2017-07-11 Tue

Rudolf Abel, a Soviet intelligence officer was born today, 11th July 1903. He was convicted in the United States in 1957 for transmitting military secrets to the Soviet Union.

Correos Chile issued this commemorative stamp of Rudolf worth 5 Chilean Pesos in 1990.

Genrich Fischer, Abel’s father and a friend of Lenin’s, emigrated to Britain around 1901 before returning to Russia 20 years later. His son, born in England and going to Russia with his father, joined the Soviet intelligence and security agency GPU (1927) and operated in western European countries and the Soviet Union in the next two decades.

In about 1948 he illegally entered the United States and, under the name of Emil R. Goldfus, lived for some time as an artist and photographer in a Brooklyn studio apartment, where he concealed shortwave radio transmitting and receiving equipment. On June 21, 1957, he was arrested by the FBI, and on October 25, 1957, a federal district court in Brooklyn found him guilty of espionage. The court sentenced him to 30 years’ imprisonment.

The U.S. government then used Abel to secure the release of Powers, whose Lockheed U-2 high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft had been forced down near Sverdlovsk, in the central Soviet Union, on May 1, 1960. President John F. Kennedy commuted Abel’s sentence, and, on February 10, 1962, in a ceremony on a bridge between West Berlin and East Germany (Potsdam), Abel was exchanged for Powers and Frederic L. Pryor, an American student who had been held without charge in East Germany since August 1961.