Bridge of Spies

by Giles Whittell

  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.”

  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.