The Spy Who Lived in New York for 9 Years – The Rudolf Abel Case | Cold War Files

Cold War Files: The Rudolf Abel Case — The Spy Who Lived in New York for 9 Years

For nearly a decade, a quiet Brooklyn painter lived a double life. Neighbors knew him as Emil R. Goldfus — a polite, soft-spoken artist who spent his days sketching street scenes and developing photographs. But federal archives tell a different story. Behind the canvases and darkroom equipment was one of the most disciplined Soviet “illegals” ever to operate on U.S. soil: William Fisher, later identified in court as Rudolf Abel.

Using FBI case files, declassified surveillance reports, trial transcripts, and post–Cold War Soviet archival material, this episode reconstructs the complete, documented operation:

• Fisher’s covert entry through Canada in late nineteen forty-eight
• His fabricated identity and establishment of a Brooklyn studio
• Shortwave transmissions, one-time pads, and microfilm photography
• Dead-drop networks across New York City
• The hollow nickel and its cryptographic significance
• The defection of courier Reino Häyhänen — the event that exposed the network
• The nineteen fifty-seven arrest at the Hotel Latham
• The federal trial and thirty-year sentence
• The nineteen sixty-two Glienicke Bridge exchange for U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers

This is a factual reconstruction based entirely on verifiable Cold War records — without dramatization and without speculation.

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Image sources (public domain / no known restrictions):
FBI Headquarters – FBI / Wikimedia Commons;
Dead drop spike – CIA / Wikimedia Commons;
KGB mugshot – National Archive of Ukraine;
New York street scenes – Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.