Bridge of Spies

by Giles Whittell

The honeymoon was over.

  * * *

  As the Silvermans lay fretting in their bedroom in Rome, the world was changing around them at eighteen thousand miles an hour. Earlier that night, a Soviet R7 rocket shortened to reduce weight and maximize velocity had wrapped itself in curtains of white flame as it left the secret launchpad deep in Kazakhstan, from where the chief designer, Sergey Korolyov, had vowed to win the race to orbit at whatever cost.

  The R7 was a fat and brutal thing, a giant cone of liquid oxygen and kerosene feeding five main rocket engines and twelve more directional thrusters. At blastoff, temperamental turbo pumps rammed fuel into the engines at a rate of nearly half a ton per second per engine. With the liquid oxygen cooled to below–183 degrees Celsius, pumps and fuel lines could freeze solid in an instant if not purged first with pressurized nitrogen. For a machine designed above all to be functional, there was an awful lot about it that could go wrong.

  Eight seconds into its flight, still only one thousand feet above the steppe, the rocket’s telemetry reported a fault in one of its four forty-two-ton boosters. For nearly two minutes Korolyov and his exhausted team watched the readouts and the night sky in silence. Four of their last six test launches had ended in disaster, and the misfiring booster could destroy the rocket at any moment.

  It didn’t. The first downrange tracking stations, clusters of parabolic dishes pointing skyward from beside the old imperial road to Samarqand, reported climb rates and acceleration that were within Korolyov’s margins of error. At 315.3 seconds, 250 miles above Siberia, the rocket’s nose cone opened and a polished aluminum sphere popped out.

  By the time the Silvermans took their unwelcome call from the Justice Department’s special attaché, Sputnik was on its sixth orbit of planet Earth. Korolyov had waited one full orbit before telephoning Khrushchev and another before informing the rest of the Politburo. But by 2:00 a.m. Rome time—8:00 p.m. in Washington—the Soviet triumph was public and official and its implications were coursing like adrenaline through every newsroom in the world. The official Soviet news service broadcast details of the satellite’s wild, dancelike trajectory, which lurched from just 150 miles up to more than 500. Television networks plotted Sputnik’s course across the Northern Hemisphere, and viewers in their millions ran outside to scan the western horizon for a fast-moving silver dot.

  Eisenhower feigned unconcern. He did not convene a meeting to discuss Sputnik until three days after its launch, and he waited yet another day before taking questions on it from the press. He acknowledged that the Russians had achieved “a very powerful thrust in their rocketry” but insisted that from a security point of view the satellite “does not raise my apprehensions.”

  The trouble was, it raised everybody else’s. Lyndon B. Johnson said that when he looked up he saw a sky that suddenly “seemed almost alien.” He demanded an all-out drive to build a rocket with a million pounds of thrust. Senator Stuart Symington seized on Sputnik to launch the argument that the Soviets had opened up a missile gap far scarier than any bomber gap before it. Symington was not above grandstanding, but he understood perfectly that Sputnik was, as NASA’s administrator put it half a century later, “an almost unimaginable embarrassment for the United States.”

  Everyone who read the papers knew that behind the Missouri senator’s scaremongering lay one brute fact: the rocket that launched Sputnik was essentially a missile. In fact, the stage-two booster that nestled at the core of the R7 and carried its payload chased Sputnik through space for several weeks. It did not beep, but it was there, the original mother ship, ninety-six feet long and traveling ninety seconds behind its progeny at twenty-three times the speed of sound. (For anyone who doubted this, the British astrophysicist Sir Bernard Lovell performed a trick. With a team of assistants from Manchester University he worked nonstop for forty-eight hours to turn the 250-foot Jodrell Bank radio telescope—then the world’s largest—into a radar scanner. He pointed it at the heavens and captured the carrier rocket’s echo as a long line on a cathode-ray tube as it hurtled over the English Lake District.)

  By way of damage control Eisenhower claimed that if he had allowed Wernher von Braun to put a satellite in one of the U.S. Army’s Redstone missiles the United States could have won the race to space. This was probably true. But it was a big “if,” and anyway the coulda-shoulda style of argument somehow didn’t suit the former supreme commander of the Allied forces in World War II. Ike also considered revealing that, unlike the Soviet Union, the United States could spy on its adversary with impunity from high-altitude reconnaissance planes. He rejected the idea.

