Bridge of Spies (2 page)

Wherever possible I have traced and interviewed those still alive who played roles in this story as it unfolded fifty years ago. Remarks from these interviews are related in the present tense to distinguish them from material found in documents, diaries, or secondary sources.

February 10, 1962

The road out of Berlin was practically deserted. It was a Saturday morning, and cold. The forecast was for snow and the rumors were keeping people in town. All the news bureaus had sent reporters to Checkpoint Charlie because it seemed the obvious place. But the forecast was wrong, and so were the rumors.

At about nine thirty a lone taxi cleared the last traffic lights in Wilmersdorf and headed west on Königstrasse, picking up speed. For a while it barreled through pristine woodland across a big, diamond-shaped island formed by the Wannsee and the river Havel. Then it crested a rise, descended for half a mile in a gradual left curve, and stopped at a traffic barrier. Beyond the barrier were a watchtower and a bridge—a solid span of green-painted steel girders across the Havel, bisected by a thin white line. Beyond the bridge was another watchtower and another barrier, beyond them a free-fire zone for the East German frontier police, and beyond that the wall—not the short section that divided the heart of Berlin but the long one that sealed off the Allied sectors from the East. At the white line the American sector ended and the Soviet empire began. It was the closest thing on the planet to a land frontier between the world’s two nuclear superpowers.

The taxi turned to be ready to head back into town. Out of it stepped a young woman with a notebook. She had fair hair and blue eyes and was shaking with nerves.

She glanced over at the military police guarding the barrier and thought better of approaching them. Instead she settled on an officer walking toward her in the uniform of the regular West German police. He carried a briefcase and a thermos and looked young, like her.

“Help me, please,” she said.

He stopped long enough to hear her say that this was the chance of a lifetime, that her career would stop before it started if she went back with an empty notebook. He replied that he couldn’t simply stand there and talk to her. The MPs were watching.

“Walk with me, then,” she said.

To the north of the road a triangular grassy slope descended to the water, with a track on the uphill side leading to a cream-colored summer house. The MPs had a clear view along the track but not of the whole slope. Trees and shrubs marked it off from the road, and the woman found that the farther down the slope she walked, the better cover they gave her. She set off down it, and the young police officer followed.

“Maybe he felt pity for me,” she says half a century later. “I took him for a walk behind the bushes and he told me the whole story.”

It had been early—soon after dawn, he said. He had seen a small convoy of cars approach the bridge from the American side and another from the East German side. Groups of men had spilled out at each end and waited. Then three from each group had walked to the white line and exchanged a few words. There had been a delay, and then a shout, and then two figures had crossed the line, one in each direction.

Annette von Broecker wrote it all down. It was not the full story, but it was better than anyone else would get that day, including the American networks. She wanted more detail, and there was some that she could add herself—a hole in the cloud above the bridge, sunlight pouring through it, two swans gliding back and forth below.

“My heart was pounding,” she remembers. “I kept telling myself what to put in. ‘Swans, sun, spies. Swans, sun, spies.’ ” Then she ran back up the slope to a pay phone and called the bureau. Her editor told her to calm down and fed in some background as she went along, but the swans stayed in.

At 3:00 a.m. Washington time, President Kennedy’s press secretary briefed him on what the police officer had seen. That left Kennedy better informed than von Broecker’s readers, but not by much and not for long. The story she filed that morning made the front page of every paper in the free world with an interest in the unfree world. It recorded a kind of spy swap that had not been tried before, in which the protagonists had to be brought to the same place at the same time and bartered with utmost care under the quiet gaze of snipers hidden in the forests on each side. This was human trafficking with the blessing of two superpowers.

It was a story that started with a search for weapons of mass destruction. Its main players were its foot soldiers. They followed orders, but not ordinary orders. For the best part of seven years they had been drawn deep into the race between the United States and the Soviet Union to establish which was closer to acquiring the means to annihilate the other. When they ran out of luck, the consequences could be beyond disastrous. Just by being human they could change the course of history, and one of them did.

What the policeman told von Broecker that morning centered on three men, not two. The youngest, at that moment, was with his parents for the first time in three years, struggling to grasp that he was free and that he could stop thinking about suicide. He was a twenty-eight-year-old Yale postgraduate student interrogated by the East German secret police—the Stasi—every day for the preceding five months on suspicion of espionage, of which he was entirely innocent. He was a young man with an inquiring mind and a serious case of wanderlust who had driven blithely into the vortex of Berlin’s paranoia in a bright red VW sports car. His personality type was not one that the Stasi, a monster sustained by suspicion and obsessed with conformity, found easy to comprehend. He was a joker, a thinker, a free spirit. His name was Frederic Pryor.

The next youngest had crossed the bridge from the East German side to the American in a cheap Russian suit, carrying a cardboard suitcase. It was a strange homecoming for a pilot, especially this pilot. He had entered Soviet airspace two years earlier wearing a custom-fitted pressure suit from the David Clark Company of Worcester, Massachusetts, to prevent his bodily fluids evaporating in the event that his cockpit sprang a leak. His mission was known only to the White House and a small team of CIA operatives scattered between Langley and the wilder fringes of Eurasia. His aircraft, a Lockheed U-2, had crossed the Kazakh steppe at two and a half times the height of Everest, then broken up and tumbled onto Russian soil not far from Sverdlovsk.

