I recently showed
Spielbereg’s BFG to friends, and
they loved Mark Rylance’s motion
and emotion characterisation of the Giant. Most of them had not
seen his previous performance in Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies. That film told the story of the
capture by the FBI of a Soviet spy, Colonel Rudolph Abel, in the late 1950’s,
and how he was later swapped for the American U2 spy-plane pilot, F. Gary
Powers. Tom Hanks played Jim Donovan, a lawyer who had worked for
the prosecution at the Nurenberg Trials, now appointed to defend the
spy. Mark Rylance, in his first major film role, played the
spy. The film is ‘based on a true story’.
However, in the second
part of this review (which I reprint from revbobsblog.blogspot) I
look more closely what seems to be a truth hidden by this film and ask
‘Who really was Rudolph Abel?’ That is a question the CIA still want not
to answer.
The Spielberg film is
not primarily about the Soviet spy. It is about the American lawyer, Donovan,
chosen to defend him at what was always going to be a ‘show trial’, but who did
so with remarkable integrity and courage, knowing the public would despise him
for his role. Although Able was found guilty and sentenced to 30
years imprisonment he was spared execution. Donovan made the argument to
the presiding Judge that this Russian should be kept alive as one day he might
be a useful pawn to swap if any American spy was caught by the Soviets.
This proved to be the case. Four years later Donovan was
asked by the U. S. Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, to work with the CIA
and secretly negotiate the swap of Abel for Powers.
Donovan again conducted
himself with courage and integrity, demanding that a young American student,
Frederick Pryor, should also be included in the swap. The Berlin Wall was being
constructed and Pryor had just been arrested by the East German Stasi on the
wrong side of the Wall. The film tells us that the CIA were not at
all concerned about this young man’s fate, but Donovan insisted, and the Stasi
eventually agreed. So an individual American’s humanity and courage triumphed
once again despite the heartlessness of Governments on both sides of the Iron
Curtain. Just as in Private Ryan
Pryor was saved by the American Hero personified by Tom Hanks.
And the Soviet spy’s life was also saved.
After the initial arrest
of Abel Tom Hanks is centre stage. We see a little of Powers, who
is never portrayed as a hero. Like the other U2
‘drivers’ he was given explicit instructions on how to destroy the top-secret
spy plane if it might fall into enemy hands, and given the means to
self-destruct if he was likely to fall into enemy hands himself. He
failed to do so. We are not told how much he revealed to his
interrogators, but I suspect he did not have a lot to reveal.
Tom Hanks played Donovan
with his customary skill, making an otherwise ordinary man quietly heroic, in
the mould of a Jimmy Stewart character in a Capra movie or, more precisely,
Gregory Peck’s Atticus Finch. Hanks has done this many times before
– and so, of course, has Spielberg. I rather like the fact that an
actor who is hardly handsome, has never been described as sexy or been an
action movie hero, is actually the biggest box office draw in Hollywood. They
say his films have grossed 11 billion dollars.
And what about the casting
of the Englishman Mark Rylance as Rudolph?
It seems that when Rylance
was approached by Spielberg twenty years ago he chose the Shakespearian stage
instead. Hanks remarked at the time that Rylance ‘ has a great future.’ I wonder if he knows how great a
past he has. Rylance is a luminary on the Glove stage – and was of
course the star of the BBC’s six part adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, but this was his first major film
role. Rylance can play ‘big’ if he wants to, as when
playing Johnny ‘Rooster’ Byron in the award winning West End and Broadway hit,
Jez Buttersworth’s Jerusalem.
But he can also play small, doing so little that every tiny thing inflection or
facial shift catches our attention and tells us something
significant. He was perfectly cast here.
The Bridge’s script helped Rylance’s minimalism. He
says very little. He says nothing that is unimportant.
His repeated response when asked by Donovan if he is worried is “Would it help?” That is wonderful.
Someone knows that being a spy is like raising teenage children – in this at
least, that when things look like going badly wrong it is far too late to start
worrying. You simply have to trust the work you did before, in the case
of teenagers during those early years when you were bringing them up, in the
case of a spy the trade-craft employed when setting up your legend and the routines
and systems to protect it. In both cases you also have to trust those
who support you. Your family or your employers. Abel had done
the best he could. Although he had been betrayed by his
deputy he would not sell out to his captors. If this loyalty cost
him his life, so be it.
The script is clear about
the nature of Abel’s trial. He was bound to be found guilty and
nothing was going to stop that, including the carelessness of the FBI, who
failed to get a warrant for the search that revealed his trove of spying
equipment. The judge chose to ignore this legal lapse.
This obviously has a contemporary relevance, and Spielberg is forthright
is his criticism of extra-legal procedures in Camp X.
There is nothing gung ho here and there are no grandstanding acting
performances. Even Donovan’s performance when appealing the
conviction in The Supreme Court is cut short (maybe a bad editing
choice?). All the actors simply get on with their jobs,
from Amy Ryan as Donovan’s wife, Alan Alder as his boss, Dakin Matthews as the
presiding judge, Sebastian Koch as the svelte East German official Donovan has
to deal with in East Berlin – a lovely counterpoint to his role in The Lives of
Others’ – and Mikhail Gorevoy as
the head of the KGB in Berlin is properly oleaginous. Scott
Shepherd is the rat-faced CIA man. Austin Stowel as
Gary Powers is really a no more than a cypher, but the film is never about
him. He is a pawn in this game. He is never
the hero. Donovan is. Abel was also a hero however, as
Donovan pointed out to the court. A brave and true soldier in a
Cold War.
