Rudolf Abel - Master Spy

So who was Rudolf Abel?  Well, as I have already told you not actually Rudolf Abel at all. 

In the movie he is played by Mark Rylance is best known as Thomas Cromwell in the television series Wolf Hall who is the correct age for the part.  Appropriately, Mark Rylance  is a stage name.  He was born David Waters.

The spy had been tried and convicted in the US as Rudolf Abel.  This was a name he selected from fellow KGB Colonels back home in order to send a message to the Russians that he had been caught and hadn't talked, even to the extent of revealing his true name. 

The man the FBI caught was known to the Russian defector who 'shopped him' as MARK so the FBI accepted the offered pseudonym and it stuck.  He was Vilyam "Willie" Genrikhovich Fisher, a KGB Colonel with distinguished military service during the Second World War when the Russians had been our allies. 

To understand Willie better you need to know a little bit of Russian history. 

I suppose that everyone knows that Lenin was the leader of the Bolshevik revolution that sized power in October after Tsar Nicholas II had been forced to abdicate during an earlier revolution in February 1917.

Willie was 'Bolshevik aristocracy'.  He was the son of a leading Bolshevik and revolutionary and a close colleague of Lenin's in their struggle.  His mother too was committed to the cause. Thus Willie was exceptionally loyal to their cause and to socialist Russia. 

The family were German speaking Russians.  Prior to exile in England Willie's father was had been an engineering professor in St Petersburg.

Ethnic Germans were over-represented in the professional class in Russia.  Many had been in Russia for generations, encouraged by tax and other privileges to settle there by Russia's largely German aristocracy; particularly Peter the Great and Catherine the Great.

But by the start of the 20th century German speaking Russians had fallen out of favour.  As tensions with the new united Germany and domestic unrest in Russia increased their loyalty had become suspect. 

The thin edge of the wedge was inserted at the end of the previous century when the reforming Tsar, Alexander II, had removed the tax and other privileges enjoyed by ethnic Germans (like himself) and, committed to the unifying affect of Orthodox Christianity, put the Protestants among them under pressure to emigrate.  Many left for the 'new world'.  The professional middle classes were extremely unhappy and as unrest grew attempts on the Tsar's life became commonplace. Two previous Tsars had already been put away.  After several failed attempts Alexander was successfully assassinated in a coordinated multiple bomb attack in St Petersburg (see my travel note and the Church of Spilled Blood). He was succeeded in 1881 by Alexander III.

Alexander III was a religious conservative who disliked his father's relative liberalism.  He began the active oppression of ethnic and religious minorities; particularly Jews and non-Russian speakers.  Lenin's brother, Aleksandr Ilyich Ulyanov (Sacha), attempted to assassinate him; a crime for which Sacha was executed.  This is said to have caused Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, who took the name Lenin, to become a revolutionary in turn. 

Alexander III died of natural causes in 1894 to be succeeded by 'Bloody' Tsar Nicholas II, a religious zealot, believing in miracles and the divine right of kings, in addition to the quackery of Rasputin. He was a military incompetent, interfering disastrously in a war with Japan and then in the First World War.  He also instigated bloody, religiously motivated, pogroms against the Jews.  His infamous secret police rounded up ethnic Germans and other minorities and exiled them to Siberia without any legal cause.  His secret police are also suspected of concocting the The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a book that would help to fuel anti-Semitism in Germany, Britain and the United States between the wars. He was the essentially ignorant and misguided man who precipitated the Revolution and set the scene for the Nazis twenty years later.  He, together with his family, met a particularly unfortunate end. 

There's more information about the Tsars on this website - follow this link.

All these things served to radicalise the professional classes.  Like Lenin, also from a professional family, Willie's parents became revolutionaries dedicated to Marxism and the overthrow of Imperial Russia. 

