Bridge of Spies (39 page)

Worse than that, was America turning against him? His first inkling came in an issue of
Time
that a new prison guard inadvertently let through the post room. It contained a short mention of an initiative by Robert Maynard Hutchins, president of the Fund for the Republic, to discover whether the differences between Airman Powers and Nathan Hale, America’s first spy, pointed to “signs that the moral character of America is changing.” What the devil did that mean, he asked Barbara in a letter. But she wasn’t writing back, and that was what bothered him most of all. He spent the long, cold nights of his second winter in prison lying awake in his cell, replaying in his head the worst scenes of their marriage and thinking of divorce. “I am a nervous wreck because of this,” he wrote in the last entry in his journal, dated January 31, 1962. “As hard as I try I cannot keep from thinking about it. I need help badly! But who can help?”

A week later the colonel who had tried so hard to turn Powers into a Soviet movie buff appeared unexpectedly in the corridor outside his cell. He asked how Powers would feel about going to Moscow the next morning, “without guards,” and Powers said he would feel just fine.

*  *  *

Donovan’s final CIA briefing before his departure for London took place at the Harvard Club in midtown Manhattan. The briefer was a friend and fellow Harvard alum, so it looked perfectly natural. Two men. Two armchairs. One wintry afternoon.

They talked about the first meeting in Berlin, scheduled for the third. Originally Donovan was to have made the trip through the wall to the Soviet embassy with a minder from the U.S. mission, someone fluent in German and Russian, unlike him. But the Agency had rethought that. Donovan was to go alone, no gun, no wire. And if anything went wrong, he would have “no official status at all.”

Donovan’s friend rephrased himself. If anything went wrong, the government would naturally take a very grave view of the matter, and at the highest level. But there had been too many awkward incidents since the wall went up, and if an official U.S. representative were somehow trapped inside a country the United States did not recognize, it would be “embarrassing.”

Speaking of incidents, he continued, there was one other thing. He explained about Fred Pryor. It was the first time Donovan heard the name, and the first time he heard that Vogel claimed to represent Pryor as well as “Mrs. Abel.” Not only that, Vogel had sent a message to the U.S. mission saying Mrs. Abel was confident that if her husband was released in exchange for Powers, Pryor would be freed as well. No one at the mission knew whether to trust Vogel, but if Donovan could fold Pryor into the deal the family would be grateful.

Donovan said he’d try. He took a cab back to Prospect Park West and packed.

*  *  *

The first person to know Pryor was missing was his girlfriend, Eleonora. She had expected him to return to his room on Viktoria-Luise-Platz on the evening of Ulbricht’s speech about the wall. She did not panic when he failed to show. This was Fred, after all. Paraguay Fred. Between answering his ad and typing up his thesis and starting to fall in love with him, she had learned a fair amount about his proclivity to roam. He was legal in the Soviet sector. He had that car. He spoke good German now, thanks partly to her. He would be fine.

By the following week there was still no word from him, and Eleonora began to worry. She telephoned his twin brother in Connecticut. He telephoned his parents in Michigan. They were retired and had plenty of time to watch the news on television. For two weeks the footage flown back nightly from Berlin of Soviet tanks back in the city they had “liberated” sixteen years earlier and of families jumping from the windows on Bernauer Strasse to escape them had been harrowing enough even for parents without sons caught up in the chaos. Now their son seemed to be lost in it.

“My father was a very take-charge sort of person,” Pryor remembers. It was true, as the Stasi suspected, that Millard H. Pryor was acquainted with Robert McNamara, the defense secretary, since they had homes in the same neighborhood in Ann Arbor. He was also friendly with another neighbor, a Professor William Haber of the University of Michigan, who in turn was an old wartime comrade of the great Lucius Clay, Kennedy’s crisis manager in West Berlin. But, his son insisted, “he was not the kind of person who would leave it to the authorities to get me out of prison.”

What Pryor senior did instead was book tickets for himself and his wife to West Berlin. He was well-to-do after a long and successful career in business, interrupted only by a spell as a navy commander in the Pacific. His sons were—more or less—through college. If he could only get Fred out of this mess, they would both be fending for themselves. He had money. If this is what it turned out to be for, then he would spend it. On arrival, Millard and Mary Pryor checked into the Kempinski.

Their first call was to the U.S. mission on Clay Allee, a low-rise complex of gray office buildings on a boulevard named after the most powerful man inside them. Considering their contacts, the Pryors did not get much help—just a short list of lawyers licensed to practice on both sides of the wall. Vogel’s name was second on the list. They called him and met with him several times in September. If there was a cultural chasm between them, Vogel bridged it effortlessly. He impressed Mary Pryor in particular with his expressions of religious faith; his claim to suffer ulcers because of his devotion to his clients; and his willingness to believe her son was not, in fact, a spy. The Pryors hired him.

It was a first step, but a first step into a morass. For all his apparently good intentions, Vogel was only a go-between, and he was hard to get to. His office was deep into East Berlin along an S-Bahn line that, since August, had been accessible only by braving a cordon of stone-faced
Vopos
in the Friedrichstrasse station.

They would let the Pryors in, but there was no guarantee that they would let them out. Outside the Eastern Bloc, East Germany was a pariah state that was ready to demand official recognition by taking hostages and forcing foreign governments to negotiate for their release. That was one reason it was holding on to their son. It was also the reason, all diplomatic niceties apart, that the U.S. mission could do so little for them.

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.