Bridge of Spies

by Giles Whittell

  As the pages of his thesis started piling up, he put an ad in the student paper for someone to help him type it. It was answered by a fellow student named Eleonora, and they developed a serious mutual interest that went beyond economics, though not as far as marriage. His loneliness was a memory. All in all, he said, “I had a very pleasant life.” It was not to last.

  “I am a lieutenant colonel of the Soviet intelligence service. For the past five years I have been operating in the United States. Now I need your help.”

  When Reino Hayhanen walked into the American embassy in Paris and started talking in May of 1957, Stalin had been dead four years. The Soviet prison camps had briefly come alive with rumors that the thaw after the dictator’s death would bring mass amnesties. But the rumors fizzled and the camps stayed open. There was still plenty of room in the Gulag for a failed spy.

  Hayhanen knew it. He had no shortage of reasons to defect. He loathed and feared Willie Fisher, his immediate superior. He resented the system Fisher represented, which hadn’t given him a respectable post inside an embassy. But he was also timid; the confidence of the younger KGB staffer who once crossed and recrossed the Soviet-Finnish border in car trunks had been eroded by alcohol and underemployment. Only the knowledge that his trip to Moscow might end in Siberia could have pushed him to take the life-threatening step of betraying the KGB.

  He was a weak man in a desperate situation, and he was showing the strain. When he announced himself at the embassy on Avenue Gabriel on the morning of May 4, he appeared drunk. When his demand to see the ambassador was not immediately granted, he became angry.

  His puffy face and strangulated accent did not convince. Nor did the smell of his breath or his fake U.S. passport in the name of Eugene Maki. So he produced from his pocket a doctored Finnish five-mark coin. He opened the coin with a pin to reveal a square of microfilm like the one young Jimmy Bozart had found four years earlier on a stairwell in Brooklyn, and the Americans at last began to take him seriously. They let him talk, and he talked for a week: about his training, his legend, his passage to America, and his inebriated, bloodstained life there. Each evening the salient details were cabled to Washington, and most of them checked out. He asked for asylum and was told he might get it if he continued to cooperate. It may be that only then did he begin to see the true cost of the choice he had made. Either that or he was afraid of flying and the prospect drew him to his old friend, the nightly pint of vodka. When he was escorted onto a Constellation to return to the United States on May 11, he tried to kick the windows out.

  Hayhanen had said enough in Paris for the news of his defection to be passed up the chain of command almost to the top. Allen Dulles (“the bumbling Dulles,” Kim Philby called him) flew up to New York to meet the incoming transatlantic flight and to hand Hayhanen over to the FBI. It must have been a gratifying trip for him: the CIA had uncovered a sinister new Soviet spy ring, but since it was operating on U.S. territory it was the FBI’s problem.

  Hoover’s men went to work. They sequestered Hayhanen in a hotel and grilled him for another seven days. He gave them everything they wanted, starting, on May 12, with his home address in Peekskill. At 12:25 p.m. that day he granted permission for his house to be searched. By 5:00 p.m. Special Agents Edward F. Gamber and John T. Mulhern were at the property revealing to Hannah Maki that her husband was a Soviet spy.

  Mrs. Maki was drinking when they arrived and drinking a bit faster when they left, though she was not left alone. From now on she would have to endure the permanent presence of Bureau bodyguards assigned to protect her from the long and presumably murderous arm of Soviet vengeance.

  Agents Gamber and Mulhern wanted names, not just addresses. Without them there would be no “ring.” Here, too, Hayhanen did his best. His first Soviet contact in New York had been called “Mikhail,” he said. Mikhail was middle-aged, of medium build, with a long nose and dark hair. Presented with photographs of every Soviet official matching that description who had been legally resident in the United States between 1952 and 1954, Hayhanen picked out his old handler, Mikhail Svirin. But just when the ring seemed about to expand, it contracted again. Svirin was long gone. He had indeed met Hayhanen once or twice at the Prospect Park subway station but had been back in Moscow for two years.

