A talk by David Saunders (Emeritus Professor of Russian History, Newcastle University) – 10th July 2024
Abel has attracted a good deal of attention in recent years because of the part he plays in Steven Spielberg’s film Bridge of Spies (2015). But the film deals only with his arrest in New York in 1957, his trial and imprisonment in the USA, and his exchange for the American U2 pilot Gary Powers on a bridge in Berlin in 1962, whereas David’s talk went back to his birth in the Newcastle district of Benwell in 1903 and forward to his death in Moscow in 1971.
The spy’s father, a Russian-born German called Heinrich Matthäus Fischer, became a revolutionary in St Petersburg at the end of 1880s. Because of his subversive activities he was obliged to flee Russia in 1901. A metalworker by trade, he chose to go to Newcastle upon Tyne because it was at the peak of its industrial might. He returned to Russia with his wife and two sons only twenty years later, after the communist takeover
The future “Rudolf Abel” (Willie Fisher or Wilhelm August Fischer) was his younger son. The family lived in Benwell from 1901 to 1908, then in Cullercoats and Whitley Bay. The young Willie Fisher went to Whitley Bay and Monkseaton High School for Boys (now Marden Middle School). His artistic talent helped him to get his first job as a draughtsman at Swan Hunter in 1918. His interest in radio telegraphy probably also began in his youth for Cullercoats acquired its first large radio mast in 1908.
Art and radio were to figure prominently in Abel-Fisher’s spying career, which began in the Soviet Union in 1927 after he had received some more education and performed his military service. In thirty years as a Soviet agent, it is thought he served in China, but certainly in Norway, the UK, the deception of frontline German soldiers during World War Two, and Canada and the USA from 1948 to 1957. His main function was probably as a coordinator and intermediary rather than as a frontline thief.
After he was exchanged for Gary Powers in 1962, his spymaster bosses permitted him to write short stories and used him to enthuse Soviet schoolchildren and introduce a Soviet film about spies, but they never let him revert from the contrived name Abel to his real name and they denied him the ease in retirement that he would have welcomed. His origins became known in the West only after his death, when a Soviet defector published a Russian-language book about him in Frankfurt in 1980.
Professor Saunders began the process of verifying the defector’s book by procuring a copy of Abel-Fisher’s Newcastle birth certificate in 1984. He has been delving into the story of his life ever since.
David Saunders July 2024