We should have known, as we set out on our quixotic mission on a November morning in 1971, that spies and their secrets are not easily parted.
There were four of us - Western journalists based in Moscow - and we were planning to crash the wake of a Soviet bogeyman from the most frigid days of the Cold War, master spy Col. Rudolf Abel.As the Cold War becomes a distant memory, some may recall only dimly - if at all - the case of Rudolf Ivanovich Abel, the Soviet agent arrested in New York in 1957 and swapped in 1962 for U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers.
But in the late 1950s, when Americans were preoccupied with nuclear fallout shelters, the indictment and trial of the quiet artist and photographer made the name Abel synonymous with communist treachery.
Now he was dead, and I was going to his wake.
We parked several blocks from Malaya Lyubyanka, a small street off Dzerzhinsky Square where the colonel lay in state in a social club of the KGB, the Soviet secret police.
We walked toward the building, just behind KGB headquarters and the notorious Lyubyanka Prison, and planned to join the line of mourners waiting to view Abel's bier.
But as we crossed Malaya Lyubyanka, a squad of KGB heavies materialized from the crowd and surrounded us, kicking and shoving us away from the mourners.
One of the jostlers seemed to take a particular interest in me. I protested that we were on a public thoroughfare and demanded to see his identity card.
"It's not important who I am," said the man, "but I know you very well, Mr. Peipert."
I had never seen the man before, but part of his job, apparently, was to keep track of me.
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My excursion into the life and times of Abel began Nov. 16, 1971, with a telephone call to the Moscow bureau of The Associated Press, where I was a correspondent from 1970 to 1974.
"Did you hear? Colonel Abel died," said the informant, Pyotr Yakir.
Yakir was a prominent Russian dissenter who had taken on the Soviet system with almost foolhardy courage.
He frequently called with tidbits of dissident doings - hunger strikes, demonstrations, petitions. But he also had good sources in the establishment because his father had been a Soviet general who was killed in a Stalinist purge.
Abel, he went on to relate, had died of lung cancer the day before in a sanitarium just outside Moscow and would lie in state in an unmarked building on Malaya Lyubyanka.
Based on Yakir's information, I filed a dispatch attributed to "informed sources." It said that Abel, whom the FBI considered the top Soviet spy in the United States from 1948 until his arrest in 1957, had died at age 68 after a six-month struggle with lung cancer.
A short time later, the official Soviet news agency, Tass, confirmed Yakir's account. Not surprisingly, it said nothing about funeral arrangements for the late colonel.
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According to the FBI, whose agents arrested Abel and later traced his movements in North America, the spy with the courtly Old World manner got off a ship from Germany at a Quebec pier on Nov. 14, 1948, carrying the U.S. passport of a dead man named Andrew Kayotis.
He made his way to New York, set up a studio in Brooklyn and lived in the Latham Hotel in Manhattan, using the aliases Emil Goldfus and Martin Collins. The real Goldfus, it turned out, was born in New York and would have been about the same age as Abel, but he died when he was 2 months old.
With what the government later termed "sheer audacity," Abel's one-room studio at 225 Fulton St. was just around the corner from a police station and directly opposite the Federal Building, headquarters for federal law enforcement agencies in Brooklyn and Long Island.
On Aug. 7, 1957, a federal grand jury delivered a 19-count indictment accusing Abel of espionage, and on Oct. 25, 1957, Abel, then 55, was convicted of conspiring to gather and transmit U.S. defense and atomic secrets to the Soviet Union and of failure to register as a foreign agent.
The chief witness against him was Reino Hayhanen, an ex-Soviet spy who had put the FBI onto Abel and testified at the trial that the colonel was the Soviet Union's "resident officer for espionage" in America. Abel was sentenced to 30 years' imprisonment and sent to the U.S. penitentiary in Atlanta.
In March 1960, Abel's court-appointed lawyer, James Donovan, lost his bid to have the spy's conviction overturned on grounds that federal agents had searched his room at the Latham Hotel without a warrant.
But on May 1 of that year a U-2 spy plane piloted by Francis Gary Powers was shot down as it flew high above Sverdlovsk in the Ural Mountains.
Powers was tried in Moscow on espionage charges and sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment.
In February 1962, a swap got under way. Abel was taken from his cell in Atlanta and transported secretly to West Berlin. Powers was flown to the Soviet sector of the divided former German capital.
At 8:45 a.m. on Feb. 10, 1962, a bitterly cold Saturday, the two spies began walking from opposite ends of the Glienicker Bridge linking East and West Berlin and crossed the center line without looking at each other.
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Little was heard from Abel after he returned to the Soviet Union. The official media indicated that he was in semi-retirement, helping train aspiring agents.
In May 1965, Soviet authorities for the first time publicly honored Abel with a tribute in Pravda by Vladimir Semichastny, then KGB chairman.
An article purportedly by Abel in the Feb. 17, 1966, issue of Molodoi Kommunist (Young Communist) told fairly accurately of his arrest and imprisonment in the United States.
It also provided an account of Abel's early days, saying he was born in St. Petersburg (now Leningrad), the son of a factory worker and revolutionary. His interest in radio engineering and foreign languages, both useful to a spy, developed when he was a member of the Young Communist League, the article said.
That sketchy biography was about the only version of Abel's life before he came to the United States. But like his life in America, much of it was a smoke screen.
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When Abel died, he was laid to rest in obscurity, as befitted a man who lived in the shadows. The official media did not report his funeral.
