Bridge of Spies
Page 1
ALSO BY GILES WHITTELL
Lambada Country
Extreme Continental
Spitfire Women of World War Two
Copyright © 2010 by Giles Whittell
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Broadway Books,
an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
BROADWAY BOOKS and the Broadway Books colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Whittell, Giles.
Bridge of spies : a true story of the Cold War / Giles Whittell. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Espionage, American—History—20th century. 2. Espionage, Soviet—History. 3. Intelligence service—United States—History—20th century. 4. Intelligence service—Soviet Union—History. 5. Powers, Francis Gary, 1929–1977. 6. Pryor, Frederic L. 7. Abel, Rudolf, 1903–1971. I. Title.
Jk468.I6W446 2010
327.127304709′045—dc22 2010018120
eISBN: 978-0-307-71998-0
v3.1
For Bruno, Louis, and Enzo
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Dramatis Personae
Author’s Note
Prologue
part one MISSIONS IMPLAUSIBLE 1 /The Waterspout
2 /The Agent
3 /The Pilot
4 /The Innocent
part two SPY CATCHERS 5 /Stakeout
6 /American Justice
7 /Falling from a Long Way Up
Photo Insert
part three CAUGHT IN THE ACT 8 /City of Cowboys and Indians
9 /A First-Class Panic
10 /Soviet Justice
11 /The Man in the Scarlet Sports Car
part four ANATOMY OF A DEAL 12 /Poker for Table Stakes
13 /Three Men and a Bridge
Epilogue
A Note on Sources
Acknowledgments
THE PRINCIPALS
William Fisher, aka Rudolf Abel, Emil Goldfus, Martin Collins, Robert Callan, Frank, Milton, and Agent Mark: KGB colonel and the most senior undercover Soviet agent in North America from 1948 to 1957
Francis Gary Powers: U-2 pilot trained by the U.S. Air Force and employed by the CIA to fly reconnaissance missions over Soviet Russia; shot down May 1, 1960
Frederic Pryor: PhD student at the Free University of West Berlin who was arrested by East German secret police on suspicion of spying but released to his parents as part of the Glienicke Bridge exchange on February 10, 1962
KGB
Reino Hayhanen, aka Eugene Maki and Agent Vik: Fisher’s KGB subordinate in New York from 1952 to 1957 and the man who would betray him to the United States
Pavel Sudoplatov: KGB general who masterminded the assassination of Leon Trotsky in 1940 and adopted Fisher as his protégé later in World War II.
Yuri Drozdov: KGB officer assigned to correspond with James Donovan from East Germany in hopes of arranging an exchange of Powers for Abel
Alexander “the Swede” Orlov: prewar Soviet “illegal” agent who defected to the United States, where he was the only person who knew Fisher’s true identity
Ivan Shishkin: senior KGB officer who posed as second secretary at the Soviet embassy in East Berlin to represent Moscow in negotiations for the Powers-Abel swap
CIA
Marty Knutson: U-2 pilot whose July 1956 photographs of Engels Air Force Base in Russia helped to demolish the theory of a “bomber gap” threatening U.S. national security
Bob Ericson: U-2 pilot who flew the penultimate Soviet overflight of April 9, 1960, and was Powers’s backup pilot on May 1
Richard Bissell: civilian head of the CIA’s U-2 program from 1954 to 1962 as the agency’s deputy director and then director of plans
Allen Dulles: Director of Central Intelligence from 1953 to 1961; lobbied President Eisenhower for authorization for U-2 overflights of the Soviet Union and was responsible for the timing of Powers’s flight on May 1, 1960
Stan Beerli: air force colonel who joined the CIA to become civilian head of Detachment B, the U-2 unit based in Adana, Turkey, where he designed the Operation Quickmove security procedures for Soviet overflights
Joe Murphy: CIA security officer in Adana who was later assigned to identify Powers on Glienicke Bridge in Berlin on February 10, 1962
SOVIET LEADERSHIP
