The 1940s and 1950s saw a number of high-profile cases like the one described in this article that s ...
The 1940s and 1950s saw a number of high-profile cases like the one described in this article that seemed to confirm people's worst fears that foreign powers like the Soviet Union were conspiring to weaken the United States and steak its secrets. How did this case and others you read about in the textbook (OpenStax) heighten people’s fears during the Cold War? How did these fears impact the way Americans lived their lives? As you read the article, A Spy in Brooklyn, pick two to three different paragraphs/sections and create some comments using the questions provided. A Spy in Brooklyn - A hollow nickel, KGB agents a real-life Cold War thriller by Norm Goldstein On June 22, 1953, Jimmy Bozart delivered We Brooklyn Eagle as usual to a sixth-floor apartment on Foster Avenue in East Flatbush. After collecting for the newspaper from the two female schoolteachers living there, Jimmy left with 50 cents, including a 15-cent tip. On his way out he tripped and dropped the coins. One of them, a nickel, fell apart revealing a tiny photograph. An incident that started with a 13-year-old newsboy’s mishap—just three days after the execution of convicted spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg—would develop into a Cold War espionage case that took four years to crack, was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court and ended with the international intrigue of a spy swap in Berlin—a saga that nearly 60 years later became an Oscar-nominated feature film. Jimmy Bozart told a friend, whose father was a New York cop, about the strange nickel, and it wasn’t long before a 67th Precinct detective came calling on the newsboy, who handed over the nickel and the photograph. As this was a time fraught with Cold War suspicions, the detective quickly contacted the FBI. The Rosenbergs had been nabbed in New York in 1950 on charges of stealing atomic bomb secrets for the Soviets, and their trial and execution had captivated the nation. Senator Joseph McCarthy was leading Communist-hunting investigations of several entities, including Voice of America, the U.S. Army and Hollywood. The “hollow nickel incident” was taken very seriously. When agents examined the nickel’s micro photo, they saw 10 columns of type-written five-digit numbers, with 21 numbers in most columns. What it all meant eluded them, but they were sure it was a coded espionage message. The FBI determined that the 1948 Jefferson nickel had a tiny hole in the R of the word TRUST, so a fine needle could be used to pry the coin open and squeeze a message into it. Agents talked to the schoolteachers who had given the newsboy the coins, but they knew nothing more. Visits to novelty stores eliminated some possibilities. One salesman told them: “It's not suitable for a magic trick. The hollowed-out area is too small to hide anything—aside from a tiny piece of paper. But their efforts to decipher the message on the micro photo came up empty and they could not identify the typewriter used, deciding it must be foreign made. Months of fruitless investigation turned into years until May 1957, when a Soviet spy, Reino Hayhanen, called the U.S. Embassy in Paris. “I’m an officer in the Soviet intelligence service,” he said. “For the past five years, I have been operating in the United States. Now I need your help.” It turned out that Hayhanen, considered an underachieving or failed spy by his superiors, had been ordered back to Moscow. Fearing banishment to Siberia, or worse, he defected. The information he spilled in Paris was checked and corroborated, and Hayhanen returned to the United States to be interviewed by FBI agents. He told them that his contact in the United States, his espionage superior, was codenamed “Mikhail.” They met only when necessary, often at the Prospect Park subway station in Brooklyn, and used hiding places known as “dead drops” to exchange messages and intelligence data. In one of these dead drops, a hole in a set of cement steps in Prospect Park, FBI agents found a hollowed-out bolt containing a typewritten message. Hayhanen told them that the spies used trick containers such as this one often. Among similar items he had been supplied with were hollow pens, pencils, screws, batteries—and coins. Hayhanen also talked about codes and cryptosystems he had used. With that data, the FBI was finally able to decipher the message in the nickel that had started the whole investigation—and had been either lost or spent by Hayhanen in 1953. The nickel’s message to Hayhanen gave instructions on retrieving $3,000 as well as on sending and receiving messages. The FBI agents now turned their attention to the identity of Mikhail. Hayhanen told them his superior had left the country and been replaced by “Mark,” who was believed to have come into the United States illegally through Canada in 1948. Hayhanen said he met Mark face to face for the first time in the summer of 1953, at the RKO Keith’s movie house in the Flushing section of Queens. Hayhanen described him as about 50 years old, 5-feet-10 or so, with thin gray hair. Mark was an accomplished photographer and on one occasion took Hayhanen to a storage room where he kept photo supplies in a on Clark and Fulton streets in the Brooklyn Heights neighborhood. It was the Ovington Brothers Carpet Company building at 252 Fulton St. (mow Cadman Plaza West). It had housed artists’ studios since the 1930s, and in the 50s and ’6os renters included the cartoonist Jules Feiffer and caricaturist David Levine. Among the tenants in 1957 was a man who had an artist studio on the fifth floor since 1954—and who had formerly rented a storage room there. His name was listed as Emil Goldfus, but he was actually the Soviet spy Colonel Rudolph Abel, a high-ranking KGB agent. The FBI set up a surveillance operation, watching for Goldfus from a room in the French Renaissance-style