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.
He announced his arrival without incident. As instructed, a week after disembarking the Queen Mary he took a walk up the West Side of Manhattan and entered the park at Seventy-ninth Street. There was the Tavern on the Green, exactly where he had been told it would be. There was the bridle path and the white-painted wooden signpost. The thumbtack in his pocket, also white, would be invisible except to someone who was looking for it. He stuck it in and kept walking. No one noticed.
No one at all. For six months, on the twenty-first of each month, Hayhanen took the subway to the Lincoln Road exit of the Prospect Park station in Brooklyn. He would smoke a pipe and wear a blue tie with red stripes. If any Soviet official needed to make contact with the new number two illegal in North America, this was where and when to do it. No one did. The only response to his thumbtack came in a hollowed-out 1948 Jefferson nickel left at a dead drop whose location, like that of the signpost, he had memorized in training. But before Hayhanen had a chance to open the coin, he either spent it or he lost it.
For seven months the hollow nickel rattled around the New York City cash economy, intact. It was found on a hot Friday afternoon the following summer in a stairwell on the Vanderveer Estates in Brooklyn, outside an apartment shared by two lady school teachers, a Mrs. Donnelly and a Mrs. Ash.
James Bozart, then thirteen, fair haired, and freckled, was collecting for the Brooklyn Eagle, which he delivered every morning and was paid for every week. “The paper was thirty-five cents for the week, and people gave different types of tips,” he remembers. “The nickels were the cheapskates, but Mrs. Ash and Mrs. Donnelly weren’t cheapskates. They gave fifty cents—usually two quarters but this time a quarter, two dimes, and a nickel.
“I took the money and turn
ed round. They closed the door. I didn’t look at the tip at first—that would be rude. I went downstairs. The light was out and my heel caught on a step, so I tripped and dropped the nickel and it bounced on the edge of one of the steps and broke in half. I’m scrabbling for it in the dark and eventually I find the back of the coin, and inside it is this tiny square of something. I go to the window and hold the square up to the light and I think, what the hell is that?”
It was a pertinent question. Only a few days earlier, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg had been electrocuted at the Sing Sing Correctional Facility thirty miles up the Hudson River. Anguished liberals on every continent believed (inaccurately) that the Rosenbergs were innocent of spying for Russia, but Senator Joseph McCarthy considered them guilty as charged. Despite the best efforts of Edward R. Murrow to ridicule him on his CBS television show, McCarthy was still too popular to be disowned even by Eisenhower, the new Republican president. For all anyone knew in the Vanderveer Estates, the Communist conspiracy to destroy America was real and growing in strength with every hollowed-out nickel that happened to break apart in front of you.
Bozart had a school friend, Carolyn Lewind, whose father was an NYPD detective. When the newsboy finished his collection he went round to her house. Detective Lewind wasn’t there, so Bozart kept the coin and went home to show it to his mother. She had gone to church for Friday-night bingo, so he showed it to his father. After an inconclusive discussion, he pocketed the coin again and went out to play stickball.
Later that evening Detective Lewind came home to be told by his wife that young Jim Bozart had dropped by with what looked like a secret message on a piece of microfilm. Scenting a national emergency, the detective told his wife she was insane to have let the boy out of the house. “Next thing my father knows, Detective Lewind and his partner are at my house asking where I am,” Bozart recalls, “and my father looks at him and says I’m playing stickball.”
Emerging from the Bozarts’ apartment building, Lewind and his partner seized the tills of two nearby ice cream vans in case either one had received a hollow nickel. Then they interrupted Mrs. Bozart’s bingo game and impounded all the money in the church.
“So everybody’s pissed at me,” Bozart remembers. “Then Lewind and his partner see me playing stickball, and they come running.”
* * *
The case of the hollow nickel ended happily for the Brooklyn Eagle newsboy. He surrendered the coin but was given a replacement—“so you’re not out of anything,” as the detectives put it. Four years later he would interrupt his college studies to testify at the celebrated trial of a Russian spy known only as Rudolf Abel. An anonymous admirer rewarded him with a new car, an Oldsmobile 98, which he sold, building a substantial fortune in the entertainment business from the proceeds.
The case did not end badly for Mrs. Ash and Mrs. Donnelly, who were questioned but never suspected of collusion with the enemy. (They assumed they had received the nickel in change either from their local A&P market or the subway ticket office.) But for Fisher and Hayhanen it did not end well at all.
The message in the coin consisted of row upon row of single-digit numbers arranged in groups of five and shrunk to the size of a small cornflake. When eventually decoded, it turned out to be Hayhanen’s official welcome to New York. It had been encrypted, transferred to microfilm, and hidden in the coin by Fisher. Unaware that their very first communication had been intercepted and transferred swiftly to the FBI, both men went on doing the only thing they ever definitely did—burrowing deeper and deeper undercover. Fisher was much better at this than his sidekick. Abandoned by the Cohens and no doubt alarmed by the gruesome fate of the Rosenbergs, he set about turning his legend—that of the semiretired photofinisher—into some sort of reality. He slunk across the East River, away from the West Side, where he had rented a one-room apartment, and resurfaced with scarcely a ripple as an artist of no great ambition or talent with a studio in a converted Brooklyn warehouse.