  The Feds kept digging. Who came after Svirin? There must have been someone.

  There was. His name was “Mark,” Hayhanen said. That was the only name he could offer because it was the only one Moscow or Fisher had given him. But he was much more helpful as to Fisher’s whereabouts. He knew about the studio and the rented storage space on Fulton Street in Brooklyn because of the time an exasperated Fisher had taken him there to give him a shortwave radio and then a camera. Hayhanen, in turn, took Gamber and Mulhern. On or about May 16, the FBI moved into rooms in the Hotel Touraine across the street from the Ovington Studios. Equipped with coffee money and ten-fifty binoculars, they settled down to wait.

  The official FBI account of the arrest of Rudolf Abel—even now—depicts it as the climax of a triumphant four-year struggle to decode the message found by Jimmy Bozart in his hollow nickel. It was nothing of the sort. The message was indeed decoded but would not have been without Hayhanen’s help; he provided his personal code word, “snegopad” (or snowfall), which unlocked the cipher and revealed nineteen lines of anticlimactic housekeeping from Moscow, congratulating him on his safe arrival in New York and reassuring him that “the package was delivered to your wife personally.” It ended: “Greetings from the comrades. Number 1. 3rd of December.” A positive identification of the typewriter used for the encrypted version helped to convict “Abel” but had nothing to do with his arrest.

  The truth is that Willie Fisher, Soviet superspy, was caught because he was handed to U.S. officials on a plate and chose to sit there rather than slip away.

  * * *

  On the morning of April 26, 1957, a Friday, Fisher was busy. He checked out of a cheap hotel on Broadway where he had been staying that week under the name of Martin Collins, paid two months’ advance rent on his Brooklyn studio, and told his friends on Fulton Street that he was heading south on doctor’s orders for a long vacation. He blamed his sinuses. Then he returned to Manhattan to catch the Silver Meteor from Penn Station to Florida.

  What was he up to? His original assignments hardly explain the trip. Preparation for the Third World War had slipped a long way down the Soviet agenda since Khrushchev’s arrival in the Kremlin. And no one seriously expected a sudden breakthrough by the slow-moving Agent Mark—as Fisher was referred to by his employers—in the recruitment of a new network of nuclear informers.

  It is conceivable that he was hoping to make contact with the Cuban revolutionary underground, which would seize power in Havana two years later. Or this could have been a real holiday. One of Fisher’s main reasons for returning to New York after his long leave despite worsening bronchial disorders (thanks to his smoking habit) was to sort out the Hayhanen mess. That seemed to have been accomplished. The miserable Finn was at last out of his hair, two days into the Atlantic on the French liner the Liberté. He would pick up fresh travel papers in Paris to take him to Moscow via Czechoslovakia, and he would get whatever he deserved.

  Fisher may simply have asked himself, what now? One thing he could do was paint, and he did pack his brushes for the journey south.

  If his own time in America was coming to an end, this would make the perfect final chapter. He had started with a long trip to California, gazing out at the Pacific while counting suspected military shipments from Long Beach to nationalist China. He would finish by gazing out at the Atlantic.

  He certainly made time for the views. Checking into the Plaza Hotel at Daytona Beach on April 28, he set up his easel and at some point over the next three weeks painted a large seascape that he liked enough to bring back with him to New York. That is all he ever admitted doing in Florida, and it may indeed be all he did, apart from sit and sniff. But his life to that point—his st
eady conscientiousness—says there is something wrong with this account; something too indolent even for the semiretired raconteur known to Burt Silverman and his friends as Emil Goldfus. And as it happens there is an alternative explanation for his long vacation. Liberated by Hayhanen’s departure and energized by world events, Fisher may actually have done some spying.

  The previous December a gigantic missile, seven stories tall, had been lowered into a horizontal position in a purpose-built San Diego hangar and wrapped in a white shroud. It was then loaded onto a truck and hauled 2,500 miles east. Fisher would have known this—not from his own sleuthing but from reading Time magazine. He devoured the press. Given how much it revealed and how little else he had to do, consuming media was a big part of his job. As Matthew Brzezinski has written in a study of the Soviet space program inspired by his time as Moscow correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, “For the Soviets, it was mind-boggling how much information the Americans naively left lying around for the KGB to scoop up.”

