Two days later he had his hearing and retold his story. No one believed it. The name stuck but nothing else did, because by this time the FBI had found in Fisher’s New York hotel room four thousand dollars in twenties wrapped in brown paper; a hollow ebony block containing a 250-page Russian codebook; a hollow pencil full of encrypted messages on microfilm; and the key to a safe-deposit box crammed with another fifteen thousand dollars in cash. They had also taken two slips of paper that Fisher had tried to hide up his jacket sleeve before being led away. On each were directions to meetings in Mexico City, the first of which would have been outside a screening of a film called Balmora at a cinema on Avenida Oberón and would have started with a script:
I: Is this an interesting picture?
L: Yes. Do you wish to see it, Mr. Brandt?
(L smokes a pipe and has a red book in left hand.)
The blockhouse story might explain the money, but not the directions or the microfilm. Fisher was denied deportation. For another month Blasco and Gamber tried to turn him. They offered better food and hard liquor for his cooperation, then a hotel room, air-conditioning, and a ten-thousand-dollar-a-year government job. Nothing worked. The master spy was courteous and patient but as forthcoming as a sphinx. “You had to admire him,” Gamber said.
No one much admired Hayhanen—even when he changed his mind. Sometime in the first week of August he agreed to testify against his boss. In Washington, Assistant U.S. Attorney William Tompkins turned on a dime and had his high-priority alleged illegal alien turned into an even higher-priority alleged spy. On August 7 Fisher was flown back to New York to answer the indictment. This time the press was there to meet him, and the man calling himself Rudolf Abel looked straight into their cameras.
* * *
Burt Silverman—artist, illustrator, ex–National Serviceman, and left-leaning Brooklyn liberal—was going to Rome. He was going elsewhere in Europe too, but Rome would be the start and finish of a grand tour in the old style for the old reasons, because the Old World begat the New and still had something to impart to the inquiring soul.
The trip would also be, among other things, a honeymoon. On March 27 Silverman had married Helen Worthman, the longtime girlfriend with whom “Emil” had found him half naked on a divan in Silverman’s studio three years earlier when asking for a cup of turpentine. Emil had been among the guests at a cocktail party at the Hotel Bolivar on Central Park West before the ceremony and had been the last to leave. It was a Jewish wedding. The men were required to wear yarmulkes and the groom said afterward that Fisher looked “like a Hassidic buck on feast day.”
Since then he had been away a lot. There had been the extended sinus cure in Florida. Then he had scarcely shown his face at the Ovington building before disappearing again. During the second absence Silverman and several of his friends were visited by agents of the FBI. Dave Levine, another painter, received a letter from Emil dated July 24, asking him to “help me in the disposal of whatever remains of mine in 252 Fulton Street.” The letter was shot through with vintage Emil mystery making, but it left little doubt that he was in trouble. “I have no specific desires except that you go through my paintings and preserve those you think worth keeping until—if ever—I may be able to get them again.” There was no explanation for the return address—a firm of lawyers in McAllen, Texas.
As for Silverman, the Bureau caught up with him one sweltering July evening as he returned home from a day’s work in Manhattan at the New York Post. There were two agents, as ever. They gave him the choice of talking in his studio or their car. He chose the car and found himself in the middle of the backseat with no quick exit, answering questions about Goldfus and a mysterious coconspirator (“Did you ever see a fat man who fell asleep while he was talking?”) and asking some of his own. He got no satisfactory answers. The agents would only say it was a matter of “the highest national security.” Silverman’s first thought was that the FBI was using Emil to get to someone else. The McCarthy madness had peaked, but several of his friends were members of the Communist Party—if only for the pizza—and the House Un-American Activities Committee was still in vigorous session. It did not enter his mind that Emil might himself be the national security concern. In the business of covering his tracks, faint as they were, Fisher was that good.
Silverman had not traveled abroad since leaving the army. To go to Rome, he and Helen needed passports, which is why he was in Manhattan again on August 8, passing a newsstand and realizing in a flash that something strange and disorientating had happened.