  The fact was that even the U-2s had failed to alert Washington to Korolyov’s masterstroke. One of them had flown over the Tyuratam launch site during a period of intense preparations in late August, but Sputnik’s launch still came as a complete surprise.

  * * *

  Once the FBI had established Fisher’s status as an alleged spy rather than an illegal immigrant, they moved him back to Brooklyn. It was there that he first met James Donovan. He looked his lawyer in the eye and said: “I guess they caught me with my pants down.” That was how much of the American public felt at the start of Fisher’s trial, and Sputnik was a big part of the reason. With satellites beeping down on them and KGB colonels living quietly among them, prospective jurors in the trial could be forgiven for recasting Big Brother in their minds. He was suddenly much more than a distant oppressor and manic builder of H-bombs. He was an infiltrator, closer to the enemy within who still obsessed Joseph McCarthy. And now he was on trial. It was not a trial that U.S. Attorney William F. Tompkins felt he could afford to lose.

  It took place in October 1957, four months after Fisher’s arrest, and lasted eleven days. Tompkins boasted to Donovan beforehand that it was an open-and-shut case, but he had never prosecuted an alleged spy before, and his key witnesses were liabilities.

  Hayhanen was a wreck. He was overweight and barely coherent despite countless hours of coaching by the prosecution. He was so terrified of testifying that he did so in disguise, but even the disguise was somehow pathetic. He wore dark glasses and dyed his white hair and eyebrows and a specially grown mustache jet black. The papers called him plump. Donovan, who was allowed to visit him in Peekskill before the trial, said he bore a remarkable resemblance to Egypt’s ousted King Farouk. He was, as Donovan reminded the jury, a bigamist, a drunkard, a professional liar, a traitor to his country, and “the most bumbling, self-defeating, inefficient spy that any country ever sent on any conceivable mission.”

  Roy A. Rhodes was scarcely more impressive. He was a former motor sergeant from the U.S. embassy in Moscow who admitted under cross-examination that by the end of his time there he was drunk every day. He had been traced with the help of an address on microfilm found in the Peekskill house, but said he had never known or met Hayhanen, “Abel,” or any other Russian connected to the case.

  If there were any other alleged members of the Rudolf Abel spy network, the prosecution failed to find them. In the end it did not matter. Tompkins had a jury willing to believe everything his improbable star witness said and a defendant who never said a word. He also had Bozart and Silverman. On the second Monday of the trial James Bozart was summoned to retell his story and identify the hollow nickel. The message it contained to Hayhanen was read into the record. Earlier that day, Silverman had taken the stand.

  “I looked over to the defense table where he was seated and we exchanged a look,” he says. “He nodded to me, and it was as if something in that nod said, ‘It’s OK. I understand why you’re here.’ It was not expository or emotional in any way. But it was that look. He nodded, ‘It’s OK.’ ”

  Then Silverman identified the Remington as Fisher’s typewriter. He was as vague as he could be, but an evidentiary link was made to the encrypted message and Hayhanen. If you believed Hayhanen was a spy, it was hard not to believe that “Abel” was one too.

  Before the trial Donovan had disarmed reporters with an informal pr
ess conference in his duplex condominium on Prospect Park, serving drinks and answering questions until past midnight. In court he dressed his client like a banker (“but in the small loan department”) and tried to reinvent him as the very opposite of the scoundrels testifying for the prosecution—a man “serving his country on an extraordinarily dangerous mission,” who was also “a devoted husband, a loving father. In short, an outstanding type of family man such as we have in the United States.”

  It didn’t work. What it did do was bolster the legend of the master spy, a legend that was already thriving thanks to two months of feverish press coverage and the twenty-five tables of spy gear submitted as evidence by the prosecution. With William Tompkins’s summing up it thrived some more.

  Tompkins was a good foil for Donovan. He had thick black hair where Donovan’s was thinning and white. He was pugnacious where Donovan was urbane. He had made his name prosecuting racketeers in New Jersey, while Donovan had made his money defending the racket of the insurance industry.