Nikita Khrushchev: Soviet premier from 1958 to 1964; abandoned bold plans for nuclear disarmament and walked out of 1960 Great Power Summit meeting in Paris after the Gary Powers overflight of May 1, 1960
Roman Rudenko: Soviet prosecutor general and veteran of the Nuremberg Nazi war criminal trials who presided at the trial of Gary Powers in August 1960
Sergei Biryuzov: marshal of the Soviet Air Defense Forces who coordinated efforts to intercept Gary Powers and told Khrushchev once the shoot-down was confirmed
Yevgeni Savitsky: colonel-general in the Soviet Air Defense Forces who ordered Igor Mentyukov to ram Powers in his Sukhoi Su-9 fighter, knowing the mission would be suicidal if successful
U.S. LEADERSHIP
Dwight D. Eisenhower: president of the United States from 1953 to 1961; authorized the U-2 program but bitterly regretted the flight of May 1, 1960
John F. Kennedy: president of the United States from 1961 to 1963; promised as a candidate to close a “missile gap” that did not exist and declined to meet Powers on his return to the United States
William F. Tompkins: U.S. attorney assigned to prosecute “Rudolf Abel” (William Fisher) in 1957; called Fisher’s espionage “an offense directed against our very existence”
James Donovan: former U.S. prosecutor at Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals assigned to defend Fisher at his trial; later brokered the Glienicke Bridge exchange in Berlin
Llewellyn Thompson: U.S. ambassador to Moscow from 1957 to 1962; learned of Powers’s survival minutes too late to prevent the release of a false cover story by NASA
Frank Meehan: U.S. diplomat assigned to assist the family of Frederic Pryor in Berlin in 1961; subsequently became the last U.S. ambassador to East Germany
SUPPORTING ACTORS
Burt Silverman: Brooklyn artist and friend of “Emil Goldfus” (William Fisher) whose typewriter was used to help convict Fisher of espionage against the United States
James Bozart: Brooklyn newspaper delivery boy who picked up a “hollow nickel” dropped by Reino Hayhanen containing a microfilm eventually decoded and traced to Fisher
Oliver Powers: miner, cobbler, and father of Gary Powers; requested an exchange of “Abel” for his son in a letter to Khrushchev and traveled to Moscow for his son’s trial in 1960
Millard Pryor: businessman and father of Frederic Pryor; traveled to Berlin in 1961 to seek his son’s release from the notorious Stasi Investigation Prison at Hohenschönhausen
Wolfgang Vogel: East German lawyer who served as go-between in Millard Pryor’s efforts to contact East German authorities
Carl McAfee: Virginia lawyer who traveled with Oliver Powers to Moscow for the Gary Powers trial and pleaded unsuccessfully for leniency to Leonid Brezhnev, the future Soviet premier
Kelly Johnson: founder of Lockheed’s secret “Skunk Works” hangar in Burbank, California, designer of the U-2, and employer of Gary Powers after he parted ways with the CIA
Dave Clark: pioneer of the use of stretch fabrics in women’s underwear and designer of the pressure suits worn by all U-2 pilots including Powers at the time of his last flight over Russia
Marvin Makinen: American student at the Free Univ
ersity of West Berlin who was sentenced to eight years in prison for spying on Soviet military installations in 1961 but released after two years at the urging of James Donovan
Wherever possible I have traced and interviewed those still alive who played roles in this story as it unfolded fifty years ago. Remarks from these interviews are related in the present tense to distinguish them from material found in documents, diaries, or secondary sources.
February 10, 1962
The road out of Berlin was practically deserted. It was a Saturday morning, and cold. The forecast was for snow and the rumors were keeping people in town. All the news bureaus had sent reporters to Checkpoint Charlie because it seemed the obvious place. But the forecast was wrong, and so were the rumors.
