30 June 2010
 
Sleeping Beauties


(Accused Russian Sleeper Agent Anna (Anya) Chapman. Photo courtesy Anna Chapman)
 
If you can imagine it, you can achieve it; if you can dream it, you can become it.
-       Sleeper Agent Anna Chapman’s pithy philosophy from her Facebook page.

The whole thing is baffling. Why would any current or former superpower spend good money to try to place highly trained agents at random cocktail parties across America?
 
The story has changed a lot from yesterday. The Russians acknowledged that certain improprieties might have been conducted, and the White House indicated that no significant damage had been done to the “reset” button on relations between the once and future adversaries.
 
That is god. One of my Russian pals here in the states was intensely interested, and we IM’d back and forth about the situation through the day.
 
The last of the accused spies was arrested by authorities on the divided island of Cyprus. It is a great destination for a vacation, by the way, or at least the Greek side is. Apparently that is what Christopher R. Metsos was up to, and the FBI indicated that they had to make the arrests over the weekend because one of them, Richard Murphy, was planning on decamping permanently. Manhattan, Yonkers, the Jersey ‘burbs, Boston and Virginia were the other nesting places of the spies.
 
I am not sure why they couldn’t have just let him go. They could have let the sleeping beauties slumber on. After the fall of the Wall and the collapse of the Communist Menace, several Sleeper agents came forth and announced that they really felt American after all those years of soccer and little league games, and would prefer to forget the whole thing.
 
The FBI had been conducting surveillance of the ring for several years, which must have been about the best duty in the Bureau, since the accused didn’t do anything except go to work and argue about who to try to get close to in the privacy of their homes.
 
Except for Anna Chapman, anyway. She was a real estate broker in New York City, and she has a Facebook page, a philosophy, and 170 friends who probably wish they were not this morning.
 
She is a fox, by the way, and not at all like the spies of the Good Old Days.
 
I remember my first encounter with the world of the real spies. Rudolf I. Abel, a no-shit Soviet Spymaster who snooped for atomic secrets, was busted in New York when I was about ten years old. The moment of his exchange for U-2 pilot Gary Francis Powers in 1962 was electrifying. It was the full flower of the Cold War, and it happened with casual ceremony at the Glienicker Brücke over the sleepy Havel River between the U.S. zone of Berlin and Communist East Germany.
 
I meant to get up there last month, but ran out of airspeed and good ideas. Maybe next trip. Abel had a fabulous story, and if he was a fox, he was not as foxy as Anna Chapman.  He had a great story.
 

(Rudolf I. Abel’s arrest photo. Courtesy FBI.)
 
He was born in Newcastle to German revolutionary parents who were active in Socialist politics. Rudolf Abel was one of several alias’s he utilized professionally. His real name was William Fischer, born July 11, 1903 Newcastle upon Tyne; died Nov. 15, 1971, Moscow.
 
Fishher was drafted into the Red Army in the 1920s and later served in the OGPU, the Soviet security service. He narrowly escaped getting caught up in the purges of the late 1930s, though he was dismissed from the service before being recalled to head a radio reconnaissance unit in the Great Patriotic War. Trained as a spy by the KGB after the victory, he resided in the United States where he ran the ring of nuclear spies.
 
The real "Rudolf I. Abel" actually was a friend with whom he lived in Moscow, and Fischer took the name as one of the five alias's he used in the U.S.
 
The use of the name “Abel” in the publicity about the arrest by the FBI was a signal back to the KGB that he had been compromised, big time.
 
He was caught after a former assistant defected, and  convicted of conspiring to obtain and transmit defense information from the United States to the Soviet Union. He was sentences to thirty years in the cooler.
 
When he returned to Moscow, he was greeted as a State Hero, and awarded the Order of Lenin. I do not imagine the Sleepers will get anything but a slap on the wrist here, and might not qualify for a pension back home. If it is home anymore.
 
Fischer continued to use the name Abel for the rest of his life. He died in 1971 of lung cancer, and on a weekend field trip I saw his grave at Donskoy monastery in 1998. It was one of those moments, a serving Spook paying tribute to one of the great ones.
 
One thing I can think of this morning is that Rudolph would not have had any friends on his Facebook page.
 
 

(Rudlof Abel tombstone. Photo Pawel Golowin)
 
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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