Bridge of Spies (14 page)

General Alfredo Stroessner, “El Excelentísimo,” was barely a year into his dictatorship, and Asunción was filled with military parades that Pryor wasn’t interested in watching. While wandering the city’s back streets he saw a sign saying
SOCIEDAD DE HERMANOS
.

“So I knocked on the door.”

A man’s head appeared in a second-floor window.

“Was wollen Sie?”

The young American had studied some German at college.
“Ich will mit Ihnen arbeiten,”
he said, looking up. I want to work with you. He was let in and given directions and the next day caught a boat up the River Paraguay to Rosario. It was about an eighty-mile overnight chug.

“From Rosario it was another fifty miles to the
sociedad
, mainly through forest,” Pryor says. “They told me where to get off the boat and pointed in the right direction, and I was on my own. I started walking at about nine in the morning and got there by about ten a.m. the next morning. Fifty miles isn’t far when you’ve got nothing else to do.

“I got lost twice along the way, the second time quite close to the community, as it turned out. And it was while I was lost the second time that I saw this little blond girl skipping through the woods. I asked her in German if she knew where the Sociedad de Hermanos was, and she looked at me blankly. So I tried Spanish, then French. Eventually she said, ‘Do you speak English?’ ”

The Sociedad de Hermanos was founded as the Bruderhof in a Germany laid waste by the First World War. It was the dream of the Anabaptist preacher Eberhard Arnold to create a Christian brotherhood “which held all property in common, regarded all work as of equal worth, upheld a radical peace testimony with complete non-participation in war … practiced simplicity of life, was governed by unanimous consent of the members in each community and based membership on unity of faith in Christ regardless of race, class or nationality.”

The Bruderhof was too communistic for the Nazis, who expelled its members from Germany in 1937. It was too German for the British, who allowed its refugee members to establish a commune in the Cotswolds but then threatened them with internment when war broke out.
It was unconditionally welcome—as the Nazis themselves would later be—only in Paraguay.

Fred Pryor had read about Paraguay’s peculiar patchwork of utopian enclaves as an undergraduate at Oberlin, Ohio. He majored there in chemistry, but the most important thing he learned was that he didn’t want to be a chemist. How much more fascinating, in an otherwise bipolar world of capitalists and Communists, was the idea of anarchists, Mennonites, and ecumenically minded Anabaptists scraping together their visions of paradise in the dark heart of South America? “How could these people live together? Why didn’t things fall apart?”

Pretty soon they did, but for a few years in the mid-1950s the Society of Brothers in the Paraguayan forest prospered and grew, welcoming more or less anyone who stumbled on its neat white bungalows.

The blond girl led Pryor there, and he was found work as a cowboy. “They asked if I could ride a horse, which I could,” he says. “They asked if I could lasso, which I could. What they didn’t ask me was if I could ride a horse and lasso at the same time, and the answer was I couldn’t.” He was taken off horses and put on house painting. He stayed three months, marveling at the work of the Society’s hospital, which treated ten thousand Paraguayan Indians a year without charge and was funded entirely by the sale of wooden toys, and adapting without much difficulty to the realities of communal property and the simple life. These included the sharing of gramophones by strict order of rotation, because the society owned only six of them.

Pryor then hitched a ride back to Asunción with a Mennonite farmer, who gave him something to eat that he would later blame for a bad case of hepatitis. But before the disease took hold he traveled to Buenos Aires, grew a beard, and took ship for England, working his passage aboard the
Ovington Grange
having persuaded the captain that he knew about engines: “Smart-ass that I was, I said I’d studied thermodynamics, which I had.” The vessel carried birdseed. As far as he could tell, it carried enough to feed every British bird for the next hundred years.

At Oberlin, Pryor had acquired a reputation as an intellectual clown. One contemporary who went on to serve in several presidential administrations calls him “not serious” as an undergraduate (even though he would become “superserious” as a professor). Others tell stories—untrue, he says—of how he once spent a summer testing toilet seats for the Dow Chemical Company, and of the time he tried to prove that
male students’ choice of toilet stall in the campus restrooms depended on their mood and level of self-confidence.

Ill with jaundice, Pryor returned to America in the spring of 1956. He still had no firm plans. He knew only that he wanted to recuperate and prove to himself—and possibly to his brother and father—that he could be serious. He was already finding that “college humor does not work on adults” and was anxious to show that even though he seemed to have been given the family’s whole portion of wanderlust, he could still get a decent job. He took and passed a civil service exam and spent a few months examining chemical patents at the Federal Trade Commission in Washington. In fact he almost lost the job before reporting for work because of budget cuts but was saved by a blind date with the daughter of a senior official at the Civil Service Commission, who intervened on his behalf.

Patents bored him anyway. In September, still fascinated to know what made one Paraguayan commune hum while another tore itself apart, he went to Yale to start a PhD in economics.

At this point in his peregrinations, Carolyn Cooper, a friend from Oberlin, saw in her old classmate “a certain naïveté … a certain lack of caution, a certain trustfulness.” Another college contemporary who remains close to him after many decades describes him as one of those who sensed that a “fundamental purity of heart” will protect them from life’s ambushes.

Pryor hated Yale. From the start he found it stifling and overly intense. It turned out that traditional economics bored him almost as much as patents, and having studied almost none of it as an undergraduate he struggled to keep up with the thoroughbreds whose doctorates would catapult them to capitalism’s commanding heights. He stuck with it for two and a half years, but when the time came to pick a topic for his thesis, he wanted out. “I just chose a topic that would take me as far away from New Haven, Connecticut, as humanly possible,” he says.