“I saw his face on the front page of the New York Times,” he says. “I recognized it instantly. I’d drawn him and painted him many times, hours and hours. His features were so very striking and clear-cut. I didn’t buy the paper—didn’t even read the headline. I said, ‘Why is Emil in the news?’ ”
Silverman telephoned his wife, who went out and bought a copy. And there was Emil for their scrapbook, torn from their amusing private world of painting and pontificating and rendered in grainy black and white under the headline “Russian Colonel Is Indicted Here as Top Spy in U.S.” He wore a dark jacket, a white shirt buttoned to the neck with no tie, and his familiar heavy spectacles. His eyes behind them were anxious, the eyebrows curling up toward the center of his forehead.
Mildred Murphy of the New York Times disagreed with Silverman about Fisher’s appearance. She called him (paragraph one, line one) “An ordinary looking little man,” whose ordinariness was the more extraordinary for his indictment “as the most important Soviet spy ever caught in the United States.”
She did not question his identity or provenance: “He is Rudolf Ivanovich Abel, a 55-year-old, Moscow-born citizen of the Soviet Union.” She did qualify as an assertion William Tompkins’s lie that “Abel” had been under investigation for a year, but she quoted him without comment on what Abel was supposed to represent—“as professional and intricate an operation as we have ever worked on.” The master spy legend was now received wisdom, the starting point for whatever was to follow.
Silverman rode the subway home in a daze that in a sense has yet to lift. Here was an answer to the Emil question, but it was other people’s answer; an answer announced by people who didn’t even know him. “The disconnect between public and private was wrenching,” he says, half a lifetime later. “In fact, I still view this as a story somebody made up about my life, a chapter which is totally untrue.”
* * *
The made-up stories were, of course, all Fisher’s. His latest—the one he told his interrogators about having found a stash of money in a blockhouse in Russia—was intended partly as a signal to Moscow that even though he had been caught, he was revealing nothing. It had also given the Soviet embassy in Washington a chance to recognize him as an errant Soviet citizen and request his deportation. That chance had not been taken. His fate as an illegal was to be disowned when things went wrong, and when they did, he was.
He needed a change in his luck, or at least a decent lawyer. The wheels of American justice turned to find him one.
The call came through to Jim Donovan at his summer cottage in the Adirondacks two weeks after the indictment. It was placed by a colleague but instigated by the Brooklyn Bar Association, whose job it was to ensure that everyone indicted in the borough had an adequate defense. The association was used to finding lawyers for the Mafia, less used to finding them for spies. But the chairman of its selection committee was a neighbor of Donovan’s on Prospect Park West and knew his background. The choice seemed obvious.
James Britt Donovan was an oaken pillar of Brooklyn society and the New York legal establishment. Tall and heavyset, he had the face of a man who boxed in college but had the sense to leave it there. His first degree was from Fordham University, where his classmates voted him “best all-round man.” When he graduated he wanted to work in newspapers, so he asked his father, a wealthy Irish-American surgeon, to buy him one. His father agreed on condition that he acquire a law degree first, so Ha
rvard Law School followed. Donovan’s dream of moguldom was wrecked by the war, in which he served as general counsel for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), precursor to the CIA. In 1946 he assisted in the prosecution of Göring and Hess at Nuremberg, showing the court harrowing footage of the liberated concentration camps. As a result he had much in common with the man he was being asked to represent. They had both been spies on the right side in the fight against Fascism. And then they had both gravitated to Brooklyn, “Abel” apparently to sabotage capitalism, Donovan to uphold it. (He prospered mightily in private practice and had spent most of 1957 defending a life insurance company against claims by the Polish government.)
He could have turned the Abel case down. His wife and four children doubtless wished he had, and the golf pro at his club near Lake Placid believed he should have.
“Why in hell would anyone want to defend that no-good bum?” the pro demanded as his client tried simultaneously to ponder the request and work on his swing. Donovan reminded him that under the U.S. Constitution “every man, however despised, is entitled to counsel and a fair trial.”
