Bridge of Spies

by Giles Whittell

  Donovan duly exploded. He issued his own Berlin ultimatum: if Moscow did not approve the deal in twenty-four hours, he would fly back to New York and tell Abel it was time to start cooperating with the United States since his family had cut him loose. “I left Shishkin in considerable heat and without shaking hands,” he cabled Washington that night.

  Shishkin let Donovan stew in his safe house for most of the next day. As darkness fell, he sent a message asking for more time. At dawn on Thursday, February 8, he sent another: “I got a favorable reply.” They met that afternoon in Shishkin’s office to toast the plan for a three-way swap with four-star Armenian cognac. Pryor would be handed over to his parents at Checkpoint Charlie; Powers and Abel fifteen miles away on Glienicke Bridge. It would be nice and quiet there if anything went wrong. Even if everything went right, there was to be a news blackout until the principals were airborne, and Shishkin had requested that press releases speak of humanitarian gestures, not spy swaps.

  When Donovan crossed back to West Berlin, he met the CIA’s Bob Graver again at the Hilton and told him it was time to send the package waiting in New York. Word reached Abel’s handler, Fred T. Wilkinson, that evening.

  * * *

  Prisoner 80016-A knew he was going home, even though no one had told him. If he had been going anywhere else he would have heard from his lawyer—and his lawyer, James Donovan, had been conspicuously out of contact.

  The clothing officer at the Atlanta federal penitentiary had been told to retrieve Abel’s civilian clothes from storage at the beginning of the week. After the midnight prisoner count on Tuesday, February 6, the Soviet master spy who had posed a threat to Western civilization and stayed late at Burt Silverman’s wedding party walked out of his cell carrying two brown suitcases. Leaving Atlanta at two in the morning, he was flown to New York on an almost empty Delta Airlines jet. He was put in a federal holding cell until Donovan’s message reached Wilkinson, the deputy director of prisons assigned to take Abel to Berlin, thirty-six hours later.

  On the onward journey there would be a party of three: Abel, Wilkinson, and Noah Alldredge, supervisor of custodial services for the U.S. Bureau of Prisons. Fisher was the package. Wilkinson would carry the pardon, signed by both Kennedys—John F. and Robert F. He would countersign it on the bridge in Berlin. Alldredge would carry handcuffs and a gun.

  They drove into New Jersey to McGuire Air Force Base and down the runway to a waiting Lockheed Super Constellation. It was luxuriously equipped with just eight seats, curtains on its windows, and a good-sized kitchen. At 6:00 p.m. it took off and flew into the night. Once it was over the ocean, the captain was told to head for Germany.

  Fisher slept fitfully and talked about prison reform with Wilkinson to pass the time. On Friday afternoon he stared uneasily at the MiGs that shadowed the huge Lockheed down the air corridor to Tempelhof. He spent that night in the U.S. Army brig in Dahlem.

  As promised, Powers caught a train to Moscow on Thursday, with the colonel from Vladimir but without guards. He spent that night back in the Lyubianka, but they drank brandy from tin cups before turning in. It was Powers’s first alcohol since Adana. On Friday he was flown by military transport to East Berlin and put up in a KGB guesthouse where dinner was served on bone china and the brandy was several grades better than in Moscow. Afterward, drawing on coaching he had received from his cell mate Zigurd Kruminsh, he beat his interpreter at chess.

  That afternoon the East German attorney general’s office signed Fred Pryor’s release papers. There would be no trial. Vogel was authorized to pick him up from Hohenschönhausen at eight o’clock on Saturday morning.

  * She looked plump and matronly, like Mrs. Khrushchev, one collaborator thought; nothing like the real Mrs. Fisher.

  * And thereby hangs another long and heroic tale: that of Marvin Makinen’s exhaustive cell-occupancy analysis of cell block 2, part of a ten-year investigation by the Swedish and Russian governments into Wallenberg’s fate in which Makinen took part after spending two years in Vladimir himself for photographing troop movements and military installations on his car trip through Ukraine in 1961.

  The news blackout was holding, but only just. By dawn on February 10, 1962, a Powers-for-Abel trade had been a media proposition for twenty months, because it seemed a sensible idea and because it would make a cracking story: the summit wrecker and the master spy, all in one headline.

