Nobody really knew Rudolf Abel
The story of a hollow coin, a newspaper delivery boy in Brooklyn, a Soviet defector, and a KGB colonel whose identity remained shrouded in mystery.
The coin
On 22 June 1953 a newspaper delivery boy in Brooklyn was walking home, having collected payment from customers in the apartment building at 3403 Foster Avenue, jingling the coins in his hand when one in particular seemed different. He dropped it on the pavement and watched in amazement as it cracked open.
The coin
A detective speaking with an FBI agent on 24 June casually mentioned the newspaper delivery boy, who was friends with another police officer’s daughter. He also mentioned the hollow coin, which contained a tiny photo with ten columns of typewritten of numbers on it. Their interest piqued, the FBI acquired the coin and the photograph, and started searching for the source. An examination of the coin suggested precision manufacturing.
The face of the coin was a 1948 Jefferson nickel. In the “R” of the word “TRUST”, there was a tiny hole—obviously drilled there so that a fine needle or other small instrument could be inserted to force the nickel open.
The customer who had given the hollow coin to the delivery boy couldn’t remember where she had got it, and every effort to decipher the series of numbers failed. Efforts continued for four years but bore little fruit.
The defector
A Lieutenant Colonel of the KGB first telephoned and then showed up at the American embassy in Paris in May 1957. Reino Häyhänen had spent five years in the US. Having been ordered to return to Moscow, he realised he would rather defect than live in the USSR.
Reino Häyhänen could have been cast in a 1950s episode of Narcos
Häyhänen wasn’t a Resident, a Soviet intelligence officer operating in another country under diplomatic cover. He was an illegal. He had joined the NKVD — the KGB’s predecessor — and after studying the Finnish language, he had served in counterintelligence during the Finnish-Soviet war. Afterwards he worked to build networks of agents to find and neutralise anti-Soviet elements in Finland.
In May 1948, he was called back to Moscow and received training in, among other skills, English. The next year saw him enter Finland as Eugene Maki. The real Eugene Maki was born on 30 May 1919 in Enaville, Idaho to an American-born mother and a Finnish father. In the mid-1920s the family had emigrated to Estonia. After a while, their former neighbours had stopped receiving letters from them and the Maki family were assumed by them to have perished.
Häyhänen spent three years in Finland establishing himself as Eugene Maki. Using the real Eugene Maki’s birth certificate from Idaho, he got the US legation in Helsinki to issue him an American passport, then arrived in New York on 21 October 1952. The next five years he worked in New York. During his debrief he mentioned using dead drops to pass intelligence to his handler, Mikhail. At one of the dead drops, FBI found a hollowed-out bolt containing a typewritten message.
Nobody came to meeting either 8 or 9th...as I was advised he should. Why? Should he be inside or outside? Is time wrong? Place seems right. Please check.
Häyhänen mentioned that they often used trick containers like hollowed out bolts and coins to pass intelligence undetected. The FBI found many such coins in his home in New York. Careful examination showed remarkable similarity to the coil the newspaper delivery boy had found in 1953. Based on information provided by Häyhänen, the FBI were able to decipher the message contained within the 1953 coin:
1. WE CONGRATULATE YOU ON A SAFE ARRIVAL. WE CONFIRM THE RECEIPT OF YOUR LETTER TO THE ADDRESS `V REPEAT V’ AND THE READING OF LETTER NUMBER 1.
2. FOR ORGANIZATION OF COVER, WE GAVE INSTRUCTIONS TO TRANSMIT TO YOU THREE THOUSAND IN LOCAL (CURRENCY). CONSULT WITH US PRIOR TO INVESTING IT IN ANY KIND OF BUSINESS, ADVISING THE CHARACTER OF THIS BUSINESS.
3. ACCORDING TO YOUR REQUEST, WE WILL TRANSMIT THE FORMULA FOR THE PREPARATION OF SOFT FILM AND NEWS SEPARATELY, TOGETHER WITH (YOUR) MOTHER’S LETTER.