Donovan enjoyed belonging. There was the golf club, the Montauk Club with its self-consciously palatial premises in Brooklyn’s Park Slope, the Brooklyn Museum (he was a governor), the New York City Art Commission (he was a member), and the Rembrandt Club, “one of Brooklyn’s oldest societies,” whose all-male membership met monthly in one another’s homes for cultural lectures followed by a champagne supper. It was black tie, he noted, “and most enjoyable in a reserved way.”
The all-round man from Fordham and Harvard comported himself at times as if afflicted by a ramrod in a painful place, but appearances could be deceptive. He was a workaholic whose idea of a good breakfast after working through the night was black coffee, ice water, and a cigarette. He was a fearless negotiator who later freed nearly ten thousand Cubans and Americans from Havana, clearing up the mess left there by the Bay of Pigs adventure. For all his loyalty to Brooklyn, his experience in Europe during and after the war had made of him a true citizen of the world. He was not blind to Fisher’s merits because of ideology. In fact, he became a devoted admirer, ignoring the torrent of abuse that came with defending what one senior judge called the least popular legal cause since that of Captain Preston in the Boston Massacre of 1770. Donovan had a high opinion of himself, but he had an even higher opinion of the law. As he told the prosecution in a pretrial conference: “We want all other countries to recognize that there is no higher justice than that found in American courts.”
After his round of golf, Donovan drove to the village of Lake Placid and borrowed a local lawyer’s library. Reading through the espionage statutes he found that since the Rosenberg case, spying on behalf of a foreign power had become a capital offense even in peacetime. Abel might have hoped for deportation, but he was looking at the electric chair.
Donovan had supper with his wife, then caught a night train to New York. “I sat alone in the club car, nursing a Scotch,” he wrote in his journal. “Before the train reached Utica, about one o’clock in the morning, I decided to undertake the defense of Colonel Abel.”
* * *
For the FBI it was no great honor to have unknowingly hosted a KGB colonel for nine years. Nor did it help, from a public relations point of view, that without Hayhanen he would never have been caught.
The Bureau set about looking busy. Evidence was minutely inspected, leads chased down, potential witnesses located and interviewed. The contents of Fisher’s room at the Hotel Latham and his studio and storeroom were laid out on twenty-five large trestle tables in the FBI field office in Manhattan. They included a hollow-handled shaving brush, a complete set of cipher tables on edible silver foil, a lathe, three pairs of reading glasses, an Aladdin’s cave of specialist photographic equipment, a small library including The Ribald Reader and a volume on thermonuclear weapons, dozens of Sucrets throat lozenge boxes, and a half-empty box of Sheik brand condoms. (It is a mystery whom, if anyone, Fisher was having sex with. When walking with one of Burt Silverman’s friends he was once startled to be greeted by a woman whom he pretended not to know, but he was never seen inviting anyone up to his studio or propositioning the models who occasionally took their clothes off for life classes in the Ovington building, much as he might have liked to. He may of course have paid for the services of professionals elsewhere, but none came forward when he was unmasked. Or he may have been as monastic as he seemed and used the condoms to keep cash dry in Hayhanen’s dead drops.)
Agents tracked down everyone whom Hayhanen identified and many whom he didn’t. They went to Colorado and Atlantic City. They quizzed the superintendent of the Ovington building and Mrs. Donnelly and Mrs. Ash of the Vanderveer Estates, who had once passed a hollow nickel to an unsuspecting newsboy. And they put a tail on the newsboy.
In the four years the hollow nickel had lain undeciphered, James Bozart had grown up. By the summer of 1957 he was still a freckled redhead, but he was seventeen and going places. Having graduated high school in Brooklyn, he had won a place at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, to study engineering. He would come home on weekends, returning on the Monday milk train to Albany, from where he caught a bus to Troy. The train left Grand Central at one in the morning and arrived at six, and he often had a carriage to himself.
