audio_story · the-man-on-the-other-end-of-the-bridge
{
"kind": "truestory",
"slug": "the-man-on-the-other-end-of-the-bridge",
"title": "The Man on the Other End of the Bridge",
"voice": "25dfa8ed-dcd0-446e-8490-5b87da2ee760",
"script": "Fog comes off the Havel in February and it doesn't lift. It thins, just enough to show you what's standing in it.\n\nA bridge, painted green. Steel arches over black water.\n\nFloodlights at both ends, angled inward, so the middle of the span is the brightest thing for a mile.\n\nTwo clusters of men, one at each end, overcoats buttoned, breath hanging.\n\nBoots on the deck. A scrape, then nothing, then another scrape.\n\nEveryone is in position. Both governments have signed off. The two men who are here to be traded for each other are standing at opposite ends of it, a hundred and forty yards of empty deck between them, with the entire arrangement built around them.\n\nAnd nobody moves.\n\nThey stand in that cold long enough for it to get into their hands, and not one of them takes a step, because the thing they are waiting for is not on this bridge.\n\nIt's a telephone. On the other side of the city.\n\nWe'll come back to the bridge.\n\nFirst, a nickel.\n\nBrooklyn, summer of 1953. A thirteen-year-old named Jimmy Bozart is collecting on his paper route for the Brooklyn Eagle, working a stairway in Flatbush, and somebody pays him partly in change.\n\nHe drops a nickel on the steps.\n\nIt doesn't ring the way a nickel rings. It splits.\n\nThe coin is hollow. Inside it, folded into that tiny cavity, is a square of microfilm — and on the microfilm is a grid of numbers. Ten columns across, twenty-one rows down. No words at all.\n\nJimmy tells a friend. The friend's father is a police officer. The police officer calls the FBI, and within a couple of days the hollow nickel and the square of film are in a laboratory in Washington, where extremely serious men look at a page of numbers and cannot do a single thing with it.\n\nIt's a one-time pad. Without the key, the numbers are just numbers, and no amount of work will turn them into anything else.\n\nSo the Bureau files it. A photograph of a grid, in a folder, in a drawer.\n\nIt sits there for four years.\n\nThen, in the spring of 1957, a heavy-drinking Soviet officer named Reino Häyhänen is recalled to Moscow and decides, correctly, that he will not survive the trip. He walks into the American embassy in Paris instead.\n\nHäyhänen has been a courier. He knows the drop sites, he knows the codebook, and he knows his chief — a man he's met in a Brooklyn park, a man he calls Mark.\n\nHe also mentions, in passing, that he once mishandled a hollow coin.\n\nOn June 21, 1957, agents knock on the door of Room 839 at the Hotel Latham on East 28th Street in Manhattan. The man who opens it is fifty-three years old and undressed, and he is not surprised in any way an observer can measure.\n\nAround the city, he is Emil Goldfus, a painter. He keeps a studio in Brooklyn, on Fulton Street, where he does landscapes that other artists in the building consider decent. He is quiet, courteous, good with radios. Nobody in that building has one bad word about him.\n\nHe gives the FBI the name Rudolf Ivanovich Abel — which happens to be the name of a dead friend, and which is the name history has used for him ever since. He was born Vilyam Fisher, in England, to Russian revolutionaries.\n\nAnd he is what the trade calls an illegal — no embassy job, no diplomatic passport.\n\nHe has been running Soviet networks in the United States for nine years with nothing between himself and the electric chair except the quality of his cover, and his cover has just failed.\n\nAgents sit with him for days. They offer him a life in America under a name of his choosing, and he declines. They ask him questions and he answers none of them.\n\nHe is charged with conspiracy to commit espionage, which carries death.\n\nWhich is where a phone rings in an insurance practice.\n\nThe Brooklyn Bar Association has been asked to find the man a defense lawyer, and the committee lands on James B. Donovan. Forty-one years old. A partner in a firm that handles liability and settlement figures for businessmen who like him.\n\nHe is also, in a way nobody in Flatbush thinks about much, a man who spent the war as general counsel of the OSS, and then went to Nuremberg on Justice Jackson's American staff, where he handled the visual evidence — where he watched his own government build an enormous, careful, functioning trial for men it could simply have taken outside.\n\nThe court will pay him ten thousand dollars for the Abel case. He gives all of it away, split between three law schools, before the trial starts.\n\nHe takes the case on a Wednesday.\n\nBy the weekend, everyone on his street knows.