At about nine thirty a lone taxi cleared the last traffic lights in Wilmersdorf and headed west on Königstrasse, picking up speed. For a while it barreled through pristine woodland across a big, diamond-shaped island formed by the Wannsee and the river Havel. Then it crested a rise, descended for half a mile in a gradual left curve, and stopped at a traffic barrier. Beyond the barrier were a watchtower and a bridge—a solid span of green-painted steel girders across the Havel, bisected by a thin white line. Beyond the bridge was another watchtower and another barrier, beyond them a free-fire zone for the East German frontier police, and beyond that the wall—not the short section that divided the heart of Berlin but the long one that sealed off the Allied sectors from the East. At the white line the American sector ended and the Soviet empire began. It was the closest thing on the planet to a land frontier between the world’s two nuclear superpowers.
The taxi turned to be ready to head back into town. Out of it stepped a young woman with a notebook. She had fair hair and blue eyes and was shaking with nerves.
She glanced over at the military police guarding the barrier and thought better of approaching them. Instead she settled on an officer walking toward her in the uniform of the regular West German police. He carried a briefcase and a thermos and looked young, like her.
“Help me, please,” she said.
He stopped long enough to hear her say that this was the chance of a lifetime, that her career would stop before it started if she went back with an empty notebook. He replied that he couldn’t simply stand there and talk to her. The MPs were watching.
“Walk with me, then,” she said.
To the north of the road a triangular grassy slope descended to the water, with a track on the uphill side leading to a cream-colored summer house. The MPs had a clear view along the track but not of the whole slope. Trees and shrubs marked it off from the road, and the woman found that the farther down the slope she walked, the better cover they gave her. She set off down it, and the young police officer followed.
“Maybe he felt pity for me,” she says half a century later. “I took him for a walk behind the bushes and he told me the whole story.”
It had been early—soon after dawn, he said. He had seen a small convoy of cars approach the bridge from the American side and another from the East German side. Groups of men had spilled out at each end and waited. Then three from each group had walked to the white line and exchanged a few words. There had been a delay, and then a shout, and then two figures had crossed the line, one in each direction.
Annette von Broecker wrote it all down. It was not the full story, but it was better than anyone else would get that day, including the American networks. She wanted more detail, and there was some that she could add herself—a hole in the cloud above the bridge, sunlight pouring through it, two swans gliding back and forth below.
“My heart was pounding,” she remembers. “I kept telling myself what to put in. ‘Swans, sun, spies. Swans, sun, spies.’ ” Then she ran back up the slope to a pay phone and called the bureau. Her editor told her to calm down and fed in some background as she went along, but the swans stayed in.
At 3:00 a.m. Washington time, President Kennedy’s press secretary briefed him on what the police officer had seen. That left Kennedy better informed than von Broecker’s readers, but not by much and not for long. The story she filed that morning made the front page of every paper in the free world with an interest in the unfree world. It recorded a kind of spy swap that had not been tried before, in which the protagonists had to be brought to the same place at the same time and bartered with utmost care under the quiet gaze of snipers hidden in the forests on each side. This was human trafficking with the blessing of two superpowers.
It was a story that started with a search for weapons of mass destruction. Its main players were its foot soldiers. They followed orders, but not ordinary orders. For the best part of seven years they had been drawn deep into the race between the United States and the Soviet Union to establish which was closer to acquiring the means to annihilate the other. When they ran out of luck, the consequences could be beyond disastrous. Just by being human they could change the course of history, and one of them did.
What the policeman told von Broecker that morning centered on three men, not two. The youngest, at that moment, was with his parents for the first time in three years, struggling to grasp that he was free and that he could stop thinking about suicide. He was a twenty-eight-year-old Yale postgraduate student interrogated by the East German secret police—the Stasi—every day for the preceding five months on suspicion of espionage, of which he was entirely innocent. He was a young man with an inquiring mind and a serious case of wanderlust who had driven blithely into the vortex of Berlin’s paranoia in a bright red VW sports car. His personality type was not one that the Stasi, a monster sustained by suspicion and obsessed with conformity, found easy to comprehend. He was a joker, a thinker, a free spirit. His name was Frederic Pryor.
