Allen Dulles took Fisher and people like him much more seriously, not least because his agency depended on spies being taken seriously. “I have the impression that the Soviet intelligence officer represents the species homo Sovieticus in its unalloyed and most successful form,” he wrote in The Craft of Intelligence, a work of occasional insight and considerable pomposity. “It is as if the Soviet intelligence officer were a kind of final and extreme product of the Soviet system.… He is blindly and unquestioningly dedicated to the cause, at least at the outset. He has been fully indoctrinated in the political and philosophical beliefs of Communism.” He is constantly subject to a rigid discipline, Dulles continued (forgetting about Hayhanen). “On the one hand he belongs to an elite and has privilege and power of a very special kind.… On the other hand, neither rank nor seniority nor past achievement will protect him if he makes a mistake.”
Dulles never knew how ineffectual Fisher really was. He once said: “I wish we had three or four like him in Moscow.” The FBI was similarly in awe of him just from Hayhanen’s description. It was not expecting mistakes. By the time Fisher finally returned from Florida and switched on the light in his studio, thirty agents were on his case. One of them, Neil Heiner, was across the street on the twelfth floor of the Hotel Touraine, wide awake.
Heiner timed Fisher’s arrival at 10:45 p.m. He watched him for more than an hour. “One light was turned on in the studio,” he testified. “I could see a male figure moving around in the room. From time to time it would pass in back of this light.” Heiner described the man as middle-aged and bald headed. “He had a fringe of gray hair around the edges. He was wearing glasses.” At a minute to midnight he put on a dark straw hat with a bright white band and switched off the light. Heiner got on the radio to say so. At 12:02 a man in the same hat exited 252 Fulton Street and turned right. Agent Joe MacDonald was waiting in shadows in a small park opposite. He followed, up Clinton Street and down into the Borough Hall subway station.
It was a Thursday night, technically Friday. There was a small crowd at one end of the platform heading back into Manhattan. Fisher and MacDonald joined it, but as the train pulled in Fisher moved away and stepped into the second-to-last car. MacDonald watched him from the last car. They both got out at City Hall and walked up to street level, where Fisher caught a bus north on Broadway to Twenty-seventh Street. MacDonald followed in a taxi, but when Fisher got off the bus and started walking, MacDonald lost him.
That was the FBI’s first good look at Fisher. It should have been their last. Three weeks had passed since Hayhanen’s defection. Even allowing for the very real possibility of his falling down drunk or succumbing to the temptations of the Place Pigalle, he should long since have reached Berlin, crossed to the Soviet sector, and reported to the KGB’s European headquarters in Lichtenberg. When he failed to show, an alarm did sound. According to KGB documents seen by Vasili Mitrokhin, the KGB defector, Moscow assumed the worst and recalled Fisher in late May or early June. Mitrokhin claimed Fisher simply disobeyed his orders, but escape was complicated. If there was a danger that he had been compromised as “Mark,” there was a danger that his other covers had been blown as well. He could not risk leaving the country as Martin Collins, Emil Goldfus, or even that long-forgotten Lithuanian Andrew Kayotis. The Center—the KGB’s Moscow headquarters—staggered into action. With the help of the Canadian Communist Party and the KGB’s Ottawa resident, it set about procuring two new passports for Fisher in the names of Robert Callan and Vasili Dzogol. But the process would take time. Fisher would have to wait.
There are other theories. According to one, Fisher allowed himself to be caught to test the loyalty of the notorious Alexander Orlov, the grand thief of Spain’s gold reserves and blackmailer of Stalin. Having defected in 1938, Orlov was by now living in Michigan, the only person in the United States who knew Fisher’s true identity. If Fisher was arrested and his picture appeared in newspapers, Orlov would see it and have the chance to reveal all. If he took that chance, his treachery would be complete. If not, the Center would know that deep in his soul he had kept the faith. So goes the theory. It is exquisitely convoluted and presupposes a KGB high command obsessed with personalities and the past, and to that extent is plausible. But it also assumes Moscow was willing to sacrifice Fisher for a largely pointless piece of closure, and it ignores the evidence that he was in fact recalled.
