Bridge of Spies

by Giles Whittell

  So the Pryors acquired a go-between to maintain contact with their go-between. His name was Duane Bruce. Where he came from, what he did after 1962, and whether Duane Bruce was his real name all remain mysteries, but thanks to the Stasi’s meticulous record keeping this much is clear: on November 26, Bruce visited Vogel at his apartment in Prenzlauer Berg in East Berlin on the Pryors’ behalf. He arrived in a VW bug, license plate B-ND 596, and stayed for two hours. Their discussion of the Pryor case was recorded in full by Vogel’s Stasi handlers; the transcript ran to twenty-five pages. Bruce started by claiming that he worked in the American sector as an insurance salesman but, business being slow, had answered a small ad published by the Free University seeking a German-speaking American. Having imagined the work would be of the tour guide variety, he was surprised to find himself being briefed by the Pryors on their search for their son. When hired to help them, he was still more surprised—as, presumably, were Vogel and his eavesdroppers when he volunteered the information—to be commandeered by the CIA for a six-week course in basic espionage. He said his training included recognition drills on Soviet Army handguns, shoulder stripes, and tank types.

  Having introduced himself with such expansive and unsolicited candor, Bruce asked how bad it looked for young Fred Pryor. Vogel gave a reply he had not given Pryor’s parents: “Well, Herr Bruce, it depends what you think is spying and what is not. According to our understanding of the law, Pryor’s actions probably qualify.” (This was undoubtedly true. Under East German law the fact that no one had actively prevented Pryor reading dusty theses on the price of Russian corn at Rostock did not mean he was allowed to read them. Quite the reverse: anything he was not explicitly permitted to read, he was not permitted to read. And reading economic literature that he was not permitted to read amounted to economic espionage. Ergo, he was a spy.)

  This being so, Vogel continued, Pryor was in big trouble if his case came to trial. He had not been allowed to see the evidence being gathered against the prisoner, he claimed, but the fact that they had been amassing that evidence for three months at the Hohenschönhausen Investigation Prison showed how seriously they were taking it.

  “They undoubtedly have some proof,” he said. “We have to assume the worst once a prosecution gets started. The only choice then for the judge will be between fifteen years and life.”

  And there it was, hanging above a sofa in an East Berlin apartment on a chilly autumn evening in 1961, floating onto the spools of a hidden Stasi tape recorder and into the receptive short-term memory of a freelance American spy: five words of pure political blackmail, “between fifteen years and life.”

  Bruce, who according to the transcript expressed no surprise, was probably exactly what he claimed to be. As Donovan would find, neither the U.S. mission nor the CIA’s Berlin station were sending staffers across the wall for fear that it would swallow them up. So they were sending greenhorns like Bruce instead, and in this case were asking him to wear two hats. He was sounding out Vogel for the Pryors but also for the Agency, which was nervous about having to trust Vogel with the much bigger prize of Gary Powers.

  Vogel was wearing not two hats but three. He spoke for the KGB via “Mrs. Abel.” (“When they tell me they are ready to do an exchange, I will be able to do it,” he assured Bruce.) He spoke for the Stasi when calmly threatening a life term for a noncrime, and he spoke for Pryor’s parents in the same breath—because his solution to the problem served both parties equally.

  “The parents must be convinced that there is a massive case against their son,” he told Bruce. “Otherwise there is no reason to do anything for him in Washington.” If the Americans wanted to add Pryor to the Abel-Powers deal, in short, they needed to ask nicely. The way things stood the only people who could make that happen were Pryor’s parents, but in return they would get their son, and East Germany would get a little respect.

  Bruce said he thought the Pryors would get the message. As he got up to leave, Vogel asked him to deliver a letter to a car dealer in West Berlin. He wanted to upgrade from an Opel Rekord to a Kapitän.

  The Pryors did get the message. In the month before Christmas, Millard went into overdrive. He lobbied the State Department through his congressman and his Washington attorney. He solicited telegrams to the East German government from the president of Yale. He crafted an elaborate scheme whereby in exchange for his son’s release the mighty Krupp steel and manufacturing combine would exhibit for the first time at the Leipzig Trade Fair. And he said something to the U.S. mission—what exactly is not clear—that made it assign, at last, a real person to his case.

