Bridge of Spies

by Giles Whittell

  Those meetings continued through the summer. There is no indication that they achieved anything beyond giving Hayhanen an excuse to drive down from Peekskill in a blue Studebaker bought with money that he was supposed to have used to set up a business as his cover. He picked up the money at dead drops whose locations he had learned in Moscow. Drop One was a hole in a wall in the Bronx. Drop Two was on a footbridge near Ninety-fifth Street in Central Park. Drop Three was under a lamppost in Fort Tryon Park, north of the George Washington Bridge. He would know which one to visit by the number of chalk marks left on a wall in the subway station at Eightieth Street and Central Park West.

  Over the winter the money kept coming—five hundred dollars a month in addition to a four-thousand-dollar lump sum meant for his cover. By his own admission he spent most of it on drink. Meanwhile, the meetings stopped. The man from the UN told him that if anyone else needed to reach him they would do so through the drops, then broke off contact. Another six months followed without a single message from his employer. In his rare sober moments, unable to confide even in his lonely and bewildered wife, Hayhanen must have reflected that this was a strange way to prepare for World War III, and an even stranger way to earn a living. Even so, as winter turned to spring and the cherry blossoms lit up Fort Tryon Park, it was more with dread than excitement that he picked up a message to meet a man named only “Mark” at the RKO Keith’s Theater in Queens.

  The sad shell of RKO Keith’s now squats under the final approach to La Guardia. At the time it was a teeming shrine to Hollywood fantasy, and there was plenty that was cinematic about the first U.S. summit of KGB illegals in the H-bomb era.

  Mark, whose real name was Willie Fisher, was impatient. Hayhanen’s personal file was already full of negative remarks about his personal life, but Fisher hadn’t read it and could not understand why Moscow had made him wait so long to meet his assistant. At his instruction they met in the men’s restroom under the cinema but moved quickly to a coffee shop three blocks away. He dispensed with passwords. “I know you are the right man,” he said. Except that he already knew he was the wrong man for the job.

  Hayhanen wore the same striped tie he had worn for his trips to Prospect Park, but it did nothing for him. He smoked the same pipe, but it made him stick out like a bad secret agent at a rendezvous. He ordered in English, but his accent was terrible. Had he set up his cover business? He had not. Fisher told him to get on with it and warned that they would be meeting at least once a week from now on.

  In the weeks that followed, Fisher slipped out of his new life as an artist and into his old one as a spy more frequently, giving Hayhanen remedial training in Morse code, photography, and microdot technique and finding to his dismay that his pupil was supremely reluctant to learn. He was baffled as to why Moscow Center would send such a klutz on such a vital assignment (and so was Vasili Mitrokhin, the KGB defector who later saw Hayhanen’s file and could only conclude that the KGB decided to keep him in intelligence work “no matter what, regardless of signs that he was in trouble” for fear that he might otherwise betray more useful agents).

  Not that Fisher’s own tradecraft was flawless. In desperation, he twice took Hayhanen to a storeroom he rented along with his studio on Fulton Street, to give him a radio and then a camera. Despite his befuddled condition Hayhanen was able to remember the address, and it would come in handy.

  Senator McCarthy was right, of course. There were reds under the bed; paid-up professional red infiltrators. There were precisely two of them. And then there was one. In June 1955, Fisher slipped a note under Burt Silverman’s door saying he would be gone a few months, and disappeared.

  * * *

  It was a time when people did just up and vanish, on both sides of the cold war. There were as many reasons as there were secret projects, and Tony Bevacqua was part of such a project. In time it would take him hurtling over Iceland at three and a half times the speed of sound. It would entitle him to quote the version of Psalm 23 favored by the pilots of the 4080th Strategic Reconnaissance Wing of the U.S. Air Force: “Yea though I fly through the valley of the shadow of death I shall fear no evil, for I am at eighty thousand feet … and climbing.” It would put him in pressure suits with titanium neck rings and visors with translucent gold leaf sandwiched between layers of toughened glass to fend off the ultraviolet rays hitting his cockpit directly from outer space. In time the project would divulge most of its secrets, but in the early years of the H-bomb era Tony Bevacqua was not yet privy to the best of them.