Another theory holds that Fisher dithered in New York because of money—not his, but money stashed in his names in safe-deposit boxes and savings accounts across the city, earmarked to pay off KGB informers. But there is no evidence that he had any informers, nor that he made much effort to distribute the money. It has been suggested that among the lucky intended beneficiaries were Morris Cohen and Kim Philby. Both were Soviet spies who spent time on the East Coast, but both had been gone more than five years—Cohen to London, Philby via London to Beirut.
There is no doubt that Fisher knew he had to flee. On May 21, three days after his return from Florida, he visited the office of a Dr. Samuel Groopman in his hotel (the Latham, on Twenty-eighth and Fifth) for a smallpox vaccination. If he was planning to stay in New York he would not have needed one—the last known case of smallpox in the United States was in 1949. Fisher was ready to go, presumably via somewhere where smallpox was endemic. He was just waiting for his passport.
The FBI was waiting too. Having lost him somewhere between Broadway and Fifth Avenue, it had no choice.
The stakeout remained at the Hotel Touraine in Brooklyn: studio 505 in the Ovington building across the street was still the only address the bureau had for “Mark.” On May 28 agents saw a man resembling him in the park where Agent MacDonald had hidden ten days earlier. The man looked nervous, the agents said. He got up from time to time and walked around as if looking for someone, and left on foot at 6:50 p.m., unfollowed.
For two more weeks, Fisher waited. While the CIA flew spy planes into Russia at seventy thousand feet, the KGB tried to get a passport to a hotel in Manhattan. It never came.
Fisher’s eighth-floor room at the Latham cost twenty-eight dollars a week. It had a west-facing bathroom window out of which he had hung an extended antenna for his shortwave radio. He had one-time pads, or cipher keys, for decoding incoming messages from Moscow and an impressive supply of hollowed-out bolts and pencils for sending his replies via dead drops. But eventually he ran out of something or decided that his rented premises across the East River needed tidying up or just got sick of sitting in his room. Even though he almost certainly knew that he had been followed from Brooklyn after his last visit and that the studio would still be under surveillance, he went back there.
“The Agents’ long hours of patience were rewarded on the night of June 13, 1957,” the FBI’s account states. Agent Heiner was once again the man in the Touraine. MacDonald had either pulled another shift or been taken off the case. The entrance to 252 Fulton Street was being watched by Agent Ronald Carlson, not from the park but from a post office building next to it that also housed the courtroom in which Fisher would be tried.
The light in the studio went on at 10:00 p.m. and off at 11:52. Wearing the same hat that MacDonald had followed, and a light sport coat, Fisher appeared on Fulton Street a few minutes before midnight and headed for the subway. Carlson followed. This time Fisher made it easy. He stayed on the subway to the Twenty-eighth Street station and led Carlson straight to the hotel.
The FBI set up a second stakeout and continued waiting. Fisher gave them no trouble. He stayed at the Latham except for occasional walks in the straw hat. It was Hayhanen who was causing problems. He wanted asylum, not infamy, but his protectors were insisting that he testify against the man they now were calling Collins (the name Fisher had given the hotel). Hayhanen refused. They moved him from Manhattan back to Peekskill and his bewildered wife, but still he refused.
Even with Hayhanen’s cooperation there was no guarantee of an espionage conviction against Fisher. Without it there was no hope
of one. A piece of microfilm found in the Peekskill cottage had led the FBI to the only other potential witness in the case, a former motor sergeant at the U.S. embassy in Moscow named Roy Rhodes. Rhodes was the real deal: a traitor of the most villainous kind who had sold out his country after stumbling into a honey trap and waking up with an attractive young lady from the KGB. Cash payments had followed in one direction; manila envelopes stuffed with secret information about the movements of junior embassy staff in the other. The court record would confirm all this in shameful detail. The trouble from a prosecutor’s point of view was that there was nothing to link Rhodes to Fisher, except Hayhanen.
The U.S. Attorney’s office in Washington sent two lawyers up to talk some sense into the drunken Hayhanen. They spent all of June 18 and 19 with him and got nowhere; he was frightened for his mother and siblings, as he had been for himself in Paris. U.S. Attorney William F. Tompkins decided there was only one way to proceed. They had brought in Al Capone as a tax evader. They would bring in Martin Collins as an illegal alien.