  But there were also some generalities that made it seductive: a spy swap was an admission by everyone involved that they really did spy. It was an admission that spies got caught and that when they did, their spymasters needed them back—to debrief, punish, perhaps reward, and to persuade those still working the dead drops that someone was looking out for them. It was an admission by the spy traders that despite the wall and the codes of silence by which they lived, they could put their shadow war on hold long enough to hammer out a deal. In a way this was reassuring. But a swap was also a fleeting chance for the disclosure people—the best-connected reporters, or the luckiest—to glimpse the secrecy people in action and photograph the hell out of them and study the creases on their foreheads and then hold the evidence up to the light and ask: do these people make us safer, or are they as dangerous as the H-bomb secrets they supposedly try so hard to steal?

  First, though, they had to know where it was going to happen.

  “There were rumors that it was imminent,” Annette von Broecker remembers. Where they came from nobody would say, but by Friday night the list of people with useful knowledge on the west side of the wall was long. At the U.S. mission General Clay knew everything, as did Allan Lightner, the head of mission, and Meehan, the newcomer from Moscow. They could be relied on to keep their counsel. Duane Bruce was another matter. Who knew how deep his loyalty to the Agency ran after just six weeks’ training? Then there were the Pryor parents, who had moved out of the Kempinski to an apartment in Wilmersdorf and after five months in the city had made some useful contacts. They had been sworn to secrecy for fear that a leak would wreck the deal, but Millard Pryor was, as his son knew, a take-charge type of person. He knew that if Meehan and Vogel failed to deliver he might need the sort of leverage that only the press could provide. How much had he told his DC lawyer and his congressman? How much did Berthold Beitz know, for that matter? He was the chairman and chief executive of Krupp, and from what Fred Pryor could establish afterward the initial plan for his release had Beitz greeting him in person at the Friedrichstrasse crossing point.

  And Bob Graver, “El Supremo”? No network correspondent worth his earpiece—and there were a few in Berlin in 1962—did not at least recognize the CIA station chief, and he’d been staying up late all week in the Golden City Bar with a big out-of-towner in well-cut suits with a Brooklyn accent who looked awfully familiar from a big New York story a few years back. It was probably worth asking the picture library to wire over a few head shots of Abel’s lawyer, James B. Donovan, just to compare.

  Small wonder there were rumors. Small wonder the entire West Berlin staff of the Reuters news agency had gathered at the bureau on Savignyplatz in West Berlin soon after dawn on the tenth, or that Alfred Kluehs, the Reuters bureau chief, was already into his second pot of coffee by then. Or that “correspondents from radio and newspapers who shared our building had dropped by,” as von Broecker recalled.

  “Everyone had picked up the same rumor.”

  Still, no one knew where it was going to happen. Covering himself as best he could, Kluehs sent his two correspondents to Checkpoint Charlie—one to the east side, one to the west. It was not an original strategy, but it was the obvious place. If an exchange happened, both sides would surely use cars, and Checkpoint Charlie, four blocks south of the Friedrichstrasse S-Bahn station, was the only place in the city that foreigners could use cars to cross the wall.

  Most news bureaus took the same view, but only Reuters had von Broecker. She was a native Berliner who chafed at her copy-taking duties as a mere editorial assistant, and who,
after Kluehs’s two staff reporters had left, had little to do but stare at a giant wall map of the city and wait for the phone to ring.

  Kluehs had stuck pins in the map along the wall to mark each crossing point. “He sat with his back to it,” she recalls. “My eyes wandered about, [then] stopped suddenly, in the southwest corner of Berlin. There was a border. There was a bridge.… I said nothing for a while. But then I could not hold back. ‘Herr Kluehs,’ I coughed. ‘What about Glienicker Brücke?’ ” She was staring at the pin that marked the Glienicke Bridge over the River Havel. “Alfred looked around, then a bolt of lightning seemed to hit him.”

  * * *

  Donovan’s day started at five thirty. He packed, made coffee, and waited in the darkened house for Graver. By seven o’clock they were at the Dahlem army base, where he asked for a final moment alone with his client.

