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For my big sister, Rachel.
You showed me the path.
You must take your opponent into a deep dark forest, where two plus two equals five, and the path leading out is only wide enough for one.
—MIKHAIL TAL, WORLD CHESS CHAMPION, 1960-1961
PROLOGUE
The Paperboy
THE KID HIKED UP THE dark stairwell to the sixth floor, hoping only for a decent tip, maybe fifteen cents. Busting up a Russian spy ring was an unexpected bonus.
It was a Friday afternoon in June 1953, collection day for Jimmy Bozart, a thirteen-year-old paperboy for the Brooklyn Eagle. The newspaper cost thirty-five cents a week, and most people threw in an extra nickel or dime. The two retired teachers on the top floor of this apartment building were a bit more generous. They usually gave him two quarters.
Jimmy knocked on the teachers’ door. One of the women greeted him and dropped coins into his hand, more coins than usual. To be polite, he waited until the door was closed to look down at his palm.
It was good. One quarter and five nickels.
But as Jimmy started down the stairwell his heel caught on a step, and the money went flying—coins bounced down the stairs, clanking and spinning. He scrambled after them. He found the quarter first. Then four of the nickels. Where was the other one?
The bulb in the ceiling fixture was out. Searching step by step in faint light angling in from a high window, Jimmy spotted the familiar sight of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello home. The back of a nickel.
Only the back.
Jimmy picked up the sliver of silvery metal. The coin had no front.
He found the other side of the coin on the landing. It had the usual front and smooth sides of a Jefferson nickel, but it was hollow. Something was wedged in the space inside, something square and black. It looked like a tiny piece of film.
Jimmy pried the thing out and held it up to the window. He saw tiny numbers printed on the film, groups of five-digit numbers typed in neat columns. Some kind of secret code?
Jimmy raced home, wondering what he’d found. Everyone knew that Soviet spies had stolen American atomic bomb secrets during World War II. Now, with the United States and the Soviet Union locked in the Cold War, there must be new enemy spies out there. Could this coin have anything to do with that?
At the Bozart family apartment, Jimmy’s dad studied the tiny piece of film through a magnifying glass. He had no idea what it was, or what the numbers meant. He told his son that he’d better show the strange find to the police.
Jimmy thought of Carolyn Lewind, a girl in his eighth-grade class whose dad was a detective. He ran to her apartment building and showed the coin and the film to Carolyn and her mother. But the detective was still at work. Jimmy dropped the coin into his pocket and left.
When Carolyn’s father came home, his wife told him that a red-haired kid named Jimmy Bozart had come by with a hollow nickel and some kind of coded message he’d found inside. Detective Lewind growled at her for letting the kid leave with potentially explosive evidence of espionage. He hurried to the Bozarts’ apartment.
Mr. Bozart didn’t know where his son was. He mentioned that his wife was playing bingo at a nearby church. Maybe she’d seen the boy.
The detective charged into the church and interrupted the game. No Jimmy. Lewind seized the bingo prize money, just in case the nickel had somehow wound up there.
He stepped outside and saw a man pushing an ice cream cart down the sidewalk. He grabbed the ice cream man’s change too, just in case.
Then he turned and saw a bunch of boys playing stickball in the street. He looked the kids over, one by one. His gaze froze on a kid with red hair and freckles. About his daughter’s age.
Barging into the game, he said, “You’re Bozart?”
Jimmy nodded.
“What did you do with the nickel?”
Jimmy reached into his pocket and held it out.
The man snatched the coin. He pulled a nickel from his own pocket and handed it over.
“So you’re not out anything,” the detective said.
Jimmy took the new coin and went back to playing stickball.
He would be a college student by the time he realized that he’d stumbled into a series of events that were moving the globe’s two great powers to the brink of the third—and final—world war.
PART 1
TWO HOLLOW COINS
COLD WARRIOR
THIS IS A STORY ABOUT spies and spy catchers. It’s about superbombs, the space race, and the global clash between the United States and the Soviet Union. It’s the story of the most intense years of the Cold War, building to the single most dangerous moment in human history. But even in such an epic struggle, small details and seemingly ordinary people play pivotal roles, shoving events in one direction or another.
What does a paperboy’s tip have to do with the end of the world?
That took a while to figure out.
The New York police passed the hollow nickel on to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Two FBI agents went to interview the teachers who’d given it to Jimmy Bozart—but who remembers where they got a particular coin? One of them must have picked it up as change at the grocery store, the women guessed. Or possibly when buying subway tokens. The women seemed credible. There was no point in questioning them any further.
Trying another angle, the agents visited magician supply shops around the city. They showed employees the hollow coin, hoping for clues to its origin.
