Big Optimism: The pilot, the spy, and the lawyer
3 men—4 really—and how they all intersected with history.
The spy had been born in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1903, son of a Bolshevik revolutionary who’d fled Russia.
In 1921, his father returned to the Soviet Union, and the boy went with him. He learned radio operations in the Red Army and by 1927 was recruited into Soviet intelligence. Then in 1948, using a dead Lithuanian’s passport, he slipped into the United States and disappeared into Brooklyn.
For nine years he posed as an artist named Emil Goldfus, working from a studio across the street from an FBI office, running networks, coordinating atomic espionage. Nobody suspected.
The pilot was born in 1929 in Burdine, Kentucky, son of a coal miner who wanted him to be a doctor. Instead he learned to fly. He joined the Air Force, excelled at piloting jets, and in January 1956 the CIA recruited him for the U-2 program—ultra-secret reconnaissance flights over the Soviet Union at altitudes above 70,000 feet.
By 1960 he’d flown dozens of missions his family thought were weather reconnaissance for NASA.
The lawyer had been born in the Bronx in 1916, represented insurance companies, and during World War II served as a Navy officer in the Office of Strategic Services. He arranged for concentration camps to be filmed as they were liberated, then served as assistant prosecutor at Nuremberg.
After the war he went back to insurance law in New York. In August 1957, the Brooklyn Bar Association came to him with a problem: the FBI had arrested a Soviet spy, and multiple prominent lawyers had refused the case.
Would he defend the accused? His wife told him not to. He took it anyway.
The spy was William Fisher, although he gave the name Rudolf Ivanovich Abel when he was arrested. Why? Because using the name of a deceased KGB colonel was a signal to Moscow that he’d been captured and wasn’t cooperating.
The lawyer? James Donovan, an American patriot who believed even a Soviet spy deserved a vigorous defense.
Abel was convicted in October 1957 on three counts of conspiracy to commit espionage. But Donovan had one argument left: don’t execute him. Someday, Donovan told the court, “an American of equivalent rank” might be captured by the Soviets, and Abel could be useful for an exchange.
The judge sentenced Abel to 30 years instead of death.
Enter the pilot: On May 1, 1960, while Fisher/Abel was serving his sentence in the Atlanta federal penitentiary, Francis Gary Powers was flying 1,300 miles inside Soviet airspace when a missile exploded nearby.
The blast tore off his U-2’s right wing. Powers parachuted to safety, but the Soviets captured him alive, recovered the spy cameras from his U2, and photographed the remains.
The U.S. government initially lied, claiming a “weather plane” had strayed off course, but when the Soviets revealed they had Powers and substantial wreckage, the cover story collapsed. Powers was interrogated, made a confession, and on his 31st birthday stood trial in Moscow. He received 10 years’ imprisonment.
The CIA contacted Donovan, and in late 1961, with President Kennedy’s authorization, Donovan traveled to East Berlin to negotiate the swap.
For 10 days he navigated Soviet and East German representatives. The East Germans tried various counteroffers. Donovan threatened to break off negotiations. Finally they agreed: Powers and Abel would be exchanged at the Glienicke Bridge spanning the Havel River between Potsdam and West Berlin.
February 10, 1962 — 64 years ago this week — was a bitterly cold in Berlin. At dawn, Donovan stood on the bridge with Abel. Twenty miles away, an American graduate student named Frederic Pryor crossed through Checkpoint Charlie to freedom. As soon as word came through that Pryor was clear, Donovan gave the signal.
Abel and Powers began walking toward each other across the center line of the bridge. Abel paused before crossing, extended his hand to Donovan.
“Goodbye, Jim,” he said. “Good luck, Rudolf,” Donovan replied.
Six months later Abel sent Donovan a thank-you gift: two 16th-century, vellum-bound editions of the Commentaries on the Justinian Code.
Powers returned to America to a complicated reception. Some criticized him for allowing himself to be captured, but declassified documents later showed he’d followed orders and refused to denounce his country.
His marriage fell apart. He remarried, worked as a test pilot for Lockheed, then as a traffic helicopter pilot for a Los Angeles news station. On August 1, 1977, his helicopter crashed while reporting on California wildfires. He was killed instantly at age 48.
Fisher—Abel—returned to Moscow as a hero, received the Order of Lenin, wrote memoirs, lectured at schools. But the KGB privately sidelined him. He died of lung cancer in 1971 at age 68. Only after his death was his true identity revealed.
Donovan continued negotiating. Months later, President Kennedy asked him to negotiate the release of over 1,100 prisoners from Cuba after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. He succeeded. He died of a heart attack in 1970 at age 53.
Post-script:
This entire story sat largely forgotten until 2015, when a British playwright named Matt Charman was reading a book about Kennedy and came across a footnote.
He researched and wrote the story—his first original screenplay—and made the rounds in Hollywood. When he got back to London, he got a voicemail: Steven Spielberg wanted to hear the pitch directly.
Nervous, overheated in his home, Charman stripped down to his boxer shorts and T-shirt. The phone rang. Halfway through his pitch, Charman heard only silence.
“Are you still there?” he asked.
“I’m rapt,” Spielberg said. “Keep going.”
Steven Spielberg directed Bridge of Spies, with Tom Hanks as Donovan and Mark Rylance as Abel. Rylance won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.
And now we know the story.
7 optimistic moments from history this week
Sunday, February 8: “It was an absolute miracle to be able to push a button and pull up on the screen everyone from all over the country.”—Gordon Macklin, recalling this day in 1971 when NASDAQ, the world’s first electronic stock market, began operations with 500 market makers trading nearly 2 billion shares.
Monday, February 9: “Caramels are a fad; Chocolate is permanent. I am going to make chocolate,”—Milton Hershey, who on this day in 1894 established the Hershey Chocolate Company, beginning his mission to make chocolate affordable for everyone—not just the wealthy.
Tuesday, February 10: “I think everyone listening in on the radio should know, Glenn, it actually is a recording of ‘Chattanooga Choo Choo.’ But it’s in gold, solid gold, and is really fine”—announcer Paul Douglas, to Glenn Miller on this day in 1942, presenting the world’s first gold record for selling 1.2 million copies.
Wednesday, February 11: “Ladies and gentlemen, we … have detected …gravitational waves! We did it!”—David Reitze, LIGO’s executive director, announcing the first direct observation of ripples in spacetime that Einstein predicted a century earlier, on this day in 2016.
Thursday, February 12: “We call upon all the believers in democracy to join in a national conference for the discussion of present evils, the voicing of protests, and the renewal of the struggle for civil and political liberty,”—”The Call” written by Oswald Garrison Villard, founding the NAACP on this day in 2016, the centennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth.
Friday, February 13: “Electronic Computer Flashes Answers, May Speed Engineering,”—New York Times headline on this day in 1946, announcing ENIAC’s public debut. The press hailed the 30-ton marvel as an “electronic brain” that could solve in seconds what took humans days, ushering in the computer age.
Saturday, February 14: “The cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really, really long trunks, and that’s cool. And that’s pretty much all there is to say.”—Jawed Karim, in the first video ever posted to YouTube. On this day in 2005, Karim and two colleagues with whom he’d worked at PayPal employees—Chad Hurley and Steve Chen founded the platform, revolutionizing how the world shares and watches video.
Leave it to Bill to bang out another awesome newsletter....
Regarding "Bridge of Spies" -- excellent movie.
Regarding the NAACP founding -- that was February 12, 1909, not 2016...