisher had almost nothing to do with it, but it was still the high point of his espionage career.

The mushroom cloud that rose off the steppe that day ended the American nuclear monopoly and occasioned rare largesse from the Kremlin. On the personal orders of Lavrenty Beria, by then the second-most-powerful man in the Soviet Union, the children of foreign illegals who had been involved in the grand theft of the capitalist bomb were given automatic places at university. For being in roughly the right place at the right time, Fisher and the Cohens were also awarded the Order of the Red Banner, an honor normally reserved for military heroes. But for Fisher in particular the party was over before it had begun. Ted Hall, one of Lona Cohen’s best sources at Los Alamos, had moved to Chicago and given up spying: “No more,” he told Fisher and Cohen when they tried one last time to talk him out of his decision. “I helped you during the wartime and now it is over.” Klaus Fuchs had been identified in the decrypted Venona Soviet intelligence cables and was arrested in London in January 1950. He named his main contact, who in turn identified two idealistic but ineffectual Communist spies, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. They were tried, convicted, and sentenced to death in 1951. Their appeals would last two years and fail. The Cohens had already fled the country. Fisher tried and failed to recruit a young
man Lona Cohen had cared for in her previous life as a housekeeper. He could be grateful that the Rosenbergs did not reveal anything to lead the FBI to him, but otherwise the outlook for his brave new spy network could hardly have been bleaker.

Until, that is, a white thumbtack appeared on a signpost in New York’s Central Park in October 1952.

*  *  *

Soviet illegals spent years establishing their cover and almost as long practicing secure communications. In the 1950s that did not mean sixty-four-bit digital encryption. It meant pencils and pads of paper (to be destroyed after one use), hollowed-out coins and bolts, rolls and tiny flakes of microfilm, dead drops, and signals for dead drops. Apart from shortwave radios there was not much communication equipment in use by the KGB in the midtwentieth century that would not have been available at the turn of the nineteenth.

The Americans behaved differently. Faced with the new realities of the nuclear age, the CIA went looking for new hardware. It commissioned extraordinary machines that might not be possible to build but would solve big problems if they could be. Roosevelt had done this with the atom bomb. Kennedy would do it with the moon rocket. Was it not the American way?

It was, but it could still take desk jockeys by surprise.

Don Flickinger, later an air force general, was at his desk in the Life Sciences Division of the air force’s Aero Research and Development Command in Baltimore one January morning in 1955 when his commanding officer summoned him urgently. Flickinger was told that the secretary of the air force wanted to see him “ASAP.” He said he could drive down to Washington anytime in the next day or so. The CO said no: he needed to be there in the next
hour
. A car was waiting.

The drive was quick. On arrival at the Pentagon, Flickinger was taken straight to the secretary and told on strict need-to-know terms that a new high-altitude reconnaissance plane was being built to an extremely tight deadline on the West Coast.

The secretary then asked Flickinger about pressure suits. Could the suits that the air force was using in its rocket planes keep a pilot alive if his cockpit depressurized at seventy thousand feet? They could, Flickinger
said, as long as the pilot descended quickly to about ten thousand feet.

“Let us assume that the pilot cannot descend from the specified mission altitude of seventy thousand feet,” the secretary said.

“Why not?” Flickinger asked.

“Because underneath is not friendly but strictly forbidden territory,” said the secretary.

“Why is it forbidden to the pilot?”

“Because underneath is the Soviet Union.”

That put a new complexion on the problem, and the meeting. Flickinger explained that the best suits available at that point were get-me-down suits only. If getting down was not an option, pilot and plane would both be lost. But
that
was the outcome that was not an option, the secretary observed. How long would it take to produce a better suit? Three to five years, Flickinger said, given the necessary funds. The secretary stood up, walked around his desk, and said he didn’t have three years. He had ten months.

*  *  *

The thumbtack in Central Park was left there by a man who claimed to be a former blacksmith from Lapland. It was true that he had lived in Lapland and worked briefly as a blacksmith, but it would have been more useful for the FBI (and Willie Fisher) to know that he was also a wife beater, an alcoholic, and quite possibly the worst spy in the history of the KGB. It was this man, more than anyone, who made Fisher look good. His name was Reino Hayhanen and he was fresh off the
Queen Mary
.

In 1952 Hayhanen was thirty-two, and his best years were behind him. Why such a dismal underachiever should have been given a central role in the collection of nuclear intelligence and the disruption of what is now called U.S. homeland security remains a mystery. There are explanations, but none suffices. His parents were Soviet citizens but ethnic Finns, so he spoke Finnish and would eventually pass as a Finnish-American. He was a diligent schoolboy who had earned a place at the Leningrad Pedagogical Institute, from which he was sucked into the lower ranks of the NKVD as its higher ranks were decimated in the terrifying purges that became known as the Terror. Perhaps most important,
he happened to be known to the new head of the KGB’s illegals directorate, Aleksandr Korotkov. A man of naked ambition but no apparent judgment, Korotkov owed his own rise through the bureaucracy to a two-year stint supervising the assassination of Trotskyites in Paris before the war and a willingness to disown his Jewish wife and children during the purges.

Hayhanen could at least claim to have run a few risks in the cause of secrecy. By the time he set sail for New York he had spent two years hammering metal and bribing neighbors in northern Finland to establish his legend as Eugene Maki, the son of returned Finnish-American emigrants. That proved enough to obtain a U.S. passport from the consulate in Helsinki. He had also married an attractive young Finn named Hannah Kurikka (without divorcing his first wife, whom he left in Russia). And he had crossed the Soviet-Finnish border undetected in the trunk of a KGB car not once but three times. He was no coward.