Bridge of Spies: A True Story of the Cold War Review

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(More customer reviews)Utterly fascinating. This book is important for anyone with an interest in why the arms race dragged on so long, but it's a must if you have a secret thing for spy planes. Considering its impact on world events, the story of Gary Powers' final flight over Russia in 1960 is surely one of the most neglected of the Cold War. It has been told before, but to my knowledge this is the first time a western writer has tracked down the Russians who actually brought Powers down. Whittell has put together the final hours leading up to the shoot-down in a way that finally lays to rest the theory that Powers somehow brought it on himself by flying too low. He also claims that but for the shoot-down there would have been no Cuban missile crisis and Nixon might have beaten Kennedy in 1960. What is not in doubt is that the collapse of the superpower summit two weeks after Powers was taken prisoner set the scene for the Berlin spy swap on the bridge in the book's title. There were supposed to be no civilian witnesses to the exchange, but one of those involved was an American post-grad falsely accused of working for the CIA, and one of those who saw the tail-end of the swap on the bridge was a young Reuters correspondent who never got a byline for her story. The author interviews them both, and many more. Brilliantly written, this is an essential addition to any Cold War buff's collection.


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Who were the three men the American and Soviet superpowers exchanged at Berlin's Glienicke Bridge and Checkpoint Charlie in the first and most legendary prisoner exchange between East and West? Bridge of Spies vividly traces their paths to that exchange on February 10, 1962, when their fate helped to define the conflicts and lethal undercurrents of the most dangerous years of the Cold War.Bridge of Spies is the true story of three extraordinary characters – William Fisher, alias Rudolf Abel, a British born KGB agent arrested by the FBI in New York City and jailed as a Soviet superspy for trying to steal America's most precious nuclear secrets; Gary Powers, the American U-2 pilot who was captured when his plane was shot down while flying a reconnaissance mission over the closed cities of central Russia; and Frederic Pryor, a young American graduate student in Berlin mistakenly identified as a spy, arrested and held without charge by the Stasi, East Germany's secret police. By weaving the three strands of this story together for the first time, Giles Whittell masterfully portrays the intense political tensions and nuclear brinkmanship that brought the United States and Soviet Union so close to a hot war in the early 1960s. He reveals the dramatic lives of men drawn into the nadir of the Cold War by duty and curiosity, and the tragicomedy of errors that eventually induced Khrushchev to send missiles to Castro. Two of his subjects — the spy and the pilot — were the original seekers of weapons of mass destruction. The third, an intellectual, fluent in German, unencumbered by dependents, and researching a Ph.D. thesis on the foreign trade system of the Soviet bloc, seemed to the Stasi precisely the sort of person the CIA should have been recruiting. He was not. In over his head in the world capital of spying, he was wrongly charged with espionage and thus came to the Agency's notice by a more roundabout route. The three men were rescued against daunting odds by fate and by their families, and then all but forgotten. Yet they laid bare the pathological mistrust that fueled the arms race for the next 30 years. Drawing on new interviews conducted in the United States, Europe and Russia with key players in the exchange and the events leading to it, among them Frederic Pryor himself and the man who shot down Gary Powers, Bridge of Spies captures a time when the fate of the world really did depend on coded messages on microdots and brave young men in pressure suits. The exchange that frigid day at two of the most sensitive points along the Iron Curtain represented the first step back from where the superpowers had stood since the building of the Berlin Wall the previous summer – on the brink of World War III.

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