\n\nHis wife, Mary, asks him the question anyone would ask, which is why it has to be him, and the answer is not stirring. Somebody has to do it, the man is entitled to a defense, and if the defense is going to be a performance then there was no point building the courthouse.\n\nHe opens the file.\n\nOn the morning of the arrest, the FBI questions Abel in the hotel room for a while, gets nothing, and steps back. Immigration agents then arrest him on an administrative warrant — not a criminal warrant, an immigration one — and while he packs his suitcase they go through the room.\n\nThey take his shortwave and his cipher pads, the hollowed-out pencils and cufflinks. Then, after he's gone, the hotel clears the room, and an FBI agent goes through the wastebasket and comes up with a hollow bolt containing microfilm.\n\nNo search warrant. Not for any of it.\n\nDonovan reads that and understands that he has a genuine Fourth Amendment argument, and that making it means standing in a federal courtroom in 1957 and telling the United States that the man who photographed its defense secrets should walk out of the building because agents skipped a piece of paperwork.\n\nHe files the motion to suppress.\n\nThe mail starts arriving at the house in Brooklyn, addressed to him by name. Some of it is written in the tone of a man who has thought about it for a while and would like Donovan to know what he thinks should happen to his children.\n\nThe telephone rings at hours when telephones don't ring for good reasons.\n\nHis kids get it at school, in the way children deliver these things — not cruelly, exactly, just constantly.\n\nAnd clients begin to do the thing that clients do, which is not to fire you. Nobody fires him. They simply have less to bring him. A file that used to come across in October arrives in the spring, with another firm's name on it, and there's never a conversation, and there's nothing to answer.\n\nJudge Byers denies the motion to suppress. The trial takes three weeks. On October 25, 1957, the jury is out for three and a half hours, and Rudolf Abel is convicted on all counts.\n\nSentencing is set for November 15.\n\nThe government wants the chair. The newspapers want the chair. There is a poll running in one of them, and it is not close.\n\nAnd Donovan understands something about that room before he walks into it: he cannot ask for mercy. Mercy is a word that will die in the air on its way to the bench. This is the country of the hollow nickel and the microfilm in the wastebasket, three years after the Rosenbergs, and no judge in America is going to spare this man because sparing people is decent.\n\nNovember 15. Federal courthouse, Brooklyn. Radiators going, overcoats over the backs of chairs, the room full well before the hour.\n\nAbel is brought in and sits the way he has sat through the entire proceeding, which is to say like a man waiting for a train that is running slightly late. He has not testified. He has not spoken to a reporter. In four and a half months of custody he has given the United States government his cover name and nothing else anyone can use.\n\nDonovan stands up in front of Judge Byers and makes the coldest argument he can construct.\n\nHe says it is entirely possible that an American of equivalent rank is going to be captured by Soviet Russia, or by one of its allies. He says that if that day arrives, an exchange of prisoners through diplomatic channels might well be in the best interests of the United States. He says: this man is worth more to us alive.\n\nHe sits down. The radiators knock. The room waits on one man in a robe.\n\nJudge Byers gives Abel thirty years and a three-thousand-dollar fine.\n\nThere is no applause for the defense. There are no letters of congratulation, and the ones that arrive at the house are the other kind. Donovan has kept a Soviet colonel out of the electric chair, and the country's position on that is that he shouldn't have.\n\nThe argument goes into the record, and the record goes into a drawer.\n\nLike the nickel.\n\nDonovan takes the search question up. The Second Circuit affirms. He petitions the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court takes it. A court-appointed insurance lawyer, arguing the constitutional rights of a Soviet spy in front of nine justices.\n\nOn March 28, 1960, the Court rules against him.\n\nFive to four.\n\nOne vote. Three years of his life, a chunk of his practice, and the standing of his name in his own neighborhood, and the answer comes back one vote short. Justice Frankfurter writes the majority. Justice Douglas writes a dissent that says the government has done something the Constitution forbids and is being allowed to keep the proceeds.\n\nIt's over. Abel goes to the federal penitentiary in Atlanta to serve thirty years, and Donovan goes back to liability work, and that's the shape of it.\n\nFive weeks later.\n\nMay 1, 1960. May Day, which matters, because half of Soviet air defense is standing at attention in parade squares.