Bridge of Spies

by Giles Whittell

  Khrushchev: It is up to the United States to decide whether there will be peace or war.

  Kennedy: Then it will be a cold winter.

  On June 15 President Walter Ulbricht of East Germany issued an unsolicited denial to the press that he would “mobilize the construction workers of the capital … for the purpose of building a wall.” Many of his top advisers knew then that this was precisely what he planned to do, but no Western reporter took the hint.

  On June 21 the commander of Soviet forces in East Berlin approved a plan to establish physical control of the borders of “Greater Berlin.” Stockpiling of barbed wire began in Soviet army warehouses close to the city.

  On June 25 Kennedy issued his response to the new ultimatum. He told the world from the Oval Office that West Berlin had become “the great testing place of Western courage and will,” where American commitments and Soviet ambition “now meet in basic confrontation.” But was it militarily tenable? “Any dangerous spot is tenable if men—brave men—will make it so.”

  On June 26 Khrushchev cabled his ambassador in East Berlin to tell Ulbricht it was time to lay “an iron ring” around the city. “If this drags us into war,” he said, “there will be war.”

  On August 1 Khrushchev met Ulbricht in Moscow and gave him two weeks to make the iron ring a reality.

  On August 3 the leaders of every Warsaw Pact country were summoned to join Ulbricht in Moscow and told of the plan.

  On August 11, Erich Mielke, the East German minister for state security, briefed senior Stasi officials on the details of “Operation Rose,” the delicate euphemism chosen for the building of the wall.

  On August 12, shortly before midnight, Ulbricht let his own cabinet in on the secret at a meeting at his country house in Wandlitz. Until then, fewer than two dozen people in East Germany had known what was about to happen.

  On August 13, a Sunday, Soviet tanks mobilized at one minute past midnight thundered toward the city as East German soldiers began digging trenches and unrolling barbed wire along the ninety-six-mile border of West Berlin. Fred Pryor was on holiday in Denmark. He would hear about the closure on his car radio on his way home later that day. He was as surprised as President Kennedy, who was called to the shore of Cape Cod and handed a one-paragraph telex as he stepped off the family motor launch at Hyannis Port seventeen hours after Operation Rose began. Much earlier, George Bailey, in Berlin for ABC News, had seen his forecast come true in the person of an East German police captain with a jackhammer, tearing up the pavement in Potsdamer Platz at four in the morning. At about the same time, an East Berlin lawyer, not widely known but with a persuasive charm and a long list of friends and associates in the West, approached the Brandenburg Gate in his car. His wife was in the passenger seat. They were on their way home after a late dinner with friends in West Berlin. West German police advised them to turn back; ahead of the Vogels the border was now a tangle of coiled wire, and behind that, East German Volkspolizei armed with machine guns were silhouetted by searchlights. The lawyer thought for a long moment, then drove on through a gap in the wire into a city being turned, as it slept, into a prison. His name was Wolfgang Vogel.

  “I belong here,” Vogel told one of many Western interviewers who later beat a path to his door on the eastern side of the wall. Hundreds of victims of the Stasi would be grateful for the choice he made that night, but the first of them was Frederic Pryor.

  The wall did not appear at once. On day one and day two of the new era of hermetic ideological segregation, there was no hint of concrete; only wire and police and, a block or two back from the border, the Soviet tanks. Ulbricht and Khrushchev were waiting to gauge Kennedy’s reaction, which was one of anger—but his anger was directed more at the CIA and State Department for failing to warn him than at the Communists. The operation was a shock, and it was devastating for the families it split in half, but in truth it was easier for Washington to cope with than a unilateral peace treaty between the Soviet Union and East Germany. Kennedy told Vice President Lyndon Johnson and General Lucius Clay to be ready to fly in to sustain morale. He denied a request from U.S. commanders in Berlin for permission to bulldoze the wire.

  Daniel Schorr of CBS News was on Bernauer Strasse, whose northern sidewalk formed the border, when the concrete first appeared. It came in slabs, at first just four feet square but then much bigger, slotted by cranes into the trenches that the soldiers and the Vopos had been digging. Schorr mused into his microphone that he was reminded of the Warsaw ghetto.

