Bridge of Spies: A True Story of the Cold War

Giles Whittell

Nov 2010 · Sold by Crown

About this eBook

The “riveting, meticulously researched, and beautifully written” (Ben Macintyre, author of The Spy and the Traitor) true story chronicles the first and most legendary prisoner exchange of the Cold War, between East and West at Berlin’s Glienicke Bridge and Checkpoint Charlie
 
“A marvelous saga of dangerous missions, helter-skelter innovation, and clandestine activity.”—The Wall Street Journal

Who were the three men the American and Soviet superpowers exchanged at Berlin’s Glienicke Bridge and Checkpoint Charlie in the first prisoner exchange of the nuclear age? Bridge of Spies vividly traces their paths to that electrifying moment on February 10, 1962, when their fates helped to define the conflicts and lethal undercurrents of the most dangerous years of the cold war.
 
Bridge of Spies is the true story of three extraordinary characters—William Fisher, alias Rudolf Abel, a British-born KGB agent arrested by the FBI in New York City and jailed as a Soviet superspy for trying to steal America’s most precious nuclear secrets; Gary Powers, the American U-2 pilot who was captured when his plane was shot down while flying a reconnaissance mission over central Russia; and Frederic Pryor, a young American graduate student in Berlin mistakenly identified as a spy, arrested, and held without charge by the Stasi, East Germany’s secret police.
 
Giles Whittell masterfully weaves the three strands of this story together and reconstructs the brinkmanship and covert mind games that brought the United States and Soviet Union so close to a hot war in the early 1960s. The exchange that day at two of the most sensitive points along the Iron Curtain represented the first step back from where the superpowers had stood since the building of the Berlin Wall the previous summer—on the brink of World War III.

Ratings and reviews

There were hints of something big, but no one was sure when and most expected it to be at a main crossing, probably Checkpoint Charlie. On February 10, 1962, one reporter, on a hunch gleaned from careful reading, found a spot on the edge of Berlin near the Glienicke Bridge between East and West across Lake Wannsee and watched a well-choreographed “dance” as cars stopped at both ends with guards at the ready and a small group of men slowly walked to the white line at the bridge’s center where they stopped and stood for what seemed to be a long time. Finally, two other men got out of cars on both sides and walked to the center, crossing the line at the same moment, 8:52 a.m. Each group quickly walked to their cars and sped away. Just before, Frederic Pryor–an American student held by East German authorities since 1961–had also been released to American diplomats at Checkpoint Charlie. It was the first spy swap of the Cold War. Though all knew Pryor was never a spy but just an unlucky student, the other two were well-known. Colonel Rudolf Abel was actually William Fisher, born in 1903 in England to Russian-German parents and later taken to Russia as a child by parents enamored with Lenin’s revolution. He later joined the KGB and was sent to lead its work in North America. But Abel was betrayed by a defector, arrested in 1957, and sentenced to life in prison. Francis Gary Powers was a spy of a different sort, a pilot of the almost mystical U-2 spy plane, shot down over the Soviet Union on May Day, 1960. The U-2 was flimsy and extremely cranky but could take off from a short runway, ascend almost vertically, and then almost glide for hours at 70,000 feet–well above any Soviet fighters–taking high-resolution photos. Eisenhower had been told that it would be undetectable, which was soon found to be untrue. Congress was under pressure from defense manufacturers claiming the USSR potentially had thousands of nuclear-tipped missiles. And the USSR had already surprised the world by putting the first satellite into space. It was important to find out whether they had those missles but how could they do that in an age before satellites and in such a huge, yet closed country? The U-2 was the answer and Powers was one of the pilots chosen to fly it. The overflights worked for years but had become a source of great tension between the two nations. Eisenhower decided to end the program but was persuaded to allow one more flight over an area not yet photographed to give answers before his Paris summit. Whitten has gathered evidence from declassified US documents and archives made available after the fall of the USSR indicating that Khrushchev may have been planning to propose a true thaw at a planned Paris summit in May 1960, knowing that a prolonged and unabated arms buildup would destroy any chances of the USSR catching up to the US in economic terms. His first overture had been a 1959 visit to the US. The timing of this flight couldn’t have been worse. Though the CIA had assumed that the chance of survival of a pilot shot down from the edge of space was extremely tiny, Powers survived. The summit did not. Whittell brings everything together into an interesting, if at times somewhat tediously detailed, read. He has written an excellent account of the lives of the three people but also a good summary of the political and diplomatic climate at the time. He makes a strong case that the shooting down of Powers just days before the summit may have significantly changed history. It’s ironic that the shooting down of Powers may have fed the flames of the Cold War while the exchange of these three men two years later may have been the first hint of an ability to step back from the precipice. Steven Spielberg directed a movie of the same name, but it focuses on the flawed investigation of Abel and later negotiations for the swap and bears little resemblance to the book (and there has been a legal dispute on the rights to use the book’s title). Don’t let that keep you from reading the book. It is well worth your time.

A truthful depiction of Russia and the United State's relations during the time of the Cold War.

About the author

Giles Whittell is a writer for the Times of London. He has been the Times’ correspondent in Moscow and Los Angeles and the Washington, DC bureau chief, and has written four previous books including two about the break-up of the Soviet empire.