“It’s not suitable for a magic trick,” one salesman told the agents. “The hollowed-out area is too small to hide anything aside from a tiny piece of paper.” No good for a performer on stage, in other words.
Holding the separate sides of the coin in his hands, the salesman explained that he’d never seen anything like it. This was no cheap novelty, nothing mass produced in any factory. These were two sides of two different authentic nickels, expertly hollowed out, and—look at this—whoever made it had drilled an almost invisibly tiny hole in the R of the word TRUST. Someone who knew to look for the hole could stick in a needle to pop the coin open.
Who made stuff like this?
No one, as far as the salesman knew.
The agents thanked the man. They tried a few more shops and got the same dead-end answers. There wasn’t much more to be done. The tiny piece of film was on its way to government code breakers in Washington, D.C. Maybe something would come of that. Maybe not.
In the meantime, the FBI moved on to other cases.
Jimmy Bozart finished eighth grade and continued delivering the Brooklyn Eagle.
And the man who’d hollowed out the nickel and hidden the coded message inside, the highest-ranking Soviet spy in America, went on living and working in Brooklyn, just a few miles from the Bozart family’s apartment. He was Emil Goldfus.
And Andrew Kayotis.
Also Martin Collins.
His real name was William Fisher.
* * *
“I would rather perish than betray the secrets entrusted to me.… With every heartbeat, with every day that passes, I swear to serve the Party, the homeland, and the Soviet People.”
Rudolf Abel swore this sacred oath in Moscow’s Lubyanka building, headquarters of the Soviet Union’s secret intelligence agency, the KGB. Later that evening he kissed his wife and daughter goodbye. For how long, he could not know. Years, certainly. Boarding a ship bound for Quebec, Canada, Abel set out on his new assignment: to expand the Soviet Union’s spy network in America, to steal the technology behind new American bombs, and to help pave the way to a glorious Soviet victory in World War III.
That’s all.
His entire life had built toward this mission. Abel was born in England to parents of German and Russian heritage. In 1921, when he was eighteen, the family emigrated to Russia. Communists had just taken over the country and would rename it the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Under communism, an all-powerful central government owns all the land and factories, controlling every aspect of the country’s economy. In theory, the government uses its power to distribute a fair share of the country’s income to every worker. Abel’s parents believed in the promise of communism, and Abel came to agree. At a young age, he committed himself to the goal of helping the Soviet Union spread its form of government around the world.
Tall and thin, with a bony face and piercing eyes, Abel spoke fluent German and English, in addition to Russian. He had a gift for building gadgets and fixing machines. Useful qualities for a spy. Recruited into Soviet intelligence, he spent several years living undercover in Norway, posing as an electronics salesman while secretly setting up radio networks for fellow spies. When Germany attacked the Soviet Union during World War II, Abel took on the incredibly dangerous task of slipping behind enemy lines. He managed to convince German commanders he was on their side, then fed them damaging misinformation, diverting their attention from upcoming Soviet attacks.
Abel’s reward was this new assignment. This time the enemy was the United States of America.
* * *
It was only three years since the end of World War II, but so much had already changed.
The Soviets and Americans had been allies in the war, united by their common enemy, Adolf Hitler’s Germany. Together, they crushed Hitler. Together, they won the war in Europe. When the fighting ended in 1945, the United States and the Soviet Union were the biggest powers left standing.
The two powers immediately began to clash over postwar plans. What, for instance, would happen in the countries of Eastern Europe that had been conquered by Germany during the war? American leaders wanted to see the establishment of democratic governments—governments that would be friendly to the United States. Joseph Stalin, the Soviet dictator, had a very different vision. Stalin’s army had driven Hitler from Eastern Europe at the cost of millions of Soviet soldiers. He now controlled that part of the globe and had no intention of letting it go. One by one, Stalin installed hand-picked puppets to lead new communist governments in Eastern Europe. He violently crushed any opposition, any calls for freedom or democracy.
“An iron curtain has descended across the Continent,” declared Winston Churchill, Britain’s prime minister during World War II, while visiting America in 1946.
It was a vivid and frightening image—the drop of a barrier across Europe, a dividing line between free and communist worlds. What would stop Stalin from continuing to expand the borders of his empire? Who could prevent more people from falling under Soviet control?
The United States would take that job, declared U.S. President Harry Truman. In what became known as the Truman Doctrine, the president committed the United States to the goal of stopping the further spread of Soviet power.
And so by the fall of 1948, as Rudolf Abel sailed west across the Atlantic Ocean, the United States and the Soviet Union were locked in a struggle for power and influence all over the world: the Cold War.
It was understood, on both sides, that there could be only one winner.