  Time’s April 1 cover story devoted eight pages to the looming triumph of ballistic missiles over bombers as the best delivery mechanism for a nuclear holocaust. The critical breakthrough had been achieved five years earlier with the fusion bomb: the blast radius of a thermonuclear warhead was so much larger than that of an old-fashioned atom bomb that missiles no longer had to be especially accurate to destroy their targets. Suddenly the weight, size, and complexity of ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile) guidance systems looked manageable. Fuel systems were still leaking liquid oxygen and nose cones burning up on atmospheric reentry, but these were modest challenges by comparison. Once they were overcome, nowhere on earth would be more than twenty minutes from doomsday.

  The Time story identified the missile under the shroud as the first Atlas ICBM. Its destination was the Air Force Missile Test Center at Cape Canaveral. “One day soon,” the piece noted helpfully, “perhaps late in April, perhaps early in May, the Bird will make its first flight. From a sickle-shaped launching pad near a sunny vacation shore the Bird will be fired, minus its warhead, on an 1,800-mile test shot southeastward across tropic islands and into an empty sea.”

  Fisher also read the New York Times. Though ideologically bound to disdain its values, he bought it every day and demanded a subscription from his lawyer when he later found himself in an Atlanta prison. He is not likely to have missed a five-thousand-word feature by Richard Witkin on April 7, starting on page one and continuing across eight columns inside under the headline “Missiles Program Dwarfs First Atom Bomb Project—U.S. to Spend More Than 4 Billion in Developing 5 Ballistic Weapons.”

  The Times gave useful progress reports on the Atlas and the Titan, the other American ICBM, still a year from its first test. It gave detailed descriptions of the Thor and Jupiter intermediate-range missiles, which were further advanced: one of them (the Thor) had actually lifted off. On its first test launch in January, it reached an altitude of six inches before slumping back onto its launchpad and exploding. Finally, the paper mentioned the Polaris ship-borne missile, plagued by the difficulty of launching from choppy seas.

  On the face of it the article was reassuring to a Russian reader. Wherever the Soviets’ missile program had gotten to—and only a handful of people on the planet knew—the Americans’ was not far advanced. No wonder four billion dollars had been earmarked to push it along.

  But any reassurance was strictly superficial. These missiles were also space rockets. The race to produce one that could put a satellite in orbit had been all but declared in the form of challenges the superpowers had set themselves for the International Geophysical Year, a peculiar initiative based on International Polar Years of decades past, but with realpolitik lurking much closer beneath a veneer of scientific cooperation. The IGY was not actually a year—it ran from July 1957 to December 1958—and it had little to do with geophysics. It acquired a significance out of all proportion to its original aims because it provided a convenient civilian excuse to build forests of ICBM prototypes and test them to destruction. Both superpowers vowed to launch “scientific” satellites during the IGY—Russia to study solar radiation, America the atmosphere. When James Hagerty, the White House press secretary, made the announcement on Eisenhower’s behalf, neither man knew how it was to be achieved—only that the National Security Council had decided that “the stake of prestige that is involved makes this a race that we cannot afford to lose.”

  Two years on there was still no proven launch vehicle in the American arsenal. The Russians were further along with their colossal R7, but this did not stop their chief designer, the maniacal Sergey Korolyov, from worrying himself sick that the Americans would suddenly leapfrog him into space.

  Korolyov’s lover—an interpreter at his design bureau—kept him supplied with translations of every published news item on the American space program. Its litany of setbacks did not convince him. His adversary, after all, was Wernher von Braun, the German rocket whiz spirited to the United States after the war, whose V-2 had been the starting point for Korolyov’s lunge toward space. If von Braun could hit London with a guided missile from across the English Channel in 1944, he could surely put a basketball in space in 1957.

