184 • FISHER, WILLIE
FISHER, WILLIE.Better known by the false name of Rudolf Abel
he adopted after his arrest in New York, Willie Fisher was born in
Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1903. Fisher’s father Genrykh had been a
Russian revolutionary of German extraction who had settled in En-
gland to escape the Okhrana. Willie Fisher fought with Soviet parti-
sans behind the German lines during World War II and had been
appointed theKGBillegalrezidentin the United States in November
- When he was arrested, Fisher used the name of Abel, a former
wartimeNKVDcolleague, to indicate to the KGB that he had been
compromised. Sentenced to 30 years’ imprisonment in March 1960,
he was exchanged for the AmericanU-2pilot Gary Powers in Febru-
ary 1962. Abel’s true identity did not emerge until some years after
his return to the Soviet Union, when it was disclosed by a German
journalist with access to the KGB. He died in Moscow in November
FLEMING, IAN.As an aspiring journalist, Ian Fleming, the future au-
thor of theJames Bondspy novels, visited Moscow in 1933 forReu-
ter’s News Agencyand pulled off an impressive coup. He was the
first reporter to telephone London and dictate an account of the out-
come of the famous Metropolitan-Vickers trial at which several Bri-
tons, includingAllan Monkhouse, were convicted of espionage and
sabotage. Fleming had originally hoped to join the diplomatic ser-
vice, but although he did reasonably well in the Foreign Office exam-
ination in 1931, he was not offered an appointment, so he used his
mother’s influence with Sir Roderick Jones to find a job with his
news agency, Reuter’s. His scoop in Moscow led to an offer of corre-
spondent in the Far East, but he took a better-paying job with a firm
of merchant bankers and later switched to stockbroking.
Fleming’s link to theSecret Intelligence Service(SIS), often eu-
phemistically referred to as ‘‘a certain department of the Foreign Of-
fice,’’ certainly predated his Moscow assignment for Reuter’s and
can be traced to his long friendship withErnan Forbes Dennis, with
whom Fleming first went to stay in Kitzbu ̈hel in August 1924 to im-
prove his grasp of German before he went to Sandhurst; Forbes Den-
nis encouraged Fleming to sign up for courses at Munich University
and the University of Geneva. Fleming had thus established two
strong links with SIS, through his mentor Forbes Dennis and later
through Reuter’s.