  He was a promising young pilot—promising enough, at twenty-three, to have completed jet fighter training at Luke Air Force Base in Arizona and been assigned to 408th Squadron of the 508th Strategic Fighter Wing at Turner Air Force Base in Georgia. He was in the process of being cleared to drop free-fall nuclear weapons on any target selected for him by the Pentagon. Since there weren’t enough atom bombs for everyone to train with, that involved old-fashioned air-to-air gunnery and skip bombing with conventional explosives in swept-wing F-84F Thunderstreaks. “You’d go as low as you wanted to go,” Bevacqua remembers. “Fifty feet, even twenty-five.”

  As a lieutenant he could live off base if he wanted to. The bachelor officers’ quarters at Turner were so grim that he and three friends had decided to do just that and share a house. Those friends were Victor Milam, Wesley Upchurch, and another pilot who was a year older than the rest of them and a year ahead in training; he was already cleared to deliver nukes, which meant he was officially trusted to keep a certain sort of secret.

  One morning in January 1956, Bevacqua, Milam, and Upchurch came down to breakfast to find that their friend had gone. There had been no warning. He had left no forwarding address or explanation. He’d simply packed and left. What would have struck them as even stranger, had they known about it, was that on the same day a young man resembling their friend in every detail checked into a Washington hotel under the name of Francis Palmer. It was not a name they’d heard before.

  * * *

  May 24, 1956, Newark, New Jersey: soon after 8:30 a.m. police answered an emergency call from 806 Bergen Street, a three-story house in a run-down neighborhood half an hour’s drive from Manhattan. A man sounding Scandinavian and giving his name as Eugene Maki had suffered a deep cut to the leg and been taken to hospital, where he received three stitches.

  The cursory police report did not mention a puddle of blood at the front of the house. It did not mention blood running through the hallway to the back door or blood spattered—Pollock-like—on the interior walls. The police chose to believe the injured man’s story that he had cut himself with a knife while packing. His neighbors knew better. They had seen the empty bottles and heard the escalating arguments in a strange European language. The man’s wife had had enough. Still unable to speak more than a few words of English and desperately unhappy, Hannah Maki had gone berserk and cut her husband’s leg to the bone.

  It was not the sort of cover life that Fisher had begged Hayhanen to set up. It was the implosion of a life torn from its roots and denied any real purpose except to hide. The last straw had been the removal of the facade of self-discipline forced on Hayhanen by his chilly and disdainful boss.

  Shortly before Fisher’s disappearance the previous summer, the two men had driven up to Bear Mountain State Park and buried five thousand dollars in cash beside a secluded stretch of hiking trail. Fisher ordered Hayhanen to return at a later date, dig the money up, and give it to Helen Sobell, the wife of Morton Sobell. (Yet another unmasked Soviet spy, Sobell had been convicted along with the Rosenbergs and sentenced to thirty years in prison, sixteen of which he spent in Alcatraz. He did not confess until 2008, when he was ninety-one.) Hayhanen did dig the money up but didn’t give it to Mrs. Sobell. He kept it and used it for the deposit on the damp and depressing premises he leased in the fall of 1955 in Newark, New Jersey.

  The idea was to set up a photo-processing shop whose real role would be as hub of a new network of nuclear spies and co
uriers. The unhappy couple moved down from Peekskill to live above the shop. While preparing the front office, Hayhanen smeared opaque glass wax over the main window. He never cleaned it off. Instead he used the space to store empty vodka bottles, which according to his later sworn testimony he drained at a rate of one a night.

  Hayhanen became known on Bergen Street for having money even though he never worked and for beating his beautiful wife unmercifully. “The screams coming from that place during the night were terrible,” one neighbor would tell a private investigator sent by a prestigious Brooklyn law office. “People were always calling the police. I called them myself one night, but the cops couldn’t get in.”

  After the knife fight that landed him in hospital, Hayhanen realized he was attracting too much attention. Leaving the Bergen Street premises locked and the wax still on its windows, he took his wife and Studebaker back up the Hudson to Peekskill. The car was once again vital for Hayhanen’s routine of checking New York’s dead drops for his wages, but it fell apart. Neighbors noted that he returned from one trip to the city minus a rear fender, from another with only one headlight, from a third with the front fender gone. When finally charged with drunk driving and stripped of his license, he was reduced to using taxis. The Hayhanens confined themselves more and more to their bungalow and put on weight.

