Bridge of Spies (38 page)

Khrushchev and Ulbricht hid most of their intentions. Khrushchev had released the two American survivors of the RB-47 shot down over the Soviet Arctic the year before but had received no answering gesture from Kennedy. Kennedy thought Khrushchev a perplexing maverick and did not want to be any further in his debt. In Berlin, the wall was four months old. It was no longer a direct threat to peace, but it was still a livid scar and East Germany was still unrecognized by the free world. Westerners sucked in by the Stasi could not be reached by official channels, and the unofficial ones were largely untested.

Being a spy in prison in Atlanta was warmer but not much more uplifting. In his fourth annual Christmas message to his lawyer, the inmate known as Rudolf Abel asked as usual for his four-pound ration of milk chocolate, then let his guard down and admitted that life on the inside was becoming “an affliction.”

And yet, within two months, something had changed. It was not that the tectonic plates of geopolitics had moved. On the contrary, the superpowers were digging in for thirty years of proxy wars and breakneck missile construction. The change was almost imperceptible. The
movement was the movement of human restlessness, between the plates, as people began finding new ways around them—people like Fred T. Wilkinson, U.S. deputy director of prisons, who late on the night of Thursday, February 8, 1962, received a message in his Manhattan hotel room to drive down West Street to the corner of Eleventh Street in Greenwich Village and wait. It was snowing. He drove carefully, stopped at the corner, and rolled down his window. A man emerged from the darkness and asked: “Are you ready to make the trip?” Wilkinson nodded and drove back to his hotel.

*  *  *

Willie Fisher had kept faith with the Cheka, and the Cheka had kept faith with him. For five years he had admitted nothing, either in prison or in court. For five years Russia had denied all knowledge of his Abel alter ego, dismissing Reino Hayhanen’s stories about him as a tissue of lies. But for nearly four of those years a young KGB officer posted to Berlin had been working the angles, trying to pry him loose—and impersonating his fictitious cousin.

For the purposes of this marathon charade, the young KGB man called himself Cousin Drewes. His real name was Yuri Drozdov. He was lean and strong, with a long, thin nose. He looked, James Donovan eventually decided, like Otto the Strangler. At that time he lived with his wife and two small children in a modest flat in Karlshorst, near the KGB’s East Berlin headquarters. He later became a general, then a private security consultant, and was still in business in comfortably appointed offices in central Moscow in 2009.

At first Drozdov didn’t have much luck as Cousin Drewes, nor as Hellen Abel, Rudolf’s wife, whose part in the negotiations was played by a real woman when necessary but whose letters to America he tended to write; he was fluent in German and English as well as Russian, and the ranking polyglot on the case.
^*

These early letters were addressed to Donovan as Abel’s lawyer and postmarked Leipzig (the KGB was still not ready to admit Abel was
one of theirs). They begged for leniency, offered nothing in return, and dripped with fake self-pity. Donovan had seen letters from the real Mrs. Abel during her husband’s trial. He had been moved by their spare descriptions of the flowers and changing seasons at the family dacha and could tell the difference at once. He forwarded the phony ones to his client, and to the CIA, and thought little of them.

The capture of Gary Powers changed everything—not just world history, but Willie Fisher’s chances of seeing his family again. The Russians, as Donovan noted immediately, had found some bait.

Oliver Powers was just as quick to see the opportunity. He jumpstarted the new dialogue with his letter to “Abel” from Pound while his son was still awaiting trial. “Dear Colonel Abel,” Powers (and Carl McAfee) wrote. “I am the father of Francis Gary Powers who is connected with the U2 plane incident of several weeks ago.…

“You can readily understand the concern that a father would have for his son and for a strong desire to have my son released.… I would be more than happy to approach the State Department and the President of the United States for an exchange for the release of my son. By this I mean that I would urge and do everything possible to have my government release you and return you to your country if the powers in your country would release my son and let him return to me. If you are inclined to go along with this arrangement I would appreciate your so advising me and also so advising the powers in your country along these lines.”