\n\nA U-2 reconnaissance aircraft is flying at seventy thousand feet across the Soviet Union, from Pakistan toward Norway, photographing missile sites. At that altitude the pilot can see the curve of the earth and the sky above him is nearly black.\n\nNear Sverdlovsk, a surface-to-air missile detonates behind him.\n\nThe aircraft comes apart. The pilot is Francis Gary Powers, thirty years old, from Kentucky, flying for the CIA at thirty thousand dollars a year. He is pinned by the forces in a disintegrating cockpit, cannot reach the destruct switches, gets the canopy off, and goes out.\n\nHis parachute opens over a collective farm.\n\nAnd the United States, believing what the CIA has told it — that no pilot survives this, that the aircraft comes down in pieces — announces that a NASA weather research plane has strayed off course after its pilot reported oxygen trouble over Turkey.\n\nKhrushchev lets that statement stand for four days. He lets Washington repeat it, elaborate it, put a NASA aircraft on a runway with the tail markings freshly painted on for photographers.\n\nThen he produces the pilot. Alive. And the wreckage, and the photographs of Soviet airfields taken from seventy thousand feet.\n\nIn August, Moscow tries Powers in the Hall of Columns, in front of the world's press, with his parents in the gallery. He gets ten years.\n\nSomewhere in a transcript from a Brooklyn courtroom, in 1957, there is a sentence about an American of equivalent rank being captured by Soviet Russia.\n\nIt has now happened. And the United States has no machinery for it at all.\n\nThe American government does not recognize prisoner exchanges. It cannot be seen to trade a convicted spy for anybody, because trading confirms that Powers is what everyone knows he is. It cannot send a diplomat, because a diplomat is the government, and the government has just spent four days lying about a weather plane in front of the entire planet.\n\nWhat it has is one convict in Atlanta.\n\nAnd then, into a house in Brooklyn, comes a letter.\n\nIt is signed by Helen Abel — a wife nobody has ever seen — and it is postmarked East Germany, and it is written in the deliberate, slightly wooden English of a document that has been through several hands. There are follow-ups. One of them comes on the letterhead of an East Berlin attorney named Wolfgang Vogel.\n\nThe family would very much like to discuss their relative's situation. Perhaps Mr. Donovan would come to Berlin.\n\nDonovan takes the letters to Washington. Washington's position is that this would be a private matter between a lawyer and his client's family. The United States government has no involvement. If it goes wrong, the United States government has never heard of him.\n\nHe goes anyway.\n\nBerlin, the first week of February 1962, and the cold there is a different animal from the cold in New York — a wet, still, riverbank cold that gets under a coat and stays.\n\nDonovan has flu.\n\nHe crosses at the Friedrichstrasse checkpoint into an East Berlin that has been sealed for less than six months. The Wall is new enough to still look temporary in places — block and raw mortar, a city with a scar so fresh it hasn't settled.\n\nA guard takes his passport into a booth and keeps it for a while. On the far side the streetlights are further apart and the shop windows have less in them, and there are gaps in the terraces where the war was and nobody has built anything since.\n\nAnd in his first days there he discovers he is not conducting one negotiation. He is conducting two, at the same time, with parties who want different things and are not entirely delighted with each other.\n\nThe Soviets want Abel back, quietly. One man for one man, done at a border, nothing said. He meets them at their embassy on Unter den Linden, where a second secretary named Ivan Schischkin serves tea and speaks about the humanitarian dimension of family reunification.\n\nThe East Germans want something else. Vogel apologizes for the heating, pours the coffee himself, and represents a state that most of the world refuses to admit is a state. What the German Democratic Republic wants out of this is not a prisoner. It's the handshake. It wants the exchange to run through it, in front of witnesses, because being a party to a deal is what a country gets to be.\n\nAnd there is a third name that nobody in Washington has sent Donovan to collect.\n\nFrederic Pryor. Twenty-eight. An American economics graduate student, writing a dissertation on East German foreign trade, who made the mistake of driving into East Berlin in late August 1961 to deliver a chapter to a friend, days after the Wall went up.\n\nThe Stasi picked him up on suspicion of espionage. He has been held ever since, without charge, without trial. No government is making noise about him. He is a student with a thesis.