One Friday soon after starting at Rensselaer he came home to find two reporters from the Daily News waiting to ask him about the hollow nickel and a Russian spy. He told them what he could about the coin; couldn’t help them with the spy. The next Monday morning he woke up pulling into Albany to find that he had company—another night owl dozing in a corner seat and hoping not to miss his stop. They both got off at Albany; both took the bus to Troy.
“I didn’t think anything of it,” Bozart says. “But this happened twice, and the second time the train was delayed and I missed the bus. Class was at nine thirty. I was distressed. So the guy from the train comes up and asks if everything’s OK. ‘I’m here to make sure nothing happens to you,’ he says. He shows his badge, calls Albany Police Department, and I go to class in a police car.”
The next Friday the same man was on the train back to New York, and the following morning he was in a car outside the Bozarts’ front door on Avenue D in Brooklyn. With an FBI tail and a place at the third-best engineering school in the country, it was hard to see how life could get much better. Bozart met up with friends to go to Lynbrook on Long Island and told them about the Fed with the badge. “ ‘Let’s lose him,’ we said, and we lost him down on the waterfront. But he was waiting when I got home.”
Assistant U.S. Attorney William Tompkins had decided that Jimmy Bozart was a vital witness in the biggest case of his career and didn’t want to lose him playing cat and mouse on the Long Island Railroad. Bozart was subpoenaed and ordered not to leave the city while waiting his turn in the witness box. “I sat and waited for a month,” Bozart recalls. “The court arranged a tutorial at Brooklyn Polytechnic, where I ended up staying.” His place at Rensselaer went to someone else.
* * *
Burt and Helen Silverman sailed for Europe on August 12. Considering Burt’s closeness to the top-ranking Soviet spy in North America, he had not been too seriously disturbed. He took a call from a New York Times reporter wanting to confirm that “Abel” had attended their wedding, and the FBI paid him a second visit, this time to pick up a Remington portable typewriter that he had borrowed from their suspect. Otherwise, nothing.
The newlyweds were anxious not to have their Grand Tour interrupted. It would last three and a half months, they told the Bureau. They had a rough idea where they were going but not many hotel reservations. “OK,” said the agent who picked up the Remington. “Have a good trip.”
They had been gone six weeks when someone stuck a needle in a tire on their rental car. It made for a less-than-triumphal entry into Rome: they realized they had a flat as they were driving past the Forum. As Burt tried to bolt on a spare
wheel, Helen’s shoulder bag was snatched from the passenger seat by a thief on a Vespa, and with it went both their passports and their money. Had they dodged the needle their tour might have continued more or less as planned, and the trial of Rudolf Abel might have turned out very differently. Instead, the Silvermans were forced to turn to officialdom for help.
“We had to go to the consulate to get new passports and a loan of money and everything else,” Burt remembers. “We were feeling kind of shitty.”
Two days later a visitor from the consulate asked for them at their hotel. Burt got ready to be impressed by the State Department’s speed at reissuing lost passports. “And this guy comes in and says, no, I’m a special attaché from the U.S. Justice Department and I’ve been trying to find you for three weeks.”
It must have been a congenial three weeks. The long arm of the U.S. Attorney’s Office had followed the Silvermans east along the Côte d’Azur from Nice to Monaco and thence to Venice, Florence, and now Rome, where its representative had spent four days scouring hotels without thinking to check the register at the American Express office. Had he done so he would have located the by-now-unhappy couple instantly, since they were hoping to meet up with friends and, as an irritated Helen pointed out, had put “a huge star by our names.”
The attaché gave a vague warning that Burt might be required at the unfolding Abel trial and left. He phoned back at two o’clock the next Saturday morning. Passport or no passport, Silverman was booked on the next day’s plane to New York to await the court’s instructions.
“Suppose I don’t go?” Silverman said.
“We’ll get a warrant. We’ll arrest you.”
Bridge of Spies Page 13