  Fisher had been under suicide watch, not because he seemed depressed but because the Bureau of Prisons thought he might have something to fear on his return to Russia, and there could be no exchange without a live body.

  He was not suicidal, but Donovan, seeing him for the first time in months, thought he looked suddenly old. Fisher accepted a cigarette and said he would miss the American brands. Then he took Donovan’s hand and thanked him gravely for his efforts as his lawyer. He promised to send some rare books from home as a token of his gratitude. (Six months later, a Soviet courier came to the Friedrichstrasse crossing point and handed over a package for delivery to Donovan’s Manhattan offices. It contained two vellum-bound commentaries on the Justinian Code, in Latin, each about five hundred years old.)

  A small convoy formed outside the army cell block: Donovan in Graver’s car with Alan Lightner; Fisher with Wilkinson and a hulking U.S. Army security guard; Alldredge with Jim Murphy, the former Detachment 10 security officer from Watertown, Adana, and now Washington. He had been flown in to identify Powers on the bridge.

  By the time the American cars headed out of the base and turned west toward the Grünewald forest, a KGB convoy was already on the road. It had a longer drive, looping south of Berlin from the Soviet sector to approach the Glienicke Bridge from Potsdam and the west. For the second time in two days, Powers had washed down breakfast with brandy left over from the night before. He sat in the back of a Wartburg sedan with the colonel from Vladimir and worried that they were driving through countryside. At around seven thirty they reached Potsdam. Shishkin appeared as if from nowhere and climbed in. He explained the plan in perfect English, and they continued to the bridge.

  Punctually at eight o’clock, Vogel pulled up outside the Hohenschönhausen prison in a Mercedes borrowed from a butcher friend. This was no day to be seen in an Opel. He was let into Pryor’s cell and told the prisoner he was being released. Pryor was completely unprepared for the news, still contemplating a choice between suicide and a show trial and still digesting what Vogel had said as he packed hurriedly and walked with him to the car. He would return to Hohenschönhausen, but not for more than thirty years.

  After four years Yuri Drozdov must have been tired of having to play the role of Rudolf Abel’s cousin. He overslept. He reached the bridge unshaved but on time and in character. He introduced himself to the bemused colonel from Vladimir as Cousin Drewes.

  In the end it was all so much easier than dismantling nuclear missiles—though one still wonders whether Shishkin and Donovan might not have made a better job of the Paris summit than Khrushchev and Eisenhower.

  They left nothing to chance. Shishkin’s underlings threw a vast, silent security net around the whole operation that they code-named Lyutentsia. Armed KGB operatives were posted overnight in the East German customs house at the west end of the bridge. More of them mingled with the regular Soviet troops guarding the barrier on the Potsdam side, and still more hid in the woods around the summer palace of the Prussian kings, across the water to the south.

  Not to be outdone, the U.S. Army provost marshal for West Berlin gave most of the West German police unit at the American end of the bridge the day off and replaced them with U.S. military police. From the U.S. officers’ club to the north of the bridge on the east side he dispatched two rowboats to drift downstream and loiter under the girders, each carrying a fisherman with a shotgun instead of a rod.

  Drozdov is scornful of the American flotilla. “Why would we need such precautions? We had the agreement of two presidents,” he points out, unwilling to admit the scale of Operation Lyutentsia five decades later. The truth was that the Soviet side could not have launched boats even if it wanted to. Since the previous August the western shore of the Havel had been mined and concrete barriers sunk into the water to deter anyone hoping to swim to freedom.

  Joe Murphy remembered a big Soviet bomber flying low over the bridge and shattering the calm shortly after his arrival at the American end. Otherwise, silence reigned. Even on a normal day, no civilian traffic was allowed on what the East Germans called “the Bridge of Socialist Unity.” Today, even diplomatic traffic was being turned back before it could get close.

