Bridge of Spies Read Online Free Page B

weeks after their arrival in Russia, in the summer of 1921, Willie and Henry had been helping to look after a large group of children camping on the banks of a river outside Moscow. One of the children had been dragged under by an unseen current. Henry had dived in and saved the child but drowned immediately afterward. Willie, who had never learned to swim, could only stand and watch. He was inconsolable.
    With Elena, he could at least find contentment and security. Through her family’s connections he landed his first job with the OGPU, precursor to the KGB. In 1931 they left Moscow with a baby daughter on his first long foreign assignment. Their destination: Norway.
    When the Fishers crossed the frontier into Finland in September 1931, they crossed into the netherworld of Soviet “illegals.” The term is misleading, as all spies worth the label break the law. But in the language of the Cheka, the original Bolshevik terror apparatus, “illegal” had a special meaning. It recalled the revolutionary underground inwhich the party’s founders had first confronted the czarist secret police; and the code names they had adopted; and the exploits of the first generation of Soviet agents sent abroad to spread the revolution when no other European country would recognize the murderous new regime.
    “Lenin” was the code name of one Vladimir Ulyanov. “Stalin” was that of Joseph Dzhugashvili. Fisher’s code name, to begin with, was Frank. He did not keep it long, but the intelligence chiefs who ran his career remained fixated by the cult of the illegals until well after they had outlived their usefulness, and they remained convinced that Fisher was ideally suited to the job.
    In a sense, he was. Like a nuclear submarine, he proved he could stay hidden almost indefinitely. But hiding took so much of his energy that it is doubtful whether he had much left over to find out anything useful about his enemy. “He was a brilliant and conscientious spy,” a retired KGB general who played a central role in securing Fisher’s eventual release insists to this day. “It is an obvious fact that he was handling agents about whom the Americans still know nothing.” In fact this is not obvious at all. There is no evidence that Fisher recruited any useful agents who have not yet been identified or transmitted any significant intelligence collected by those who have been. This did not stop both sides colluding in the creation of the legend of Willie Fisher—by another name—as the most effective Soviet spy of the cold war.
    In Oslo, his work protected him. It was simple and unobtrusive: his job was to build his cover as an importer of electrical appliances and establish a network of radio relay stations to help Moscow communicate with other spies in northern Europe. For three years he busied himself in the attics of Communist sympathizers and unsuspecting clients, hiding and testing radio equipment. He and his young family lived quietly on the Baltic coast, while in Russia the Cheka began to devour its own.
    For decades, Stalin’s reign of terror was understood as an expression of his own peculiar madness. But his purging of the intelligence apparatus that he relied on to control his empire may have a more rational explanation—that he had been a traitor himself. The claim was first published in the 1990s in a Russian biography of Stalin by Edvard Radzhinsky. Vasili Mitrokhin’s treasure trove of documents on Sovietforeign intelligence, smuggled out of Russia as the Soviet Union collapsed, also contained evidence that Stalin may have been a paid informer of the czar’s secret police before 1917. If so, the information would go at least some way toward explaining his merciless paranoia toward anyone connected—however tenuously—to the Bolshevik old guard.
    As a Chekist whose father had known Lenin, Fisher was lucky not to be woken in the night and summarily executed on his return to Moscow. Instead he was merely fired. A friend