Bridge of Spies (40 page)

His mind drifted back to the war, when Claridge’s soot-blackened bricks hid an oasis of expensive comfort and the OSS kept a suite on the same floor as the exiled kings of Yugoslavia and Romania. When steak could not be obtained anywhere else in Europe, it could generally be obtained at Claridge’s.

Donovan was in no rush. It was a Tuesday. Not expected in East Berlin until the weekend, he indulged himself over the next two days browsing the shelves of rare-book shops in Mayfair. He left his purchases with a favorite bookbinder, together with his Brooklyn address; if all went well, he would not be coming back through London. On Thursday he dined at the hotel with old friends, telling them he was leaving for Zurich the next morning. From the front desk he sent a cablegram to his wife with the delightful news that he had been invited to Scotland for a short break.

On Friday, Mr. White was at Claridge’s before dawn. He drove Mr. Dennis out of the sleeping city for two hours, through driving rain, to an RAF base where a U.S. Air Force C-45 was waiting for him. It took off immediately, with Donovan the only passenger. Coffee and doughnuts were served over the English Channel, sandwiches and more coffee while refueling at Weisbaden. Darkness was falling when they landed at Tempelhof, and so was snow.

There were no formalities. Donovan was met airside by Bob “El Supremo”
Graver, the CIA’s Berlin station chief, a man of mythic stature in intelligence circles whose all-knowing aura and confidence in dealing with the Agency’s top management had saved him from disgrace when he completely failed to predict the building of the wall.

Graver took Donovan to a darkened safe house in the American sector and showed where stashes of American cigarettes and cask-aged Scotch had been left for his convenience. A maid would let herself in each morning to cook breakfast and clean the house. Otherwise he would be on his own there. Donovan unpacked, missing London already. Graver picked him up again for dinner at the Berlin Hilton, where he pointed out a public telephone at the Golden City Bar. He gave Donovan a number he was to call from there with his report the following and subsequent evenings, explaining that the number would be manned continuously “for this sole purpose” while he was in Berlin.

It was still snowing the next morning, only harder. Donovan ate breakfast in the safe house with Graver, studying the Agency’s latest maps of the wall and its crossing points. He was running late by the time he reached the Friedrichstrasse crossing point. Marching to the front of a long line, he announced his appointment at the Soviet embassy and was let through at once. For a brief moment he could imagine himself as the spy who went out into the cold.

The heart of Berlin was a freezing lattice of ruins under snow—a monument to war. Donovan had last seen it in 1945, when Allied bombs and Soviet artillery had reduced Wilhelmine Germany’s architectural showpieces to rubble and Mongolians in Red Army uniform terrorized those with nowhere else to flee to. He found it little changed. “As far as one could see in any direction, the buildings were in ruins or disrepair,” he wrote in his diary.

Only the giant Soviet embassy was intact and lit; a beacon of socialist hope on the boulevard of tears. In the foyer of the consular section Donovan shook the snow off his coat and came face-to-face with the cast of amateur players that the KGB had assembled to maintain the pretense of disinterest in the case. Donovan’s reception committee introduced themselves as Frau Abel, her daughter, and her cousin Drewes. Only their real names and a printed program were missing.

Drewes, played as ever by Yuri Drozdov, said nothing—just “kept opening and closing powerful hands,” Donovan noted. But the woman playing Mrs. Abel took the trouble to ask after her husband. When Donovan replied that he was fine, she actually sobbed for several minutes. It was quickly clear to him that none of these characters was a principal. He had no way of knowing how much spadework had been done by “Drewes,” he of the powerful hands, but his instincts were right. He had yet to meet his opposite number. They all waited. As they waited, he smoked. When the “daughter” asked for a cigarette, he ignored her.

At noon exactly, a door behind them opened and a tall, good-looking apparatchik in a suit and rimless glasses introduced himself as Ivan Shishkin, second secretary at the embassy.

Shishkin was in fact the most senior KGB officer in Europe. He was the summiteer to Drozdov’s Sherpa, sent to Berlin in 1959 expressly to find and groom the intermediaries, Vogel among them, needed to bring in a spy the Kremlin did not recognize through a country the Americans did not recognize. He was fluent in four languages, including English, with a quick mind and a bone-dry sense of humor. He took one look at the big man from Brooklyn and decided he could have some fun with him.

He ushered Donovan and his retinue of unfortunate “East Germans” into a conference room and asked how he could help.