He chose Berlin.

*  *  *

It was not hard to enroll as an American at the Free University of West Berlin at the end of the 1950s. The university had been established by General Lucius Clay, the hero of the Berlin Airlift, on the first day of the blockade of the city in 1948. Like the blockade, the university was
an expression of American defiance funded largely by the American taxpayer, for both of which West Berliners were deeply grateful. Tuition was fifty dollars per semester for all comers.

Pryor didn’t even phone ahead. “I went to Berlin. I showed up at their admissions office. I was admitted on the spot,” he says. It may have helped that he was still attached to Yale and studying for a PhD on Communism, but he abandoned his chosen thesis subject soon after arriving to specialize in Soviet bloc foreign trade. He would soon know more about how the East German and Soviet governments fixed export prices than almost anyone in the world, and it would get him into trouble. But first he had to improve his German. He enrolled in a crash course for foreigners. “I read German all day. I went to classes in German. I made an enormous effort, memorizing ten or twenty words a night, forgetting half of them the next day,” he says.

Time
magazine nosed around the university while he was there and pronounced the eleven-thousand-strong student body “a happy lot, inclined toward U.S. jazz and blue jeans.” Yet for all their openness to America and his effort with their language, Pryor’s first year in Berlin was lonely. There were no dorms, so he lived alone in a rented room near the city center. Students who didn’t know one another well addressed one another with the formal
“Sie.”
When he stood up in a lecture theater to argue with a professor whose remarks on Eastern Bloc trade he found especially preposterous, his fellow students rushed to defend the professor and his German let him down on cross-examination.

Still, he kept his chin up. “German is not a difficult language to learn,” he decided when the twenty words a night began to stick. As his confidence grew, he started phoning East German academics at the Hochschule für Planökonomie, the brain of the command economy that Khrushchev still believed would conquer the world. He began asking for interviews. The Ministerium für Staatssicherheit or Ministry for State Security—“Stasi” for short—had no rules on this. It had not occurred to the world’s most meticulous secret police force that simple curiosity might induce a Westerner to open the phone book and start asking how nonmarket economics worked. People were eager to tell him. (It turned out, for example, that the price East Germany paid for Soviet wheat was not plucked from thin air but based on the world market price at Newport News, Virginia.) Some of the people Pryor met
became lifelong friends. In all he conducted thirty-five interviews with the East German economists who served as the high priests of five-year planning, and the interviews became the basis of his thesis.

Getting to East Berlin was easy. “You just hopped on the subway and you were there,” he says. “Or the S-Bahn.” Or you drove, and the strong dollar made driving eminently possible even for a student. In 1960 Pryor bought a bright red VW Karmann Ghia and switched rooms to a more desirable address in an old apartment house on Viktoria-Luise-Platz. There were nightclubs aplenty in the brave island of freedom that was West Berlin, but Pryor was not the clubbing sort. His preference after a long day transcribing insights into state-sanctioned price fixing was for Brahms or Bach at the Hochschule für Musik, and there was plenty of that too.

As the pages of his thesis started piling up, he put an ad in the student paper for someone to help him type it. It was answered by a fellow student named Eleonora, and they developed a serious mutual interest that went beyond economics, though not as far as marriage. His loneliness was a memory. All in all, he said, “I had a very pleasant life.” It was not to last.

“I am a lieutenant colonel of the Soviet intelligence service. For the past five years I have been operating in the United States. Now I need your help.”

When Reino Hayhanen walked into the American embassy in Paris and started talking in May of 1957, Stalin had been dead four years. The Soviet prison camps had briefly come alive with rumors that the thaw after the dictator’s death would bring mass amnesties. But the rumors fizzled and the camps stayed open. There was still plenty of room in the Gulag for a failed spy.

Hayhanen knew it. He had no shortage of reasons to defect. He loathed and feared Willie Fisher, his immediate superior. He resented the system Fisher represented, which hadn’t given him a respectable post inside an embassy. But he was also timid; the confidence of the younger KGB staffer who once crossed and recrossed the Soviet-Finnish border in car trunks had been eroded by alcohol and underemployment. Only the knowledge that his trip to Moscow might end in Siberia could have pushed him to take the life-threatening step of betraying the KGB.

He was a weak man in a desperate situation, and he was showing the strain. When he announced himself at the embassy on Avenue Gabriel on the morning of May 4, he appeared drunk. When his demand to see the ambassador was not immediately granted, he became angry.

His puffy face and strangulated accent did not convince. Nor did the smell of his breath or his fake U.S. passport in the name of Eugene Maki. So he produced from his pocket a doctored Finnish five-mark coin. He opened the coin with a pin to reveal a square of microfilm like the one young Jimmy Bozart had found four years earlier on a stairwell in Brooklyn, and the Americans at last began to take him seriously. They let him talk, and he talked for a week: about his training, his legend, his passage to America, and his inebriated, bloodstained life there. Each evening the salient details were cabled to Washington, and most of them checked out. He asked for asylum and was told he might get it if he continued to cooperate. It may be that only then did he begin to see the true cost of the choice he had made. Either that or he was afraid of flying and the prospect drew him to his old friend, the nightly pint of vodka. When he was escorted onto a Constellation to return to the United States on May 11, he tried to kick the windows out.