  * * *

  There was a perfectly good reason for the dutiful Fisher to abandon Hayhanen to his vices. He had told the credulous Burt Silverman that he was going to California to sell the rights to a device he had invented for producing multiple color prints from a single negative. In fact he was going home on leave. That entailed an impossibly romantic odyssey by rail, road, and Air France Constellation via Mexico City, Paris, and Vienna. It produced poignant pictures for the Fisher family album of the colonel in his own skin and a short-sleeved shirt, relaxing in deck chairs outside Moscow with his wife and friends. And it nearly saved him from what was to come: it is likely that Fisher’s superiors considered keeping him in Moscow to teach tradecraft rather than sending him back to what had proved a singularly unproductive stint abroad.

  In the end, though, Fisher did return to New York. He phoned Burt Silverman out of the blue one afternoon early in 1956 and said he’d had a good trip to California. To explain the length of his trip—he had been away seven months—he added as an afterthought that he had had a heart attack in Texas. As ever, Silverman suspended disbelief and took weird old Emil at face value. He was concerned about the heart attack but, more than anything, relieved. His friend was back, and for someone who had just cheated death he sounded in remarkably good spirits.

  Back in Brooklyn, the artist known as Emil threw himself into painting and the social life of the Ovington studios with a new confidence. It was as if his strange unexplained absence had confirmed his status as a man of many parts who decided for himself which parts could be discussed and which could not. He had immunized himself from gossip and began to test his immunity. One evening, when Silverman joked to a friend on the telephone that he and Emil had been “listening in on Moscow” on the shortwave radio, Fisher snarled at him never to use the phrase again on the phone, even in jest. It was completely out of character but good advice given the times. It was not mentioned again. Another night, sketching a nude model at a life class, Fisher leaned over to a fellow student who thought he knew him well and whispered, “Boy, I’d like to fuck her.”

  Had he given up spying altogether? It is entirely possible. Stalin had been dead three years. Fisher knew from his long visit home that Russia was already a changed country; less paranoid, less likely to shoot an ineffectual illegal or send his loved ones to the Gulag. And the world knew too. Khrushchev’s “secret” speech of February 1956, in which he denounced Stalin’s cult of personality, was widely leaked within a month. It allowed an aging Bolshevik like Fisher to hope that the insanity of Stalinism was truly over, but it also laid bare that insanity to Western sympathizers who had hoped it wasn’t real—including those of the American Communist Party. Many of Silverman’s friends were party members, but there cannot have been a worse time to try to recruit them as spies.

  “It’s bad enough when you’re out of the loop from the art world point of view,” Silverman says, looking back. “But people in the [Ovington] group who were party people were always mildly cynical about the effectiveness of the CP in America to start with, and in their particular party cell it was a joke.” Membership had become an excuse “for getting together to have pizza. The revolution was on hold.”

  That suited Hayhanen. Given his confected existence as an inebriated hillbilly of mysterious private means, the last thing he needed was the scrutiny of zealots. Yet that was what Fisher had in mind for him. On his return from Moscow, Fisher took one look at the pudgy, twitching figure Hayhanen had become and cabled the Center urging that he be ordered home. He was. The KGB’s preferred method was to promote Hayhanen to lieutenant colonel and suggest in firm language that he take a holiday, but the message was clear even to its recipient.

  Hayhanen took fright. He repeatedly defied Fisher’s instructions to buy a ticket to Europe, saying he was being followed by the FBI and feared arrest if he tried to leave the country. Fisher suspected he had cut a deal with the Feds. Before one of their last meetings in Fort Tryon Park he hid in bushes near the rendezvous point before showing himself, fearing a trap. In fact Hayhanen was never followed by the FBI. They had no idea who or where he was until, at last, he sailed for Le Havre and walked into the U.S. embassy in Paris. It was May 1, 1957, and he was wearing his striped tie.

  * Abakumov was second in command only to Lavrenty Beria in the Soviet security apparat and a less-than-cuddly character. When his sister was arrested for profiteering in the war he reputedly told the officer who asked how he would like to handle the case: “Why do you ask me? Don’t you know your duty …? Shoot her.”

  Nightfall in Turkey, a day’s donkey ride from the birthplace of Saint Paul. As the moon rises behind the Taurus Mountains they cast a deepening shadow, and the ancient city of Adana does little to dilute the darkness. The year is 1960. Camel trains still come this way with bales of dyed wool from Kurdistan, and young men are still stoned for thieving. Not long ago a rapist—probably; the American witness was never told—was thrown off a bridge over the Seyhan River with one end of a rope tied round his neck and the other to the balustrade. His body was left hanging there for a day.

