Bridge of Spies Read Online Free

As the Bikini lagoon erupted, the outlook for international Communism looked bleak indeed. Yet from the bowels of the Lyubianka—headquarters of the KGB and the true engine room of the revolution—there came a glimmer of hope.

 
    “There are many countries in our blood, aren’t there, but only one person.”
Graham Greene (via Mr. Wormald in a cable to MI6
headquarters in
Our Man in Havana
)
     
    Shortly before midday on November 14, 1948, an aging Cunard liner laden with immigrants picked up a pilot for the last few miles of its transatlantic crossing. It nosed up the Saint Lawrence Seaway beneath the lowering darkness of the Plains of Abraham and docked in Quebec at five past one. A cold wind raked the quayside. The SS
Scythia
had been nine days at sea since leaving Cuxhaven on the north German coast. Most of its passengers were in family groups being met by those who had made the journey before them. Most were refugees from the joyless austerity of a country destroyed by war and occupied by its victors. They stepped cautiously down the
Scythia
’s gangplanks, wrapped in thick coats, clutching what they would need for the first few hours of their new lives.
    For a few moments Andrew Kayotis may have stood out among them. As a single man, middle-aged, taller than average despite his stoop, it was probably unavoidable. But he did not stand out for long. No one met him. He carried only a suitcase so had no need of a porter. His papers were in order. He showed his passport, walked briskly to the railway station on the Rue Saint-Pierre, and bought a ticket for the first train to Montreal.
    “Kayotis” had spent the crossing reading quietly in his cabin, taking walks on the
Scythia
’s promenade deck, and talking very little. The voyage had been a hiatus between two worlds, and two identities. Hisreal name was William Fisher. His future name was Emil Goldfus. His Kayotis papers were a convenience of transition, to be torn up and flushed away as soon as Goldfus was ready to spring to life. His code name was “Arach,” and for nine years from the moment he stepped ashore in Quebec he was the most senior Soviet spy in North America.
    *  *  *
     
    At his trial, Fisher would be called a threat to the free world and to civilization itself. It is more accurate to think of him as the Forrest Gump of Soviet foreign intelligence. Most Americans who had dealings with him decided he was “brilliant,” and it was true that he could speak five languages and amuse himself for hours with logarithmic tables and back issues of
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
. But his brilliance never got him far. His luck got him much further. He was a mild, stoic, generous man, far too good natured for his profession, who rode his luck through the terrifying middle decades of the twentieth century straight into the safe haven of the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary.
    By the time
Life
magazine published its article on the Bikini blasts, Fisher had been in training for the toughest assignment of his career for nearly a year. It would take him into the heart and soul of the Main Adversary—the United States, that vast and baffling country that somehow produced guns
and
butter (and Rita Hayworth) with no guiding hand at the controls of its economy.
    Fisher’s main task was to rebuild the Soviet spy network in America. If he succeeded, the flow of information from Los Alamos and the top secret fuel enrichment laboratory at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, would start again. Stalin’s scientists would conquer nuclear fission, then leapfrog the West to make a reality of fusion, and the H-bomb as well. Berlin, Washington, and London would quake without a shot being fired. That was the fantasy, and as long as Fisher was safely ensconced at a KGB training facility in the woods outside Moscow, there was no harm in fantasizing.
    Fisher’s superiors had chosen him for his background and his personality. As far as they could tell he was a man of