4. IT IS TOO EARLY TO SEND YOU THE GAMMAS. ENCIPHER SHORT LETTERS, BUT THE LONGER ONES MAKE WITH INSERTIONS. ALL THE DATA ABOUT YOURSELF, PLACE OF WORK, ADDRESS, ETC., MUST NOT BE TRANSMITTED IN ONE CIPHER MESSAGE. TRANSMIT INSERTIONS SEPARATELY.
5. THE PACKAGE WAS DELIVERED TO YOUR WIFE PERSONALLY. EVERYTHING IS ALL RIGHT WITH THE FAMILY. WE WISH YOU SUCCESS. GREETINGS FROM THE COMRADES. NUMBER 1, 3RD OF DECEMBER.
The handler
Although he didn’t know for sure, Häyhänen had a strong feeling that Mikhail was a Soviet diplomat. The physical description he gave the FBI led them to suspect Mikhail Nikolaevich Svirin, former first secretary to the Soviet United Nations Delegation in New York. When they showed Häyhänen a photograph of Svirin, he immediately recognised his handler. But there was a problem: Mikhail had returned to the USSR in 1956.
Mikhail’s replacement was Mark, a Colonel in the KGB who had entered the United States after illegally crossing the border from Canada in 1949. This was promising. While a Resident would enjoy diplomatic immunity, an illegal had no such protections. The FBI conducted a detailed debrief of Häyhänen to find out whatever they could about Mark. In addition to a physical description, Häyhänen recalled a storage room for photographic equipment in a building in Brooklyn to which Mark had once taken him.
The details led the FBI to a studio apartment leased to Emil R. Goldfus, a photographer. But Goldfus had disappeared three weeks earlier, telling his neighbours that he would be away for a seven-week vacation. Surveillance was established. A few weeks later, agents observed a man matching Mark’s description sitting in the park opposite the target building. After a while he departed. The FBI agents did not follow him, reasoning that if he was the man they were after, he would return later.
It took three weeks but one evening in June 1957 agents noticed that the lights were on in the studio they were watching. A man was observed in it. The lights went out at 11:52pm, and a man matching the description of Mark exited the building and walked to the Subway station nearby. He was followed and observed entering Hotel Latham on East 28th Street. A few days later Häyhänen was shown photographs of the suspect.
You’ve found him. That’s ‘Mark.
Emil Goldfus aka Mark aka Martin Collins aka Rudolf Abel
Mark was arrested a few days later. Another set of papers identifying him as Martin Collins were recovered from him. Interrogation revealed that his real name was Rudolf Ivanovich Abel, born July 2, 1902 in the Soviet Union.
Rudolf Abel
He refused to discuss his intelligence activities, but his photo studio & hotel room yielded shortwave radios capable of receiving signals from Russia, cipher pads, cameras, microdot film, and many other tools of the trade. He was convicted in October 1957 and sentenced to 30 years in prison. Rudolf Abel served less than five years, and was repatriated to the USSR in exchange for Francis Gary Powers, the American U-2 pilot shot down by the Soviet Union. The exchange took place at Glienicke Bridge in Germany.
Glienicke Bridge, across the Havel River in Germany
Abel died in Moscow in 1971, his remains interred at Donskoy Monastery. Curiously, his tombstone bears the name William Fisher.
William Fisher
Born in Newcastle on 11 July 1903, William Fisher lived in the United Kingdom till the age of 18 when his family — his father Heinrich Fisher and his mother Lyubov who had emigrated to the UK in 1901 from Tsarist Russia to escape persecution for being socialists — returned with him to Soviet Russia.
William Fisher’s birth certificate
A committed communist like his parents, William joined the Red Army as a radio operator. He spoke English, Russian, German and French, and soon found himself working for the intelligence agencies. In 1948 the KGB sent him into the US where he worked until his arrest in 1957.
The Americans remained clueless about the existence of William Fisher because throughout his interrogation, trial, and five years of incarceration, the name he gave them was Rudolf Abel, the name, coincidentally, of a different KGB officer.
A stamp featuring Rudolf Abel released by the USSR after his death.
Sources
Shaunak Agarkhedkar writes spy novels. His first two - Let Bhutto Eat Grass & Let Bhutto Eat Grass: Part 2 - deal with nuclear weapons espionage in 1970s India, Pakistan, and Europe.
Brilliant.