The letter was wildly optimistic and it annoyed the CIA, which assumed it had a lock on American spy swap negotiations. But it thrilled Fisher because it gave Donovan a reason to write something concrete back to “Mrs. Abel” and her lawyer—a certain Wolfgang Vogel.

Unlike “Drewes” and most of his accomplices, Vogel was a real person. Still only thirty-three, he had been appointed to the Abel case a full two years before he met Fred Pryor, in response to a KGB request to the Stasi for a go-between.

Vogel was a lawyer, the hardworking, god-fearing son of a Catholic schoolteacher from Lower Silesia. But above all he was a player. In 1953, when East Germany’s Communists enlisted Soviet force to crush a rebellion on the streets of Berlin, he was the protégé of a justice minister who defected to the West and tried to take Vogel with him.
Then, as in 1961, he stayed in the East. As his biographer wrote: “Faust made his bargain with the devil. Vogel made his with the Stasi.” The Stasi called him Secret Informer “Georg.” In his reports to them he preferred to sign off as Eva.

He liked antique watches, Western cars and suits, and other people’s secrets. He earned them with charm, discretion, and the highly sensitive antennae of a natural deal maker. In due course he would persuade the West German government to part with six hundred million deutsche marks for the freedom of nearly a quarter of a million people from behind the Iron Curtain. He also dabbled in high politics, setting the agenda and taking the notes at a delicate summit between the leaders of the two Germanys in 1982. But in 1961 his main chore was meeting Yuri Drozdov for coffee in East Berlin and crafting letters to Jim Donovan.

It took Vogel and Drozdov a while to answer Oliver Powers’s prayers : they took their cues from Moscow, and there could be no progress toward an exchange in the frosty aftermath of the Vienna summit or during the building of the wall. But on September 11, 1961, they delivered. In Brooklyn, a letter reached Donovan from “Mrs. Abel” saying

“There it was,” Donovan wrote. “That is what I had been waiting to read.”

He forwarded the letter as usual to the CIA, which digested it like a cold-blooded monster with glacial metabolism and four months later produced its response: a phone call to Donovan. Would he come to Washington?

Would he ever. Donovan was earning good money traveling the length and breadth of the United States defending the insurance industry against irritating claims from outraged policyholders. But the work was dull. It was not a good reason to be staying up so late, smoking so
many cigarettes, and seeing so little of his family. Spying was a far better one. It reminded him of wild times with the OSS during the war, and the case of Rudolf Abel in particular was sufficiently high profile—when allowed into the headlines—to help build the Donovan brand in the minds of Democratic voters; he hoped that one day they might back him as a New York senator.

The CIA was in agreement with the KGB. The time was right for an exchange. As they told Donovan, it would be in the national interest. That shorthand covered a multitude of motivations: since Abel had made it abundantly clear he would not talk, and since any intelligence he could provide on the United States on his return to Moscow would be five years out of date, his continued presence in Atlanta was merely a burden on the taxpayer. As for Powers, the U-2 affair could not be consigned to history as long as he was stuck in Russia. (Nor could the Agency give him the merciless grilling it felt he deserved about what really happened over Sverdlovsk.)

As Donovan knew, the Soviets appeared ready to do the deal. So the Agency asked: would he be willing to undertake a mission to East Germany to make it happen? If so, he would have the full logistical support of the CIA but was to make it look like a business trip and tell no one its true purpose, even in his own family.

Donovan was a man of broad experience and deep convictions who took the world almost as seriously as he took himself. He was a grownup. Even so, he could barely contain himself.

From his hotel in Washington he immediately composed and sent a letter to “Frau Abel” in “Leipzig.” It was dated January 11, 1962. He proposed a meeting at the Soviet Embassy in East Berlin at twelve noon on Saturday, February 3. If this was agreeable, he asked her to cable his law office the three words “Happy New Year.”

Two weeks later—late but not too late by the Russian calendar—the New Year’s greeting arrived. “The meeting in Berlin was set,” Donovan wrote. On January 27 he attended the annual luncheon of the International Association of Insurance Counsel at the Plaza Hotel in New York and told anyone who would listen that he would soon be traveling to London to discuss an unspecified merger. He made free with promises of Liberty scarves for members’ wives. Then he booked a suite at Claridge’s and a first-class seat to London on Pan Am.

