Rudolph Abel is best known as the
KGB spy traded in 1962 for
U-2 pilot
Francis Gary Powers to conclude the "
U-2 Incident." Five years earlier, in 1957, he was a household name, on par with
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
Abel was born in England in 1901 under the name William August Fisher. In
Russia he took the name Rudolf
Ivanovich Abel. His native English ability (not to mention his ability with four other languages) made him prime agent material. He rose to the rank of
Colonel in the KGB and was dropped into
New York City in 1948. His mission was to set up a spy network to steal
atomic secrets. Many of the scientists who had worked on the
Manhattan Project relocated to New York to teach in area universities.
Abel's first assignment was to find suitable locations where informants could drop information for later retrieval (known in spy trade as a "
dead drop"). He needed to take a lot of photographs to record good spots. Some of the spots he found and photographed included a waste basket outside
Tavern on the Green and under a balcony carpet at the
Symphony Space theater.
To avoid suspicion regarding his odd travels and shutterbuggery, not to mention all his odd microfilm developing equipment, his cover story was he was a retired
photo finisher and an artist.
Abel went by the name Emil Goldfus, a New York native born in 1902. The name came from a forged birth certificate of a real Emil Goldfus born in 1902 but died in infancy in 1903 (this was an early and common form of
identify theft ... acquiring birth certificates from names taken from tombstones of infants that died within a year of birth).
Abel located to a
studio apartment at 246 Fulton street (a place called the Ovington building) . By strange coincidence
Norman Mailer was his upstairs neighbor, and was working on a book about a writer becoming involved with spies called
Barbary Shore.
Abel remained undetected for several years. However in 1957 a
Paris-based KGB agent named Reino Hayhanen was about to be recalled to Moscow by his spy masters. Not wanting to give up the lights of Paris, Hayhanen defected to the American
embassy, promising to tell them everything he knew. The problem was, the Soviet spy network at that time was very, very compartmentalized and Hayhanen knew very little. He did, however, remember something about a room being rented in the Ovington building.
State-side, the
FBI visited 246 Fulton street and discovered one Emil R. Goldfus (aka Abel). Initially the FBI was quite curious about a strange radio in Abel's possession. It didn't quite fit in with him being an artist. Abel tried to claim he was also interested in
ham radio as a hobby. Upon a more careful search, they found another
birth certificate in his possession with the name "Martin Collins". So who was he? Martin or Emil? The FBI placed him under arrest and made a thorough search of his studio. There they found an amazing array of spy stuff, things most Americans had only seen in movies or read about in books. They found a coin that held a
microdot in a secret chamber, a hollowed-out pencil containing 18
microfilms, and block of wood with another secret compartment that contained an obvious
one time pad.
Yeah, he was a
spy, alright.
Abel's arrest was a major coup for a government trying to wake up America to the demands and reality of the emerging
Cold War. His trial was prime time stuff in newspapers and TV. However, unlike our government in its current War on Terrorism, Abel was not brought before a military tribunal. Abel was indicted in a regular court and given the full protection of the Bill of Rights. He was even able to appeal his case to the
Supreme Court, on the grounds the original FBI search was not legal. His appeal failed. Abel was given thirty years, although originally he was going to be given the death penalty. His defense attorney General Counsel James B. Donovan convinced the judge to spare his life, on the grounds he would prove useful for further intelligence. Donovan's suspicion was correct, as the Soviets happily traded Powers for this one single man.
Following the spy trade, Abel was pressed into retirement by the KGB and was forcibly located to a city 30 miles from
Moscow called Chelyushkinskoe. Many KGB spies were "retired" there so they could be kept an eye on and not be used as
double agents by the West.
Several years later, Abel was allowed to move to Moscow. He died of
cancer there in 1971 at the age of 68.
Curiously the FBI justified its snooping on
Martin Luther King based on King's association with Stanley Levison, an executive in the
Communist Party of America. Levinson himself had known Abel. The FBI therefore justified its snooping on King as .... merely
connecting the dots!