William August Fisher (11 July 1903 – 15 November 1971), better known by the alias Rudolf Ivanovich Abel (Russian: Рудольф Иванович Абель), was a Soviet intelligence officer. He adopted his alias to alert his Soviet KGB handlers when he was arrested in the USA on charges of espionage by the FBI in 1957.
Fisher was born and grew up in Newcastle upon Tyne in the North East of England in the United Kingdom to Russian émigré parents. He moved to Russia in the 1920s, and served in the Soviet military before undertaking foreign service as a radio operator in Soviet intelligence in the late 1920s and early 1930s. He later served in an instructional role before taking part in intelligence operations against the Germans during World War II. After the war, he began working for the KGB, which sent him to the United States where he worked as part of a spy ring based in New York City.
In 1957, Fisher was convicted in US federal court on three counts of conspiracy as a Soviet spy for his involvement in what became known as the Hollow Nickel Case and sentenced to 30 years' imprisonment at Atlanta Federal Penitentiary in Georgia. He served just over four years of his sentence before he was exchanged for captured American U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers and Yale University doctoral student Frederic Pryor. Back in the Soviet Union, he lectured on his experiences. He died in 1971 at the age of 68. His real identity and country of birth were only revealed after his death.
Fisher was born William August Fisher on 11 July 1903, in the Benwell area of Newcastle upon Tyne, England, the second son of Heinrich and Lyubov Fisher. Revolutionary activists of the Tsarist era, his father was of German origins and his mother was of Russian descent. Fisher's father taught and agitated with Vladimir Lenin at Saint Petersburg Technological Institute.
In 1896, Heinrich Fisher was arrested for sedition and sentenced to three years internal exile. As he had served a sentence for offenses against the Russian Imperial Crown, he was forced to flee to the United Kingdom in 1901, the alternative being deportation to Germany or imprisonment in Russia for avoidance of military service. While living in the United Kingdom, Fisher's father, a keen Bolshevik, took part in gunrunning, shipping arms from northeast England to Russia's Baltic coast.
Fisher and his brother, Henry, won scholarships to Whitley Bay High School and Monkseaton High School. Though Fisher was not as hard-working as Henry, he showed aptitude for science, mathematics, languages, art and music, inherited in part from his father's abilities. Encouraging their son's love of music, Fisher's parents gave him piano lessons; he also learned to play the guitar. It was during this period that Fisher developed an interest in amateur radio, constructing rudimentary spark transmitters and receivers.
Fisher became an apprentice draughtsman at Swan Hunter, Wallsend, and attended evening classes at Rutherford College before being accepted into London University in 1920. Though Fisher qualified for university, the costs prohibited him from attending. In 1921, following the Russian Revolution, the Fisher family left Newcastle upon Tyne to return to Moscow.
Fluent in English, Russian, German, Polish and Yiddish, Fisher worked for the Comintern as a translator following his family's return to the Soviet Union. Trained as a radio operator, he served in a Red Army radio battalion in 1925 and 1926. He then worked briefly in the radio research institute before being recruited by the OGPU, a predecessor of the KGB, in May 1927. That year he married Elena Lebedeva, a harp student at Moscow Conservatory. They had one child together, a daughter named Evelyn who was born on 8 October 1929. During his interview with the OGPU, it was determined he should adopt a Russian-sounding name and William August Fisher became Vilyam Genrikhovich Fisher. Following his recruitment, he worked for the OGPU as a radio operator in Norway, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and France. He returned to the Soviet Union in 1936, as head of a school that trained radio operators destined for duty in illegal residences. One of the students was the Canadian-born Russian spy Kitty Harris, who was later more widely known as "The Spy with Seventeen Names".
Despite his foreign birth and the accusation that his brother-in-law was a Trotskyist, Fisher narrowly escaped the Great Purge. However, in 1938 he was dismissed from the NKVD, the moniker the OGPU had adopted in 1934. During World War II, he again trained radio operators for clandestine work behind German lines. Having been adopted as a protégé by Pavel Sudoplatov, he took part in Operation Scherhorn (Операция Березино, Operatsiya Berezino) in August 1944. Sudoplatov later described this operation as "the most successful radio deception game of the war". Fisher's role in this operation was rewarded with what his superiors regarded as one of the most prestigious postings in Soviet foreign intelligence, the United States.
After rejoining the KGB in 1946, Fisher was trained as a spy for entry into the United States. In October 1948, using a Soviet passport, he travelled from Leningradsky Station to Warsaw. In Warsaw, he discarded his Soviet passport and using a U.S. passport traveled from Czechoslovakia and Switzerland to Paris. His new passport bore the name Andrew Kayotis, the first of Fisher's false identities. The real Andrew Kayotis was Lithuanian born and had become an American citizen after migrating to the United States. Kayotis had applied for and received a visa to visit the Soviet Union. However, the Soviets retained his passport, which Fisher eventually used. Kayotis had been in poor health and died while visiting relatives in Vilnius, Lithuania. Fisher, as Kayotis, then travelled aboard the RMS Scythia from Le Havre, France, to North America, disembarking at Quebec. Still using Kayotis' passport, he went to Montreal and crossed into the United States on 17 November.
On 26 November, Fisher met with Soviet "illegal" Iosif Grigulevich (codenamed "MAKS" or "ARTUR"). Grigulevich gave Fisher a genuine birth certificate, a forged draft card and a forged tax certificate, all under the name of Emil Robert Goldfus, along with $1,000. After handing back Kayotis's passport and documents, Fisher assumed the name Goldfus. His codename was "MARK". The real Goldfus had died at only 14 months, having been born on 2 August 1902, in New York. Goldfus's birth certificate was obtained by the NKVD at the end of the Spanish Civil War, when the Centre would collect identity documents from International Brigades members for use in espionage operations.
In July 1949, Fisher met with a "legal" KGB resident from the Soviet consulate general, who provided him with money. Shortly afterwards Fisher was ordered to reactivate the "Volunteer" network to smuggle atomic secrets to Russia. Members of the network had stopped cooperating after postwar security was tightened at Los Alamos. Lona Cohen (codenamed "LESLE") and her husband Morris Cohen (codenamed "LUIS" and "VOLUNTEER") had run the Volunteer network and were seasoned couriers. Theodore "Ted" Hall (codenamed "MLAD"), a physicist, was the most important agent in the network in 1945, passing atomic secrets from Los Alamos. The Volunteer network grew to include "Aden" and "Serb", nuclear physicists contacted by Hall, and "Silver". Fisher spent most of his first year organizing his network. While it is not known for certain where Fisher went or what he did, it is believed he travelled to Santa Fe, New Mexico, the collection point for stolen diagrams from the Manhattan Project. Kitty Harris, a former pupil of Fisher's, had spent a year in Santa Fe during the war, where she passed secrets from physicists to couriers. During this period, Fisher received the Order of the Red Banner, an important Soviet decoration normally reserved for military personnel.
In 1950, Fisher's illegal residency was endangered by the arrest of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, for whom Lona Cohen had been a courier. The Cohens were quickly spirited to Mexico before moving on to Moscow. They were to resurface in the United Kingdom using the identities of Peter and Helen Kroger. Fisher was relieved when the Rosenbergs did not disclose any information about him to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), but the arrests heralded a bleak outlook for his new spy network. However, on 21 October 1952, as instructed by Moscow, Reino Häyhänen left a thumbtack on a signpost in New York's Central Park. The thumbtack signaled to Fisher that Häyhänen, his new assistant, had arrived.