  That was on Tuesday morning. On Tuesday afternoon a nineteen-year-old East German army sergeant named Conrad Schumann, distressed by the sight of a daughter handing flowers to her mother across the border wire, took a run at it and jumped. He cleared it neatly, like a well-trained pony. His right boot pressed the wire down. He kept his left foot high and his gun strap taut so that nothing snagged. At that instant a shutter clicked, recording his escape on the single most iconic square of thirty-five-millimeter celluloid of the cold war—and Schumann ran on into a waiting West Berlin police van.

  Johnson and Clay reached Berlin at the end of the week and found themselves mobbed by grateful, hopeful crowds all the way from the airport to the Schöneberg district city hall. The next day, 1,500 American troops rolled along the autobahn from their barracks in Helmstedt, one hundred miles away across the West German border, to reinforce the U.S. Army’s Berlin garrison. Kennedy kept his closest military adviser up all night to check every twenty minutes that the convoy had not triggered the Third World War. When it arrived safely, Mayor Willy Brandt said he believed the threat of war had passed, and the White House began to breathe again.

  The following Friday—August 25—Khrushchev invited the American journalist Drew Pearson to his summer house in the Crimea to explain his actions in Berlin. Ulbricht had a similar urge on the same day, but he satisfied it with a speech rather than an interview. It was to be delivered near Alexanderplatz, in the heart of East Berlin, and was widely publicized in advance. It is likely that a tall, fair-haired English spy named David Cornwell was there. Though posted to Bonn, he spent the last week of August in Berlin quietly researching a novel, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, that he would publish as John le Carré. And it is certain that Fred Pryor was there, the budding expert on Soviet foreign trade. He wanted to know how Ulbricht would justify the wall. He also wanted to test the East German promise that access to East Berlin for westerners would be unaffected by the new border controls.

  Pryor had no trouble getting in. As usual, he crossed into the Soviet sector at Checkpoint Charlie in his car, the red VW. It was his farewell visit to the East. He had a development job lined up in Pakistan, and his doctoral thesis was complete. In fact, he had a few copies on his passenger seat. After listening to the speech, he planned to deliver them to people who had helped him with it. And after that he hoped to say good-bye to a young economist, a Fräulein Bergman, who had worked with him on a separate project comparing textile firms in the two Germanys. Maybe he would even ask her out to dinner.

  Pryor did not see le Carré in Alexanderplatz. Not to recognize, at any rate. He did see a westerner whom he knew, though. A fellow Oberlin graduate from the class of 1955 was in the crowd and several inches taller than most of the East Germans around him. Martin Skala, in what he calls his postcollege “idealistic phase,” was visiting from Austria. He had crossed the border with some money for a church group hidden under his clothes and was hanging around for the speech before returning to West Berlin for the night. The two men listened as Ulbricht blamed ideological weaklings and Western provocateurs for forcing his hand on the thirteenth. Then they chatted about how small the world was, and Pryor gave Skala a ride to Checkpoint Charlie. Skala got out; Pryor headed back to East Berlin.

  Fräulein Bergman was not at home. Nor was her landlady at liberty to tell Pryor where she had gone. Finding out these meager facts took him out of his car and up several flights of stairs. When he returned to the car he found it surround
ed by East German police.

  “They asked where I had been. I told them. They asked what I was doing there. I said I went to see somebody but they weren’t there.”

  Bergman had fled to the West, and the Stasi had staked out her apartment. Pryor was arrested on suspicion of helping her flee and attempting to recover her possessions. He was taken first back to Alexanderplatz, to police headquarters. There he tried claiming that he had gone to the wrong address, but no one believed him. That evening he was moved away from the city center, beyond the reach of any conceivable quick rescue, out of the category of unfortunate misunderstandings and into the vortex of Stasi paranoia. He was moved to the Hohenschönhausen Investigation Prison, a world unto itself in a remote northeastern suburb that never appeared on an East German map. The streets leading to it simply stopped. It was a prestigious place to work but a soul-destroying place to live: a complex of fifty-four squat brick and concrete buildings ringed by its own wall and monitored by its own octagonal watchtowers, where right-thinking people locked up wrong-thinking people and tormented them until they confessed.