Sometime later that winter of 1971, I had occasion to meet a good Russian friend, a brilliant misfit named Sergei Ignashiev, who had some intriguing information about the late spy.
Ignashiev had once studied in the elite institute that trains Soviets for the diplomatic service, but he became disillusioned with the Soviet system and dropped out. He did not become an active dissenter, preferring instead to quietly go his own way. He had a clerical job at the Foreign Literature Library, which gave him access to foreign books and enough spare time to pursue his main interest, vintage American films.
A friend who worked as an orderly at the hospital where Abel spent his last days had cared for him as he lay dying, Ignashiev said. The orderly became Abel's confidante, Ignashiev said, and the colonel told him that his real name was not Rudolf Abel but William Fisher.
The man who became one of the Soviet Union's greatest spies told the orderly that he was born and reared in England and that his father was an agitator in the British labor movement of the early 1900s.
It was a fascinating yarn, but I was incredulous. I had read a fair amount about Abel and recalled nothing about a British connection. The story of the deathbed confession was secondhand and seemed impossible to corroborate.
The AP bureau's set of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, the standard Soviet reference work, had no entries on a William Fisher or any Fisher. None of my British colleagues could recall a British union figure named Fisher.
But Ignashiev worked in a library that had previous editions of Great Soviet Encyclopedia. It was worth a look. A day or two after passing the request to Ignashiev, we met on a street corner and he gave me a typewritten sheet, an entry on a Henry Fisher copied from the first edition of the "Great Soviet Encyclopedia," issued over the period 1929-1949.
Henry Matveyevich Fisher, it said, was a St. Petersburg metal worker and labor organizer who was born in 1871 and died in 1935. He was an associate of Vladimir Lenin, founder of the Soviet state, and served three years in exile in the Archangelsk region for revolutionary activities after czarist police arrested him in 1894.
Then came the passage that practically leaped off the page: "In 1901 he went abroad and lived for a long time in England, where he took part in the labor movement. He helped collect arms for dispatch to Russia. Upon formation of the British Communist Party, he joined its ranks. In 1921, he returned to the Soviet Union and joined the All-Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks)."
If Henry Fisher was in England from 1901 to 1921, that meant his son, William (alias Rudolf Abel), was almost certainly born there and probably first set foot in Russia as a young man.
No wonder he was able to blend in so easily in America. English was his native tongue, and he grew up with Western ways.
But the story still lacked tangible evidence linking William Fisher with Henry Fisher.
It came months later - in dramatic fashion in a Moscow cemetery.
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In August 1972 a telephone call from another Soviet dissident again put me onto Abel's trail.
Alyosha Tyumerman was a Jewish "refusenik" who had taken up the cause of Jewish emigration with reckless abandon.
The latest protest against the plight of Soviet Jewry, which he phoned to tell me about, was a graveside vigil on the anniversary of the death of a Jewish actor, Solomon Mikhoels, who died in 1948 in an automobile accident in Minsk.
Jewish activists contended, probably quite rightly, that Mikhoels' car crash was no accident - that it was arranged by Stalin's secret police and that the prominent Shakespearean actor was one of the first victims of an anti-Semitic purge.
So there we stood beside the grave of Mikhoels in the Donskoi Cemetery on the southern fringes of Moscow - Tyumerman, fellow refuseniks and a handful of Western journalists. The refuseniks prayed and sang, we watched and took notes, and a posse of KGB agents tried to look inconspicuous behind the trees.
The demonstration over, Tyumerman asked me, "Do you want to see the grave of Colonel Abel?"
The question came as a surprise. We didn't even know Abel had been interred in Donskoi Cemetery, where Moscow's only crematorium was located. There had been nothing in the official press since a brief Pravda report of his death.
But because of the bizarre tale I had heard about Abel's last days, I particularly wanted to see his grave. So we began hiking through the huge cemetery, Tyumerman in the lead like a tour guide, the entourage of KGB watchers bringing up the rear.
Soon we stood before a white marble marker that bore an unmistakable sketch of the dead spy - the birdlike features, a fringe of hair around a bald pate, penetrating eyes.
Below the sketch were the words, etched in gold Cyrillic letters:
FISHER
William Genrikhovich
Abel Rudolf Ivanovich
11 VII 1903-15 XI 1971
In Russian, the second part of every name is the patronymic, formed from the first name of the person's father. "William Genrykhovich" means "William, son of Henry."
In the same plot were the graves of Abel's parents: Henry Matveyevich Fisher, who was born in 1872 and died in 1935, and Lyubov Vasdevna Fisher, 1881-1945.
Finally, here was proof, engraved in stone, of Abel's origins.
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By all accounts, Abel conducted himself during captivity in the United States like a prisoner of war. But his interrogators did not even get his name, rank and serial number.
At a hearing before U.S. immigration officers, Abel gave his occupation as teacher and said he had attended elementary school from 1910 to 1916 and high school from 1916 to 1920 in Moscow. He gave his father's name as Ivan Abel and said he was born in Moscow.
James Donovan, the New York lawyer who represented Abel, described him in his 1964 account of the case, "Strangers on a Bridge," as "an extraordinary individual, brilliant and with the intellectual thirst of every lifetime scholar."
But the lawyer added that Abel maintained remarkable self-discipline while in captivity, refusing to cooperate with his interrogators or admit that his activities in America were directed by the Soviet Union.
Despite the many interrogations and the vast resources of the FBI, Abel's real identity and his background remained a mystery.
Now, in a Moscow graveyard, Abel's cover was finally blown.