The next youngest had crossed the bridge from the East German side to the American in a cheap Russian suit, carrying a cardboard suitcase. It was a strange homecoming for a pilot, especially this pilot. He had entered Soviet airspace two years earlier wearing a custom-fitted pressure suit from the David Clark Company of Worcester, Massachusetts, to prevent his bodily fluids evaporating in the event that his cockpit sprang a leak. His mission was known only to the White House and a small team of CIA operatives scattered between Langley and the wilder fringes of Eurasia. His aircraft, a Lockheed U-2, had crossed the Kazakh steppe at two and a half times the height of Everest, then broken up and tumbled onto Russian soil not far from Sverdlovsk.
Falling from seventy thousand feet, there are no standing orders. To begin with there is only the hiss of oxygen, the slowly tilting blue black dome of the stratosphere, and the deathly quiet realization that the altimeter is starting to unwind. That is all this pilot had to work with. That and the time it takes to drop thirteen vertical miles at an average speed of a hundred miles an hour, which is about ten minutes. He was not supposed to live. If it was a rocket that hit him, the blast should have taken him out with the plane. Even if it was something else, there was almost no chance that his pressure suit would save him. At seventy thousand feet, blood boils in ten seconds. It was regrettable, they all agreed—the tight handful that knew—but the pilot was a goner.
He survived the blast. As he fell, he forced himself to think. As his cockpit began to spin, he ruled out the strategies that would definitely kill him. As he fell through thirty thousand feet, he calmly popped his canopy. As he kept on spinning, he cut his oxygen supply and floated free. He breathed what air there was six miles up, and five, and four. He thanked whoever packed his parachute when it opened. He looked at the countryside below him and thought it looked a bit like Virginia. He picked a spot and landed hard. In Washington, they had no way of knowing, but he survived it all.
His name was Francis Gary Powers, Frank to his friends, the son of a Virginia coal miner who defied his father’s ardent wish that he become a doctor and became a fighter jock instead. He had never contemplated suicide, though there was no shortage of people back home who wished he had. His long fall to earth on May 1, 1960, led swiftly and directly
to the worst rupture in U.S.-Soviet relations since the Berlin airlift of 1948. It wrecked the Paris summit later that month at which Eisenhower and Khrushchev had hoped to launch a new era of détente. It threw into high gear the arms race that took the world to the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 and did not end until the collapse of the Soviet empire nearly three decades later. From the moment Powers was reported missing, there were well-placed skeptics on both sides of the cold war who suspected that his entire mission had been planned to fail, and in doing so to prevent the outbreak of superpower peace. It is a theory that lingers to this day.
The oldest player in von Broecker’s story walked away from the American sector toward the death strip and the wall and his idea of freedom. He stooped a little and smoked too much, which gave him a bad cough and a worse case of sinusitis. According to the New York Times, the CIA, and the Supreme Court of the United States, he was a Soviet master spy. It was a description that delighted his handlers and went with him to his grave. His name, allegedly, was Rudolf Abel. His aliases from nine years spent roaming North America under deep cover included Emil Goldfus, Martin Collins, Robert Callan, Frank, Mark, and Milton, shortened to Milt by coconspirators and admirers. In retirement and death he has acquired an aura as the last of the great Soviet “illegals”—not that Russia stopped trying to smuggle people like him into the United States. His professional heirs include the ten “unregistered agents” of Moscow uncovered by the FBI and sent briskly home in 2010, among them the bewitching redhead known as Anna Chapman and instantly immortalized by New York’s tabloids. They and the courts quickly found out most of what there was to know about Miss Chapman. They were less thorough with Abel. Despite five years of exhaustive American due process, no one in the West knew who he was or where he came from, or what he spied on. Some of that is still not known, but this much is: his real name was William Fisher. He was exceptionally good at shrinking coded messages onto microdots, and he was British.