Rudolf Abel aka William Fisher
William Fisher was a Soviet intelligence officer of the KGB who used multiple aliases and identities to establish a spy ring in the United States tasked with obtaining secrets of atomic weapon development following the Second World War. The network he developed and built was extensive and closely supported by KGB officers in both Moscow and the United States.
Fisher communicated with handlers in Moscow through the use of several methods, one of which was to include microscopic messages in hollowed-out American coins, which could easily be passed surreptitiously. One such coin became his undoing when it was accidentally used as part of a payment to a paperboy.
The coin – a nickel – broke open when the boy dropped it on the ground, and it and the microfilm it contained were soon in the hands of the FBI. For the next four years the FBI struggled to find the meaning of the coded message on the microfilm and the origin of the coin. In May 1957 a KGB agent ordered to return to Moscow defected, and from him the FBI learned the content of the message, which was personal in nature and addressed to the KGB agent defecting at the time, Reino Hayhanen. The defecting agent also revealed the nature of Fisher’s activities as a spy and much of the materials Fisher and his network had sent to the Soviet Union.
When Fisher was arrested, he gave his name as Rudolf Abel and his New York apartment was a treasure trove of trick devices for the concealment and delivery of messages. Abel was tried and convicted on three counts of espionage and sentences to 30 years in federal prison. He was later exchanged for American U2 pilot Francis Gary Powers, an event dramatized in the film Bridge of Spies.
After returning to Moscow, Abel became a lecturer for the KGB on espionage activities and methods. He died in 1971. The FBI never caught any of the other members of the network he established in the United States to spy for the Soviet Union, and the extent of its damage to the United States has never been fully determined.