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Most people don't remember who Rudolph Abel was anymore. His real name was William Fischer and he was born in 1903 at Newcastle upon Tyne in England, but that isn't where he died, he died in Moscow in the former Soviet Union in 1971. So who was guy and why should we care about him? We should care and take his case as a lesson learned. You see, old Rudolph was a master spy who operated for many years undetected. Maybe he became a spy because his father was an associate of Lenin and was even exiled for three years for being a revolutionary. He then moved to Britain for twenty years before returning to the Soviet Union. While he was in England he became the local organizer for communists in the factories and shipped weapons to his adopted mother land. Maybe that should have been a tip to the authorities to watch the son carefully.

Rudolph Abel aka William Fischer served in the Red Army for several years. They began to give him espionage assignments. I guess with a record like his father had, they believed that they could really trust him. He was assigned to organize communist radio stations in several european countries. Then came the big time. His assignment was to go to England. He was to take care of sending and receiving coded messages for the Philby spy ring. Anyone over the age of 50 will remember that Philby was one of the most notorious spies of our time and did a huge amount of damage to the British Government and in turn to us, because the British has access to many American secret documents. Philby was playing the double agent game. The Soviets got some of their nuclear know how from Philby who in turn had gotten it from Pyotr Kapitsa a physicist. One of Philby's great coups was getting the physicist to visit the Soviet Union where they took his passport and kept him there.

Abel was fired in 1938. I never heard of a spy being fired before, but it was because his brother was an enemy of the party and his direct supervisor had defected. The miracle of this whole thing was that Stalin never punished him, and as a matter of fact, he was reinstated three years later. The Soviets began to train him to spy in the United States.

Now it was time to sneak him into this country and they did it by giving him the passport of an American Citizen who had died. He used it to enter Canada and crossed over the border in 1948. One of his duties was to set up sabotage networks. The other was to establish radio contact with Moscow. He was good at setting up sabotage rings and set up many on the west coast in ship building companies. He didn't stop there, he began to make contacts and was able to establish a large network of people that would come through Mexico posing as migrant workers, but who in reality were spies ready to sabotage military installations. He acquired many hundreds of explosive experts who were ready to create havoc in this country. What he really wanted was nuclear information and he began devising ways to obtain it. He approached many nuclear scientists and asked for help for the Soviet Union. Amazingly it doesn't seem that any of them turned him in. It is said that he only got one to agree but spies were able to obtain enough nuclear info that the Soviets were able to create and explode a nuclear bomb in 1949. The nuclear scientist who agreed to help the Soviets was Theodore Hall who worked at Los Alamos. But other scientists eventually joined Hall and submitted their information to Abel. Why did they do it? Their excuse was that they were worried about the US having a nuclear monopoly.

Hollow bolt used to hide messages

Famous hollow nickel used to hide messages

Abel was extremely good at what he did. He became the supervisor for two important Soviet spies named Cohen and he was put in charge of all nuclear espionage in this country. Hall said he was quitting in 1952 and did. In 1955 Abel was called home and evaluated, then he was sent back to the U.S. I guess he wasn't corrupted by western life yet. One of the ways that secrets would be passed was in hollow nickels. The FBI had gotten their hands on several of them but couldn't trace them back to their point of origin. Even the former Soviet spies working for the FBI didn't know who was passing them. That was until 1957. In 1957 a spy named Hayhanen defected and told the FBI that the hollow nickels were from his boss who used the name Mark. He didn't know that Mark was Abel but he did know what Mark looked like. He was going to set Mark up for the FBI. The problem was that the Soviets found out that Hayhanen defected and sent Abel to Florida and put other agents on watch. Unfortunately these agents weren't as good as Abel and told Moscow that things were safe but didn't realize that the FBI was staking them out. Abel was ordered back. He was captured on July 21, 1957 along with all sorts of spy equipment including hollow nickels. He wasn't talking. After a trial he was sentenced to three concurrent sentences of 30 years, 10 years and 5 years with fines of $2,000 and $1,000. You would have though that he would have gotten death for his offenses. He actually had the nerve to appeal on the grounds that his constitutional rights were violated but lost.

Abel didn't remain in jail because he had the good fortune to be exchanged for Francis Gary Powers our downed U-2 pilot after serving only 5 years.