  That person might have been vaguely familiar to the Moscow policeman at the head of the queue to view the wreckage of Gary Powers’s plane in Gorky Park the previous year. It was the amiable Frank Meehan, who knew little about spy planes but enough about Communists to have been reposted to Berlin, where America urgently needed to understand them better.

  Meehan was born in New Jersey but grew up in Scotland and spoke English, German, and Russian with the same soft Celtic inflection. Looking back, he was modest about his role in springing Pryor, not least because in the great scheme of ideological empire building and nuclear deterrence that had trapped him, it was a modest task. But it meant a lot to the Pryors, and he was perfect for it.

  “We heard in the mission that there was some political steam building up at home, and I was told to get into the case and start handling the family right,” he says. “We had to deal with this, and we didn’t have anyone to deal with. There was no one I could go to [in East Berlin] and say, ‘I’m a representative of the American mission.’ … I couldn’t go to anybody. But I could go to Vogel.”

  Meehan and Vogel found they could trust each other. They were both Catholics, serious about faith but less so about doctrine. They actually looked similar, and they got along.

  “He just didn’t behave like an East German,” Meehan remembers, sitting on a terrace beside a lake in the Bavarian Alps, having traveled there forty-seven years later to attend his old friend’s funeral. “Here was one of the most ideological regimes going, totally devoted to the Soviet Union, a hard, militant, difficult pain in the arse, and here was a guy that you could talk to. He wouldn’t read the leading article in Neues Deutschland to you. He would think and speak on his feet. That was certainly the impression that I got, which I reported, of course, so at that point I became a sort of channel.”

  The existence of the channel may have been the clincher. Millard Pryor’s efforts in Washington and Berlin created a gratifying fuss on the American side. Vogel, as “Eva,” duly reported it all to the Stasi, but his own connection with Meehan was more valuable. Here was a political officer from the U.S. mission cultivating the next best thing to diplomatic relations. From the point of view of the German Democratic Republic, it was not a bad reward for trading in a perfectly innocent economist.

  Once Vogel had made this argument to his Stasi handler and his handler had made it to the East German attorney general, Vogel visited Pryor in prison at Hohenschönhausen. He made no promises, but for Pryor’s remaining nights in prison his interrogator stood guard to make sure he didn’t kill himself.

  * * *

  James Donovan kissed his wife and children and left for the airport.

  It was January 29, 1962. For paying passengers, transatlantic travel was already a miracle of nonstop great circle routes over Gander and the Icelandic fishing grounds, only marginally subsonic. His Pan Am 707 had him in Heathrow in time for breakfast.

  A cab took him to Claridge’s. The Agency was ready to deny him if the operation turned sour, but he was not alone. On British soil, he was the guest of MI6. Soon after he checked in, a Mr. White knocked at his door, handed him an envelope of West German currency, and asked if he would mind being called Mr. Dennis while in London. Donovan said he didn’t mind. He invited Mr. White in for a morning bracer of the hotel brandy, then lay down to snooze off his jetlag.

  His mind drifted back to
the war, when Claridge’s soot-blackened bricks hid an oasis of expensive comfort and the OSS kept a suite on the same floor as the exiled kings of Yugoslavia and Romania. When steak could not be obtained anywhere else in Europe, it could generally be obtained at Claridge’s.

  Donovan was in no rush. It was a Tuesday. Not expected in East Berlin until the weekend, he indulged himself over the next two days browsing the shelves of rare-book shops in Mayfair. He left his purchases with a favorite bookbinder, together with his Brooklyn address; if all went well, he would not be coming back through London. On Thursday he dined at the hotel with old friends, telling them he was leaving for Zurich the next morning. From the front desk he sent a cablegram to his wife with the delightful news that he had been invited to Scotland for a short break.

  On Friday, Mr. White was at Claridge’s before dawn. He drove Mr. Dennis out of the sleeping city for two hours, through driving rain, to an RAF base where a U.S. Air Force C-45 was waiting for him. It took off immediately, with Donovan the only passenger. Coffee and doughnuts were served over the English Channel, sandwiches and more coffee while refueling at Weisbaden. Darkness was falling when they landed at Tempelhof, and so was snow.

