“[Gary Powers] performed his duty in a very dangerous mission and he performed it well, and I think I know more about that than some of his detractors and critics know ….”
— CIA Director Allen Dulles
Standing on a hill recently, overlooking the Glienicke Bridge near Potsdam, Germany, several thoughts came to mind. While the civil engineer in me was admiring the elegant design of the structure, my romantic side saw actors Tom Hanks and Mark Rylands standing at night in the snow near the east end of the bridge, acting out a famous exchange of spies that took place in 1962.
First, the engineering. Built in 1907, the 420-foot-long bridge is a fine example of a steel truss with top and bottom “chords.” Usually, both these chords are horizontal, making for a rather utilitarian look, but in this case, the top chord is a sweeping inverted arc, reminiscent of a suspension bridge like the Golden Gate. The webs — networks of vertical and diagonal struts between the top and bottom chords — provide stiffness and stability, while transferring loads to the twin piers and abutments.
Now the human story. In the 2015 Steven Spielberg movie Bridge of Spies, Hanks and Rylands play James Donovan and Josef Abel, reenacting the Cold War drama in which Soviet spy Abel was exchanged for CIA operative/pilot Gary Powers. His U-2 spy plane had been shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960. The swap took place on the “Bridge of Spies” (a play on Venice’s Bridge of Sighs, another story), the first of four prisoner exchanges there.
At the end of World War II, Germany was divided into West and East, with Berlin having special status, an enclave deep within communist East Germany. The city itself was divided into West (American, French and British sectors) and East (the German Democrat Republic, the GDR, that is, East Germany). One of a handful of crossing points between the two was the Glienicke Bridge, 15 miles southwest of Berlin’s city center. In my photo, the light green half of the bridge was GDR territory, and the darker green was in West Berlin. The Powers-Abel swap took place here on the morning of Feb. 10, 1962 (not nighttime, as in the movie).
The story began five years earlier, when Soviet intelligence officer Rudolf Abel (William Fisher, born in England to Russian Bolshevik parents) was betrayed by a fellow spy and sentenced to 30 years imprisonment by a US court. He narrowly escaped the death penalty thanks to his lawyer James Donovan, who persuaded the judge that Abel might be useful in a future prisoner swap. When Gary Powers’ U2 was shot down by a Soviet missile in 1960, Donovan was sent to East Berlin to negotiate an exchange.
Two years later, the two complete strangers passed each other in the middle of the Glienicke Bridge, Abel en route to Moscow and Powers on his way to Washington DC. Simultaneously, at Berlin’s Checkpoint Charlie, the GDR released American economist Frederic Pryor, an innocent victim of the Cold War whom Donovan had insisted be included in the exchange.
Abel returned to his family in Moscow and died of lung cancer seven years later. Meanwhile Powers received a cold reception in the U.S. for allowing his damaged plane to fall into Soviet hands, although he was able to clear his name after testifying before the Senate Committee on Armed Services. He subsequently became a Lockheed U-2 test pilot before signing on as a traffic reporter for a Los Angeles TV station. In 1977, after reporting on a brush fire outside LA, the helicopter he was piloting crashed, killing him and his cameraman.
Fast forward to November of 2014, when the Glienicke Bridge, the Bridge of Spies, was closed to all traffic for a week for filming. Fittingly, Spielberg’s version of the historic spy swap took place exactly where the drama had originally played out — 52 years earlier.
Barry Evans (he/him, barryevans9@yahoo.com, planethumboldt.substack.com) loves visiting movie locations.
This article appears in ‘What Else Can We Do?’.