  All the principals were in place by eight o’clock. By eight fifteen they were out of their cars and huddled around the barriers at each end of the bridge. It was cold and overcast but not snowing. There was time for a cigarette, and wisps of smoke hung in the air above the clusters of winter coats. Donovan looked at his watch. At exactly eight twenty two groups of three detached themselves from the larger groups and began walking toward each other and the center line. The trio from the Potsdam side was led by Shishkin. From the American end came Donovan, Murphy, and Lightner. Each group paused, with a few feet to go, to let Shishkin and Donovan step forward alone and shake hands at the border. Then the others joined them for introductions and a moment’s small talk.

  Shishkin had drawn a sketch of the bridge at his last meeting with Donovan the previous day and choreographed the next moves minute by minute. Two more groups stepped onto the bridge: at one end, Abel carrying his suitcases, flanked by Wilkinson and the hulk from army security; at the other, Powers and the colonel from Vladimir and another KGB man whom Shishkin introduced as a Mr. Pryzov. Powers had one suitcase and a rolled-up rug he’d made in prison.

  Pryzov crossed the line and asked Fisher to remove his glasses. He turned smartly and told Shishkin they had the right man. Murphy identified Powers.

  “He obviously was nervous. He didn’t know my name, which he should have,” Murphy says. Powers had confused him with his security officer from Peshawar. Murphy didn’t doubt that the man in front of him in the too-big Russian greatcoat, flanked by Russian goons, was the proud young pilot he’d first met in the canteen at Paradise Ranch in the middle of the Nevada desert. But he had come a long way to make sure the KGB hadn’t produced a look-alike.

  “Look, I want to ask you a couple of questions.…”

  As the others on the bridge looked on and the personnel of Operation Lyutentsia waited in their hiding places, Murphy asked Powers the name of his high school football coach. Powers couldn’t remember. “Then I asked him the name of his dog,” Murphy says. “He got that right.”

  Wilkinson took the presidential pardon from an inside pocket, signed it, and told Fisher he was free to go. The colonel from Vladimir shook Powers’s hand and gave him a box of souvenirs (including several Sputnik paperweights) bought in Moscow with the money left in his prison account. Powers and Abel walked past each other and across the line. No one died. No one took a picture. Both men looked straight ahead and kept walking until they were back among their own people, out of the onrush of the cold war.

  Shishkin was anxious to go, but both sides had agreed to stay on the bridge until word came from Checkpoint Charlie that Pryor had been freed. No message had come through. Shishkin tried bluffing. He said that as far as he knew Pryor had already been handed over.

  Donovan: “We wait right here until my people confirm he’s been released.”

  And there they waited, as a hint of sun behind the clouds relieved some of t
he gloom over the bridge and Annette von Broecker, the Reuters editorial assistant, raced toward it in a taxi.

  As they waited, Drozdov studied Powers and Fisher. Powers was wearing a good coat and a warm hat and looked well fed, he reckoned. Fisher looked awful, “as if he’d been on a real prison regime.” The truth was that Fisher smoked too much but had never been more admired than in prison. Powers had lost a bit of weight, but by prison standards both had been pampered. It paid to be a real spy.

  Pryor, the innocent, had suffered. At Checkpoint Charlie he was still having trouble taking in developments. “It was so unreal I couldn’t allow myself to be anything but a passive observer,” he says. “It was like participating in a stage play.”

  The play dragged on. As arranged, Frank Meehan and Millard Pryor were on the south side of the checkpoint waiting for the handover, but there was a delay. Meehan strolled across the border and approached the Mercedes. “Just get in the car, Frank,” Vogel said. Meehan got in. Stasi men, unmistakable in their gray leather jackets, were more in evidence than usual on the East German side. Vogel made light of them by asking Pyror if he recognized any from prison, but he did not appear to understand the holdup.

  On the bridge, Donovan felt the need to say something. He tried a joke. Maybe Vogel was arguing with Pryor over his fees, he said. “This could take months.” Shishkin loved it, which was a good thing. He had Abel now and could have marched him off the bridge at any moment. If he had, there would have been little the Americans could have done for Pryor if the Stasi decided to hold on to him. For the next few minutes the only thing keeping Shishkin on the bridge was what Tolstoy might have called his honor. That and the sense that Donovan might have come after him with his fists, and perhaps the strange pleasure of being suspended above the water, between two worlds, in a moment of history.