  Shared values and the proximity of the Soviet Armenian border have produced a mutual defense pact between Turkey and the United States. One result, five miles east of Adana, is a smooth, hard stretch of concrete three thousand yards long. It runs northeast to southwest. Along its southerly side, looking at the mountains, stands a tidy row of huts, hangars, and trailers. The whole complex is surrounded by a tall wire fence.

  In one of the trailers an astronaut sleeps. In fact the astronauts of the Mercury project have not yet slipped the bonds of U.S. airspace, but they have been fitted for their space suits, and this figure looks very like them. He wears heavy black boots and an olive flight suit, bulky yet tight, with half-concealed tubes and lines of crossed lacing down each triceps and leg. The suit is hermetically sealed to a helmet that leaves only its wearer’s eyes visible beneath an ovoid faceplate. His mouth and nose are covered by a mask attached to a hose from a canister of pure oxygen, which he has been breathing for two hours.

  A man enters the trailer, gives the astronaut a signal, and picks up the canister. Keeping close together so the hose stays slack, they step outside.

  A van is waiting. It drives the pair to a hangar halfway down the concrete runway, in front of which a black-painted aircraft sits so low on its undercarriage that a man standing at its front end can stroke it like a horse’s nose. The wings quickly taper to invisibility in the darkness, drooping as they go, laden with fuel.

  The pilot has eaten a late breakfast of steak and eggs. There are people stationed here who will swear in years to come that steak and eggs wer
e not available in this part of Turkey in 1960, but the balance of evidence suggests that they were, flown in on U.S. Air Force C-47 cargo planes from Wiesbaden, Germany, precisely to ensure that these men in laced pressure suits did not go hungry in the air.

  Out of the van but still connected to the canister, the pilot takes a final breath and holds it. Disconnected from the hose, he climbs a short flight of metal steps and lowers himself into the black plane’s cockpit, where he is immediately reconnected to pure oxygen from the plane’s own supply. He starts breathing again while his assistant straps him in. The suit makes even small movements awkward, so the assistant does most of the preflight checks. The canopy closes over the helmet. The single jet that takes up most of the space behind it starts with a low roar, rising quickly to a scream.

  Turkey in 1960 is a free country, at least in principle. There is nothing to stop anyone from the Soviet embassy three hundred miles away in Ankara making the scenic drive through the mountains to Adana with binoculars or night-vision goggles in the glove box and watching what happens next.

  The plane does not use the whole runway. It does not even use a tenth of it. As its wings stiffen under their own lift, stabilizers wedged beneath them fall away and the aircraft seems to stand on its tail. In fact it climbs at fifty-five degrees, but this is still so steep that it is two miles high before it clears the perimeter fence and twice the height of Mount McKinley before it makes its first left turn over the southern fringes of Adana. To the pilot, the only view is of stars.

  The mission planned for this strange black plane with its muted, suited pilot is a seven-thousand-mile tour of Eurasia, ending back here between the mountains and the Mediterranean in a little over twenty-four hours. While it is gone the base personnel will abstain from much of their usual banter, and maybe even from some of their drinking. They will be counting down the time until it reappears as a black line high over the eastern horizon. Except that in this case it does not reappear. Fifty years later its wreckage is on permanent display in the Russian Armed Forces Museum in Moscow, next to the Great Hall of Victory, where thousands of schoolchildren each year still contemplate their grandparents’ prodigious sacrifices in the defeat of Nazism. The room full of twisted American aluminum is smaller; the lessons there less clear. Both sides claim it as evidence of a victory. Both sides have their reasons. But taken as the remnants of a moment rather than a contest, the crumpled air intakes in room 20 are a monument to hubris and luck—great mounds of it, good and bad, accumulated over years of brinkmanship and blundering in the age of Dr. Strangelove. These bits of plane are also a question mark. What if? What if they had stayed in one piece and the aircraft—official manufacturer’s designation “Article 360”—had completed its mission and released its pilot as planned to stretch his cramped legs and sink a long martini in the hut by the concrete outside Adana that served as the American officers’ club? The question hardly bears thinking about, but it can be answered. If Article 360 had stayed aloft, so would hopes of détente at the great power summit scheduled for mid-May that year in Paris.