Rudolf Abel

Known to the world as Rudolf Abel, he was really Vilyam Fisher, a Soviet illegal working out of a studio in Brooklyn. The case is worth knowing for how it came apart: a hollow nickel that a 14-year-old newspaper boy found in 1953 sat unexplained until Fisher's subordinate, Reino Hayhanen, called the US Embassy in Paris four years later and gave the network away. Fisher was sentenced to concurrent terms of up to 30 years but served only about four. His real consequence was diplomatic: in February 1962 he was exchanged for Francis Gary Powers, the U-2 pilot shot down over the Soviet Union, in the swap later dramatized as Bridge of Spies.