  In fact Korolyov’s suspicions were well founded. Von Braun’s Redstone missile could almost certainly have won the satellite race if adapted for the purpose. But the Redstone was an army weapon. Von Braun was on the army’s payroll, and Eisenhower was determined to keep the space race as far as possible a scientific affair. That way, if and when a U-2 was shot down, satellites could quite innocently take over the vitally important business of snooping on the Soviet Union.

  In 1956 National Geographic had confidently predicted that the first man-made satellite would be launched aboard a Vanguard rocket built by the Glenn Martin Company. The New York Times was sticking with that story. If accurate, Korolyov still had time. The first Vanguard test was not due until December. But why the shroud over the Atlas when so much about the American missile program was so open? Was “the Bird” about to lay an egg in orbit, winning the space race in the process? It was a vastly more urgent question for Moscow than whatever Castro and his friends were up to, and it is hard to imagine the subject did not come up in the encrypted cables received by Willie Fisher’s shortwave radio.

  On the separate but still vexing subject of Soviet security, the Times noted that the pace of production of the Thor intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) (range 1,500 miles, designed specifically to hit Russian targets from Britain) was picking up. “Getting the Thor to the firing range at Cape Canaveral is simpler than transporting the ICBMs,” the obliging Witkin wrote. “The intermediate range weapon can be accommodated in an Air Force C-125 Globemaster.”

  It was a good thing Fisher had packed his brushes. There would be plenty for a painter to look out for.

  On April 19 a Thor took off from the Cape and flew for thirty-five seconds in the wrong direction before being destroyed from the ground.

  In case Fisher was not already packing, his morning read on April 21 announced construction of “a huge platform able to subject intermediate range ballistic missiles to the same motions they would encounter in launching on heavy seas.” It ran under a boys’ own artist’s impression of a Thor atop a terrifying four-legged machine in a hardened silo ten times the height of a man. Location: Cape Canaveral.

  On the twenty-fourth the Associated Press reported that a Lockheed X-17 missile launched from the Cape had attained a top speed of 9,240 miles per hour on its return to earth. The flight ended in a splash, but Fisher would have known its significance: to test their tolerance to intense heat, the air force was experimenting with missile nose cones at speeds close to those achieved by ICBMs on reentry.

  No self-respecting Soviet spy could read all this and stay in Brooklyn strumming his guitar. The Cape would not be formally unveiled as America’s gateway to space until December, but missile-themed motels were already springing up nearby. Restaurants were holding be
ach parties timed so customers could toast the bright glow of rocket engines hurtling into the night. It would not be hard for a man in a straw hat to blend in.

  Two days after the X-17 flight, yet another rocket shook the bungalows along Cocoa Beach, this time in the presence of Defense Secretary Charles E. Wilson. And Willie Fisher headed for the sun.

  If he wanted to meet Cubans he would have stayed on the Silver Meteor all the way to Miami. Instead he stepped off the train 250 miles north of there, a short bus ride from the natural grandstand that the Space Coast’s beaches provided for the greatest technological show on earth. In a sense, he would have company. The day before Fisher’s departure from New York, Senator Styles Bridges, Republican from New Hampshire and a member of the Armed Services Committee, told an American Legion luncheon that “about a dozen” Soviet submarines were thought to be lingering in the shallow waters between Cape Canaveral and the Bahamas. “The story is not substantiated,” Styles admitted, “but we do know that the Russians spare no effort to learn what we are doing.”

  * * *

  Fisher’s KGB file has never been opened to scholars. The theory that in April 1957 he bestirred himself to go and squint into the sun at space rockets is based on what he read, where he went, and when. It explains an otherwise baffling trip—though no more baffling than what happened to him next.

  Burt Silverman has probably gotten as close to the truth about Fisher’s capture as anyone. “Throughout the course of the time that I knew him, there was a sense about him that was genuine,” he says. “Even in his exposure there was something kind of like, ‘Oh, I fucked up.’ ”