KGB Man: The Cold War’s Most Notorious Agent and the First to be Exchanged at the Bridge of Spies

Lawyer Kuhne (Business Bribes) delivers a no-thrills account of Rudolf Abel’s espionage activities in America from 1948 to his arrest in 1957. A colonel in the KGB, Abel was “a perfectionist” who came to the U.S. “to revitalize the network of atomic spies... whose productivity had been thwarted by postwar security enhancements.” He “undoubtedly traveled to Santa Fe” with knowledge about the Manhattan Project, according to Kuhne, and sent one of his co-conspirators, Reino Häyhänen, on a mission to locate a U.S. Army mechanic attached to the embassy in Moscow who had been recruited by Soviet intelligence before returning to the States. Abel was eventually betrayed by Häyhänen, who had been recalled to Moscow for doing shoddy work and feared for his life. Though FBI agents found a plethora of spy equipment in Abel’s possession—including a cipher pad for cryptography and fake birth certificates—he refused to discuss his espionage activities. Sentenced to 30 years in prison, he served less than five before he was exchanged for U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers in 1962. Unfortunately, Kuhne saps the story of drama by quoting trial transcripts and FBI reports verbatim and relegating the prisoner exchange to the epilogue. Readers will be disappointed. (Jan.)