Advice to Young Spies

"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.

A Soviet anthology of spy stories contains a stirring Abel call for KGB recruits. "The best representatives of our youth are going into intelligence work that requires the creative acquisition of the Marxist-Leninist theory, a general educational background and a broad spiritual outlook." That might seem questionable to Russians who witnessed the demonstration against the Czechoslovak invasion in Red Square last August, when a gang of young KGB operatives brutally mauled the demonstrators.

Naturally Discouraged. Abel's sudden blossoming into print and native recognition is somewhat surprising. Last week he even appeared in a movie based partly on his own experiences. Russia long denied that he was a spy, or indeed a Soviet citizen at all. At Abel's 1957 trial, he refused to disclose his identity, confessing only that he had entered the U.S. illegally. At that time, the Soviet press described him as a wretched German photographer victimized by "a hoax concocted by J. Edgar Hoover and American authors of lowbrow science fiction." In fact, as Abel now tells it, he was the son of a Russian revolutionary exiled to the far north under Czar Nicholas II. He prepared for his future vocation by distributing Bolshevik literature, beating up "Trotskyites" and studying radio engineering and foreign languages. Now 65, Abel notes that his country, which "values highly the courage, valor and boundless loyalty" of the KGB agent, has awarded him the Order of Lenin, two Orders of the Red Banner, the Order of the Red Star and other medals for his 30-year service.

Some specialists in the U.S. believe that the Soviet leaders are not so naive as to expect the current glorification campaign to popularize the KGB with the Russian people. The purpose of the exercise is rather to raise the morale of the KGB, which employs some 750,000 people. They were naturally discouraged after Stalin's death when their power was sharply reduced, and most of the vast slave-labor camps they had manned for 25 years were disbanded. But there is much hope for the future, Abel believes, because the young people he now sees entering the KGB are displaying "exceptional stubbornness and persistence in learning from the work experience of their older comrades--the real masters of their profession." It is a self-serving but nonetheless chilling thought.

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