* * *
Juggling a series of false names and forged passports, Rudolf Abel traveled by train from Quebec City to Montreal. He crossed the border by bus and headed south. In New York City, a Soviet diplomat slipped him $1,000 in cash. Abel rented a tiny apartment and began to explore his new home.
The next step was to meet the librarian.
HOLLOW COIN #1
HER NAME WAS LONA COHEN. The thirty-five-year-old New Yorker was a librarian by day—and a longtime secret agent for the Soviet Union. During the war she’d earned legendary status in the Soviet spy service by sneaking past FBI agents with atomic bomb plans hidden in a tissue box. With agents like that, Rudolf Abel hoped to build a new Soviet spy network in America.
They arranged to meet at the Bronx Zoo. Abel followed Cohen to the zoo, to make sure she wasn’t being tailed. He saw right away he was dealing with someone trained in tradecraft—the tricks and techniques of espionage. Cohen dry-cleaned herself expertly, strolling in the front door of a crowded store and darting out a side exit. She got on a subway car and jumped off just as the doors were closing. A lesser spy than Abel would have lost her trail.
Abel and Cohen met outside the zoo’s birdhouse, sat together on a bench, and began making plans.
* * *
The two spies met often over the following months, walking through parks and museums, looking like ordinary friends enjoying ordinary outings.
All the while, the Cold War was rapidly expanding.
The U.S. military built its arsenal of atomic bombs from 9 in 1946 to 170 in 1949.
The Soviets responded in August 1949 with a successful test of their first atomic bomb.
In October 1949, communists seized power in China, the world’s most populous country.
President Harry Truman countered with the next major escalation. On January 31, 1950, Truman told the world that the United States was going to try to build a new kind of bomb. A superbomb, some called it. More accurately, a hydrogen bomb.
Rudolf Abel, a man who read physics textbooks for fun, understood the basic science. He could see why a hydrogen bomb’s power would be virtually unlimited. Would it be possible to build such terrible weapons? Maybe—that was a question for the world’s top physicists.
Would it be possible to steal some useful secrets from the Americans? Maybe—if Abel could build a good enough network of spies. But the ever-widening Cold War was making it harder than he had hoped.
* * *
On a hot day in June 1950, a young man in a suit walked a long, circuitous route through the streets of Manhattan’s Upper East Side, glancing at reflections in shop windows to check behind him. Certain he was not being followed, the man entered an apartment building and knocked on the door marked 3B.
Lona Cohen came to the door in shorts. She was alarmed to see Yuri Sokolov, a Soviet official at the United Nations—and, secretly, an intelligence agent. It was a major violation of the rules of tradecraft for Sokolov to risk being seen at Cohen’s home. She let him in, quickly closing the door behind him.
Lona’s husband, Morris, a history teacher and fellow spy, came to greet the visitor. Sokolov made small talk, in case the room was bugged, while pulling out a pen and pad of paper.
The situation has changed, he wrote. It’s better for you both to leave the country.
The Cohens understood. It was front-page news. British authorities had just arrested Klaus Fuchs, a physicist who had helped the Americans design the first atomic bomb. Fuchs had confessed to being a Soviet spy and was awaiting trial in London. In Philadelphia, the FBI had picked up Harry Gold, who’d worked as Fuchs’s courier, delivering stolen bomb plans to the Soviets. Now the whole world knew that the
Soviet Union had built its atomic bomb with plans stolen from an American lab. Lona Cohen had been part of the theft—and could not know how long that would remain a secret.
Probably the FBI will know about yourselves, Sokolov wrote. So it is better not to wait.
Morris grabbed the pen. Is it an order? Or advice?
An order.
Lona Cohen gathered the notes and burned them in the bathroom sink.
* * *
Just like that, Rudolf Abel was all alone.
There was no panic. Trained to play the long game, Abel went about establishing what looked like a normal life in New York. He opened a bank account and chatted with the owners of neighborhood shops. He rode subways and buses, learning the routes and stops. He went to the movies and strolled through parks, casually making note of potential dead-drop locations. In his apartment, he made clever spy gadgets, crafting pencils with hidden chambers under removable erasers, cutting hidden compartments into cuff links and batteries.
His masterpiece was a hollow nickel. He carved it by hand from two real nickels. On the front, where it said IN GOD WE TRUST, he drilled a tiny hole into the letter R.
THE SUPER
“HAVE YOU GOT A PROBLEM for me to solve?”
A young physicist named Edward Teller sat on a train with a fellow scientist, Otto Frisch. This was back in the early 1930s, years before World War II. Teller and his friend were taking a break from the German university where they worked—but Teller’s brain did not do well with breaks. He needed a problem, a puzzle, anything.
Frisch couldn’t think of one. Teller would not relent.
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