The Cold War's Most Famous Walk: The Bridge of Spies Exchange
On a freezing Berlin morning in 1962, a downed American pilot and a Soviet master spy walked past each other into freedom on the Glienicke Bridge.
At 8:52 on the morning of February 10, 1962, two men started walking toward each other across a bridge in Berlin. A white line painted across the middle of the span marked the border between East and West. From the western end came Francis Gary Powers, the American pilot whose spy plane had been shot out of the Soviet sky nearly two years earlier. From the eastern end came Rudolf Abel, the Soviet Union's most important spy in America. When they reached the line, they did not stop. They kept walking — each man into freedom, each man into the other side's country.
Powers had arrived at that bridge by way of one of the Cold War's greatest embarrassments. On May 1, 1960, flying a CIA U-2 reconnaissance plane high over the Soviet Union, he was brought down by a Soviet surface-to-air missile near Sverdlovsk. Washington's first instinct was to lie: officials announced that a civilian weather-research plane had gone missing. Then Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev produced the pilot — alive — along with the wreckage and his cameras. The Paris summit between the superpowers collapsed within days. Powers was tried in Moscow and sentenced to ten years.
Abel's road to the bridge had been longer and quieter. His real name was William Fisher, a colonel in Soviet intelligence who had lived undercover in the United States since 1948, running agents and photographing secrets without ever being caught. His luck ran out in 1957, when a disgruntled subordinate, Reino Hayhanen, defected to the Americans in Paris. Hayhanen remembered a Brooklyn storage room rented by one Emil R. Goldfus, an artist and photographer. The FBI opened the locker, found spy equipment, and arrested the quiet man in the Brooklyn Heights studio that June. Convicted that fall and sentenced to thirty years, Abel never broke, never talked, and never confirmed his real name. Even CIA director Allen Dulles is said to have admired his professionalism.
The swap was brokered by James Donovan, an American lawyer acting for Washington, in months of secret negotiation. Thrown into the deal was a third man: Frederic Pryor, an American economics graduate student arrested by East German police in August 1961 on trumped-up espionage charges. As Powers and Abel crossed at the Glienicke Bridge, Pryor was released at Checkpoint Charlie, fifteen miles away — the Stasi made him wait in a car for nearly half an hour, holding up the whole arrangement in a last show of power.
The exchange lasted minutes, but its shadow was long. The Glienicke Bridge became known around the world as the Bridge of Spies, the stage for Cold War prisoner swaps in 1985 and 1986 as well. More than that, the morning of February 10, 1962, quietly established a rule both superpowers would follow for decades: spies were assets to be traded, not liabilities to be buried. It was, in its strange way, an act of civilization inside the Cold War — two enemies agreeing, at a white line on a bridge, that even their secret wars had rules.
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