Business trips did not come much better than this.

*  *  *

The man Donovan was to rescue was in less salubrious accommodation. After his sweaty romp with Barbara in the cell with the easy chair and the bouncy cot, Gary Powers had been driven out of Moscow, through farmland and forest, to the prison where all high-value foreign enemies of the revolution ended up. It was a walled complex of cell blocks and workshops 150 miles east of the capital outside the town of Vladimir.

After the war, probably in 1947, it was to Vladimir that the most celebrated prisoner taken by the Red Army in its devastating march on Berlin, Raoul Wallenberg, was brought and left to die. Wallenberg should have been borne aloft on the Soviet troops’ shoulders to Moscow, Yad Vashem, and eventually home to Stockholm, for he was the Swedish Schindler, the young diplomat who saved thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Holocaust by giving them exit visas and free passage to his country. He was the very opposite of a Fascist. But having allowed him to disappear, probably through simple clerical error, neither Stalin nor any of his successors would admit it. Wallenberg was almost certainly still alive in cell block 2 in 1961, but no entreaty by the Swedish government or those he saved has ever elicited conclusive proof of his fate from the Kremlin or the KGB.
^*
His bravery was rewarded with decades of solitary confinement and an unmarked grave.

Vladimir prison was also the home for most of his adult life of Tamas Andras, a Hungarian prisoner of war who arrived there without papers in 1945 and was simply forgotten. He spoke no Russian, and no one at the prison spoke Hungarian. Guards and officials thought his mutterings were those of a madman, and he was sequestered in a special wing for the insane, out of earshot of anyone who might understand him, for fifty-five years. He was rescued and repatriated in the spring of 2000 after a Hungarian television journalist overheard his rantings while researching a feature on post-Communist Russian prisons.

No such atrocities were visited on pilot Powers. Not one of the horror stories he had heard from his employers about the Soviet treatment of spies came true. In fact, as he wrote repeatedly in his prison journal—for the censors who might read it but also for posterity—he was treated better than he dared hope. He was allowed to write and receive mail. He was sent monthly care packages by the U.S. embassy in Moscow, their contents chosen by Barbara before her departure (to include lump sugar, cigarettes, pipe tobacco, instant coffee, and Pream powdered milk). He was allowed a long, hot shower every ten days and as much reading material as he could devour.
Time, Life
, and
Newsweek
were banned in favor of the
Daily Worker
, but the entire English-language fiction section of the Moscow State University Library was available to him, and since most of it predated the revolution it included the classics. He read Shaw, Dickens, Galsworthy, and Thackeray, and Voltaire and Tolstoy in translation. He liked especially Pushkin’s
Tales of Ivan Belkin
. Nor did the cross-cultural education of Gary Powers end there. He asked for and was given an English-speaking cell mate, Zigurd Kruminsh, who taught him Russian and quilt making, won his lasting friendship, and never let him suspect that he was in fact a stooge. Together they attended prison screenings of Soviet films that Powers described briefly in his journal: “October 15: Saw my second movie—about a quarrel on a collective farm. Not real good.” “October 29: Saw another movie about construction of a railroad bridge in Siberia. Fair.”

When a visiting KGB colonel asked how he rated what he had seen of Soviet cinema, Powers said he thought it compared with American B-movie westerns. The colonel was so dismayed that he had a sixteen-millimeter print of a Bolshevik classic on the conquest of Russia by barbarians sent specially from Moscow. A private screening was arranged for the two men in cell 31.

Despite his gentle handling, by his second Christmas in Vladimir Powers was going quietly out of his mind. This was partly because he thought his preferential treatment meant he could be released at any time: the longer he remained inside, the more personally he took his sentence. But there were other reasons. The previous Christmas he had received ninety-six cards, thanks to a seasonal drollery from Herb Caen, the
San Francisco Chronicle
columnist: “Let him know that U-2
haven’t forgotten.” But 1961 brought no syndicated reminders for American readers and hardly any cards. Was the world forgetting?