Falling from seventy thousand feet, there are no standing orders. To begin with there is only the hiss of oxygen, the slowly tilting blue black dome of the stratosphere, and the deathly quiet realization that the altimeter is starting to unwind. That is all this pilot had to work with. That and the time it takes to drop thirteen vertical miles at an average speed of a hundred miles an hour, which is about ten minutes. He was not supposed to live. If it was a rocket that hit him, the blast should have taken him out with the plane. Even if it was something else, there was almost no chance that his pressure suit would save him. At seventy thousand feet, blood boils in ten seconds. It was regrettable, they all agreed—the tight handful that knew—but the pilot was a goner.

He survived the blast. As he fell, he forced himself to think. As his cockpit began to spin, he ruled out the strategies that would definitely kill him. As he fell through thirty thousand feet, he calmly popped his canopy. As he kept on spinning, he cut his oxygen supply and floated free. He breathed what air there was six miles up, and five, and four. He thanked whoever packed his parachute when it opened. He looked at the countryside below him and thought it looked a bit like Virginia. He picked a spot and landed hard. In Washington, they had no way of knowing, but he survived it all.

His name was Francis Gary Powers, Frank to his friends, the son of a Virginia coal miner who defied his father’s ardent wish that he become a doctor and became a fighter jock instead. He had never contemplated suicide, though there was no shortage of people back home who wished he had. His long fall to earth on May 1, 1960, led swiftly and directly to the worst rupture in U.S.-Soviet relations since the Berlin airlift of 1948. It wrecked the Paris summit later that month at which Eisenhower and Khrushchev had hoped to launch a new era of détente. It threw into high gear the arms race that took the world to the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 and did not end until the collapse of the Soviet empire nearly three decades later. From the moment Powers was reported missing, there were well-placed skeptics on both sides of the cold war who suspected that his entire mission had been planned to fail, and in doing so to prevent the outbreak of superpower peace. It is a theory that lingers to this day.

The oldest player in von Broecker’s story walked away from the American sector toward the death strip and the wall and his idea of freedom. He stooped a little and smoked too much, which gave him a bad cough and a worse case of sinusitis. According to the
New York Times
, the CIA, and the Supreme Court of the United States, he was a Soviet master spy. It was a description that delighted his handlers and went with him to his grave. His name, allegedly, was Rudolf Abel. His aliases from nine years spent roaming North America under deep cover included Emil Goldfus, Martin Collins, Robert Callan, Frank, Mark, and Milton, shortened to Milt by coconspirators and admirers. In retirement and death he has acquired an aura as the last of the great Soviet “illegals”—not that Russia stopped trying to smuggle people like him into the United States. His professional heirs include the ten “unregistered agents” of Moscow uncovered by the FBI and sent briskly home in 2010, among them the bewitching redhead known as Anna Chapman and instantly immortalized by New York’s tabloids. They and the courts quickly found out most of what there was to know about Miss Chapman. They were less thorough with Abel. Despite five years of exhaustive American due process, no one in the West knew who he was or where he came from, or what he spied on. Some of that is still not known, but this much is: his real name was William Fisher. He was exceptionally good at shrinking coded messages onto microdots, and he was British.

*  *  *

Thirty years later—in 1992—I hitched a ride in a Russian army truck across the roof of the world. That was what the driver called it, but Western cartographers know it as the Pamir plateau. It is a moonscape of thin brown grass and permanent snow, none of it lower than fifteen thousand feet. Across it winds a four-hundred-mile road built by Soviet frontier guards for no other reason than to defend their frontier. To the east of the plateau lies Tibet, to the south, a thin strip of Afghanistan, and beyond that the unspeakably jagged peaks of northern Pakistan.

Three hours along the road the truck stopped. The soldiers with me in the cab pointed toward the Afghan border and a tiny cluster of white domes just inside what had, only a few months before, been Soviet territory. The domes were a radar station. “That’s where we detected Powers,” the soldiers said. They used the word “we” even though the oldest of them would have been a baby at the time. Their inherited pride was as memorable as the freezing desolation of the place.

On the same trip I took a taxi halfway across Kazakhstan to Baikonur, the Soviet Cosmodrome, to watch a night launch by a Proton rocket with a German satellite in its nose. Later I trundled north over the steppe, along a lonely spur of the Trans-Siberian railway line, and pestered a sleepy crew of bureaucrats to let me into the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site. Eventually they relented. A charity had stuck a four-sided post in the dirt at the entrance with
MAY PEACE PREVAIL ON EARTH
in a different language on each side. Inside the site, an irritated Russian army colonel accused me of “radiophobia” for taking out a Geiger counter.

Times had changed. In 1960 the only way for a foreigner to see Baikonur or Semipalatinsk was via the inverted periscope through which U-2 pilots peered down on their targets from seventy thousand feet. Only Powers and a handful of others had that privilege. The same was true of Chelyabinsk, a grotesquely polluted arms metropolis in the Urals that was one of the last places Powers photographed before being shot down—and one of the first places I visited as a Moscow-based reporter in 1999. We were taken there by Green Cross International (chairman: Mikhail Gorbachev). Before that, covering show business and equally serious topics from Los Angeles, I interviewed women who had, they said, been abducted by aliens a few miles from where Powers trained in the Nevada desert, and I played cricket where he died in the San Fernando Valley. Wherever I went, his ghost seemed to have gotten there first.

The legacy of Francis Gary Powers is haunting enough anyway for how it changed the world. It gave us thirty years of cold war that might very well have been avoided. But it also gave us what the young policeman witnessed on Glienicke Bridge—a faint echo of the three-hour truce on Christmas Day in 1916, when troops from the opposing armies in the Flanders mud emerged from their trenches for a surreal game of football. Before and after those moments, human folly reigned supreme. Pryor, Powers, and Fisher bore more than their share of it. This is their story.