Bridge of Spies

by Giles Whittell

  He was interested chiefly to know whether any of those he had interviewed had joined the Stasi in accusing him of spying. None had, though some had been denounced by their colleagues for their contact with him. That knowledge distressed him, but not as much as the circumstances in which he found the man he credited with his release.

  Wolfgang Vogel was by then in jail, accused of blackmail by the reunified German state and by some of those whose freedom he had negotiated. When they had first met, Pryor wrote, “I was on one side of the bars, he on the other.… [Now] our positions were reversed. Although he seemed able to bear up under the situation, I had a hard time maintaining my composure. He had been able to help me get out of prison in a totalitarian state; but now, I could not help him get out of prison in a democratic state.”

  Vogel served only a short term and retired comfortably to Schliersee, an hour south of Munich. His funeral there was attended by a fabulously retro cast of Berlin luminaries including Egon Krenz, the last East German Communist leader, and the last U.S. ambassador to East Berlin—Francis J. Meehan.

  Having faced down the flood of memories brought on by reading his file, Pryor returned to the United States and lived with them for five more years. Then he took the next step. The file identified his interrogator by name. He went back to Berlin and looked the name up in the phone book. “I went to his house,” he recalls. “His wife stuck her head out of the window and asked what I wanted. I said I wanted to talk to her husband. I explained who I was, and she retreats and says to come back that evening.”

  The two men went to a bar and drank beer for three quarters of an hour.

  “We walked there and we walked back. I didn’t taunt him about the fall of Communism, didn’t ask him about his life,” Pryor says. “I wanted to know what they planned to do with me if I hadn’t been exchanged, what they were really going to try me for. He was not forthcoming. It was a meeting of two people who didn’t like each other. But he made no apologies. He still believes I’m guilty. He said, ‘You were spying. We did our duty.’ ”

  Most of the original material for this book comes from face-to-face interviews that I conducted from 2007 to 2009 in Russia, Germany, and the United States with participants in the story and people who knew them. These interviewees included, in alphabetical order: Nikolai Batukhtin, Stan Beerli, Tony Bevacqua, James Bozart, Yuri Drozdov, Jack Goff, Jean Goff, Marvin Makinen, Carl McAfee, Frank Meehan, Joe Murphy, Alexander Orlov, Gary Powers Jr., Frederic Pryor, Burt Silverman, Annette von Broecker, and Mikhail Voronov. Eileen Cline, Carolyn Cooper, Richard Cooper, Sergei Khrushchev, and Martin Skala, among others, were interviewed by telephone. Igor Mentyukov was traced to his home in Belarus and interviewed for me by Olga Sorokina.

  Among the most important primary and online sources were White House and other official papers relating to the U-2 affair made available by the CIA at the Center for the Study of Intelligence and by the Eisenhower Presidential Library. More declassified documents on the U-2 shoot-down, including a transcript of the Prettyman Enquiry conducted upon Powers’s release, are available at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. Yet others have been released as a result of Freedom of Information Act requests by Chris Pocock. I used newspaper and magazine accounts in the archives of the New York Times, the Times (London), and Time magazine for contemporary views of Abel’s arrest and trial, the aftermath of the shoot-down, the failure of the Paris Summit, Powers’s trial, the building of the Berlin wall, and the Glienicke Bridge exchange. Recollections in the Russian media of the events of May 1, 1960, were also valuable, although most were not published until after the fall of the Soviet Union.

  The best research conducted since the cold war on Khrushchev’s desire for détente in 1960 is contained in Khrushchev, the Man and His Era by William Taubman, and Khrushchev’s Cold War by Timothy Naftali and Aleksandr Fursenko. Like Father, Like Son by Vin Arthey and The U2 Spyplane: Toward the Unknown by Chris Pocock are definitive studies of William Fisher and the U-2 respectively. While any errors in this book are mine alone, I also turned for detail on Fisher to Bombshell by Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel, The Mitrokhin Archive by Christopher Andrew and Vasily Mitrokhin, Abel by Louise Bernikow, By Any Means Necessary by William E. Burrows, My Silent War by Kim Philby, The Shadow Network by Edward Van Der Rhoer, Sacred Secrets by Jerrold and Leona Schechter, and Special Tasks by Anatoly Sudoplatov. For perspectives on the U-2 affair I drew on The Man Who Touched the Sky by Johnny Acton, Mayday by Michael Beschloss, Reflections of a Cold Warrior by Richard Bissell, Remembering the Dragon Lady by Linda Rios Bromley and Gerald E. McIlmoyle, Red Moon Rising by Matthew Brzezinsky, The Craft of Intelligence by Allen Dulles, Waging Peace: The White House Years by Dwight D. Eisenhower, Spyplane by Norman Polmar, Spy Wife by Barbara Powers, and Skunk Works by Ben Rich. For the context and mythology of the Glienicke Bridge exchange I made use of Negotiator by Philip Bigger, K Blows Top by Peter Carlson, Strangers on a Bridge by James B. Donovan, Stasiland by Anna Funder, Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower by Sergei Khrushchev, Spy Trader by Craig R. Whitney, and Joe Alsop’s Cold War by Edwin M. Yoder Jr.

  Half a century is more than half most lifetimes. I was lucky to find survivors of the stories told here and I am grateful to those who agreed to tell them, especially when it meant throwing off the secrecy that bound them during the cold war. Most are acknowledged in the Note on Sources, but I am particularly indebted to Frederic Pryor, the only survivor of the prisoner exchange of February 10, 1962, for reaching back into his memories of a unique and painful episode.

  Scores of others helped with the research and writing of this book, chief among them Chris Pocock and Vin Arthey. Both are experts without whose unstinting advice the project might well have imploded. In Russia, I would have been at a loss without the irreplaceable and irrepressible Olga Sorokina. For their willingness to answer e-mails, give out numbers, or tolerate long absences or sudden impositions I would also like to thank Christopher Andrew, Joseph Albright, Tom Baldwin, Stan Beerli, Tony Bevacqua, Grace Blundy, Linda Rios Bromley, David Chappell, Daniel Finkelstein, Thomas Fuchs, Tim Hames, James Harding, Yuri Kobaladze, Margarita Kondrasheva, James Nathan, Rebecca Nicolson, Norbert Potzl, John Ray, David Reynolds, Laura Swanson, Alla Vareldzjan, Konstantin Yershov, and Lyudmila Yershova.

  My thanks to Bill Hamilton for his unfailing support and wisdom, to Bill Thomas for taking the plunge, to Charlie Conrad for making sense of the result, and to Jenna Ciongoli, Rachel Rokicki, Julie Cepler, and the rest of the team at Broadway Books for their astonishing patience. I am grateful also to George Lucas in New York for lunch and Mike Jones in London for whatever lies in store. In Wiltshire, Jon and Hilary Stock let me use their house. In Chelsea, Matthew and Kate Whittell let me use their boat. In Putney and Marblehead, Jim, Jane, Fran, and Ted helped to look after Bruno, Louis, and Enzo, but my deepest thanks and love are for Karen, who looked after everyone, all the time.