From my point of view there is another interesting thing about Willie.  He was born William August Fisher 14 years earlier than my father, a few miles from my birthplace in Newcastle upon Tyne.  When exiled from Tsarist Russia his father had chosen Newcastle as a good place to buy guns then to ship them to fellow revolutionaries in the Baltic.  Young William was technically literate from an early age and a radio amateur.  After school he worked as an apprentice draftsman at Swan Hunter & Wigham Richardson Ltd, the Shipyard where my grandfather was Assistant Shipyard Manager.  Not only that, but my grandfather's close friend Bill Buckle, who introduced him to my grandmother, rose to become chief draftsman and was in all probability William's supervisor.  Follow this link.

Young Fischer was fluent in several languages including English, Russian and German and when the family returned to Russia he worked as a translator and then in radio: first as an operator and then in radio research, before being recruited to train spies.  In this role he was part of elaborate wartime spy games to disrupt the Germans and capture their agents.

The first atomic bombs were dropped on Japan in 1945.  A year later Willie would became a professional spy presumably hoping to protect his country from a similar fate. 

Willie is known to have entered the United States as Andrew Kayotis in November 1948. During the next eight and a half years he travelled around North America under a variety of pseudonyms. 

In New York he used the cover of being a painter and photographer, to explain his range of equipment, and was relatively active in the New York art scene, inviting other artists to his studio.  He was or became a competent painter, if too figurative for the fashion of the day, as we see in the movie.

He even got to return to Russia to see his family and had just got back, to discover his fellow spy's treachery, before being uncovered himself.

By the time he was eventually discovered and arrested in New York (in April 1957) he was 53 years old.

Partly based on stolen information the Soviet Union would successfully explode its first atomic (fission) bomb in 1949.  Then in 1952 the US would explode the first hydrogen (fusion) bomb.  Russia would soon respond with its own version, topping this in 1961 with the most powerful hydrogen bomb that has ever been exploded. Meanwhile Britain and then France (independently) would demonstrate their nuclear capability followed by: China; India; Pakistan; and North Korea.  

Historically Russian scientists and engineers have been at the forefront of many technologies (see my comments on Radar elsewhere).   For example, Igor Sikorsky (of helicopter and flying-boat fame) was one of several Russian aviation pioneers.  This tradition was set back for a period when that 'ignorant peasant', as Churchill called him, Joseph Stalin decided it would be a good idea to 'purge' his scientists. But the 'bomb' saw them reinstated.  

So as the fifties rolled on the obvious lead Russian scientists and engineers had taken in some areas of space, aeronautics and submarines would lead the US to steal Soviet secrets.  Spying on each other to discover technical advances would quickly become a major pastime for many nations.

More recently modern 'stealth' technology (that makes ships and aircraft invisible to Radar) is based on the work of the Russian/Soviet physicist Petr Ufimtsev.  But 'stealth' technology did not have to be 'stolen'.  Like so many other significant breakthroughs it was not thought to be important enough to be kept secret and was simply translated by US aircraft makers and French ship builders from a book in Russian: Method of Edge Waves in the Physical Theory of Diffraction, that was in the public domain.  Professor Ufimtsev worked in the Institute of Radio Engineering and Electronics of the USSR Academy of Sciences, the same institution as Willie had.   But it's a sign of the times that in the 1990's Professor Ufimtsev was a visiting lecturer at UCLA in California.  No, he hadn't defected, he was on loan from the University of Moscow.

At the end of the day it was not clear what or how much secret information Willie or his network had stolen or possibly simply taken from public sources.  His movements are largely unaccounted for and such information that was intercepted was one time code and indecipherable.  Most of what is known about his operations was revealed by a defector who was an incompetent, a drunkard and a thief, who Willie had little reason to trust and had already asked to be repatriated.  Initially the defector even had difficulty providing enough information to identify 'Rudolf Abel'. 

If the Russians hadn't successfully stolen US atomic secrets who knows what might have happened?  Maybe the USSR or China or Vietnam would have been 'nuked' like Japan?

Although the secrets obviously leaked, US authorities dismiss Fischer/Abel's role in this; while the Russians claim the opposite.   Take your pick:  Lies, damn lies; and propaganda.