Hotel Touraine on Clinton St. near the photo studio. One day, agents spotted a man fitting the description of Mark on a bench in the park directly opposite 252 Fulton St. The agents thought he appeared nervous, as though he were looking for someone. But he soon left. The agents decided not to follow him, but to wait. If that was him, they surmised, he'd be back. Meanwhile, they checked daily on the dead drops that Hayhanen told them about, mostly in Prospect Park. The building surveillance finally paid off on the night of June 13, 1957, when they saw lights go on in the studio and a man moving about the room. The man left the building near midnight and walked a few blocks down Fulton Street to a subway station. He took a train to East 28th St.in Manhattan and walked to the nearby Hotel Latham, where he was registered under the name Martin Collins. A photograph of Goldfus, taken with a hidden camera, was shown to Hayhanen, who said: “You've found him. That’s Mark.” At 7 o'clock on the morning of June 21, they knocked on the door to Room 839 in the Latham. The resident opened the door and was confronted by FBI agents who addressed him as “colonel” and stated that they had “information concerning [his] involvement in espionage.” He said nothing in response. Then, the FBI agents called in Immigration and Naturalization Service officers who arrested him for illegal entry into the United States and failure to register as an alien. Following the arrest, the FBI found numerous false papers, including two American birth certificates. One was in the name of Emil R. Goldfus, born in 1902 in New York; the other for Martin Collins, born in 1907, also in New York. They determined that Emil Goldfus had died in infancy; the Collins certificate was a forgery. They learned that their man had also used many other names since he entered the United States. At first, he refused to cooperate, but eventually he claimed to be a Soviet citizen, Rudolf Ivanovich Abel, born July 2, 1902, in the Soviet Union. It was later learned that his real name was Vilyam Genrikovitch Fisher, born July 11, 1903, in Newcastle upon Tyne, England. His parents, Heinrich and Lyubov, were Bolshevik supporters from Germany, and the family moved to Russia in 1921. But Rudolph Abel was the name by which he became known to all of America. In a search of his hotel room, the FBI found $4,000, a hollow ebony block containing a 250-page Russian codebook, a hollow pencil holding encrypted messages on microfilm and a key to a safe-deposit box containing another $15,000. In his Brooklyn photo studio, they found espionage equipment, including shortwave radios, cipher pads, cameras and film for producing microdots, as well as more trick containers, including a hollow shaving brush containing microfilm. The FBI believed they had captured the highest-ranking KGB agent operating in the United States—one who had been undiscovered for nine years. It was front-page news. Truman Capote, living in Brooklyn Heights at the time, recalled later: “Life can be pretty exciting around here. Remember Colonel Rudolf Abel, the Russian secret agent, the biggest spy ever caught in America, head of the whole damned apparatus? Know where they nabbed him? Right here! Smack on Fulton Street! Trapped him in a building between David Semple’s fine-foods store and Frank Gambuzza’s television repair shop.” After uncovering the evidence of espionage, the United States no longer considered Abel an illegal alien. He was indicted as a spy and flown from the Federal Alien Detention Facility in McAllen, Texas, to New York to stand trial in federal court in Brooklyn in October 1957. There, Abel, then 55, was tried for espionage. Abel was defended by James Donovan, a Bronx-born attorney who had been associate general counsel at the Office of Scientific Research and Development in 1942 and general counsel at the Office of Strategic Services from 1943 to 1945, when he became assistant to Justice Robert H. Jackson at the Nuremberg trials in Germany. He was a partner in the New York-based law office Watters and Donovan when he accepted the job of defending Abel, after many other lawyers had refused. On Oct. 25 Abel was convicted on three counts of espionage: conspiracy to transmit defense information to the Soviet Union; conspiracy to obtain defense information; conspiracy to act in the United States as an agent of a foreign government without notifying the secretary of state. Donovan argued against a possible death sentence and won. Abel was sentenced instead to 30 years in prison at the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, Ga. Donovan appealed the conviction to the Supreme Court on the grounds that Abel’s rights had been violated, particularly the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures. But the conviction was narrowly upheld in a 5-4 decision on March 28, 1960, and Abel went back to prison. On May 1, in one of the Cold War's most dramatic incidents, American U-2 spy plane pilot Francis Gary Powers was captured after he was shot down by a surface-to-air missile over the Soviet Union. On Feb. 10, 1962, after Donovan had negotiated with Soviet mediators, KGB Colonel Vilyam Genrikhovich Fisher (aka Rudolf Ivanovich Abel), still imprisoned, was swapped for Powers. The exchange took place at the Glienicke Bridge between West Berlin and Potsdam, East Germany. At virtually the same time, Frederic Pryor, an American student who had been arrested and held without charge in East Berlin, was also released through Donovan's efforts. Rudolf Abel went back to the Soviet Union and his wife and daughter. He kept a low profile, though he was occasionally called on to give patriotic speeches, before he died of lung cancer in 1971. In 1990 the Soviet Union issued a commemorative postage stamp to honor Abel. Just a year later, in December 1991, the country he had spied for, the nemesis of the United States for half a century, was no more.