  Tompkins knew there was a risk some jurors would refuse to see a serious conspiracy in a hollow nickel, and he decided to confront it. “These items have been referred to as toys,” he said. “I don’t believe anybody would call these toys for amusement. They are not toys for amusement. Ladies and gentlemen, they are tools for destruction, destruction of our country.… Tools for destruction, believe me!”

  And the man who used them? Why, he had shown “the cunning of a professional … a master spy … a real pro.… He knows the rules of the game and is entitled to no sympathy.”

  Having failed to prove that Fisher had actually stolen or transmitted a single secret of any kind in his nine years at large in the United States, Tompkins went on: “I simply say this—this is a serious offense. This is an offense directed at our very existence, and through us at the free world and civilization itself.… The Government is entitled to protect itself when they find people conspiring to commit an offense. We are not helpless. We don’t have to wait for a corpse before we look for a criminal.”

  An offense directed at our very existence … We are not helpless. With these words ringing in their ears the jury retired for three and a half hours and returned on the sultry afternoon of October 25 to find Fisher guilty on all counts. He had spent the trial doodling on notepads, leaning over for amused asides with his defense team, and sometimes, as far as Donovan could tell, daydreaming “in a world of his own.” When the verdicts were read out, he did not react. Three weeks later, when the judge spared his life but sentenced him to thirty years in federal prison, he understood that he might never see his wife and daughter again. Still he didn’t flinch. This was his moment, after all; the moment when all the threads of a revolutionary life came together at a single point and revealed him as a true, triumphant specimen of Homo sovieticus. He had accomplished nothing useful since the war, but no one in the free world knew that. What mattered was that he was here, a socialist-realist polymath, still utterly mysterious to the U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of New York, betrayed and convicted but unbroken and quite possibly omniscient. He was the iron will incarnate, the threat made flesh, a sort of human Sputnik.

  Outside the courtroom the jury foreman said this had been “the most important spy case ever.” Tompkins said a severe blow had been struck at Soviet espionage. But the spy himself seemed to be riding high. As the court rose, he dropped his mask of impassivity and was “unusually affable” with reporters as he was led away. Donovan found him in a holding cell in the basement, smoking a cigarette and making plans for his appeal.

  Everyone admired him—Dulles, Gamber, and even Tompkins said so. For his own part Donovan called him extraordinary and brilliant, possessed of a “consuming intellectual thirst.”

  As prisoner 80016-A in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, Fisher kept busy. He learned silk-screening and played chess with a fellow convicted spy, Morton Sobell (the one whose wife Hayhanen had stiffed of five thousand dollars, which he kept for himself). He wrote logarithmic tables for the fun of it and taught French to a cellmate, Vincent “Jimmy” Squillante, a former New York garbage king and godson of a Gambino family capo.

  But busy was not the same as content. He probably missed Russia. He definitely missed his family. He wanted to go home.

  Neither Fisher nor his lawyer ever quite lost hope that they would find a way to ensure he didn’t die in jail. Both knew there was at least the theoretical possibility of a spy swap sometime in the future. Donovan mentioned it in his written argument against the death penalty, submitted to the trial judge in Brooklyn before sentencing. Fisher mentioned it in February 1958, when he heard that Donovan was going to visit Dulles on his behalf. But there was a problem: he was now officially a master spy. A fair swap would need two of them, and as Fisher himself noted sometime later, there was no one quite like him in jail in Russia. That would not change. There was no one quite like Fisher in jail in Russia at any point in the cold war. What did change was the arrival outside Moscow of an equivalent: a celebrity spy of a very different sort.

  The other strategy for freeing Fisher, besides human barter, was to appeal his conviction. Everything about the original trial—from the unanimity of the verdict to what Donovan called the satisfaction of the American public at the sentence—suggested it could not be done. But the trial had been quick. Donovan had barely cleared his throat, let alone shown the world what he could do in a corner. And from the very start he had seen a weakness in the prosecution’s case that lodged in his mind and offended his sense of what was right.