\n\nThe room where Vogel does business has one small electric heater and a window that looks onto a street with almost nothing on it. Donovan sits in his overcoat, coughing, taking notes in a hand that gets worse as the afternoon goes on, and works out what each man across from him is actually selling.\n\nSchischkin wants speed and silence, and keeps referring to Abel as a private German citizen with a family.\n\nVogel wants his ministry's name typed on a document with an American's name next to it.\n\nSo here is Donovan, in a cold room in a divided city, with exactly one thing to spend.\n\nAbel is the card. There is one of him. And each of the two parties across the table will accept him — for a different American.\n\nTake the clean trade. Abel for Powers. It is nearly certain, and it is the entire reason anyone in Washington tolerated this errand. Powers is a serving American airman whose face the whole world watched in a Moscow courtroom. Bring him home and you have done the job you were sent to do, and no reasonable person on earth will say otherwise.\n\nAnd Frederic Pryor stays in his cell, and stays there, because after Abel walks across there is no second Abel. Ever. The last piece of leverage the United States owns will have been spent, and the boy with the dissertation will be a man nobody can buy.\n\nOr hold out for both. Tell the Soviets and the East Germans that they each get a piece of the same prisoner.\n\nWhich is more than the card is worth, and both of them know it, and either one of them can end this by standing up and putting on his coat.\n\nIf it collapses: Powers serves his ten years in a labor camp, Pryor stays where he is, and the man who broke it is an insurance lawyer from Brooklyn who was never authorized to gamble a captured pilot's freedom on a graduate student he has never met.\n\nVogel wants an answer. Schischkin wants to know when the American expects to conclude.\n\nDonovan goes back across to West Berlin, to a hotel room and a fever, and writes the day up in the notebook he has been keeping since he landed.\n\nHe refuses the one-for-one.\n\nHe tells Schischkin that the matter of Mr. Pryor is a separate question, being handled by other people, and that of course it has no bearing on their business — while making it unmistakably clear that their business will not conclude until that other question is settled.\n\nHe tells Vogel that the Soviets are impatient, which is true, and that Berlin is holding things up, which is useful.\n\nEach side comes to understand that the obstacle is the other side.\n\nIt takes a week of cars at odd hours and unheated rooms with the tea going cold — a man from a liability practice arguing a hostage transfer the way he would argue a warehouse fire settlement, never conceding a point for free, always leaving them a way to say yes that looks like their idea.\n\nOn February 8, Washington and Moscow have an agreement. Two days later, before dawn, they go to the bridge.\n\nThe Glienicke Bridge crosses the Havel from West Berlin into Potsdam. It is chosen for the reasons that make it useless for anything else: it is a border, and at that hour there is nobody on it.\n\nFog off the water. The floodlights on. American cars at the western end, Soviet cars at the eastern end, and the guards keeping their hands in their pockets.\n\nRudolf Abel is brought to the western end in a suit that no longer fits him, having flown from Atlanta, having been told very little.\n\nFrancis Gary Powers is brought to the eastern end in a heavy overcoat, eighteen months into a ten-year sentence, having been told even less.\n\nThey are put in view of each other. The documents are ready. The men who need to identify each man have identified him.\n\nEverything is in position.\n\nAnd then it just stops.\n\nBecause Donovan's condition is not on this bridge. It's across the city, at Checkpoint Charlie, where Frederic Pryor is supposed to be walked out to the American side — and until somebody standing there says so, out loud, into a telephone, to somebody standing here, nothing on this bridge is going to happen.\n\nSo they wait.\n\nSoviet officers and American officers, a full span apart in the fog, on a green steel bridge over a black river, not talking, not moving.\n\nMinutes. Long ones. The kind where men check watches they can't quite read and then look at the water.\n\nAbel stands with his hands at his sides and does not ask anyone what the delay is.\n\nPowers, at the far end, has been in Soviet custody for twenty-one months and has no way of knowing whether this is the exchange or a piece of theater that ends with him back in a car.\n\nThe river below them moves slowly and makes no sound worth mentioning. Somewhere behind the eastern floodlights an engine idles, then shuts off. After that there is only the water.\n\nThen someone comes with the word.\n\nPryor is out. Walked across at Checkpoint Charlie into West Berlin.\n\nThe signal is given at both ends of the bridge at once.