It was a legalistic trick, but it seemed justified. These were not gentle times. Collins or Goldfus or whoever he was would remain innocent until proven guilty since that was the American way, but in the meantime it was the task of Tompkins and the FBI, despite the lack of any concrete evidence, to take very seriously the idea that this stooping, birdlike figure with the hat band was stealing America’s thermonuclear secrets and sabotaging her rockets. Lord knew, someone seemed to be. Atmospheric sampling by U-2s over Alaska and the Aleutians showed that the Soviets were letting off bigger and bigger H-bombs at the rate of nearly one a week. And everyone knew how badly things were going down at the Cape. Less than a week after Fisher’s return from Daytona Beach, the next Thor test ended almost before it had begun in yet another launchpad fireball, “lighting up the [predawn] countryside like day and sending a thunderous roar along the beaches.” And the mighty Atlas, trucked from San Diego, with its hundred tons of fuel and its 360,000 pounds of thrust? It blasted off on June 11 and blew up at five thousand feet. “The whole show lasted no more than a minute,” someone told one of the dozens of reporters who raced to the scene.
Late on June 20, five men met in the offices of the Immigration and Naturalization Service on New York’s Columbus Avenue. Three were local. Two had flown up from Washington. After midnight they made their way to the downtown FBI field office and spent two hours rehearsing the operation planned for later that morning.
It was a sweltering night at the end of a weeklong heat wave. There was no relief from the ocean because what breeze there was came from inland, and no air-conditioning for Fisher at the Latham. It was not that sort of hotel. He slept with nothing on—if he slept at all. The stakeout had closed in on him. It was now more like a siege: eight FBI men on the eighth floor taking turns watching the corridor and listening from room 841, immediately next door to Fisher’s.
Shortly before seven in the morning the INS men arrived at the hotel. Their instructions were to wait in room 841 until asked for. The FBI would open proceedings.
At 7:00 a.m. Agent Ed Gamber knocked on the door of room 839 and asked for Mr. Collins. Fisher woke and answered as he was. He was not even wearing his false teeth. He made no attempt to resist or run. After answering a few basic questions about himself (as Martin Collins), he fell silent. Gamber watched him sitting naked on a double bed that nearly filled the room and noticed his Adam’s apple rising and falling involuntarily in his throat.
In his treatise on “homo Sovieticus,” Allen Dulles wrote: “Since the ingrained Soviet approach to the problems of life and politics is conspiratorial, it is no surprise that this approach finds its ultimate fulfillment in intelligence work. When such a man does finally see the light, as has happened, his disillusionment is overwhelming.”
Fisher’s moment to be overwhelmed came that morning on that bed. Nine years. He had spent nine years in this country, pushing his own identity to the very back of his mind and impersonating the unreal people created for him by Moscow Center so perfectly that no one had even heard him whisper his wife’s name in his sleep. His wife, a harpist in a children’s orchestra in Moscow, had grown used to the life of a single mother. His daughter, a teenager when he left her, had grown up and married. He had followed orders. He had traveled the length and breadth of the Main Adversary trying to revive the spy networks of the war years. He had failed, but this was hardly his fault and he had not been blamed. His tradecraft had been masterly—not a single dead drop discovered or cable intercepted on his watch—and his cover was as deep and unquestioned as any in the history of the illegals. He was a war hero, a devoted Communist, and a colonel in the KGB. He had been inducted, like Stalin and Zhukov before him, into the Order of the Red Banner. And then he had been sent Reino Hayhanen, who had imploded and betrayed him. For want of a fake passport he had been left to wait for this moment in a cheap New York hotel room, where his only options were to keep the faith and pay the price or to implode himself.
“Colonel, we have received information concerning your involvement in espionage,” Agent Gamber said.
Fisher kept the faith. Gamber’s use of “colonel” confirmed that his information came from Hayhanen, since no one else outside Russia knew Fisher’s rank. But he was not about to join the wretched Vik—Hayhanen—in that special circle of hell reserved for traitors. He would admit nothing, reveal nothing, volunteer nothing. That was the Chekist way, and Fisher understood it perfectly.
