Book Review | Like Father Like Son: A Dynasty of Spies

CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence

Studies in Intelligence, 2005

Like Father Like Son: A Dynasty of Spies

Vin Arthey. London: St. Ermin’s Press, 2004. 288 pages, endnotes, bibliography, photos, index.

Reviewed by Hayden B. Peake, curator of the CIA's Historical Intelligence Collection

In his book Strangers On A Bridge, James Donovan tells the story of KGB illegal, Col. Rudolf Abel, who was betrayed by a KGB defector to the CIA. Arrested by the FBI in 1957, Abel was sentenced to 30 years in prison. In February 1962, he was exchanged for U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers.

Several books were written about the case. One, by Abel’s friend Kyrill Khenkin, published only in Russian, had a real surprise. Reviewed by scholar-author Walter Laqueur in 1983, Khenkin’s book claimed that Rudolf Abel was really Willi Fisher, born in Newcastle, England, in 1903. Years later while working as a television producer in Newcastle, author Vin Arthey learned about the Willi Fisher story and decided to determine whether Khenkin was right. Like Father Like Son makes it clear that he was.[5]

The book has two parts. The first focuses on Willi’s growing up in England. His German father and Russian mother were both active communist organizers working clandestinely for the party. The Russian revolution was motivation to return to Russia, where they were given quarters in the Kremlin. After finishing his education and serving a tour in the Red Army, Willi married and had his only child, a daughter, Evelyn. His knowledge of English got him a job as a translator-interpreter, first with the KOMSOMOL (Young Communists) and later with OGPU (a predecessor of the KGB).

Building on his language skills, Fisher was trained as an illegal; his first assignment was to Scandinavia. In 1935, he was sent to London to work with another illegal, Alexander Orlov, who, along with Arnold Deutsch, was busy recruiting the Cambridge ring, a fact Fisher never revealed that is acknowledged for the first time publicly in this book. After Orlov’s defection in late 1938, Fisher was sacked. Although he survived the purges, he was forced to work in an aircraft factory until recalled by the NKVD (successor to the OGPU) in September 1941 as a radio operator. He was assigned to train illegals—for example, Kitty Harris, who became Donald Maclean’s handler. At some point, he went to work for Pavel Sudaplatov, who directed the NKVD Special Tasks directorate, and ended the war a hero, having run successful radio deception operations, Operation MONASTERY among them.[6] Nevertheless, he was then dismissed from the NKVD for a second time, before being rehired again and sent to the United States in 1948 as Willie Martens— just one of his cover names—where his English could be put to use.

Arthey adds considerable detail to Fisher’s stay in the United States, where he worked as an artist while supporting the Rosenberg network, atomic spy Ted Hall, and Morris and Leona Cohen. (The latter escaped just before the Rosenbergs were caught and eventually became KGB illegals in Britain.) When arrested, Fisher adopted the name of another KGB colonel, then dead, so that his masters in Lubyanka would not acknowledge him by any of his cover names. Abel never revealed his true identity or the details of his work to the FBI.

After his return to the Soviet Union, despite his adherence to the KGB code of silence during interrogation—protecting his knowledge of Philby and the Cambridge agents—Fisher was never again accepted as an active intelligence officer. He was involved with training young officers but was never fully trusted. When he was hospitalized in October 1971, the suspicious KGB had his room bugged. He died a month later. His tombstone reads Willi Fisher and Rudolph Abel.

During his research for this book, Arthey contacted Fisher’s daughter and from her learned the details of his final years. His book adds much to the story of one of the KGB’s most famous illegals, who suffered the sad fate of official obscurity in the final five years of his life.

[5]Louise Bernikow, ABEL (New York: Trident, 1970); Kyrill Khenkin, Okhhoynik vverkh nogami [The Hunter on His Head] (Paris: Posev, 1980); Walter Laqueur, “From HUMINT to SIGINT,” The Times Literary Supplement, 11 February 1983.

[6]For more detail on Operation MONASTERY, see Robert Stephan, Stalin’s Secret War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), reviewed in Studies in Intelligence 48, no. 4 (2004).