To begin with, Donovan played along. He presented his credentials, stated his business, and assured Mr. Shishkin that he could deliver Rudolf Abel, together with a pardon signed by President Kennedy, within forty-eight hours of an agreement being finalized to release Powers and Pryor in return. Shishkin said he knew all about the Powers-Abel plan; he had been empowered to seek the release of Abel out of socialist concern for the poor man and his East German relatives. But he knew nothing about the Pryor matter. On this he would have to seek separate
instructions. Could he wait till Monday? Donovan was tired and his back was hurting. He rounded on the mute actress playing Mrs. Abel and accused her and Vogel of dragging him all this way from New York under false pretenses. Then he stomped out into the snow.

Abel’s “daughter” followed him.

“Don’t you wish to see Herr Vogel?” she asked.

It was an important cue, and Donovan missed it. He said that whether or not he saw Vogel was up to the Soviet authorities. He had never liked the sound of Vogel, and the latest Agency intelligence on the man, conveyed to him at the Harvard Club, had strengthened his own hunch that the East German could not be trusted. He said a curt good-bye and trudged back to Friedrichstrasse.

That evening Donovan had a long talk with Bob Graver, the CIA station chief, at the West Berlin Hilton’s Golden City Bar.

He didn’t know it, but he had almost blown the operation on day one. By failing to call on Vogel he had shown his contempt for the fiction that the East Germans had an important role in the exchange. To Vogel’s Stasi controllers it was an important fiction, and they had Pryor. It took all of Vogel’s diplomatic skill to repair the damage, especially to the vanity of his most important patron, a former Nazi concentration camp inmate named Josef Streit who only a week before had been appointed East Germany’s attorney general.

For the next two days Vogel worked the phones from his office in the backstreets of East Berlin, mollifying Streit and waiting for a visit from Donovan. At last it came. Donovan drove out to Vogel’s shabby three-story building on Alt-Friedrichsfelde in a cab with Drozdov. It was a significant test of the worldliness on which he so prided himself. Bearing in mind that whatever was said would inevitably be closely analyzed by those listening in, he needed to be courteous and grateful without being gushing. A little flattery might even have helped. But he was nervous. Outside, climbing the steps to Vogel’s reception room in the gathering dusk, he was acutely conscious of Drozdov (“Otto the Strangler”) behind him and thought he might actually be attacked. Inside, Vogel was charm itself and confirmed that as far as the East German government was concerned Pryor could be added to the Abel-Powers deal. But Donovan radiated mistrust. He refused to take the East German’s word for anything or to confirm that he could deliver Abel on the
basis of what had been promised so far. That depended on whether the promises were in good faith, which was for his government to decide. He would have to report back to Washington. Later he wrote that Vogel looked like an insurance salesman.

Streit was livid. Who was this jumped-up elitist to doubt Vogel’s word, or his? He might have been at Harvard and Nuremberg, but Streit had been at Dachau and Mauthausen, and not as a guard. If Donovan wanted Pryor so badly, he could have him for Abel and no one else. Otherwise the deal was off.

Streit summoned Vogel to his office to remind him he could have Pryor shot, never mind locked up for life. Again Vogel soothed Streit’s fragile ego and made the case that East Germany had more to gain by letting Pryor go—the Krupp steel exhibit at the Leipzig Trade Fair, the gratitude of sensible Americans like the young diplomat Frank Meehan—than by putting him on trial.

It is not clear what changed Streit’s mind, but it was probably a combination of Vogel’s common sense and Donovan’s return to the fray the next day. He did not soften his act. He toughened it up. On his second visit to Vogel’s office he listened stonily as Vogel tried to insist that his attorney general had taken “a firm position in the matter.”

“Nonsense,” Donovan said. “If Shishkin told the attorney general of East Germany to walk across this floor on his hands he’d get down and try.… I have no time for childish games.”

Donovan then demanded to be directed to a good hotel for lunch, and left. Drozdov recommended the Johannishof on Friedrichstrasse and asked if he could come along. By the time the coffee was served, Streit had caved.

Even then it wasn’t quite over. After lunch, the ersatz Abel family, together with their lawyer and their American associate, repaired once more to the Soviet consulate. All that remained was for Shishkin to repeat his original offer of Powers for Abel, and to approve the East German side deal. Shishkin chose not to. Possibly because of last-minute second thoughts in Moscow, probably for the sheer sport of seeing Donovan explode, he pointed out that since Powers was hardly a national hero at home, a more appropriate swap would involve Abel and Marvin Makinen, the student-spy arrested in Kiev the previous summer.

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.