Steve Sheinkin - Fallout: Spies, Superbombs, and the Ultimate Cold War Showdown

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For my big sister, Rachel.

You showed me the path.

You must take your opponent into a deep dark forest, where two plus two equals five, and the path leading out is only wide enough for one.

MIKHAIL TAL, WORLD CHESS CHAMPION, 1960-1961

THE KID HIKED UP THE dark stairwell to the sixth floor, hoping only for a decent tip, maybe fifteen cents. Busting up a Russian spy ring was an unexpected bonus.

It was a Friday afternoon in June 1953, collection day for Jimmy Bozart, a thirteen-year-old paperboy for the Brooklyn Eagle. The newspaper cost thirty-five cents a week, and most people threw in an extra nickel or dime. The two retired teachers on the top floor of this apartment building were a bit more generous. They usually gave him two quarters.

Jimmy knocked on the teachers door. One of the women greeted him and dropped coins into his hand, more coins than usual. To be polite, he waited until the door was closed to look down at his palm.

It was good. One quarter and five nickels.

But as Jimmy started down the stairwell his heel caught on a step, and the money went flyingcoins bounced down the stairs, clanking and spinning. He scrambled after them. He found the quarter first. Then four of the nickels. Where was the other one?

The bulb in the ceiling fixture was out. Searching step by step in faint light angling in from a high window, Jimmy spotted the familiar sight of Thomas Jeffersons Monticello home. The back of a nickel.

Only the back.

Jimmy picked up the sliver of silvery metal. The coin had no front.

He found the other side of the coin on the landing. It had the usual front and smooth sides of a Jefferson nickel, but it was hollow. Something was wedged in the space inside, something square and black. It looked like a tiny piece of film.

Jimmy pried the thing out and held it up to the window. He saw tiny numbers printed on the film, groups of five-digit numbers typed in neat columns. Some kind of secret code?

Jimmy raced home, wondering what hed found. Everyone knew that Soviet spies had stolen American atomic bomb secrets during World War II. Now, with the United States and the Soviet Union locked in the Cold War, there must be new enemy spies out there. Could this coin have anything to do with that?

At the Bozart family apartment, Jimmys dad studied the tiny piece of film through a magnifying glass. He had no idea what it was, or what the numbers meant. He told his son that hed better show the strange find to the police.

Jimmy thought of Carolyn Lewind, a girl in his eighth-grade class whose dad was a detective. He ran to her apartment building and showed the coin and the film to Carolyn and her mother. But the detective was still at work. Jimmy dropped the coin into his pocket and left.

When Carolyns father came home, his wife told him that a red-haired kid named Jimmy Bozart had come by with a hollow nickel and some kind of coded message hed found inside. Detective Lewind growled at her for letting the kid leave with potentially explosive evidence of espionage. He hurried to the Bozarts apartment.

Mr. Bozart didnt know where his son was. He mentioned that his wife was playing bingo at a nearby church. Maybe shed seen the boy.

The detective charged into the church and interrupted the game. No Jimmy. Lewind seized the bingo prize money, just in case the nickel had somehow wound up there.

He stepped outside and saw a man pushing an ice cream cart down the sidewalk. He grabbed the ice cream mans change too, just in case.

Then he turned and saw a bunch of boys playing stickball in the street. He looked the kids over, one by one. His gaze froze on a kid with red hair and freckles. About his daughters age.

Barging into the game, he said, Youre Bozart?

Jimmy nodded.

What did you do with the nickel?

Jimmy reached into his pocket and held it out.

The man snatched the coin. He pulled a nickel from his own pocket and handed it over.

So youre not out anything, the detective said.

Jimmy took the new coin and went back to playing stickball.

He would be a college student by the time he realized that hed stumbled into a series of events that were moving the globes two great powers to the brink of the thirdand finalworld war.

THIS IS A STORY ABOUT spies and spy catchers. Its about superbombs, the space race, and the global clash between the United States and the Soviet Union. Its the story of the most intense years of the Cold War, building to the single most dangerous moment in human history. But even in such an epic struggle, small details and seemingly ordinary people play pivotal roles, shoving events in one direction or another.

What does a paperboys tip have to do with the end of the world?

That took a while to figure out.

The New York police passed the hollow nickel on to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Two FBI agents went to interview the teachers whod given it to Jimmy Bozartbut who remembers where they got a particular coin? One of them must have picked it up as change at the grocery store, the women guessed. Or possibly when buying subway tokens. The women seemed credible. There was no point in questioning them any further.

Trying another angle, the agents visited magician supply shops around the city. They showed employees the hollow coin, hoping for clues to its origin.

Its not suitable for a magic trick, one salesman told the agents. The hollowed-out area is too small to hide anything aside from a tiny piece of paper. No good for a performer on stage, in other words.

Holding the separate sides of the coin in his hands, the salesman explained that hed never seen anything like it. This was no cheap novelty, nothing mass produced in any factory. These were two sides of two different authentic nickels, expertly hollowed out, andlook at thiswhoever made it had drilled an almost invisibly tiny hole in the R of the word TRUST. Someone who knew to look for the hole could stick in a needle to pop the coin open.

Who made stuff like this?

No one, as far as the salesman knew.

The agents thanked the man. They tried a few more shops and got the same dead-end answers. There wasnt much more to be done. The tiny piece of film was on its way to government code breakers in Washington, D.C. Maybe something would come of that. Maybe not.

In the meantime, the FBI moved on to other cases.

Jimmy Bozart finished eighth grade and continued delivering the Brooklyn Eagle.

And the man whod hollowed out the nickel and hidden the coded message inside, the highest-ranking Soviet spy in America, went on living and working in Brooklyn, just a few miles from the Bozart familys apartment. He was Emil Goldfus.