  It was a technicality, but a technicality that went to the heart of the Constitution. Fisher had been arrested and charged by immigration officers, but only after the FBI had entered his room, searched it, taken evidence, and questioned him without any sort of warrant. The strategy had been to force an entry and try to intimidate Fisher into cooperating. It had failed and in the process had violated the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable search and seizure. Donovan argued that this made the search illegal and anything it turned up inadmissible in court. When he made this case at trial and at Fisher’s first appeal, it was swiftly rejected. He then appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States, which took it much more seriously.

  On February 25, 1959, in full morning dress, Donovan asked all nine Supreme Court justices a question: “What is our national defense, in an age of intercontinental missiles, hydrogen bombs and man-made satellites? … Will it be our stockpile of atomic bombs? Our development of poison gas or lethal rays? Or will it be that with quiet courage we have maintained a firm belief in the truths of freedom that led our ancestors to migrate to this land?”

  The chief justice thanked him profusely for his “self-sacrificing” labors and a month later admitted the court could not make up its mind. It wanted the case reargued. This time Donovan put up in style at the Hay-Adams Hotel and allowed himself a glance at the morning papers before walking to the Court. Abel was once again the talk of the nation. His case was providing what the Washington Post and Times-Herald called “a rare spectacle of the protection afforded a defendant, whatever his crime, by the American Bill of Rights.”

  Camp X-Ray and its shuffling orange jumpsuits were still two generations into the future. But a time traveler would have been interested to note that in all Fisher’s appeals there was never any doubt that the Constitution’s protections applied to him as an alien.

  Back in front of the Court, Donovan drew inspiration from the revolution. He had managed to convince himself that Fisher’s arrest under false pretenses recalled the harassment of secessionist Americans by the British in the 1770s. When that harassment was denounced in open court, as President John Adams had said, “American independence was there and then born.”

  From American independence to the right of a weary Soviet spy to keep his door shut? It was a stretch, but clearly an invigorating one. Donovan felt good about his arguments that day. He shared a bottle of whiskey with friends on th
e train back to Boston and told Fisher in a letter that the Court “finds it extremely difficult to refute our legal arguments.”

  For four more months the justices cogitated. On March 28, 1960, they split five-four to uphold the conviction. Fisher heard the result on the radio in Atlanta and immediately telephoned Donovan to ask if the closeness of the vote meant he could appeal again. It didn’t. It meant he was stuck in jail for another twenty-seven years unless his strange career had any strangeness left in it.

  A month later, Frank Powers was blown out of the sky.

  “There are no accidents and no fatal flaws in the machines; there are only pilots with the wrong stuff.”

  Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff

  “It was a beautiful, clear day,” Nikolai says. “I got up as usual at seven o’clock and went outside. The sky was clear, no clouds at all. I was preparing to report for duty when the siren sounded.”

  Nikolai Batukhtin still lives a short drive from the missile base where he was stationed in the spring of 1960. From the nearest highway and even the approach road the base is obscured by dense woods; nothing in it rises above treetop height.

  The winter of 1960 had been brutal, “the worst cold ever.” As a lieutenant Batukhtin had been assigned a domik—a wood cabin with a stove—but the enlisted men had been in tents since February. On this clear day the snow had finally melted. There was warmth in the sun and a slack day in prospect for everyone, since it was May 1, May Day, the Day of Spring and Labor and of jubilant comradeship for socialists everywhere. It would be written later that a young Boris Yeltsin was among the marchers under the party banner in nearby Sverdlovsk.

  The brand-new rockets were at ease, nearly horizontal on their launchers. There were six in all, one per launcher, positioned in a neat hexagon and connected to one another by tracks cut through the trees that made a Star of David pattern when seen from above. Each stood in a clearing of its own that opened onto a larger central clearing with a control cabin on wheels in the middle. The cabin and the launchers were the color of the forest, dark green and still shiny from the factories where they had been rushed into production on the personal orders of the general secretary. The rockets were gray. Batukhtin was not an excitable soul, but the Dvina—for that was its code name—made him proud. They said that in tests at Sary Shagan it had exceeded expectations, and the expectation was for a missile that could hit an intruder traveling at one thousand miles an hour at eighty thousand feet. Its sharklike fins and long, slim body had a deadly beauty. Comrade Designer Pavel Grushin had surpassed himself.