\n\nAnd the two men walk.\n\nThey come toward each other along the deck, Abel heading east, Powers heading west, and there is a moment near the center of the span where they are level with one another. Two men in overcoats, one American, one Soviet, passing on a bridge in the fog with nothing to say and no reason to stop.\n\nThey do not stop.\n\nThe whole exchange — five years of it, the nickel, the wastebasket, the Supreme Court, the missile over Sverdlovsk, Helen Abel's letters — takes about as long as crossing a street.\n\nAt the western end, Abel shakes Donovan's hand before he goes.\n\nThen Donovan gets in a car and drives back into West Berlin with two Americans he had never met before that week.\n\nPowers comes home to a reception with the heat off.\n\nThe questions start almost immediately, and they are not gentle: why didn't he destroy the aircraft, why didn't he use the silver dollar he was carrying with the poison needle inside it, why is he alive at all. A Senate Armed Services subcommittee takes him through it in March 1962, closed doors, and concludes that he did what he was supposed to do and told the Soviets very little.\n\nHe ends up flying a helicopter for a Los Angeles television station, covering traffic and brush fires. On August 1, 1977, he runs out of fuel coming back from a fire in Santa Barbara County, puts the aircraft down to avoid a field with children playing on it, and dies. He is buried at Arlington.\n\nRudolf Abel — Vilyam Fisher — goes back to Moscow, where he is decorated, put to work training young officers, and eventually put on a postage stamp. He dies of lung cancer in 1971.\n\nFrederic Pryor, the man the bridge waited for, goes back to Yale and finishes his dissertation on East German foreign trade. He becomes an economics professor at Swarthmore. He publishes for another fifty years.\n\nJames Donovan goes back to Brooklyn and back to insurance law.\n\nFor about five months.\n\nBecause now the government knows exactly who to call. In the summer of 1962 he flies to Havana to negotiate with Fidel Castro for the men captured at the Bay of Pigs — sits with him for hours, argues him down from sixty-two million dollars in cash to food and medicine, and comes back having gotten out eleven hundred and thirteen prisoners, and then thousands of their relatives after that. He runs the whole thing, again, as a private citizen.\n\nHe dies in 1970, at fifty-three.\n\nAnd the bridge keeps working.\n\nBoth sides discover they now have a place to do the thing neither of them officially does, and they use it, over and over, for the next twenty-four years — in June 1985, when more than two dozen people are walked across in a single morning, and again in February 1986, when a small, exhausted man named Anatoly Shcharansky is told to walk straight and deliberately zigzags across it out of spite.\n\nBy then nobody calls it the Glienicke Bridge anymore. They call it the Bridge of Spies.\n\nThe fog burned off that first morning by mid-day, February 10, 1962, and the span went back to being empty — green paint, and a white line across the middle of a river between two countries.\n",
"synopsis": "A newspaper boy in Brooklyn drops a nickel on a stairway in 1953. It splits open, and a square of microfilm falls out. The FBI can't read it and can't place it, so it goes into a file and waits four years — until a defector gives up his chief, and agents walk a middle-aged painter named Emil Goldfus out of the Hotel Latham. His real name is Rudolf Abel. He is a Soviet illegal: no embassy, no immunity, nothing standing between him and the electric chair. The court needs someone to defend the most hated man in America, and the job goes to James Donovan, a Brooklyn insurance lawyer whose practice depends entirely on being liked by people who now cross the street.\n\nDonovan finds an actual defense — the agents searched Abel's room without a warrant — and files it, and keeps filing while the phone calls come and the clients quietly subtract themselves. When the government asks for death, he doesn't argue mercy; mercy won't survive that room. He argues arithmetic: one day the Soviets will catch an American of equivalent rank, and if that day comes, this man is the only thing the United States will have to trade. Abel gets thirty years. Nobody thanks him for it.\n\nThen, on the first of May 1960, a U-2 comes down near Sverdlovsk, and the Soviets pull Francis Gary Powers out of it alive.\n\nWhat follows is the winter of 1962: a private citizen with no title and no protection crossing into an East Berlin six months into its wall, negotiating with two governments that want incompatible things, and finding a third American in a Stasi cell that nobody sent him to collect. One prisoner to spend. A bridge over the Havel, chosen because at that hour there is nobody on it.",
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"durationSeconds": 1632
}