He would be arrested if he did not cooperate, Gamber said. Fisher, now in underpants, just sat there. It looked passive but it was the biggest, most inspired decision of his life. From that moment the legend of the master spy began to grow; he had found his calling as a stonewall.
It was not, in fact, a difficult decision. Part of Fisher’s reasoning was that this whole embarrassing mess might be part of a plan to turn the otherwise inexplicable Hayhanen into a double agent. Despite everything, he still trusted his employers: when his lawyer suggested later that Russia had written him off, he snapped back that he did not believe it and resented the idea. Being written off and being sacrificed for the cause were very different things.
But there was also Fisher’s family and his self-respect. “Cooperation” with the FBI was the one way to guarantee he never saw his wife and daughter again. If he kept his counsel there was always the chance, however slight, of being traded in years to come for someone the Americans wanted back. If he kept his counsel, furthermore, no one need know that he had almost nothing to reveal. And what they didn’t know they could only imagine.
After twenty-three minutes of staring at Willie Fisher and his Adam’s apple and getting nothing out of him, Agent Gamber and another agent conferred sotto voce in the corner. They asked the INS men to come in and make the arrest, and it was done. The Kremlin’s most secret weapon had been detained under section 242 of the Immigration and Nationality Act. From where Fisher sat things looked so bad that they could only get better, and that is exactly how they turned out.
He outwitted the INS men almost as soon as they had arrested him, or so he claimed years later in an interview with Moskovskyi Komsomolets newspaper in Moscow. Remembering he had left a potentially incriminating sheet of paper from a onetime code pad on a table under the window, he asked if he could tidy up some paints and other artist’s materials above it on the windowsill. They said he could, so he calmly wiped his palette clean with the sheet of paper, then flushed it down the lavatory. With it went his last message from Moscow.
He was told to dress and pay his bill and then was taken to the INS office to be booked, photographed, and questioned some more. He looked pissed off but rakish in his mug shot, like an angry reporter.
For seven hours, as the heat wave finally broke outside, he was given reasons and opportunities to cooperate. For seven hours he turned them down, which meant his status did not change. Improvised categories of detainee, such as “enemy combatant,” were for the future. Fisher was a suspecte
d illegal alien and subject to well-established procedures. As night fell, he was driven across the Hudson and put on a waiting DC-3 that took off with only him and two INS officers aboard and headed south by southwest.
Fisher wanted to know where he was being taken, but no one would tell him, so he worked it out. He kept an eye on the stars and made estimates of his time and speed in the air. When the plane stopped to refuel at 11:00 p.m. he said, “We’re in Alabama,” and he was right. They flew on across the Gulf of Mexico to Brownsville, Texas, then drove in darkness to McAllen, ten miles from the Rio Grande.
On leaving New York, Fisher disappeared from all official records for five days. Was this rendition? His lawyer tried to make something of it at his trial, but the judge was unimpressed. Fisher was hit in the face once while being questioned in McAllen but was never blindfolded, drugged, or tortured. That, too, was for the future. The truth was that the INS was going by the book: McAllen was the site of the Federal Alien Detention Facility, and Fisher was held there for six weeks.
In that time his hopes rose briefly when he realized that most of his fellow inmates were being deported to Mexico. To Mexico! The last refuge of Trotsky was the first choice of escape route for any Soviet spy in trouble in America. If Fisher could only get out of solitary he could practically swim there.
He reached McAllen on a Saturday and was questioned in relays over the weekend by the INS men who had flown out with him, and by Gamber and Special Agent Paul Blasco of the FBI, who followed. He gave them nothing. But then, on Monday morning, he was handed a leaflet setting out the rights of an illegal alien, which included a prompt deportation hearing. Fisher changed tactics; he told a story.
“I decided to state that my real name was Rudolf Ivanovich Abel,” he wrote in an affidavit, “that I was a Russian citizen; that I had found a large sum of American money in a ruined blockhouse in Russia; that I then bought in Denmark a forged American passport and with this passport I entered the United States from Canada in 1948.”
Bridge of Spies Page 12