  There were no formalities. Donovan was met airside by Bob “El Supremo” Graver, the CIA’s Berlin station chief, a man of mythic stature in intelligence circles whose all-knowing aura and confidence in dealing with the Agency’s top management had saved him from disgrace when he completely failed to predict the building of the wall.

  Graver took Donovan to a darkened safe house in the American sector and showed where stashes of American cigarettes and cask-aged Scotch had been left for his convenience. A maid would let herself in each morning to cook breakfast and clean the house. Otherwise he would be on his own there. Donovan unpacked, missing London already. Graver picked him up again for dinner at the Berlin Hilton, where he pointed out a public telephone at the Golden City Bar. He gave Donovan a number he was to call from there with his report the following and subsequent evenings, explaining that the number would be manned continuously “for this sole purpose” while he was in Berlin.

  It was still snowing the next morning, only harder. Donovan ate breakfast in the safe house with Graver, studying the Agency’s latest maps of the wall and its crossing points. He was running late by the time he reached the Friedrichstrasse crossing point. Marching to the front of a long line, he announced his appointment at the Soviet embassy and was let through at once. For a brief moment he could imagine himself as the spy who went out into the cold.

  The heart of Berlin was a freezing lattice of ruins under snow—a monument to war. Donovan had last seen it in 1945, when Allied bombs and Soviet artillery had reduced Wilhelmine Germany’s architectural showpieces to rubble and Mongolians in Red Army uniform terrorized those with nowhere else to flee to. He found it little changed. “As far as one could see in any direction, the buildings were in ruins or disrepair,” he wrote in his diary.

  Shell holes were still in the sides of crumbling walls. The streets were strangely deserted and seemed filled with an oppressive fear. It was as though the Russians had decided in 1945 that East Berlin should continue a living death so the Germans would never forget.

  Through the falling snow I made my way to Unter den Linden. As I rounded one deserted corner, there suddenly appeared a group of ten or twelve youths, in shabby trench coats or heavy turtleneck sweaters and without hats. Some had cigarettes dangling from their lips. They looked like a pack of wolves.

  Only the giant Soviet embassy was intact and lit; a beacon of socialist hope on the boulevard of tears. In the foyer of the consular section Donovan shook the snow off his coat and came face-to-face with the cast of amateur players that the KGB had assembled to maintain the pretense of disinterest in the case. Donovan’s reception committee introduced themselves as Frau Abel, her daughter, and her cousin Drewes. Only their real names and a printed program were missing.

  Drewes, played as ever by Yuri Drozdov, said nothing—just “kept opening and closing powerful hands,” Donovan noted. But the woman playing Mrs. Abel took the trouble to ask after her husband. When Donovan replied that he was fine, she actually sobbed for several minutes. It was quickly clear to him that none of these characters was a principal. He had no way of knowing how much spadework had been done by “Drewes,” he of the powerful hands, but his instincts were right. He had yet to meet his opposite number. They all waited. As they waited, he smoked. When the “daughter” asked for a cigarette, he ignored her.

  At noon exactly, a door behind them opened and a tall, good-looking apparatchik in a suit and rimless glasses introduced himself as Ivan Shishkin, second secretary at the embassy.

  Shishkin was in fact the most senior KGB officer in Europe. He was the summiteer to Drozdov’s Sherpa, sent to Berlin in 1959 expressly to find and groom the intermediaries, Vogel among them, needed to bring in a spy the Kremlin did not recognize through a country the Americans did not recognize. He was fluent in four languages, including English, with a quick mind and a bone-dry sense of humor. He took one look at the big man from Brooklyn and decided he could have some fun with him.

  He ushered Donovan and his retinue of unfortunate “East Germans” into a conference room and asked how he could help.

  To begin with, Donovan played along. He presented his credentials, stated his business, and assured Mr. Shishkin that he could deliver Rudolf Abel, together with a pardon signed by President Kennedy, within forty-eight hours of an agreement being finalized to release Powers and Pryor in return. Shishkin said he knew all about the Powers-Abel plan; he had been empowered to seek the release of Abel out of socialist concern for the poor man and his East German relatives. But he knew nothing about the Pryor matter. On this he would have to seek separate instructions. Could he wait till Monday? Donovan was tired and his back was hurting. He rounded on the mute actress playing Mrs. Abel and accused her and Vogel of dragging him all this way from New York under false pretenses. Then he stomped out into the snow.

