The Amateur

Was Emil Goldfus really an amateur painter and photographer working in Brooklyn Heights, or was he a high-ranking KGB "Spymaster" named Col. Rudolf Abel? In fact, he was both and neither. 


About 7:02 a.m. on the morning of June 21st 1957, a naked man of multiple names was lying unsuspectingly across the bed in room 839 of Manhattan's Latham Hotel when he heard a knock at the door. It was an uncharacteristically vulnerable moment for him. FBI agents approached the door, having successfully trailed a subject they knew as 'Mark' from Emil Goldfus's Brooklyn studio to Martin Collins' hotel, camping out in an adjoining room the night before. All three, it turned out, were the same man.  


Author Nathan Ward (DARK HARBOR: The War for the New York Waterfront) revisits the Cold War case of Colonel Rudolf Abel, the senior KGB agent ever caught on American soil, who lived as an artist in a Brooklyn studio building, and whose name, of course, was not Rudolf Abel either. Drawing on thousands of newly declassified FBI documents as well as his own interviews with surviving artists who knew him as the courtly painter down the hall, Ward creates a shadowy double portrait of a man who fooled everyone except the lieutenant who betrayed him.