The Bridge of Spies 60 years on

This month marks sixty years since an old bridge on the edge of Berlin became one of the most important sites of the Cold war. On February 10th 1962, the Glienicke Bridge that connected Potsdam and Berlin across the Havel River became the fabled Bridge Of Spies.

Glienicke was a bridge, but by the early 60s it was also a checkpoint between the Soviet-controlled East Germany and the American sector of West Berlin - a chink in the fabric of the Iron Curtain through which people could pass.

Before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it was used on multiple occasions as the location for prisoner exchanges between the USA and the USSR. But its most well-known exchange was its first - the swapping of the American U2 pilot Francis Gary Powers and the Soviet intelligence agent Rudolph Abel, made famous by the eponymous Tom Hanks film.

Powers, who had been recruited into the CIA from the US Air Force, was captured when his spy plane was shot down during an attempt to fly over the entire Soviet Union in 1960, while Abel (who was born in my hometown of Newcastle Upon Tyne in 1903) had been operating undetected in America for almost ten years when the FBI identified and arrested him in New York in 1957.

The stories of both men capture some of the defining aspects of the height of the Cold War, and have played parts in inspiring my first two espionage thrillers set in this era, Red Corona and A Loyal Traitor, which feature MI5 officer Richard Knox and his CIA comrade in arms Abey Bennett.

America had thought the U2 airborne spying programme was its key to global intelligence domination. They were sure no Soviet planes or missiles could reach its cruising altitude. But then a S75-Dvina missile did, sixty-five thousand feet above the Urals. The United States’ response was immediate - it pivoted from aerial to orbital surveillance. The CIA took over NASA’s Discoverer satellite programme, renamed it Corona, and got to work turning the Cold War into a space race.

Likewise, Abel’s assumption of an American identity and decade-long mission to steal atomic secrets reflects the rampant fears of the time about sleeper agents, mind control, and generally not being able to trust anyone. Abel was only suspected of not being who he claimed to be when his assistant turned and gave the FBI his code-name and description. This paranoia has inspired plenty of literary and cinematic explorations, from The Manchurian Candidate to The Parallax View, and I delve into it too in A Loyal Traitor, revealing how it worked on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

However, there’s another shared element to Powers’ and Abel’s tales that makes them fascinating, and ripe for inspiration when you’re writing about the murkier, grubbier aspects of the Cold War. Because they were both kind of embarrassing.

As soon as the CIA found out Powers’ U2 had been shot down they strong-armed NASA into releasing a statement saying that one of its planes had gone missing over northern Turkey after their pilot reported difficulties and bailed out, and that it may have accidentally strayed into Russian territory. The Soviet Union promptly paraded Powers - who had not used the poison-tipped needle sewn into his flight suit to commit suicide - and the wreckage of his U2 in front of the world’s media. 

Similarly, while having a covert agent operating illegally and undetected on foreign soil for almost ten years is, in theory, a remarkable feat, it isn’t much of a coup if that agent never gathers a single piece of intelligence of any actual value. Abel had a pretty good life in New York for a Soviet spy. He painted a lot. But the network of operatives he claimed to command was almost entirely fictitious and he didn’t get his hands on any atomic secrets.

So, neither were exactly glorious endeavours. Yet both America and Russia pitched the Bridge Of Spies exchange as a victory - the triumphant returns of patriotic heroes who had been prepared to give their lives in service of their countries and were the personification of their states’ respective skills in technological ingenuity and individual subterfuge. We know now that wasn’t really the case on either side - at least not wholly. 

But, as we are also currently all too aware given very recent events, when it comes to the Cold War powers, it's always the posturing that seems to matter the most, regardless of the relation it bears to the situation on the ground, and that you shouldn't always let truth get in the way of a good story. 

[This article originally appeared in the Capital Crime February 2022 newsletter]