  Abel’s “daughter” followed him.

  “Don’t you wish to see Herr Vogel?” she asked.

  It was an important cue, and Donovan missed it. He said that whether or not he saw Vogel was up to the Soviet authorities. He had never liked the sound of Vogel, and the latest Agency intelligence on the man, conveyed to him at the Harvard Club, had strengthened his own hunch that the East German could not be trusted. He said a curt good-bye and trudged back to Friedrichstrasse.

  That evening Donovan had a long talk with Bob Graver, the CIA station chief, at the West Berlin Hilton’s Golden City Bar.

  He didn’t know it, but he had almost blown the operation on day one. By failing to call on Vogel he had shown his contempt for the fiction that the East Germans had an important role in the exchange. To Vogel’s Stasi controllers it was an important fiction, and they had Pryor. It took all of Vogel’s diplomatic skill to repair the damage, especially to the vanity of his most important patron, a former Nazi concentration camp inmate named Josef Streit who only a week before had been appointed East Germany’s attorney general.

  For the next two days Vogel worked the phones from his office in the backstreets of East Berlin, mollifying Streit and waiting for a visit from Donovan. At last it came. Donovan drove out to Vogel’s shabby three-story building on Alt-Friedrichsfelde in a cab with Drozdov. It was a significant test of the worldliness on which he so prided himself. Bearing in mind that whatever was said would inevitably be closely analyzed by those listening in, he needed to be courteous and grateful without being gushing. A little flattery might even have helped. But he was nervous. Outside, climbing the steps to Vogel’s reception room in the gathering dusk, he was acutely conscious of Drozdov (“Otto the Strangler”) behind him and thought he might actually be attacked. Inside, Vogel was charm itself and confirmed that as far as the East German government was concerned Pryor could be added to the Abel-Powers deal. But Donovan radiated mistrust. He refused to take the East German�
�s word for anything or to confirm that he could deliver Abel on the basis of what had been promised so far. That depended on whether the promises were in good faith, which was for his government to decide. He would have to report back to Washington. Later he wrote that Vogel looked like an insurance salesman.

  Streit was livid. Who was this jumped-up elitist to doubt Vogel’s word, or his? He might have been at Harvard and Nuremberg, but Streit had been at Dachau and Mauthausen, and not as a guard. If Donovan wanted Pryor so badly, he could have him for Abel and no one else. Otherwise the deal was off.

  Streit summoned Vogel to his office to remind him he could have Pryor shot, never mind locked up for life. Again Vogel soothed Streit’s fragile ego and made the case that East Germany had more to gain by letting Pryor go—the Krupp steel exhibit at the Leipzig Trade Fair, the gratitude of sensible Americans like the young diplomat Frank Meehan—than by putting him on trial.

  It is not clear what changed Streit’s mind, but it was probably a combination of Vogel’s common sense and Donovan’s return to the fray the next day. He did not soften his act. He toughened it up. On his second visit to Vogel’s office he listened stonily as Vogel tried to insist that his attorney general had taken “a firm position in the matter.”

  “Nonsense,” Donovan said. “If Shishkin told the attorney general of East Germany to walk across this floor on his hands he’d get down and try.… I have no time for childish games.”

  Donovan then demanded to be directed to a good hotel for lunch, and left. Drozdov recommended the Johannishof on Friedrichstrasse and asked if he could come along. By the time the coffee was served, Streit had caved.

  Even then it wasn’t quite over. After lunch, the ersatz Abel family, together with their lawyer and their American associate, repaired once more to the Soviet consulate. All that remained was for Shishkin to repeat his original offer of Powers for Abel, and to approve the East German side deal. Shishkin chose not to. Possibly because of last-minute second thoughts in Moscow, probably for the sheer sport of seeing Donovan explode, he pointed out that since Powers was hardly a national hero at home, a more appropriate swap would involve Abel and Marvin Makinen, the student-spy arrested in Kiev the previous summer.