  Pryor was never told what the Stasi wanted him to confess to, but he had a pretty good idea. “I was arrested for the wrong thing,” he says. “But once they discovered the dissertation in my car they got excited. I realized after a couple of days that I would be in prison for the next ten years.”

  He was put in a cell with a cell mate who worked diligently as a stooge, and he was interrogated every day for five and a half months. Every two days he was led down the yellow-lit corridor of his cell block, across perhaps five meters of open space and into a “tiger cage”—the prisoners’ term—to exercise. The cages were concrete boxes four meters long and two and a half meters wide, open only to the sky. That gave those in them an occasional view of Soviet jets descending toward East Berlin’s Schönefeld Airport, but the view was obscured by an armed guard on a metal platform, one for each four cages. The platforms were positioned above the cages where their corners met, enabling guards to shoot prisoners at point-blank range in the unlikely event that they attempted to do anything other than prowl. Sessions lasted fifteen to twenty minutes.

  Prisoners sometimes found loose lumps of asphalt in the cages and lobbed them into neighboring cages to advertise their existence. The recipient of such a lump could take it back to his cell, but it would be confiscated at his next cell inspection.

  Pryor’s cell was five paces long and two wide, with two pine bunks, a small window filled with glass bricks, a sink, and an open toilet bowl. Under the window were a small table and a chair, both bolted to the floor.

  He was not tortured, but his interrogation made those of Willie Fisher and Gary Powers look perfunctory by comparison. “I had nothing to hide, so I answered their questions,” Pryor says, which was one reason the questions did not stop. There were two other reasons: having read his thesis, the Stasi tried to build a case of economic espionage against him under Article 14 of the East German criminal code. And having researched his background they became convinced that his father was a personal friend of Robert McNamara, the U.S. secretary of defense and a fellow homeowner in Ann Arbor, Michigan. This would make Pryor one of the most valuable bargaining chips to have fallen into the Stasi’s web since its creation. The result was an epic two-way conversation about nothing, recorded in minute detail.

  When he returned to Berlin to read his Stasi file in 1994, Pryor found that it was 10,000 pages long, including a meticulous German translation of his thesis, transcripts of interrogations of everyone he had interviewed, 350 pages of notes and suggested questions handwritten by his cell mate, and seventy-two items taken from his wallet.

  One of these items was his Yale library card, stamped with the words SPECIAL STUDENT—ONLY ROOM 413.

  To his interrogator, “special” was a special word.

  Interrogator: I thought you said you were a regular student.

  Pryor: I was.

  Interrogator: What’s the special room?

  “We spent about a week on that,” Pryor says. “Then finally I remembered that in my last semester I hadn’t paid my tuition on time. Room 413 was the economics seminar room, the only room in the library I could use until I paid my bill.”

  A week’s work done, the interrogator let it go. He was a professional, after all; a graduate of the Stasi’s own university in Potsdam, the Harvard Law of Eastern Bloc interrogation schools. He had other ways to wear young Pryor down.

  Another week, he asked about a girl Pryor had met half a dozen times in East Berlin. She was a medical student. The relationship had been strictly conversational, he says, a series of dates at which they talked about the endless differences between growing up in Ohio and East Germany. It had ended at her request when she explained that it might start to look bad on her records to have had such frequent contact with a foreigner. Pryor did not explain this in the interrogation room, for her sake, but “they kept pushing, pushing, pushing, and suddenly I got the notion of what they were really after.”

  Just as Pryor understood that “fear of the Stasi” was not acceptable to the Stasi as an explanation for ending a relationship, so his friend did too. They must have got to her, and she must have said something else.

  “So after three days I said, ‘I confess, I tried to screw her.’ ‘Tried to screw her.’ He wrote it down. And the questioning stopped.”

