COLD WARRIOR
THIS IS A STORY ABOUT spies and spy catchers. It’s about superbombs, the space race, and the global clash between the United States and the Soviet Union. It’s the story of the most intense years of the Cold War, building to the single most dangerous moment in human history. But even in such an epic struggle, small details and seemingly ordinary people play pivotal roles, shoving events in one direction or another.
What does a paperboy’s tip have to do with the end of the world?
That took a while to figure out.
The New York police passed the hollow nickel on to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Two FBI agents went to interview the teachers who’d given it to Jimmy Bozart—but who remembers where they got a particular coin? One of them must have picked it up as change at the grocery store, the women guessed. Or possibly when buying subway tokens. The women seemed credible. There was no point in questioning them any further.
Trying another angle, the agents visited magician supply shops around the city. They showed employees the hollow coin, hoping for clues to its origin.
“It’s not suitable for a magic trick,” one salesman told the agents. “The hollowed-out area is too small to hide anything aside from a tiny piece of paper.” No good for a performer on stage, in other words.
Holding the separate sides of the coin in his hands, the salesman explained that he’d never seen anything like it. This was no cheap novelty, nothing mass produced in any factory. These were two sides of two different authentic nickels, expertly hollowed out, and—look at this—whoever made it had drilled an almost invisibly tiny hole in the R of the word TRUST. Someone who knew to look for the hole could stick in a needle to pop the coin open.
Who made stuff like this?
No one, as far as the salesman knew.
The agents thanked the man. They tried a few more shops and got the same dead-end answers. There wasn’t much more to be done. The tiny piece of film was on its way to government code breakers in Washington, D.C. Maybe something would come of that. Maybe not.
In the meantime, the FBI moved on to other cases.
Jimmy Bozart finished eighth grade and continued delivering the Brooklyn Eagle.
And the man who’d hollowed out the nickel and hidden the coded message inside, the highest-ranking Soviet spy in America, went on living and working in Brooklyn, just a few miles from the Bozart family’s apartment. He was Emil Goldfus.
And Andrew Kayotis.
Also Martin Collins.
His real name was William Fisher.
For the sake of clarity, let’s use the name by which he would become infamous in America: Rudolf Abel. And let’s follow him into the story by jumping back five years to 1948, to the Soviet capital of Moscow in the early days of the Cold War.
* * *
“I would rather perish than betray the secrets entrusted to me.… With every heartbeat, with every day that passes, I swear to serve the Party, the homeland, and the Soviet People.”
Rudolf Abel swore this sacred oath in Moscow’s Lubyanka building, headquarters of the Soviet Union’s secret intelligence agency, the KGB. Later that evening he kissed his wife and daughter goodbye. For how long, he could not know. Years, certainly. Boarding a ship bound for Quebec, Canada, Abel set out on his new assignment: to expand the Soviet Union’s spy network in America, to steal the technology behind new American bombs, and to help pave the way to a glorious Soviet victory in World War III.
That’s all.
His entire life had built toward this mission. Abel was born in England to parents of German and Russian heritage. In 1921, when he was eighteen, the family emigrated to Russia. Communists had just taken over the country and would rename it the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Under communism, an all-powerful central government owns all the land and factories, controlling every aspect of the country’s economy. In theory, the government uses its power to distribute a fair share of the country’s income to every worker. Abel’s parents believed in the promise of communism, and Abel came to agree. At a young age, he committed himself to the goal of helping the Soviet Union spread its form of government around the world.
Tall and thin, with a bony face and piercing eyes, Abel spoke fluent German and English, in addition to Russian. He had a gift for building gadgets and fixing machines. Useful qualities for a spy. Recruited into Soviet intelligence, he spent several years living undercover in Norway, posing as an electronics salesman while secretly setting up radio networks for fellow spies. When Germany attacked the Soviet Union during World War II, Abel took on the incredibly dangerous task of slipping behind enemy lines. He managed to convince German commanders he was on their side, then fed them damaging misinformation, diverting their attention from upcoming Soviet attacks.
Abel’s reward was this new assignment. This time the enemy was the United States of America.
* * *
It was only three years since the end of World War II, but so much had already changed.
The Soviets and Americans had been allies in the war, united by their common enemy, Adolf Hitler’s Germany. Together, they crushed Hitler. Together, they won the war in Europe. When the fighting ended in 1945, the United States and the Soviet Union were the biggest powers left standing.
The two powers immediately began to clash over postwar plans. What, for instance, would happen in the countries of Eastern Europe that had been conquered by Germany during the war? American leaders wanted to see the establishment of democratic governments—governments that would be friendly to the United States. Joseph Stalin, the Soviet dictator, had a very different vision. Stalin’s army had driven Hitler from Eastern Europe at the cost of millions of Soviet soldiers. He now controlled that part of the globe and had no intention of letting it go. One by one, Stalin installed hand-picked puppets to lead new communist governments in Eastern Europe. He violently crushed any opposition, any calls for freedom or democracy.
“An iron curtain has descended across the Continent,” declared Winston Churchill, Britain’s prime minister during World War II, while visiting America in 1946.
It was a vivid and frightening image—the drop of a barrier across Europe, a dividing line between free and communist worlds. What would stop Stalin from continuing to expand the borders of his empire? Who could prevent more people from falling under Soviet control?
The United States would take that job, declared U.S. President Harry Truman. In what became known as the Truman Doctrine, the president committed the United States to the goal of stopping the further spread of Soviet power.
And so by the fall of 1948, as Rudolf Abel sailed west across the Atlantic Ocean, the United States and the Soviet Union were locked in a struggle for power and influence all over the world: the Cold War.
It was understood, on both sides, that there could be only one winner.
* * *
Juggling a series of false names and forged passports, Rudolf Abel traveled by train from Quebec City to Montreal. He crossed the border by bus and headed south. In New York City, a Soviet diplomat slipped him $1,000 in cash. Abel rented a tiny apartment and began to explore his new home.
The next step was to meet the librarian.
Text copyright © 2021 by Steve Sheinkin