Some critics have
complained about the film’s length. I was surprised afterwards to learn that it
is 141 minutes . It did not feel like it. It is a
remarkable movie, and I strongly recommend it.
But
who was Rudolph? There
is a truer and even more interesting story not told here. It
seems that the man caught by the FBI was not Colonel Rudolph Abel, but Colonel
Willie Fisher. A recent article by Simon Armstrong of the BBC
(28/11/15) refers to Vin Arthey’s book Abel: The True Story of the Spy They
Traded for Gary Powers,
and David Saunders, a professor of Russian history at Newcastle University has
also researched the full story of the spy’s childhood and career.
According to a book by the
Soviet spy Kirill Khenkin Fisher was born on North Tyneside on the 11th July 1903. Sanders has seen his birth
certificate. Fisher’s ethnically German parents were Russian
Communist agitators, forced to flee Russia at the turn of the
century. His older brother Henry is believed to have organized
running guns back to Russian for the communists, and Willie helped his father
to distribute anti-German literature on North Tyneside. After the
Revolution the family returned to Russia and Fisher joined the Red
Army. He spoke English, Russian, German, French, Polish and Yiddish
and was a gifted radio operator. During the Battle of
Stalingrad he played a crucial part in an important fuhlspiel, using false radio transmissions to convince the German High
Command that one of their battle groups was cut off and operating behind Soviet
lines and persuading them to send in Commandos
reinforcements. This was a deadly trap that cost the
Germans dearly. Arthey considers this to be the most
significant event of his career.
After the war Fisher was
trained in further spy-craft and rose in the ranks of the KGB. He
taught Konan Molodi how to use codes an cyphers in radio signals.
Molodi later assumed the identity of Gordon Lonsdale and ran the
British Naval spy Harry Hougton at Portland, whose capture is recorded in
‘Spycatcher’ by MI5’s Peter Wright. In 1953 Fisher was sent to New
York with a false identity to take over the Soviet spy network in the USA.
He was then the ‘control’
of the Rosenbergs and Krogers. “The FBI was working hard to disrupt
Soviet spy rings, but Fisher kept the show on the road” writes Arthey, “I don’t think his job was seeking out
military secrets, but he was an important cog in the wheel that got information
back to Russia.” He
may also have been regrouping the penetration of the nuclear research site at
Los Alamos. The arrest of the ‘Atom Spies’, the Rosenbergs, had
thrown this mission into a spin. Fisher’s chief operator at Los
Alamos was Kitty Harris, another English born Communist spy previously trained
by Willie. But his deputy in New York, the Finnish Reino Hayhanen, was
an incompetent drunk. Under the threat of being sent back to Moscow
(where he might have been ‘promoted’ by means of a Makarov pistol at the back
of his head) Hayhanen defected and told the Americans everything he
knew. Because of the standard trade-craft practice of cut-outs and
closed-cell structure Hayhanen did not even know his boss’s name, only
his general area of residence, cover occupation (painter and sign-writer) and
rank (Colonel). Eventually however that was enough and Fisher was
arrested by the FBI and charged on three counts.
At this point Willie
Fisher showed what a good spy he was. He told the FBI/CIA that he
was Colonel Rudolph Abel of the KGB. Fisher and Abel had become
friends many years earlier, so Fisher knew a lot about his friends
biography. The CIA knew such an officer existed, but they did not
know that he had recently died in Moscow. When the
Americans announced the arrest of Colonel Abel the KGB knew that although their
main man had been arrested the CIA did not know his real identity.
Willie Fisher maintained this pretense during the four years he spent in prison
before he was swapped for Capt. Gary Powers, shot down over Russia in 1960.
So Fisher had cleverly
signaled to his superiors that he had not revealed his true
identity. He had not betrayed his greatest secret. The
KGB bosses would decide if they believed him. This would be a
question of life or death if he was swapped, but there was nothing more he
could do. Worrying would not help. The film
leaves his fate unclear, and rather suggests that it would not be
positive. In fact, despite the fact that the Russians never totally
trusted any spy who was not ethnically Russian, his loyalty was
recognized. He was reunited with his wife and daughter in
Moscow. He could never work abroad again and did not like being
paraded round the new KGB recruits as a hero – what he called a ‘museum piece’
– he lived in Moscow until he died of lung cancer in his bed in 1971.
Steven Spielberg’s new
movie tells of the arrest, trial and eventual release of this spy, but does not
reveal this ultimate deception. Nor do Spielberg and
the script writers make it clear that Fisher was in jail for over four years
before the swap.
All this must have been
known by the film makers, as attested by the way Mark Rylance speaks his lines
with a British accent. Rylance used a Scottish, rather than Geordie,
accent, because he found it easier to master, but “I’ve met everybody
who knew him as an English speaker. “ says Dr Arthey.“They said he didn’t speak anything like [a Geordie]. The best
we’ve got is that he spoke with a kind of Scots-Irish accent, which he told
people was down to being brought up by a Scottish aunt in Boston. “
The film, along with
official and unofficial sites refer to him as Rudolph Abel, perhaps deferring
to the CIA who still don’t want to admit that they were fooled by their most important
captive. Professor Saunders says “We make a lot in this country about Kim
Philby and the Cambridge Five, but those British spies didn’t have any rank in
the KGB. Abel (sic) is the only British-born ranking officer in
Soviet external security services that we know of.”
So it seems that Willie
Fisher was much more remarkable in life than he is in this film.
During WW2 he would have been seen by the Americans and
British as a hero, fighting on behalf of our valued – indeed essential – allies
the Russians against the Germans. Stalin and his betrayal of
Marxism was not Fisher’s fault, and I feel rather proud of him.
