The Kremlin’s Geordie Spy

In February 1962, Gary Powers, the American pilot whose U-2 spy plane was shot down over Soviet Union airspace, was released by his Russian captors in exchange for one of their own. Soviet KGB Colonel Vilyam Fisher, not least because he was born, plain Willie Fisher, at number 142 Clara Street, Benwell, in Newcastle upon Tyne. Willie’s revolutionary parents fled Russia in 1901, settling in the north-east where Willie was brought up to share the family ideology. Leaving England for the newly formed Soviet Union in 1921, Willie began a career as a spy. Narrowly escaping Stalin’s purges, Willie was sent to spy in New York, where he ran the network that included notorious atom spies Julius Rosenberg and Ted Hall. In 1957 he was arrested and sentenced to 30 years in prison. Six years later, the USSR’s regard for Willie’s talents was proven when they insisted on swapping him for the stricken Powers. Tracing Willie’s story from the most unlikely of beginnings in Newcastle, to Moscow, New York and back again, The Kremlin’s Geordie Spy is a singular and absorbing true story of Cold War espionage to rival anything in fiction.