<i>KGB Man: The Cold War's Most Notorious Soviet Agent and the First to Be Exchanged at the Bridge of Spies</i> by Cecil Kuhne

Villyam Fisher, convicted in a New York court in 1957 under the name Rudolph Abel on charges of spying for the Soviet Union, was swapped for Francis Gary Powers, the U-2 pilot shot down over Soviet airspace in 1960. Fisher was a Soviet illegal, infiltrated into the United States and living undercover. Later dramatized in The Bridge of Spies, the trial and prisoner swap transfixed the country, with tales of hollowed-out coins containing microfilm strips, dead drop locations throughout New York, and Abel's incompetent, alcoholic assistant, Reino Häyhänen, whose decision to defect in Paris after being recalled to Moscow led to Fisher's arrest. Not until many years later was it revealed that Rudolph Abel, the name under which Fisher had been tried, was a pseudonym.KGB Man: The Cold War's Most Notorious Soviet Agent and the First to Be Exchanged at the Bridge of Spies is a deeply flawed, error-filled, and poorly researched book. The author, Cecil Kuhne, is identified as a legal litigator; the bulk of his book focuses on legal minutiae, and a considerable portion is simply verbatim sections of the testimony in the trial or transcripts of the interrogations of “Abel” conducted by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). At one point Kuhn lists every item found in Fisher's apartment and art studio—more than twenty pages filled with such irrelevant things as “sketchbook whose first sheet has words ‘good luck and happy drawing,’” one deck of playing cards, and “every item in his decidedly drab wardrobe.” There are no footnotes or mentions of any secondary sources, no discussions of interviews, and no indication that the author bothered to find out anything about Fisher's career either before his arrest or after his repatriation. Nor does the book contain an index.If Kuhne had done even the barest due diligence, he would have found an excellent biography of Fisher, Vin Arthey's Like Father Like Son: A Dynasty of Spies, published in Great Britain in 2004. One telling example of Kuhne's refusal or inability to conduct any research is his casual mention that at some point in his career Fisher took the Abel pseudonym. In fact, Abel was an old friend who had served under Fisher in the intelligence service. Giving that name to the FBI after his arrest prevented the disclosure of Fisher's real name and was intended as a signal to his Soviet superiors.The son of a Russian-born, British supporter of Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks, Fisher had worked for Soviet intelligence since 1927, serving in Norway and England, narrowly escaping purges of the intelligence service in the late 1930s, and overseeing radio communications for a large-scale Soviet disinformation campaign aimed at German troops during World War II. Because of his native English, he was recruited to serve as the chief of the illegal KGB station in the United States in 1948. Entering the country illegally from Canada, he traveled extensively in the United States, trying to reconstitute Soviet intelligence networks that had been disrupted and largely shut down after Elizabeth Bentley's defection in 1945. Kuhne fails to provide almost any of this information.Although Kuhne claims that Fisher was “undoubtedly the most prolific Soviet spy to have ever pierced the shores of America,” he is wildly off the mark. Soviet espionage had recruited hundreds of U.S. citizens in the 1930s and during World War II who provided important military and political secrets. Most of these spies had either quit or been identified and removed from their positions by the end of the 1940s. Fisher's work, important as it was, did not come close to this earlier intelligence haul. Among other handicaps, he was unable to rely on members of the Communist Party of the United States, who had come under suspicion and surveillance that made their recruitment difficult.Although some of Fisher's assignments still probably remain unknown, he had, at best, only a handful of sources, and they did not amount to much. Soviet officials ordered Fisher and Häyhänen to provide Helen Sobell, the wife of convicted spy Morton, with $5,000. They concocted an intricate plot involving burying the money in an upstate New York park, but it never came to fruition because Häyhänen stole the money when Fisher returned to Moscow for a few months. It never occurs to Kuhne to ask why an experienced Soviet intelligence officer could not get a package of cash to someone in New York City.The scant material that has emerged from Russian archives suggests that Fisher apparently supervised the “Volunteer” network serviced by Morris Cohen and Leona Cohen that included Theodore Hall and possibly two or three other nuclear spies. But by 1948 Hall was reluctant to remain involved in espionage, and he disengaged. The Cohens were forced to flee the country after the arrests of the members of the Rosenberg ring that occurred during Fisher's tenure. Fisher undoubtedly ran other spies, but after 1952 he evidently became much less active. He spent six months in Moscow in 1955. Upon his return, he grew more concerned about Häyhänen's behavior, especially his heavy drinking. Häyhänen had several brushes with the police for domestic violence and, unbeknownst to Fisher, had accidently lost one of the hollowed-out nickels used for smuggling microfilm, mistakenly giving it to a newsboy, who later turned it in to the police and FBI.Recalled to Moscow and fearing punishment, Häyhänen defected in Paris and provided the FBI with everything he could recall about his boss. The clues enabled the FBI to put Fisher's art studio under surveillance, and agents eventually saw him entering it. “Abel” was first held on a deportation warrant because the FBI hoped to induce him to defect, but he remained silent before finally providing his false name. The extensive espionage paraphernalia found in his apartment and Häyhänen's testimony easily enabled his conviction (oddly enough, Kuhne goes directly from the trial testimony and lawyers’ summations to the sentencing, never describing the jury's verdict). His lawyer, James Donovan, eventually negotiated his exchange for Powers.Kuhne's book offers nothing that has not already been said about Fisher-Abel, lacks context, omits a great deal of relevant information, and is marred by numerous factual errors. Neither someone seeking an introduction to an important but not terribly successful Soviet spy, nor an espionage afficionado, will find much of value in it.

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