"Clean hands, a cool head and a warm heart." Those are the job qualifications for a good KGB agent, writes Russian Spy Rudolph Abel, addressing fledgling operatives in the Soviet secret police. The convicted spy that the U.S. exchanged for downed U-2 Pilot Francis Gary Powers in 1962, Abel is the exemplar and frequent spokesman for a current massive Soviet propaganda campaign. Its aim: to trumpet the glorious exploits of the KGB in the Russian press, TV, radio and cinema.
Abel is a good advertisement. For nine years he ran a network of KGB spies in the U.S. so skillfully that, when he was finally caught, CIA Director Allen Dulles wistfully observed: "I wish we had three or four like him inside Moscow right now." Abel kept in constant touch with the Kremlin from a studio whose windows, bristling with short wave radio antennas, directly faced the Brooklyn headquarters of the FBI.
Hollow Tie Clasp. In the end, it was his audacity that led to his conviction. When a disaffected KGB agent betrayed him, he was caught red-handed with the tools of his trade, including hol-lowed-out cuff links and other secret-message containers, a code book, a coded telegram, microfilm equipment and maps of U.S. defense areas. "It's incredible," Abel's defense attorney James B. Donovan told him, "you violated most of the basic rules of espionage with all that paraphernalia lying around."
In reminiscences published in Russia last year, Abel not only makes light of this lapse but uses it to score a point for his team, joining Spies Kim Philby and Gordon Lonsdale in the international intelligence game of trying to make the rival service look as dim-witted as possible. Abel boasts that he was able to destroy the most incriminating evidence under the noses of the arresting officers by flushing his encoder down the toilet and scraping paint from his artist's palette onto the coded cable. In the car that took him to prison, Abel claims that one bumbling FBI man examined his hollowed-out tie clasp and let a microfilm message fall to the floor unnoticed. "No professional spy wants to admit that he goofed," says an FBI spokesman, dismissing Abel's claims as "complete nonsense."
Productive Leisure. The memoirs are part of what is rapidly becoming Abel's own five-foot shelf of recollected life and works. In a recent interview published in the Russian youth magazine Smena, he describes the gracious pastimes that a KGB colonel like himself engages in during his spare time: playing Bach on the lute and the classical guitar, landscape drawing. Abel's most productive leisure hours were apparently spent in U.S. penitentiaries while serving 41 of his 30-year sentence for espionage. Here, he claims, he sketched a portrait of President Kennedy so fine that Attorney General Robert Kennedy asked Abel to make him a present of it. The claim seems a little unlikely in view of the quality of his sketches now illustrating some of his works in Russia.