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A Look Back … The Cold War: Strangers On a Bridge
On February 10, 1962,
two men stepped on to opposite ends of the Glienicke
Bridge in Berlin. Francis Gary Powers—a prisoner of
the Russians since 1960— faced westward. Rudolf Abel—captured by the FBI in 1957—faced
eastward. Both men had been captured while performing daring intelligence
missions. When the signal was given, Powers and Abel began to cross the bridge.
They passed in the middle of the bridge, with barely a nod. They were headed
home.
Spy Exchange
The exchange of Powers and Abel was the first
of many East-West prisoner exchanges to take place over the next 27 years. It
also marked a change in Cold War intelligence. The Soviets had long excelled at
espionage, but lost Abel to one of America's early counterintelligence
coups in 1957. For their part, the Americans did well at technical collection,
and were pioneering the use of overhead reconnaissance from the edge of space
and beyond when Powers' U-2 spy plane was shot down.
Francis Gary Powers:
U-2 Pilot
Powers had flown for the U.S. Air Force before shifting to the Central
Intelligence Agency to become one of the first U-2 pilots in 1956. He flew 27
successful missions in U-2s (not all of them over the Soviet Union) before a
surface-to-air missile downed his ship near Sverdlovsk on May 1, 1960.
- Francis Gary Powers with a U-2 model.
The Soviets captured him immediately, but took their time
telling the news. This made the Eisenhower Administration very uncomfortable
because it initially denied that the lost and presumably dead pilot had any
intelligence connection. In August 1960, Powers was tried and convicted of
espionage against the Soviet Union. He was
sentenced to ten years in prison. Powers was cleared by the U.S. government of
all allegations of misconduct after his repatriation.
Powers worked for Lockheed as a test pilot from 1963 to
1970. He co-wrote a book about his experience title “Operation Overflight: A
Memoir of the U-2 Incident” in 1970. Powers then became a helicopter pilot for
a Los Angeles
television station. He died in 1977 when his helicopter crashed on his return
from covering a news story.
The Man with Many
Names
We know far less about the other man on the bridge that February day.
"Rudolf Abel" was the name he gave his FBI captors on June 21, 1957.
However, he had arrived in the United States
in 1948 under the name of “Andrew Kayotis,” and lived in a Brooklyn
artists' colony during the late 1940s under yet a third, "Emil Goldfus."
American authorities had no inkling of Abel’s espionage
before his deputy defected in May 1957 at the U.S. Embassy in Paris. After Abel’s death in 1971, we learned
his real identity: he was William Fisher, an Englishman who had moved to Russia with his
family when he was a child.
Abel was fluent in English, German, Yiddish and Polish. He
served in the Red Army communications unit, and then worked as a language
teacher until 1927. Abel joined the OGPU—the forerunner of the KGB—the same
year. During World War II, he served as an intelligence officer on the German
front. He was known for his operational tradecraft and survived a lengthy
career as a spy before his arrest because he always covered his trail.
We still do not know what he accomplished as a senior KGB
"illegal" officer, although he was treated well on his return to Moscow. He was
posthumously hailed along with other famous operatives in a commemorative
volume published by the Russian foreign intelligence service in 1995.
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Posted: Feb 20, 2009 01:07 PM
Last Updated: Feb 20, 2009 01:50 PM
Last Reviewed: Feb 20, 2009 01:07 PM