Soviet spy ring cracked by nickel

On June 22, 1953, a paperboy for the Brooklyn Eagle, knocked on the door of one of his customers in an apartment building on Foster Avenue in Brooklyn. The paperboy was going through the month-end ritual of collecting from his customers. The lady customer only had a dollar bill and the paperboy did not have enough coins to make change so he asked the neighbors next door if they could help. The neighbors pooled their coins and produced enough change for a dollar, and the bill was paid.

As the paperboy was leaving the apartment building, and jingling the change in his hand, he could not help but notice that one nickel weighed less than the other nickels.

As he examined it, it fell to the ground and opened up after hitting the cement sidewalk. Inside was a miniature photograph showing numbers arranged in columns.

Two days later a New York City detective casually remarked to an FBI friend about the hollow nickel a newsboy had discovered. The detective had received the information from another police officer whose daughter was acquainted with the paperboy. The New York City Police picked up the nickel with its contents and turned it over to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

FBI agents in the New York City office examined the hollow nickel. The interior of the coin appeared to be what agents described as a microphotograph portraying 10 columns of typewritten numbers. There were five digits in each number and 21 numbers in most columns. Suspecting a coded espionage message, the agents shipped it to the FBI Laboratory for further analysis.

Following its arrival in Washington, the coin received careful scrutiny by a team of FBI scientists. Hollow coins, occasionally used in magic acts and only occasionally seen by the FBI, were seldom if at all, seen by ordinary citizens. The coin was indeed unique, even for the FBI. It was a Jefferson nickel with a tiny hole drilled in the letter R of the word "TRUST." Investigators concluded that the tiny hole had been made to accept a device to open the coin. The other side of the coin had been made from another nickel minted during World War II and composed of a copper-silver alloy.

As efforts began to decode the message on the microphotograph, FBI agents in New York launched an investigation. The neighbors who had given change to the newsboy for a dollar bill knew nothing of the coin and confirmed that they had never seen such a thing. Proprietors of novelty stores and other businesses in the area were contacted and photographs of the hollow coin were shown to them, but this failed to produce anything positive. A detailed canvassing of the neighborhood did not yield any useful information. The meaning of the microphotograph seemed destined to remain a mystery.

From 1953 to 1957, attempts to solve the mystery of the hollow nickel by interviewing former intelligence agents who had defected to the free world from communist-bloc nations shed no light on the case. FBI investigators checked out hollow subway tokens, other hollow or trick coins but none appeared to suggest a tie to the one discovered in Brooklyn. The search for the person for whom the coded message in the nickel was intended was nowhere to be found.

Seemingly unrelated events can occasionally bring solutions to insolvable mysteries. The key to the paperboy's hollow nickel proved to be a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet State Security Service (KGB). The 36-year-old officer telephoned the United States Embassy in Paris and subsequently in an interview stated that he had been operating as a spy in the United States and needed help. The spy, Reino Hayhanen, explained that he had just been ordered to return to Moscow and felt defection was better than returning for an uncertain future.

Mr. Hayhanen had been born on May 14, 1920 near Leningrad to two Russian peasants. Despite this modest background, Hayhanen became an honor student and in 1939 earned the equivalent of a certificate to teach high school. In September of 1939, he was appointed to a primary school in the village of Lipitz. His high level of proficiency in the Finnish language, however, attracted the NKVD or secret police. Two months after beginning his job as an elementary school teacher, the NKVD drafted him to go to the combat zone and translate captured documents and interview prisoners during the Finnish-Soviet war.

When the war ended Hayhanen was ordered to review the loyalty and reliability of Soviet workers in Finland and to develop sources of information in Finland. His real job was to identify anti-Soviet elements in the intelligentsia. By 1943, he had gained considerable respect for his knowledge of Finland and Finnish matters and was accepted into membership into the Soviet Communist Party. At the end of the war Hayhanen received promotion to the rank of senior operative and worked in the village of Padani, identifying dissidents. The KGB called Hayhanen to Moscow in the summer of 1948 and gave him a new assignment. He would be required to learn English, sever all connections with his family and receive special training in photographing documents as well as in the encoding and decoding of messages. While his training continued, he worked as a mechanic in Valga, Estonia, and in 1949 entered Finland as Eugene Nicolai Maki, an American-born laborer.