Sep 4, 2026 · 29 min · 11 segments
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Phil ThompsonHost
His father, Heinrich, had fled Russia after running guns for revolutionaries in the years before 1905.
As a young man, he worked as a translator for the Communist Youth League, then spent two years operating radios for the Red Army.
Through his wife's family connections, he found work with the OGPU, a forerunner of the KGB.
By his mid-twenties, Soviet intelligence judged him ready to start what would become his life's mission.
He was fortunate to survive Stalin's purges of the 1930s, being fired rather than shot.
The Soviets desperately needed a functioning intelligence service and so in September 1941, Fischer was reinstated as a lieutenant in the secret police, the NKVD.
During the freezing revolution day parade of November 1941, German panzers halted only 30 miles away.
Stationed in Red Square, Captain Fischer picked up a desperate radio transmission from the front lines and passed it up to Stalin, who ordered the parading soldiers to march straight from the square into combat, halting the German advance.
By the summer of 1944, Fischer was turning his mastery of the radio airwaves directly against the German military machine.
He helped run a brilliant radio hoax in Belorussia, deceiving the German high command into flying 67 supply missions to an artillery regiment that had already been captured.
That wartime service was enough to secure him the placement his superiors valued above all others.
He first arrived in Quebec in November 1948, travelling under the name of a dead Lithuanian immigrant.
Once he arrived in New York, he became Emil Goldfuss, a semi-retired photo finisher with a late-life enthusiasm for painting, and he rented a small studio in a building full of working artists in Brooklyn.
The local realist art scene became the perfect cover for Fischer, who moved in that world effortlessly.
He was, in effect, ordered to single-handedly prepare the North American continent in case of a third world war.
This involved scouting US ammunition dumps and military installations and to organise a sleeper sabotage network from the central US all the way to the west coast.
He was also tasked with rebuilding the atomic spy ring that had so successfully infiltrated the Manhattan Project, but this was not to be.
His father, Heinrich, had fled Russia after running guns for revolutionaries in the years before 1905.
As a young man, he worked as a translator for the Communist Youth League, then spent two years operating radios for the Red Army.
Through his wife's family connections, he found work with the OGPU, a forerunner of the KGB.
By his mid-twenties, Soviet intelligence judged him ready to start what would become his life's mission.
He was fortunate to survive Stalin's purges of the 1930s, being fired rather than shot.
The Soviets desperately needed a functioning intelligence service and so in September 1941, Fischer was reinstated as a lieutenant in the secret police, the NKVD.
During the freezing revolution day parade of November 1941, German panzers halted only 30 miles away.
Stationed in Red Square, Captain Fischer picked up a desperate radio transmission from the front lines and passed it up to Stalin, who ordered the parading soldiers to march straight from the square into combat, halting the German advance.
By the summer of 1944, Fischer was turning his mastery of the radio airwaves directly against the German military machine.
He helped run a brilliant radio hoax in Belorussia, deceiving the German high command into flying 67 supply missions to an artillery regiment that had already been captured.
That wartime service was enough to secure him the placement his superiors valued above all others.
He first arrived in Quebec in November 1948, travelling under the name of a dead Lithuanian immigrant.
Once he arrived in New York, he became Emil Goldfuss, a semi-retired photo finisher with a late-life enthusiasm for painting, and he rented a small studio in a building full of working artists in Brooklyn.
The local realist art scene became the perfect cover for Fischer, who moved in that world effortlessly.
He was, in effect, ordered to single-handedly prepare the North American continent in case of a third world war.
This involved scouting US ammunition dumps and military installations and to organise a sleeper sabotage network from the central US all the way to the west coast.
He was also tasked with rebuilding the atomic spy ring that had so successfully infiltrated the Manhattan Project, but this was not to be.
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