He had little to report to Moscow. In the whole of 1952 and 1953, two critical years in the development in the American hydrogen bomb, the only noteworthy information from the chief Soviet illegal in the United States to his superiors was a concocted report that he had become a naturalized citizen.
“I could never work out what the hell he was doing there,” his friend Kyrill Khenkin said later. There was a real question: which person was now more real—the career KGB officer and former wartime radio expert or the family man forcibly separated from his family, watching the clock go down on his career? And there is a suitably evasive answer: in a city that was quite comfortable with frauds and misfits, Fisher went native.
Burt Silverman first met him in 1954. They were in an ancient, clanking elevator in the Ovington studios building on Fulton Street, where both had space on the fifth floor. They were going up, Silverman reading his mail, Fisher looking at Silverman. “It was the briefest of interactions,” Silverman says. “He looked at me in a very direct way and he nodded and he said hello, and he didn’t say anything else. And I said hello back. I remembered it as unusual because there were a lot of people in that building who never said hello. He had a certain kind of daring that was unusual.”
Silverman had recently left the army after national service and wanted to paint for a living. It irritated him that fifty miles east, on Long Island, a heavy drinker with trademark black jeans and the name Jackson Pollock was cornering the market. He was doing it by splattering paint randomly over huge canvases laid out on the floor of a barn, and this was not Silverman’s style. He was politically left leaning but artistically conservative. He wanted to paint things as they were, and he considered Pollock a plaything of shallow Manhattanites who cared only for fashion or a fraud who had beguiled them, which amounted to the same thing. On Pollock, Silverman and Fisher found common ground.
A week or so after their encounter in the elevator, Silverman was sweeping his studio when Fisher knocked quietly on his open door and came in to introduce himself as Emil Goldfus.
“I am retired,” he said in what Silverman took to be a mild Scottish accent. He said he had saved enough from running a photographic lab to be able to give up work and paint. He gave himself a tour of the room, admiring Silverman’s work and looking, the younger man says, “like a bird.” They talked about painting. Silverman lamented the Pollock phenomenon and Fisher said he liked Levitan, the nineteenth-century Russian realist. It was true, and clever, and the start of a quite singular relationship.
Their next meeting was also contrived by Fisher. Late one night Silverman was unwinding in his studio, half naked with a girlfriend whose portrait he had been painting. There was a loud knock at the door, and Fisher appeared asking for a cup of turpentine. Silverman muses later: “I’m not quite sure where the transformation took place between what was a young man’s annoyance at an older man coming to borrow turpentine, to the point that it became something very warm and fuzzy.… but it was quite rapid.”
Silverman’s father had died the previous year, and Burt found in “Emil” a replacement of sorts. Fisher had not seen his own family in six years; he found in Burt and his friends shared interests and a safe haven from suspicion. He would tell made-up stories about previous lives as a Boston accountant and a lumberjack in the Pacific Northwest. He spoke of nights spent playing marching tunes around campfires with Big Bill Haywood of the Industrial Workers of the World. He would invite Burt and his girlfriend to his studio for “jungle coffee” and aimless conversation (and sometimes music; he sought tips on painting but gave them on playing the guitar). Nothing was hidden, and nothing seemed more eccentric than the dozens of boiled white linen handkerchiefs he always had hanging out to dry—not the Hallicrafters shortwave radio standing on its end, apparently for want of a spare part; nor his large collection of bespoke optical equipment, which included an unusual miniature tripod with a slot for a strong magnifying lens; nor even the piles of maps and photographs of Bear Mountain State Park.
Not eve
ryone believed what Emil said about himself. Jules Feiffer, a playwright friend of Silverman’s, decided he’d been “on the bum.” Another friend, the illustrator Jerry Schwartz, who knew something of the photography business, could not believe that Emil had made money in it. But if there was something not right about his stories, that did not necessarily mean there was something wrong about the man. As Schwartz put it: “People make up stories about who they are and what their life is.”
With hindsight, Silverman has come to see Fisher as the lucky winner of a “reverse Fulbright”—a permit to roam and discover America at the Soviet government’s expense, with an informal expectation that he would pass on some of what he learned on his return. It is a charming and highly plausible summary of what Fisher was really up to, even though Silverman acknowledges some naïveté in his readiness to take “Emil” at face value. “I can be conned like the next person,” he admits. “But sitting in that studio with him endless hours, bullshitting about a whole variety of things, there was something about him that was beyond the con man.”
* * *
The courtly artist who so endeared himself to Silverman scared the heck out of Reino Hayhanen.
They did not meet for eighteen months—the timing of such things was left to Moscow—but when they did there was no doubt who was in charge. By early 1954, Hayhanen had been joined in New York by his second wife. They had moved out of the city to a remote lakeside bungalow near Peekskill. A sense of unreality about Hayhanen’s first months in America, created by the total absence of communication from his superiors, had eventually lifted when a “legal” rezident attached to the Soviet delegation to the United Nations met him at the Prospect Park subway station and recognized him by his pipe.
Bridge of Spies Page 4