  Thirty-three years later, going through his file, Pryor looked at the transcript of her interrogation. “She said roughly the same thing as I did: ‘I had to break up with him because he tried to violate my socialist virginity, meine sozialistische Keuschheit zu verschmutzen.’ And so our stories agreed.”

  He was fed well—“three squares a day.” The Stasi called it the tubercular diet, and Pryor assumed he was put on it because his mother was Jewish and it would look bad if when he was eventually released he raised his shirt for the press and said, “Auschwitz.” But feeling full did not make him a happy prisoner. He was told he would stay in Hohenschönhausen, denied all contact with the outside world, until he confessed to spying. Parcels and letters from his parents were not delivered. His interrogator told him his girlfriend in West Berlin had betrayed him, and he could never quite dismiss the idea that this might be true. When his cell mate intimated that he would have to stand trial for espionage, Pryor had visions of a German version of the farce that Powers had endured in Moscow and said he would sooner commit suicide.

  “I meant it,” he says later, matter-of-factly, toward the end of his career as an economics professor in Pennsylvania. “I didn’t want to be used as a tool in cold war propaganda.” How he would have killed himself was a tricky question given the scarcity of implements in his cell. But he got as far as thinking about biting through the veins in his wrist, and his kamikaze warning to his cell mate may have shaken a few bureaucratic screws loose higher up the Stasi chain of command.

  Soon afterward, on a cold February day in 1962, he had a visitor. They were given a room for a private conversation that was inevitably recorded and transcribed in full for Pryor’s file. The man who joined him there was a lawyer who evidently did well for himself. He was youngish, compact, dapper, and guardedly optimistic. He pointed first to the ceiling as a warning that microphones would be hidden there. Then he introduced himself as Wolfgang Vogel and handed Pryor a note in handwriting he recognized immediately as his father’s. It consisted of five words: “You can trust this man.”

  Christmas 1961 was not a good time to be in jail as a spy in the Eastern Bloc. It was cold outside, miserable inside, and godless everywhere. Snow blanketed northern Eurasia, covering its prison exercise yards and hiding the missile silos that the U-2 had never quite photographed.

  Khrushchev and Ulbricht hid most of their intentions. Khrushchev had released the two American survivors of the RB-47 shot down over the Soviet Arctic the year before but had received no answering gesture from Kennedy. Kennedy thought Khrushchev a perplexing maverick and did not want to be any further in h
is debt. In Berlin, the wall was four months old. It was no longer a direct threat to peace, but it was still a livid scar and East Germany was still unrecognized by the free world. Westerners sucked in by the Stasi could not be reached by official channels, and the unofficial ones were largely untested.

  Being a spy in prison in Atlanta was warmer but not much more uplifting. In his fourth annual Christmas message to his lawyer, the inmate known as Rudolf Abel asked as usual for his four-pound ration of milk chocolate, then let his guard down and admitted that life on the inside was becoming “an affliction.”

  And yet, within two months, something had changed. It was not that the tectonic plates of geopolitics had moved. On the contrary, the superpowers were digging in for thirty years of proxy wars and breakneck missile construction. The change was almost imperceptible. The movement was the movement of human restlessness, between the plates, as people began finding new ways around them—people like Fred T. Wilkinson, U.S. deputy director of prisons, who late on the night of Thursday, February 8, 1962, received a message in his Manhattan hotel room to drive down West Street to the corner of Eleventh Street in Greenwich Village and wait. It was snowing. He drove carefully, stopped at the corner, and rolled down his window. A man emerged from the darkness and asked: “Are you ready to make the trip?” Wilkinson nodded and drove back to his hotel.

  * * *

  Willie Fisher had kept faith with the Cheka, and the Cheka had kept faith with him. For five years he had admitted nothing, either in prison or in court. For five years Russia had denied all knowledge of his Abel alter ego, dismissing Reino Hayhanen’s stories about him as a tissue of lies. But for nearly four of those years a young KGB officer posted to Berlin had been working the angles, trying to pry him loose—and impersonating his fictitious cousin.