The Hollow Nickel and the Soviet Spy Behind the Mask

In 1953, a Brooklyn newsboy fumbles his change and a nickel breaks open on the sidewalk, revealing a microphotograph of secret numbers inside. For four years the FBI is baffled by a single coin, and that fumbled five-cent piece becomes the thread that unravels one of the most successful Soviet spy rings in American history.This is the story of the man the world knew as Rudolf Abel, who was actually William Fisher, a British-born radio prodigy turned elite Soviet illegal operating from a Brooklyn art studio. It is a tale of immense psychological discipline undone by a spectacularly incompetent assistant, ending on the famous Bridge of Spies.How Fisher's identity was laundered through dead men's passports, from Soviet citizen to Andrew Kayotis to Emil GoldfusThe art-studio cover that let a spy disappear for days without raising a single neighbor's suspicionReino Hayhanen, the deputy who drank away KGB funds, transmitted from the same location, and accidentally spent the hollow nickelThe 23 minutes of total silence Fisher held during his arrest, and how giving a dead friend's name signaled Moscow he hadn't talkedThe 1962 prisoner exchange at the Glienicke Bridge that traded Fisher for U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers